Charles Fain Lehman, Neetu Arnold, Judge Glock, and Carolyn Gorman unpack Trump’s border pageantry at “Alligator Alcatraz,” exposing the left’s silence on illegal immigration. They break down the One Big Beautiful Bill, $1 trillion in spending cuts, tax policy in the balance, and a fight for fiscal sanity.

Audio Transcript

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Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome back to the City Journal Podcast. I'm your host, Charles Fain Lehman, senior editor of City Journal. Joining me on the panel today are Neetu Arnold, Judge Glock, and Carolyn Gorman, all in various roles at the Manhattan Institute, City Journal, and the rest. Welcome everybody to this shortly before the Independence Day weekend episode of the City Journal Podcast.

I want to take us right into the news of the week, which is that Congress is racing to complete passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as I refer to it, TOBBBA. It passed the Senate and now it's back in the House, and it's still unclear if it's going to make through the House, and it's funny with Thomas Massie, whether he's going to move ahead on it. But I want to get people's read on where we are, noting that the final bill may be different. It seems like the Senate stripped a number of the, stripped a number of provisions out of the House's version. We'll see if they survive through the Senate. Judge, I feel like you've been watching this debate a little bit. Can you give us a sense of what's going on right now?

Judge Glock: Yeah, it's, we're, it's in a strange spot in that everyone agrees something has to get across the finish line and nobody wants to see a circumstance similar to Trump's first year in his first term where you had that famous or infamous thumbs down move by Senator John McCain which ended hopes, at least for the moment, for that moment of healthcare reform.

Nobody wants to see that happen again. So obviously everybody is working to get something across. But that means that everyone is also really nervous about being jammed that everyone's got a particular opinion, a particular demand to come out of this big bill and they know this is the time to make it. So it looks like the House is going to try to just push the bill through right now. If I had, if I was a betting man, I'd say they're not going to make it on just the straight vote. All that'll be close and then what's going to happen is a good old fashioned conference committee where the muckety mucks in each house of Congress get together in a dark, I don't know, probably not cigar smoke-filled room now, but vape smoke-filled room and try to do all the good old fashioned horse trading that makes our government so big and unwieldy. So you know, we'll see where it goes, it's...

I don't think it's a beautiful bill, but the one policy thing that I, or wait, two quick policy things I'll say. One, does anyone else’s ears just grate when you hear the term “bill act”? Cause it is like, occasionally in the news, you'll see something like, as Republicans refer to it, “The One Big, Beautiful Bill.” It’s like, no, as Charles already pointed out, that is the legal name, but it's “The One Big, Beautiful Bill Act,” which is supposed to be a contradiction in terms. but that's, so that's a policy complaint there.

But the other one is, my other concern is yes, this significantly adds to the deficit, but on the plus side, this is one of the few bills, tax cut bills that actually tries to offset itself with some amount of spending cuts. you know, the fact that Trump originally asked everybody to put this in “one big, beautiful bill,” the spending cuts, the changes, the tax cuts, does have this weird circumstance where we're actually trying to cut spending the same time we cut taxes, which is somewhat a relief even if it comes nowhere close to meeting the actual spending reductions that would be needed.

Carolyn D. Gorman: Well, that's the problem, right? Like, does it actually end up doing what it is intended to do? It's good that the intentions are there, but we, you know, we talked on this podcast a few weeks ago about whether or not Republicans have any interest in fiscal constraint anymore and womp, womp, like.

Neetu Arnold: I mean, the impression that I get is, you know, looking at this big-picture is whether Trump can actually rally Republicans together around this bill or whether the fractures within the Republican party are going to outpower Trump. I think that's what I'm really looking out for. And, you know, whether this bill actually meets the July 4th deadline, which is tomorrow. And that seems extremely tight, maybe unlikely.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I mean, you the big case of this, I forget to make this point, but the big case of this is that basically, Mike Johnson has been able to successfully prod his conference into compliance through essentially the leverage of having Donald Trump threaten/cajole them. And he seems to have the president on his side still. On the other hand, you know, the great defector in the House conference, Thomas Massie, who Trump is already working to primary, so he's lost his leverage there. Seems like he could be an issue and then you, to I think Neetu and Carolyn’s point, there's like a, there's a needle that you have to thread where it's like on the one hand, you want to keep the deficit hawks happy, and the other hand, it's just like a great deal of pork that you need. A big hold up in this bill It seems like was the State And Local Tax Deduction which is a major demand for New York Republicans who are like, you know, their sense of their job in Congress is to get the SALT cap raised. So it's like how do you satisfy both constituencies simultaneously? And you kind of can particularly with the narrow margin that Republicans currently have. So I agree that it could be a huge issue. I'm curious about people's takes on the policy angles here, though. I mean, are there features of the bill that stick out to people, noting that it may end up getting revised out of existence? Although I think the broad strokes are still there, or likely to remain.

Judge Glock: Yeah, I mean, it's tough to say on the whole. I'm a believer in that old Milton Friedman line that the amount that the American public gets taxed is just the amount the federal government spends. Everything else, the actual tax rate is somewhat secondary. Like, we look at that and see that's how much money gets taken out of our paycheck this year or next year.

But sooner or later, the spending is going to have to get paid for. And so in one sense, that makes tax cuts look less consequential than they are, either for good or for bad, because that's just money we have to spend either now or later. But it also makes tax increases look less important, because again, the real issue is spending. So I mean, to me, if we're looking at a bill that I have some disagreements with the scoring methodology and so forth, but that does actually cut spending by potentially over a trillion dollars. Like to my mind, that's pretty significant. Like the tax cut stuff, you know, it's generally bad in the sense of it's a bunch of giveaways without trying to simplify the tax code. And that's not particularly helpful. If it's simplification, that's actually a net good, even if it doesn't cut or raise taxes.

But the spending cuts, it's a big thing and I think to some extent should be celebrated. And this didn't happen in the TCJA, the first term Trump tax cut. So this is interesting, they're trying to combine that. And like Neetu and Carolyn said, we'll see if it actually works out.

Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah, I definitely agree. And one of the things that sort of like impacts that is when these tax cuts are meant to take place. So some of the Medicaid cuts are not scheduled to start until after 2030. So, you know, whether or not that ends up saving any money, we'll have to wait and see.

Neetu Arnold: I mean, the part of the bill that stuck out to me, especially since I'm in education policy, is the college endowment tax. Yeah, and like I think what's interesting is when you look at public perception, know, a lot of people have their issues, some issue or other with the bill, but when it comes to that endowment tax and raising it from the 1.4 percent excise tax to a multi-tiered structure where if you have a higher endowment, then that college is going to get punished, or you know, they're going to get taxed more.

And I think that's the particular part of the bill that a lot of Americans seem to support. And I think it kind of plays into the overall distrust of higher education institutions. I don’t know whether an endowment tax would actually fix our colleges is a bit questionable. It seems more punitive to me, but you know, it is playing into public sentiment. So that is the one part of the bill where I actually see positive sentiments.

Charles Fain Lehman: I mean there's, you know, there are a couple of places where they've been effective on that front, right? So like the “no tax on tips” got passed, I think with unanimous consent in the Senate. They were just like, yeah, Democrats, we don't want to lose “no tax on tips” to the Republicans. We're with them too, which is crazy to me. But it's like, you know, it's not what we would call sound fiscal policy, but on the other hand, it sure plays nicely. Did the Trump accounts make it into the most recent version of the bill? I haven't paid enough attention.

Judge Glock: There's some very, yeah, there's some variation of them. It's not the full original Trump accounts in the Senate bill, but I'll note yet that “no tax on tips,” Kamala Harris said she wanted no tax on tips. She jumped on that bandwagon at the end of the last campaign because she realized people loved it. The one note I'll give here, and I probably shouldn't say this out loud, but as a former waiter, I'm not saying what I did, but most people don't report their tips right now. And because, you know, it's often in cash. What I've heard is that since people have moved away from cash, it's gotten harder for people not to report their tips. So in a sense, you can see like, this is a campaign to kind of return to the status quo ante pre everything being digitized, pre everything credit card when we were doing more cash and just allow the tips to be untaxed again, like they were circa 2005, 2010.

So, you know, maybe not ideal, but like, we have this weird change in payments, which led to changes in taxes. And now everyone's got up in arms again about it. So we'll see.

Carolyn D. Gorman: One of the things that I think is just beneficial is keeping some continuity from the tax cuts that are meant to expire in December.

Charles Fain Lehman: The 2017, extending them, the TCJA tax cuts, yeah.

Carolyn D. Gorman: That's right. I mean, American households, their average income every month is so much more volatile than people realize. So anytime you can sort of help add some consistency around expectations, I think that's useful for families that just have such a tough time, you know, keeping a budget because, you know, twice a year you've got months with, where if you're paid on a bi-weekly schedule, you're going to get paid three times versus two times. Tax refunds are a huge cash infusion. So when you think about just those three months alone, that's a third of all months that income is going to be different. So that volatility, I think makes it hard to plan. anytime you can kind of have continuity is maybe useful for households.

Charles Fain Lehman: There's a way that I've been thinking about it. I'm curious what people make of this. my mental model is an ideal bill would have extended TCJA. They would have not sunset TCJA because you can't raise people's taxes. That's not an option. And it would have spent the money on the border enforcement that the bill does spend, because I think it's part of the president's mandate. Frequent panelists, Daniel Di Martino and I have written about, if you want to do mass deportations, you kind of got to fund it.

I probably would have offset that with the Medicaid cuts and then like everything else would not have gone. And so that's sort of the ideal bill that I would have liked to live in that world. But then also separately I'm kind of like, you can't actually ever get the ideal bill out of Congress. So I guess, you know, one model of like the bill that we're actually going to get is like the ideal bill, except also there's a bunch of other stuff in there to like get it over the finish line. I wonder what people make of that as a model.

Like, you know, should we see this as just sort of like the best you can plausibly get? Or is there a more realistic best they could have got?

Neetu Arnold: Here's my question. I mean, it's a massive bill. They're trying to address a lot of issues at once. Why? Was there a way to break this down and have smaller bite-sized pieces? It seems kind of impossible to me to ask lawmakers to just, you know, forego their vacation and just spend all their time on this bill.

Judge Glock: I know you're particularly concerned about the Congress members vacation time right there as all Americans are. Our heart goes out to them, that regular three-day work week can get pretty brutal, especially during the mid-summer times. So like, yeah, originally they were talking about two big bills. This was what Majority Leader Thune and others wanted at least to try to deal with this. And Trump from the beginning insisted on, we wanted the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.

That's why we got that right now. And, you know, there's virtues and costs to that. Like the general trend of congressional lawmaking has been more omnibus bills. If you look at the bills, I forget what the cutoff line is, but those over, I say, a hundred pages or something, the proportion of all lawmaking that goes to those bills has kept going up for the past 40 years. So we have more and more bills that are big, big chunks. And what that usually means is the majority leaders and the speaker get together and find something through leadership that pushes everything together. They try to make everyone happy, but they just kind of present it as a fait accompli to their members and hope they can all vote for it. You know, that's different from how bills were usually done in the past, which was working their way up through different committees and a bunch of individual inputs from everybody. This had some of that, certainly, but it's definitely leadership driven and that has cost and benefits. I think it makes you more likely to have trade-offs from different sectors if you have them all in one big bill. It's a little harder if it's just leadership to get that input though. And you know the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We'll find out whether this was a good idea in a few hours or in a few days or weeks most likely. So we'll see.

Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah, it's definitely interesting to see sort of the little things that end up getting stuck in there and get through. It does seem like this is just a lawmaking trend. You're just going to continue to see more of these kind of big bills.

Charles Fain Lehman: I want to take this out, so I'm going ask everyone in the panel, do we think this thing gets over the finish line or is there going to be a last-minute John McCain thumbs down from Representative Massey or somebody else, Lisa Murkowski, I don't even know who's going to torpedo it. Judge, I'll start with you. Is it going to get through?

Judge Glock: I'll do if… Who knows? It might even be, the first vote might have even happened by the time we air this thing.

Charles Fain Lehman: That's true. I feel like we should say we're recording this morning, so when it goes up at like 3 or 4 o'clock today, it might be completely different.

Judge Glock: Things change, things change quick. If, again, if I was a betting man, I’d say it's not going to make it through in this first try. They're going to go to a conference committee we're going have a good old-fashioned smoke-filled room where they hash it out and then it will probably get through.

Charles Fain Lehman: Alright, Neetu, what's your take?

Neetu Arnold: I don't know. Okay, I'm kind of divided now. know earlier I said, you know, I'm kind of skeptical that it'll make it through, but I don't know. I kind of changed my mind, but I don't know why. Like I'm going off gut feeling here. We're going to say they're going to get it done by tomorrow, because I just feel it.

Charles Fain Lehman: We can, no, cause the good thing is we're actually, we're going to do, we're going to do two takes of that. We're just going to edit Neetu to be correct, regardless of what actually happens. Carolyn, where are you, where you at?

Carolyn D. Gorman: Well, you know, I'm going to avoid any forecasting questions you ever give me to whatever extent I can.

Charles Fain Lehman: It's what the people want. It's what the people want.

Carolyn D. Gorman: You know, I actually, I don't know, like, what Thomas Massie wants, like what would make him say yes? And so for that reason, I'm thinking maybe it just happens. Like members of Congress who want to make a stink over spending can say their bit and say they did, but then just chalk it up to passing with momentum maybe, so I think it'll get done.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, that's where I lean. I think the Speaker has consistently demonstrated his ability to pull it out at the last possible second. And a lot of that is with Trump’s backing, but also nobody predicted he would be in the job this long. He's made it happen. So, you know, I'm optimistic about his ability to make it happen.

Carolyn D. Gorman: Also, Judge, I wish there was more sort of backroom cigar-smoking deal making still, but I just feel like we're maybe not doing enough of that anymore. So.

Judge Glock: It's happening. It's just again, we don't even hear about the back rooms because the back rooms are on some godforsaken zoom call somewhere.

Charles Fain Lehman: That sounds terrible. All right. All right. I want to take us from one godforsaken prison to another. Earlier this week, the president toured the new immigration detention facility in Florida, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, because it's been constructed at, I think, an abandoned airport, which is inaccessible except by flight, and it's surrounded by alligators and snakes.

This has provoked to the predictable backlash. It's like we're building a CECOT in America. At the same time, the President sort of seems to be reveling in, you know, the comic absurdity of this. We've talked about the President's affection for Alcatraz on this show before. But I'm curious what people make of this. Do you think it's overwrought? Do you think there are legitimate concerns? Should we be doing this at all? Where are people at on... Should we be organizing an MI trip to Alligator Alcatraz? What do people think?

Neetu Arnold: Only a Florida man would come up with this.

Carolyn D. Gorman: I'm a big proponent of site visits, so yeah, let's get the MI trip on the books.

Judge Glock: Yeah, wait, how close is this to Mar-a-Lago, right? We're talking like, in the whole YIMBY-NIMBY debate, which obviously I've got on top of mind right now, like, is Trump willing to have an Alcatraz in his backyard? And it seems like he's not opposed to it. You know, this is, a lot of people object to these things sometimes, and maybe it's nice to see that you can just build a nice prison and you don't have all the local opposition.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, mean, to me, part of what's interesting is just like, to what extent is this? I mean, obviously, there's this sort of showmanship on the part of DeSantis. And there's been sort of a Trump came out and said, you know, we've had our differences, but Ron DeSantis is my friend. Ron DeSantis will always be my friend, which is telling politically. But, you know, I think this is situated in the context of broader frustration over the president's deportation agenda, where, you know, he'd like to get a lot of people moving out. There's a recent estimate from the Center for Immigration Studies that implied that the unauthorized population had declined by something like a million people over the first five months of this year. But a lot of that is just like the border is no longer being overrun by people. So actual entries into the country declines, the population declines.

But they're still turning people out at a pretty anemic rate. I think there have been real struggles to get this off the ground, partly because it's hard and partly because of the courts. So I guess the broader question here is, how do people perceive the administration's immigration efforts going and how do they feel like the public's perception, what do they think the public perception is of these immigration efforts? Is Trump getting points on the board by running Alligator Alcatraz or is he further alienating people?

Carolyn D. Gorman: I mean, this seems like the type of thing his base would like, but, you know, I think it really depends on your expectations. It was always going to be hard to do this. And so maybe it would be beneficial for the president to kind of frame things, to manage expectations, I guess. Closing the border and being successful on that aspect, sort of cutting things off from the head is a really useful thing to maybe be messaging because there is that longer-term work that's going to have to be done to address the people who are already here.

Judge Glock: Yeah, it's interesting. So Trump overwhelmingly beat Biden and then Kamala Harris in polling on immigration. Like that was one of the clearest advantages he had coming on. The press, of course, attacked him relentlessly on this, but they were attacking him on one of his most popular policies. That was very clear. People were upset about the, you know, what would, Charles, you remember it was how many new arrivals or residents we have, about four million plus during the Biden years?

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, between five and six million people during the entire Biden term. Yeah.

Judge Glock: During the entire Biden term. You know, that was unprecedented. People were willing to clearly change course on that. Right now, his polling in immigration is underwater. So they're less thrilled about that, because, of course, you're seeing a lot of individual cases that look pretty bad. But in terms of, the big spending on sort of border security, that security, that still seems where Trump has the strongest claim on the popular sentiment right there.

You know, that it also relates into the there are one big beautiful bill discussion in that some senators and representatives were pulling back on border security spending to my mind for the correct argument that we've beaten a lot of this. Like the reduction in crossings is so much lower. It is like what we're talking 90 plus percent reductions. The crossing aspect of it is down so much, we don't need to spend as much on all of the facilities. You know, there's a lot else we need to do, immigration judges, detention centers, and so forth. But like on some aspects of this, like Trump has won that game and like you just take the victory lap and then focus on these other issues around how to deport people, immigration judges, et cetera.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, that is the core thing. Daniel Di Martino has written a great deal about this, where I think they got to his number in the bill, where he said we 800 new immigration judges, and we can do 3 million deportations in the next four years. I think that's approximately the right set of numbers. And they gave him the number that he wanted. I don't know how involved he was in that, but they gave him the number that he wanted, which is great. And I think his point is like, when you think about the system as a queue, we're cutting people off at the start. It turns out deterrence does actually work, shocking everybody who claimed theatdeterrence doesn't work. And then you just have a lot of people who have been in the country, people who have standing orders for 10, 15, 20 years who need to be processed and then removed. There are like a million people with final orders for removal right now, who haven't been removed. You need do something for them, you need resources for that. But then you have five million new additions in the past four years. Those people also need to get their due process and then get moved out of the country. And I think they're moving in that direction.

You know, I do think it is, immigration politics is all about what the salience is, right? And sometimes this is the argument for the Alligator Alcatraz is like, if you can show people something like cool and scary, it takes their minds off of those sort of tough cases that the Democrats/the press/the press who are Democrats have used to sort of shift the issue, right? We're not talking about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, except when they're talking about prosecuting him anymore. And that's been where Trump has been weakest on immigration is those high-salience issues. So if you can sort of shift to here's a different way of thinking, know, the tough on immigration stance, if you can shift to that, then maybe you're winning the public debate as well. That's my theory at least.

Neetu Arnold: Look, you wouldn't need to resort to an Alligator Alcatraz if we were just handling immigration properly in the first place. And Democrats have not really presented a viable option in the past couple of years. I think we'd be having a very different conversation right now if, I don't know, we were having common sense immigration reform.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, mean, this is the funny thing is the set of Democrats who sort of tried to talk the talk but haven't really walked the walk on immigration, Ruben Gallego in the Senate, John Fetterman also in the Senate, there are a handful of Blue Dogs who have sort of been like, well, we do need more aggressive immigration enforcement. They sort of realized this is something you can give up on pretty easily. But they don't really want to walk the walk legislatively.

All right. I want to take us out, so let me ask, we're talking about the immigration super jail. If we're trying to build a bigger facility, where would you panelists site your immigration super jail? Carolyn, I'll start with you.

Carolyn D. Gorman: I kind of like where it is now.

Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, fair enough. Float Everglades, me too.

Neetu Arnold: It's not so much of a place. I do like the idea of just using your natural surroundings as a way to create negative incentives to come to this country illegally. So you know, I think swamps are kind of eerie, you know, maybe cactus, I don't know, super extreme temperatures, like if it's super cold or super hot, I don't know, maybe cockroach-infested. I don't know. I hate cockroaches.

Charles Fain Lehman: I feel like you'd have some litigation problems with cockroaches, but it's doable. Judge, where would you site it?

Judge Glock: Yeah, first, Florida is great for a million reasons. It's super villain, Super Villain 101 is you use alligators in your moat to protect your base. Like that's just assumed if you're building a super lair or whatever you want to build. So that's great. Two, it's great because Florida has a lot of other legal immigrants. And so you can have the legal immigrants guard the illegals and help kick them out. And, you know, that's exactly as the American system is supposed to work. So I think Florida's perfect.

Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, so see I'm going to have to go, like I think you could diversify here. Florida's good, you also want one in Texas, because you want proximity to the border. But then there were other, like, you know, if we're talking about imposing supe-lairs, like the obvious analogy is ABX Florence, which is referred to as the Alcatraz of the Rockies, and this is the like, you know, super intense 23 hours a day in solitary jail where they detain people like Ted Kaczynski or the Oklahoma City, Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, or people who have like escaped multiple other federal facilities.

So like you could, you could pop one down in the Rocky mountains, like near ADX Florence. I'm not sure it would be like that effective, but it would be kind of cool if you could have that. And Trump would like it, which is an important part of any siting decision under this BOP is how much.

Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah, but what were like the super villain alligator substitutes there?

Charles Fain Lehman: I mean, that's a mountain. It's pretty hard to navigate.

Judge Glock: Cougars. Cougars, Pumas, I don't know what is ever left of it.

Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah.

Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, that's true. You also get rattlesnakes in Texas, so that's good. Proximity of the border.

Carolyn D. Gorman: There you go, there we go. And Texas is so hot. Yeah.

Neetu Arnold: And Arizona.

Charles Fain Lehman: All right. Texas is very hot. So is Florida, Arizona. I'm glad that I'm not responsible for solving this problem.

All right. Before we go and get into our July 4th weekend, speaking of July 4th, there's a recent Gallup poll that's been doing the rounds that finds that the fewest Americans on record are extremely or very proud to be American, so at 58 percent, which is still a majority, but not by much. there's actually the figure is now 36 percent for self-identified Democrats, and still remains mostly high 80s, low 90s Republicans, but then zoomer Republicans, it's only 65 percent. So there are signs of problems throughout. We're actually going to have a great piece tomorrow on the website about, we asked five of our contributors, including Carolyn, to talk about why they're proud to be Americans. That will run on City Journal’s website, so I encourage everyone to check it out. Before we go into the weekend, I want to ask everyone on the panel, why are you proud to be an American? Neetu, I'll kick it to you.

Neetu Arnold: I immigrated to this country in the 1990s with my parents. Yes. And it's such a privilege to be here. I've been fortunate to meet so many great people here and I'm just super grateful to be here. I mean, I really love the culture of innovation and opportunity. I think it's a country that really values risk-taking and you know, your ability to improve your life, especially over generations, is not set in stone based on your family circumstance or socioeconomic status. If you work hard, if you believe in yourself, I think this is a country that still, you know, there's just so many opportunities out there and you just have to go take it.

Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, that's a good answer. Yeah, welcome to America. I feel like, by the way, we did this thing, and like half of our responses are people who are like, I can't, you know, I'm an immigrant or I'm a child of immigrants. And that's why I love America. it's like, that's really at our intersection is like, you know, immigrants who really love to wave the flag, ideal for the City Journal. Judge, when did the Glocks come to America? When did the Glock family come to America?

Neetu Arnold: Yeah.

Judge Glock: Like during the Civil War or some shit, you know. It's classic like…

Charles Fain Lehman: Oh, late arrivals.

Judge Glock: Yeah, yeah, big-headed pasty Irish and Germans like flown over on sailing ships and hanging out, moving like five feet in from the ocean and never leaving. They're not like those, like that was all the exploring they wanted to do. And then they stopped.

There's a, there's the old economist joke about, one economist asks the other “how’s your wife doing?” and the other says “relative to what?” And, and I always say, and I always say, it's like this, where, for all those people who aren't proud to be American, where else would you rather be? Have you seen the rest of the earth? Like seriously, so much of it is a shit show. Like it's one, it's totally, even the nice places, like in Europe, they're all living in like little cardboard boxes. Their houses are, are totally jokes.

We're stretching out here in these mansions across America, driving giant trucks, we're living the life, like, where else on earth would you rather be than America in 2025? It's pretty good. And then so relative to what? Yeah, America beats every other country on earth. Maybe there's some imaginable thing I'd come up with, but relative to any real existing country, America wins.

Charles Fain Lehman: Fair, okay. Carolyn, wait, when did your family come here and also why are you proud to be an American?

Carolyn D. Gorman: Yeah, so we are third-generation and almost entirely Irish Catholic. The Gormans settled in Skaneateles Falls, which is in central New York by the Finger Lakes. And they also didn't move very far. But my sister recently moved to London and, Judge, to your point, they don't have air conditioning and right now it's super hot and it's like the one time it's been hot and she's, you know, over there like, oh my God, this is awful. So.

Judge Glock: And their house is probably like 200 square feet in London too. Like even for New Yorkers, London looks small.

Carolyn D. Gorman: No, totally. But no, in this City Journal piece, Charles, I wrote on why I love American music. But I'll make a broader sort of statement of love here. Yeah, look, we're not a perfect nation, but that's sort of exactly why the U.S. is so impressive. It's explicitly, explicitly our aim to sort of organize government in a way that allows us to try to become a more perfect union and we're kind of uniquely equipped with the freedoms to do that. And so, you know, on net, things are so good here for so many people that it's easy to forget how good we have it. And I think that that definitely says something.

Charles Fain Lehman: My family, when did we come here? Late into the 20th century, whenever all the other Jews came. No, mean, I'm a big America guy. I won't show it on camera because someone will steal my identity, but I have an American flag credit card and I believe that that epitomizes American identity. And what I appreciate in America is our just sort of unrepentant, unironic commitment to loving our country. This is what's alarming to me at the Gallup poll. I think American identity is bound up in unapologetically just being pro-America, including all of the ridiculous parts of it. It's just like, yes, that's why we're awesome. We're just better than everyone else all the time forever, even in the bad parts. That's also better than everyone else.

I can talk about America all day, but that is about all the time that we have. So thank you as always to our panelists. Thank you to our producer. Wait, Sophia Izzo is our producer today because Isabella Redjai is out to celebrate America. Thank you, Sophia. Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode or even if you didn't, don't forget to like, subscribe, click the bell, ring the bell, do whatever the heck you're supposed to do on YouTube and all of the other platforms. Leave us comments and questions down below. Until next time, you've been listening to the City Journal Podcast. Hope you'll join us again soon.

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