Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast. I'm John Pudhor. It's the editor of commentary,

the 72 year old monthly of political analysis, intellectual poverty and cultural criticism from a

conservative perspective. Join us at commentary magazine.com. We give you a few free reads and then

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including our beautiful monthly magazine in your mailbox 11 times a year with me as always

our senior editor Abe Greenwald hello Abe hi John and our associate editor Noah Rothman

Hi Noah hi John so we approach the dog days of August with Congress out of session Donald Trump

wandering around the country alarming everybody in you know conventional circles with his bizarre

behavior at rallies and various speeches and tweets and everybody else on his side apparently

thinking that this is all okay and we're hearing stories about how General Lokelli is taking real

control of the White House is control of paper flow into the Oval Office he and staff secretary

Rob Porter are going to make sure that the open access to his office and the free flow of paper

that anyone can put before Trump is going to be limited and meanwhile with all of this nonsense going

on after Labor Day Congress will come back in session and the actual job of governance of the

United States will continue to the extent that we have to do something to raise the debt ceiling or

the government will run out of money and there is the big question of whether or not the Trump

legislative agenda derailed entirely by the by the failure of health care reform can be brought

back on track by tax reform and the leaks that are coming out about tax reform are kind of

alarming or surprising or sound like they are that things are being played with at the

congressional level that cannot possibly in the end make it into law gigantic monumental changes

to the tax system that will be done with 51 votes in reconciliation like limiting the mortgage

introduction of removing eliminating the state and local tax deductibility of your of your state

...