Know Your Enemy - Trump the Dove? Or Trump the Neocon? (w/ Curt Mills)

Matt and Sam are joined by Curt Mills, of The American Conservative, to assess Trump's national security team.

Duration: 1h 3m
Broadcast on: 21 Nov 2024
Audio Format: other

The second Trump administration hasn't started, but it's already proving chaotic, disturbing, and downright bewildering. (Not unlike the first!) Trump's picks for key staff and cabinet positions display a discordant, if not altogether surprising, mix of ideologies, experience, and scandalous baggage. (Indeed, one of his picks, Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, withdrew from consideration between the time we recorded our interview and when we recorded the intro.)

For this episode, we're focused on Trump's national security team, which is shaping up to be divided against itself: neoconservatives like Marco Rubio (State) alongside quasi-isolationists like Tulsi Gabbard (Director of National Intelligence) alongside bellicose TV personalities like Pete Hegseth (Defense). To make sense of it all, we're joined by Curt Mills, a longtime foreign policy reporter and executive director of The American Conservative. A semi-enemy, Curt hails from the paleoconservative school of foreign affairs, which prioritizes realism and restraint. (That is to say, he's not thrilled about Rubio...) Based on Trump's appointments thus far, we ask Curt to assess, from his perspective, the relative strength of various factions of the Trump coalition: Will Trump listen to the warmongers in his midst? Will he side with the America Firsters? Or will he ignore everyone and just make some deals? Listen to find out.

Further Reading:

Curt Mills, "What a Trump Cabinet Might Look Like," The American Conservative, Oct 18, 2024.

— "What Trump Could Do in Foreign Policy Might Surprise the World," NYTimes, May 13, 2024.

Patrick Smith & Peter Alexander, "Police report details alleged sexual assault by Trump's defense pick Pete Hegseth," NBC News, Nov 21, 2024.

Baker, Haberman, Swan, "Gaetz’s withdrawal follows revelations in a sex-trafficking inquiry." NYTimes, Nov 21, 2024.

Dave Phillips and Carol Rosenberg, "The Metamorphosis of Pete Hegseth: From Critic of War Crimes to Defender of the Accused," NYTimes, Nov 21, 2024.

David Frum, "Unpatriotic Conservatives," National Review, Mar 25, 2003.

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All right. Welcome listeners to episode 104 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sittman, your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam Heather Bell. Hey, Sam. Hello, Matt. We're going to skip over the how are you doing a portion of this intro. That's an annoying question to get asked these days. Yeah. So instead, let's get right to it. Yeah. What are we talking about, Matt? Who do we have? Well, you know, one thing in our discussion, Sam, after the election when we were talking to each other about what next episodes we want to do and kind of, you know, our broader response to the election results, one thing we thought was important to do is try to the best of our ability to have smart enemies on the podcast, conservatives, especially who just are embedded in that world and might have a better sense than we do from the outside of, you know, what's happening in Trump's orbit, especially right now, this kind of transition period where Trump's making his cabinet picks, you know, who'll be his advisors on his team. It's kind of a whirlwind of news stories with lots of new details coming out and things are getting more settled by this point. But it's been an interesting season and it made us think that an important topic to think about more seriously and discuss with someone who actually knows more than we do about what's going on is Trump's foreign policy, you know, the team he's chosen in these nominations, how he campaigned, you know, just what's going on. The war in Ukraine is a major concern as is Israel, Palestine, you know, what is Trump going to do. And so we had a on a great guest, Kurt Mills, who's the executive director of the American Conservative that's essentially the editor in chief position and the American Conservative is, you know, for those not familiar with it. It was founded in 2002 by Pat Buchanan and others as a kind of alternative that stood for a restrained and realist foreign policy, in contrast to the Bush administration's neo-con warmongering. And Kurt's worked there for, I followed his work for many years, and he's also someone that rarely embarrasses himself online by saying idiotic and ridiculous things that are simply indefensible. So we thought he was an enemy, so to speak, we could actually have a good conversation with. Yeah, it should be a low bar, not to say like extremely disgusting or idiotic things on the internet, but not a lot of conservatives pass it. Kurt does. And he's, he's our first, I think, a valid paleo-conservative guest. So that's something that perhaps helps that we're mostly talking about the part of the paleo-conservative suite of policies that we are most interested in sympathetic to, which is foreign policy restraint, and that really is the parameters of this conversation. But I would agree with you, Matt, that, I mean, first of all, I'll echo, it's not just on Matt's initiative, I'm very interested in having more conservatives on the podcast. It just feels like we can't really avoid it at this point.

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam are joined by Curt Mills, of The American Conservative, to assess Trump's national security team.