Art of the Arms Deal

The American Mind

The Claremont Institute

Philosophy, Declarationofindependence, Founding, Politics, Conservative, Limitedgovernment, Society & Culture, News, Constitution, Claremontinstitute

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2025

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As Joe Biden shuffled toward the finish line of his presidency, he and his staff let off a final volley of pardons—but who was really holding the (virtual) pen? This week, the guys sit down to weigh in on the renewed discussion of autopens as the New York Times reports on a cache of emails that may reveal the truth. Trump, meanwhile, caused a stir by agreeing to sell military supplies to NATO, which will then be passed to Ukraine. In the U.K. and Europe, technocrats crack down as triple crises fester: unchecked immigration, rampant crime, and youth radicalization. Plus: book and movie recommendations!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Coming up on this episode of The Roundtable.
0:02.5	Trump is one among few aberrations over the last century of the bipartisan foreign policy
0:09.9	approach, which has been more ideological than not.
0:13.4	It has had faith in a kind of blank slatism amongst peoples.
0:17.9	If you just give them liberal democracy, all will be well and they'll never
0:22.0	go to war again. It was the mission creep of the Bush doctrine in Iraq and even Afghanistan
0:27.7	that somehow we'd put liberal democracies in both places and it would solve our problems.
0:32.3	I think Trump thinks that was stupid. It's part of his no dumb war's policy going back to his
0:37.2	primary run. So he's really a return to wars policy, going back to his primary run.
0:38.3	So he's really a return to a prudential rather than ideological foreign policy. So that's the proper way to view it. All the breathless rhetoric about him betraying his base, I think, is unfounded. And you've got to just let the man to cook. Hello and welcome once again to the roundtable, your weekly publishers and editors podcast here at the American Mind. I'm your host, Spencer Claven, associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and Autopen editor of the American Mind. I do all my editing in absentia remotely. I just sort of tell an AI
1:47.3	the big outlines of what I want to do, and then it does it without my approval or attention.
1:54.1	Thanks very much to my co-host for holding down the fort while I was gone, allowing me to
1:59.0	recover from my altitude sickness last week.
2:02.4	This week, I am joined by what feels like the dream team.
2:06.4	There was a time when this crew felt like a slightly new gang after we had shuffled around the hosting responsibilities.
2:13.6	Now this is the OG crew managing editor, Mike Sabo, and publisher and president Ryan Williams.
2:22.6	The gang's all here.
2:23.9	We've got a few items to get through starting with, as I alluded to, opening the Biden Autopen Saga.
2:33.2	I think this is roughly 3,025 news cycles ago. We heard about the
2:39.2	auto pen, which is something, one of those things that emerged and then suddenly everyone on
2:43.7	Twitter was an expert about it. But basically, the beginning of this is that when Biden became clearly incapacitated and as
2:54.2	when Trump was elected and as it became clear that there was going to be this grand regime
	...

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