The Dispatch Podcast - America and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Debate

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

Last night was the first presidential debate and it was … not a great moment for the country, to say the least. As Sarah reminds us, presidential candidates go into debates with a strategy, basing their metric of success on their ability to boost turnout among an already existing base. Did either candidate achieve what they wanted to achieve? Are undecided voters who watched the debate now more or less likely to show up to the polls? If you haven’t been following every twist and turn of the race, Trump appeared strong and forceful during the debate, interrupting the moderator and his doddering opponent in perpetuity. But were Trump’s interruptions strategic? As Jonah argues, “He didn’t let Biden talk when Biden was talking badly.” Rather than give Biden the opportunity to fumble, the president was just a “blunderbuss of interruptions,” a problem that was compounded by his refusal to condemn white supremacy. Biden, on the other hand, somewhat succeeded in his do no harm, let Trump be Trump strategy, minor gaffes aside. But it was by no means a show-stopping performance from the Democratic nominee. All things considered, it mostly served as a reminder that maybe mute buttons would be a good idea next time around. After a debate recap, Sarah and the guys discuss the electoral and national security implications of the New York Times’ report on Trump’s tax returns, as well as the DNI Director John Ratcliffe’s letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham regarding the FBI’s handling of Crossfire Hurricane. Stick around for a fun conversation about our podcast hosts’ favorite cult classic films. Show Notes: -30 day free trial at The Dispatch, Dispatch Live Post-Debate Edition, Frank Luntz’s focus group, post-debate Telemundo poll, New York Times’ report on Trump’s tax returns, DNI letter from John Ratcliffe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to The Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined as always by Steve Hayes, David French, and Jonah Goldberg. This podcast is brought to you by the dispatch. Come on by and try out our free membership trial at the dispatch.com slash 30 days free. You can check out our full slate of newsletters, including the ones that are for members only, like my midweek mop-up for my political newsletter, The Sweep, but there's lots more than that. and it'll be fun. You can try it. There's no downside, really. For those of you who joined us last night for our special dispatch live for the debates, thanks for coming by. We had such a good time,

and we'll do it again for the next debate. But now, our regularly scheduled podcast. Today's podcast is brought to you by Bespoke Post and Gabby. We'll hear from them a little later. We're going to start with the debate, a couple moments that the guys want to talk about in particular, And then we'll do Trump tax return story in the New York Times and the letter from the

Directorate of National Intelligence about the 2016 campaign. Plus, a little bit on cult movie classics. Let's dive right in. last night was the debate. We got to start with that, so we're starting with my topic, which is you go into these debates with a strategy,

and each campaign knows what they want to get out of it, who they're targeting, and that's how they judge their metric of success. Given that, Steve, not who won or lost the debate based on your own thoughts, but based on the campaign's own metrics

as you saw them and what you thought they were trying to accomplish last night, how did they do? Well, that's a really smart way of framing the question because I would give two totally different answers to that. I thought Trump had overall a pretty good night. If you're doing it sort of as, I mean, you know, he was a bully. He was obnoxious. He talked over the moderator and his opponent. He said things that weren't true. But in the context of Donald Trump and thinking back to his debate performances with Hillary Clinton and then in the primaries, he seemed in command, he seemed, he had answers. He seemed confident. And I think if you were coming to this

debate and you haven't been following every twist and turn of the race, Trump came off. You don't like some of the excesses of the personality stuff, but he wasn't, you know, he wasn't as bad as he was during the coronavirus briefings. So in that sense, I think, you know, on a debater's scorecard, he would have done reasonably well if I were scoring that. But given the way that you asked it, I think he didn't accomplish what he set out to accomplish. I think he came in to accomplish to try to make Joe Biden have either a senior moment where he couldn't remember things because he was so flummoxed by all of the interruptions

or have a real meltdown. And the closest we got from Joe Biden was when he looked at the president and after the president interrupted him 10 times in a row and said, you know, oh, shut up, man. And I don't think that was a great moment for Biden, but it wasn't anywhere near the kind of catastrophic moment that I think some Democrats were worried Joe Biden might have had. Jonah? Well, as we discussed in our exciting and vivacious dispatch live event last night, I think Steve's wrong about how good Trump did, but not in.

not wildly wrong, not Spanish wine wrong. But that said, I think that the only, so my answer last night was Biden clearly won because his strategy going in was do no harm, be non-threatening, let Trump be Trump to the extent that he may not turn off new voters, but he keeps, the voters who have already been turned off that he needs will stay turned off. and Biden did that. He did no harm. He had no flubs. Trump's strategy going in, I think, was, or I thought last night, and I still think today, the primary strategy was, as I believe you put it last night, to get one minute

out of this that was of Biden melting down, having the senior moment, having the mental and competent moment, trying to eat the microphone, whatever it is, that they could run on an endless loop on social media and on friendly media outlets, and the other 89 minutes wouldn't matter, as you put it. I think that was still the primary strategy. They failed on that, which is not to say that he didn't execute it well. It's just Biden didn't take debate. The only place I would revise and extend my analysis of this is that I think...

Trump, an additional error of Trump's, is that he didn't let Biden talk when Biden was talking badly, right? He did not strategically interrupt Biden. He was just a blunderbuss of interruptions. And there were a lot of moments when, you know, just after sleeping on it, where Biden was saying stuff that was not true, that was meandering, and that could have done the whole Alzheimer patient walking off into the snow thing that they were looking for, but Trump let him off the hook again and again and again. So I think he didn't execute it as well as I thought he had did last night. And the other thing I would say, though, that he did execute better or that I didn't appreciate is Frank Luntz did these focus groups, and I hate focus groups, and I certainly hate focus groups

after debates. And every time someone says, I don't know, I'm still undecided. I didn't hear enough about education. I want to take out a giant old newsreel, a schoolhouse rot, and beat them about the head and neck with it. But that said, he said for the first time in his life in these focus groups, a significant percentage of people said that they were not more likely to vote for Trump. They were more likely not to vote at all than when they went in. They were so disgusted with the whole thing. And part of Trump's secondary strategy is to make this election so ugly that normal decent citizens are just, you know, refreshing, hitting the refresh on their browser to see if they can get a cheaper flight to Canada. And that, I think, actually

was pretty effective. I think Canada is no longer letting us in, right? Because of coronavirus. That is true. Trump will change that. I think that's a super interesting point, Jonah, because that's exactly what I was wondering watching it, whether they believed that by making the debate more or less unwatchable, especially for, as a woman, I felt like it was extra unwatchable. Like, there's nothing in it for me to watch men, you know, interrupt each other and like alpha machismo each other out. Like, I found it, like, I couldn't understand what they were saying half the time.

And I just sort of tuned out for large chunks of it probably. but it certainly helps Trump if he can get Biden voters not to show up. And so overall, if you think you can get more Biden voters not to show up than your own voters not to show up, then that's a winning strategy of sorts. The question, though, is that, did that actually happen last night? Did he get more of the Biden voters to throw their hands up? And I don't know. David, what do you think of, you know, the moderation aspect?

Yeah. I thought he did as best he could with what you would say was an impossible job. You know, you kept seeing folks on, you know, I kept seeing critiques, especially this morning from folks who are more Trump sympathetic saying he should have just let the debate play out. Well, that wasn't a debate that he was going to be letting play out. It was nothing but constant interruptions and total violations of the rules that Trump's, team agreed to before the debate. So at some point, Chris Wallace had to step in. And you can't sit there and say, well, Chris, every time you step in with Trump, you have to step in with Biden. Like there's sort of a moderate the interruption counter when one person is interrupting more. I mean, you know, one of the things about the debate overall that I thought was, you know, as I thought about it overnight, if you go back to 2012, there were a couple of things about the debates that were outside of the norms in ways that really angered Republicans. One was Candy Crowley stepping in in the foreign policy debate to purport to try to fact-check

Mitt Romney. And then the other one was, I don't know if you remember the vice presidential debate well, but Biden was kind of rude, interrupted, talked over Paul Ryan. And I remember leaving that debate saying that was, that's just not the way, you know, I was irritated at Joe Biden after that debate. And the funny thing about the 2020 debate was that it's like it took both of these flaws of the 2012 debates and just, and I don't blame Wallace for this because he kept being boxed in constantly, but sort of Trump took this and just ramped it all the way to the red line.

and blew through every sort of conventional guardrail and when that occurs, the fact of the matter is there's not a great way to respond to it and I guess the best way to respond to it, the only real way to respond to it is for voters to say,

no, we don't like that. That's going to be the only check on that kind of behavior because it's asking too much of a moderator to get control of the most powerful man in the world when he decides he doesn't, want anyone to, to moderate him. I thought it was really interesting before the debate last night, even started. I talked to a Trump voter who said, boy, I'm really worried that Chris Wallace will not be fair

to the president. And I was like, why? I mean, Chris Wallace, you know, loves his reputation as one of the toughest interviews in town. He's going to be really tough on both of them because that's, you know, his own incentive structure. And this Trump voter was like, I don't know, I think Wallace is going to be super biased against the president. And, you know, halfway through the debate, I checked in and they were like, oh, I didn't want to say anything, but like, I told you so.

So this idea that from the right that they're sort of blaming Wallace for how things went was really interesting to me that those seats had somehow been planted before the debate itself. But at the same time, has there ever been a moment in the Trump presidency? or the Trump candidacy when Trump supporters were not complaining about the refs and were not complaining about the media? I mean, it's just what they do. It's the nature of being a Trump backer. That's what you do. Look, I mean, Chris is taking, I thought he did a good job. I agree with David entirely. I think it was an impossible situation. I think, you know, he was as firm as he could possibly be stopping the president from his interruptions and at times stopping Joe Biden when Joe Biden interrupted and trying to get the debate back on track and trying to sort of coax some substance

policy answers out of these two candidates. I think Biden came in wanting to talk more about policy and drive a contrast on policy, but didn't really get there. And when he got there, didn't do it very well. He seemed lost to me. He didn't seem in command of his thoughts and in command of his arguments very well. He kept trying out these obviously pre-planned, canned one-liners, and he missed half of them. And so to me, especially when he was addressing the camera directly, he felt like a typical politician, but a not very effective typical politician. But Wallace had had to step in and try to corral Donald Trump, or the debate would have just devolved even worse than it did. And it was, you know, it wasn't great. Wasn't a great moment for the country.

Yeah, one thing, Steve, that you mentioned, it reminds me of sort of there's this consistent pattern that you have, and Jonah has pointed this out repeatedly in his work, is that Trump will say, he's elected to be a disruptor. He's not going to play by the rules, and he's going to charge into there like a bull, you know, in a China shop. And then when people react to the disruptive force, his critics will say, why are you all acting differently? Yeah. There's a way you're supposed, these are there are rules you're supposed to follow and and so the the entire you know it's combination of it's it's a combination of bullying with resort to immediate victimhood if there is any response to the bully that is outside all of the normal rules that the bully was

elected to disrupt and you know i just think after a while i think a lot of people are just onto this game. They're just, they're on to it now. Yeah, see, that's what about the next debate? Go ahead. Just very quickly. That, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my watched the dispatch live thing last night. And, um, and she sort of made that point and chastise

me as she often does for not making it myself, um, in that, you know, Steve and I disagreed about the, oh, shut up man thing. And, um, that was a perfect example of, um, you know, um, that was a perfect example of, Biden being pushed into breaking norms, right? He began, as, as we noted last night, he began by saying Mr. President and the President and all of that, and then Trump kept being a jerk. And so finally Biden says, oh, shut up, man. And the, the idea that you're going to then say, oh, how outrageous it is for Biden to have violated norms leaves out the fact that he was sort of goaded into it by a president who was actually violating norms and um and i think that a lot of people in the audience

as david says have figured that out and aren't going to hold it against Biden very harshly for saying that except for the people who are already in um trump's column and they don't matter electorally the um now i can't forget i forgot my other point was so sarah you can have it Well, I'll just jump in real quick and maybe you can think of it. I don't at all blame Biden for that very human reaction. I mean, it was a human moment. It was, in some ways, it was Joe Biden at his most authentic. But I think he came in.

Wait, you didn't think he had that prepared? No, I don't think he had that prepared. I don't think he wanted to do that. I don't think he wanted to be. I think they hadn't prepared in their pocket and they said, you know, if there's a moment where you need to deploy this, keep this in your pocket. Because, I mean, I've been there. You have those things where you prepare for all these contingencies.

you give your candidate things to hold in their pocket and lines to deploy if this happens, then this. I think that was one of those. Biden had lots of those. This didn't strike me as one of them. It struck me as authentic and just frustrated in the moment because Trump had, I went back and listened to it. Trump had interrupted him at that point. Just, you know, Biden would get out three words and then Trump would jump in. And this was like again and again and again. And it felt like just sheer frustration. And that he was, it was to me, the closest that Biden came to being off of his game. I think Jonah's probably right when he says, you know, look, in, in effect, Joe Biden was probably speaking for a lot of Americans who've wanted to say that to

Donald Trump for a long time. I just didn't think it was a, it was a great moment, particularly if his goal was to come in and sort of prosecute a case and make a more substantive argument, to establish the contrast that we know that he wants to continue to establish. All right. Last piece on this, and we'll have a dispatch live after the next debate. So previewing that, if you will, David, what would need to change at the next debate for you to say there was some big shift in the race or in how you think voters are perceiving this? You know, I think that what would have to change.

So the core Trump effort, and this is something you laid out, I thought, really effectively in Dispatch Live, the core Trump effort, Sarah, seemed to be that he was going to push Biden into Biden making the big mistake. And the problem was, and as Jonah said it, he never gave Biden an opportunity to make a mistake because he was just constantly. interrupting and doing the constant pushing, the constant hectoring. And so there was never an opportunity, really. I mean, I suppose there could have been, you know, if Biden had really fumbled for him to have one of those true word salad moments and have that sort of, that moment that, that, that moment that, as you said, could be put on social media and repeated and repeated and repeated.

You know, maybe it's overused to say that he went to 11. I think he went to 12. If he just dials back to 10 and pushes and stops, perhaps he can push Biden into, to, you know, a particularly bad Bidenism. But I'm not sure that'll happen. I mean, we've seen Biden debate now throughout the primaries, and he's been fine. I mean, he's not been great. He's not been awful. And I think he'll just continue to be fine.

And it will be interesting to me to see if what the polling says after this debate and will Trump realize that didn't work and he'll voluntarily dial it back? I don't know. We'll see. Jonah? Yeah. I mean, and this sort of picks up on the thing that I forgot when I forgot my point earlier, when we were talking about Wallace. Basically, vast swaths of the pro-Trump right have got themselves into this non-falsifiable feedback loop. And so by definition, difficult, challenging, skeptical questions and interviews are biased, while fawning, you know, tell me, is it true, Mr. President?

that only you can create a boulder so heavy, even you can lift it kind of questions. Wait, you saw that Lou Dobbs interview too? Yeah. And so beyond that, the part of the larger feedback loop is that Trump is going to watch all of the media that is going to tell him what he wants to hear,

and he's going to believe it. He's already doing the thing where he's buying all the Twitter polls as scientific that he won, And so I'm just very, very skeptical that there's going to be some advisor, some person in there who is going to say to him, well, that really didn't work. You're going to have to change your entire MO because he is so caught up in not just his own sort of narcissism, but an entire ecosystem of confirmation bias that I don't. don't know that there's anybody who can get through to him at this point to change it. So very skeptical he changes it at all. I'm skeptical that they're going to cancel the debates, though I think that chorus is going to grow louder. I could see the third debate cancel

if the second one goes like this again. But I don't, I think they're going to go with the same game changer, silver bullet strategy for the second one hoping, okay, this time I'll really push Biden over the edge. Steve? So before then we have the vice presidential debate, and let me just quickly put this in context. If you look at where people said the country was going, the direction of the country, January 1, 37% right direction, 56% wrong direction. And today, following months of civil unrest, burning cities, pandemic, collapsing economy,

right direction is 29, wrong direction, 64. So a change, but not much of a change. change. If you look at Trump's approval as of January 1, his approval rating was 44.6, his disapproval was 51.9. If you look at Trump's approval rating today, it's 45, and his disapproval is 52.9. So basically, we're in the same place that we were before the pandemic and the economic collapse and the civil unrest and the burning cities. It's hard for me. you to imagine that anything much could happen in these three remaining debates, the two presidential and the one vice presidential, that will dramatically alter what's been a steady

race relatively for the past 10 months. I do think there will be some additional scrutiny on the vice presidential debate this year, in part because both of the people at the top of the ticket are older. And Joe Biden looks like somebody who's not a two-term president. I think there is a sort of conventional wisdom that Kamala Harris is auditioning as she's campaigning here to be a potential president. Every vice president does to a certain extent, but I think more in her case. And so I think there will be additional attention paid to her. It will make what she says matter more, and there will be more discussion of the potential role that either Mike Pence or Kamala Harris will play going forward.

All right, David. Next topic. There was a specific moment in the debate that you'd like to discuss. Yeah, and this is the moment that I think as we were talking after the debate was already emerging as sort of the viral moment. It was going to be either the shut up man or it was going to be this one. And it was when Wallace asked Trump to condemn white supremacy, which is just a layup. It's just a layup.

It's the easiest thing in the world to do. But both Wallace and Biden impressed him on the proud boys. And now the proud boys are, now this is where things always get a little tougher for Trump. So if Trump identifies a group of people or knows of a group of people, who really, really like him. And he likes tough guys who really, really like him. He's always, if he believes that these people, these folks really appreciate him,

he's always had trouble condemning them, no matter who they are. I mean, so recently we saw the Q&N where he kind of professed this general vague ignorance, but hey, they love our country. And, you know, this was the genesis of the very fine people on both sides, which was not referring to the Saturday chaos and violence,

but was referring to the Friday night before, which was this alt-right-led march. And so he's always had this trouble condemning people who like him. And the proud boys really like them, some Donald Trump. And so he said of the proud boys, they need to stand back, which would be fine. And then the next thing he said, and stand by. which is very much. And something that sounds like, be ready.

And that's exactly how they interpreted it. The proud boys online, they interpreted it and began to say, standing by, sir. And on the one hand, you could say, well, I mean, stand back. Maybe that's the really important word that was used. But then when you combine it with some of the other stuff in the debate, where he said, was it twice, Steve, where he said, this will not end well regarding the election and that. and the possible chaos with the voting, when he urged his supporters to essentially become poll watchers.

You know, all of this together, really, to me, signified that he actually likes having his street thugs. He seems to actually like having his street thugs. I mean, and when you think about back in the 2016 election, when, you know, you've offered to pay the legal fees of people who would punch protesters. I mean, he likes these guys. And look, I mean, it's overused to say that's dangerous. It's dangerous. It's, you know, I wanted to say it's not, you'll hear people say again and again,

it's dangerous and dangerous. It's not overused. It is dangerous. It is dangerous. And, you know, one of the things that we saw in 2016 was everyone at first when the alt-right came out, we're saying, calm down, calm down. It's just on Twitter. It's just on Twitter.

Well, then it turned into the streets, and then people died. And the proud boys, well, they're already. in the streets. They're not just on Twitter. They're already in the streets. And I thought that was the low moment. Steve, I thought that that is a moment that we should definitely be talking about. But I also thought that even asking that question presumed a certain amount of, if you're

a Trump supporter, a certain amount of bias on Wallace's part, right? what was the equivalent question that Biden got, you know, maybe when it comes to fracking jobs or something else where it was, hey, disavow this thing that your supporters have said or like. And so I think for a lot of Trump supporters, that whole, the lead up into it was actually Trump refusing to play that game, regardless of what he said. Yeah, I mean, so Chris Wallace did ask Joe Biden directly. and I think aggressively about his refusal to answer the question about court packing. And I think that would be the same if you're going to press.

I mean, it's not the same in terms of, you know, which group that supports you do you denounce? But it was a pretty aggressive run at Joe Biden. Well, like there was the Antifa exchange, but Wallace didn't particularly press him on that when he said Antifa is an idea. Yeah, he could have jumped. I thought Chris could have jumped in there. There was also a point at which Joe Biden, Trump had said something about. the problem with schools across the country teaching our kids to hate their country. And Joe Biden said, nobody's doing that.

Well, no, actually, people are doing that. And it's a problem. It's a real problem. I'm not sure that Donald Trump's, you know, federally driven patriotic education program is the right response to it. But it is happening. It is a problem. And Joe Biden didn't get pressed on that. Look, I'd be more sympathetic to that case from Trump's support.

if Donald Trump didn't have the history that David just laid out, right? I mean, he's done this before. Remember the painful interview he had with Jake Tapper of CNN on David Duke, where Tapper asked him three different times to denounce David Duke, and Trump just couldn't bring himself to do it. Like, that's not hard. This is an easy thing to do. And it's not just a missed opportunity for Trump that he didn't just say, hey, yeah,

Those guys are creepy. Of course I denounce white supremacists. Who's in favor of white supremacists? It's a crazy question to ask. I mean, that would be the right response. If I got that question, I would take umbrage at the question and be angry at the moderator for asking it. How dare you ask me? Of course I'm not for white supremacist. And Trump's reaction, his instinct was precisely the opposite to stumble around to avoid answering the question, I think very deliberately, avoid answering the question, missing the opportunity to denounce something that deserves a heavy and prompt denunciation, but then going further, but then saying, stand back and stand by, I might need you.

And as David says, there were other moments in the debate that suggested he might have actually really meant that. So I don't think this was a case of Trump being stubborn. I think we've discussed this before. I mean, Trump has a certain idea in his head of what his base is. And it's an idea, I think, that is shaped to a certain extent of his growing up as a Manhattan liberal. And he thinks conservatives are sort of, you know, these rednecks who might be offended if he denounces the proud boys or David Duke or Charlottesville. Now, to be fair to him on Charlottesville, he did actually have the denunciation in his remarks and denounced white supremacist. showing us that he could in fact do it. But then he also said there were good people on both

sides. And as David correctly points out, what they were discussing, there weren't actually. The sons of the Confederacy, the people were making arguments in defense of preserving history were not actually there. This was just an alt-right white supremacist rally. So I think that is, you know, Syria, you said, you know, is there a moment? And that is certainly feels like a moment to come out of this debate. I was texting with a friend who I'd say he's apolitical. He's not undecided, not a fan of either of the candidates. But he wrote back to me today and said,

Trump's blatant refusal to denounce white supremacy is the thing to push me to the other side. So it registered. Jonah, I saw last night a Telemundo poll. you know, one of those snap polls right afterwards that are, you know, not that great. But nevertheless, it was interesting because 66% of Spanish speakers who watched the debate thought Trump won. Yeah, my understanding, and I'm really open to the correction on this, is that I looked around

for that. I think that was actually a Twitter poll, not a Snap poll. Got it. And as a Twitter poll, it is what. Cephologists and political scientists call hot garbage. But it would not shock me at the same time if some of that stuff

played better with Hispanics than a lot of the sort of liberal caricatures and clichés that come out of a sort of beltway analysis. We already know that, right? We know he's doing better among Cubans. We know Biden's underperforming with Hispanics compared to even Hillary Clinton.

and I think there are a bunch of different reasons for one is that I think Hispanics are more law and order than people think and that you know it's kind of funny I just learned this recently um the word for like progressive in in a lot of Spanish speaking countries basically translates into like communist dictator and so when Biden says stuff like I'm going to be the most progressive president in American history, it has a completely different valiant, particularly among Venezuelans and Cubans and people like that. And so it would not stun me if, you know, Hispanic Americans, which is, again, a very heterodox group, don't like riots and don't like the sound of Democrats talk. as if it's a, you know, got to hear both sides kind of proposition. But I don't put, if I'm right, and I think I'm right about the Telemundo thing, and I don't put much stock in that.

I do want to say one thing about the Proud Boys thing, which I could say a lot about, but I'll refrain. I don't think it's quite accurate to call them white supremacists. Some of them surely are, and there's a lot of cross-pollinization between the Proud Boys and white supremacist groups. but the proud boys themselves are are much more classically fascistic as opposed to Nazi in the sense that they're like fight club there are a bunch of dudes who are driven by all sorts of maladaptive masculine dysfunction about their place in modern society and there are black

proud boys they're Hispanic proud boys they're but whatever color they come in they're And they're basically just these dudes who like to fight, like to scuffle, like to pretend that they're warriors for a great civilization and all of this kind of stuff. But basically, they're they're misfits in a modern economy. And they're looking for post hoc rationalizations for why they need to get into street fights. I mean, this is brown shirts versus red shirts. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah.

So fascinating, Tim Scott was asked today, do you find it concerning that Trump refused to condemn white supremacists? I mean, this is classic Tim Scott. I think he misspoke in response to Chris Wallace's comment. I think he misspoke. I think he should correct it. If he doesn't correct it, I guess he didn't misspeak. Did you see Rick Santorum on CNN? Going to Steve's point, because this is an obsession of mine, that people don't understand the difference between.

an explanation and an excuse. And like so earlier when David was talking about how Trump likes to have goons who are going to stand up for him, he likes to brag about how he's got tough guys for him, David was doing it as an explanation, right? He wasn't doing it as an excuse. Last night, Santorum said, well, look, the thing you got to remember is Chris Wallace was asking him to do something he doesn't like to do, which is to criticize people who support him. he was basically saying white supremacist support him

and therefore you just have to understand that he's just uncomfortable criticizing him and like that's a perfect example of the confusing an explanation for an excuse centauran was right it's just in no way excuses not condemning white supremacy right well I don't

I'm with I am with you Jonah that there will definitely be a second debate but I just don't know that I can watch it like if it is the same as last night I know we have to do the dispatch live and Steve I understand that this is actually my job but I feel an argument for hazard pay coming

I just don't know that was so unpleasant well all three of us just for the people who didn't watch a dispatch live thing which they should next time all three of us went into this saying this is going to be terrible. I am already full of dread. And Steve was like the golden retriever

marching into the room. This is going to be great. This is going to be so much fun. I'm excited for this. And we were right and he was wrong. That's true. Sarah, it was so bad that there were times when I walked out of the room just where I would just listen to it rather than watch it. Because I would, if I didn't have to do Dispatch Live, I would have turned it off. Like, yeah. I would have turned it off. It was actually painful. At about the 45 minute mark, I kept thinking, I've never, the next 45 minutes are going to feel like four hours. It'll be very interesting. I thought that I had, go ahead, Sarah, sorry. I thought I had fully prepared. I mean, my expectations were low. So I brought my favorite drink, my little spin drift. I had gotten

a chocolate cake from Eddie V's, like the ultimate indulgence. I mean, half a chocolate cake, because I've been, like, eating it through the week. But whatever, I had things ready to, like, perk myself up at low points. That chocolate cake was gone at the three-minute mark. It'll be interesting to see, I don't know if we'll be able to get this from the immediate Nielsen numbers, but to see how many people did, in fact, turn it off. Because I imagine that won't be a small number. And it makes me wonder, will we see that kind of eur attrition for subsequent debates?

if people tuned in out of some sense of civic responsibility and have just said basically like, if they're not taking their civic responsibility seriously, why should I? There was that CBS poll that, you know, said most people were annoyed and yada yada, but 17% of respondents found the debate informative? Who are you 17%? Let's take a short break and hear from one of our sponsors today,

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All right. Jonah, we have not talked about the president's taxes. T-it-up. So I'm going to be a little more nuanced on this than some people might expect. I don't like what the New York Times did very much, or at least the way they did it. I think there was some fantastic reporting, and yes, it's all Pulitzer bait, yada, yada, yada. they kept putting an enormous amount of stink on what he was doing trying to insinuate that he broke the law without providing any evidence that he broke the law and the Times has had a problem with

as always had a weird view on taxes to begin with for 20 years now they run these these blaring headlines about how the number of audits isn't going up fast enough or took a dip in some specific year, that somehow that is like the most glorious thing government does is strap on its proctologist gloves and go looking for extra coins out of the American taxpayer. But so more broadly, and I'm not really summarizing what the Times did, because I assume at this point everybody knows the story, $750 in last year, or in 2016 and 2017, and income taxes.

in previous 10 years or so, no income taxes at all. But so much of the coverage of the story, I just think gets taxes wrong. It is not your patriotic duty to pay your taxes. It is your legal obligation to file a return. And if we're going to say that paying income taxes is your patriotic duty and makes you a patriot, which a lot of people are trying to imply about Trump,

then the fact that the top 1% pay more than the bottom 90% in income taxes, does that make them more patriotic? Because the fact that there are like tens of millions of people in this country who actually are net recipients of government transfers rather than paying in for income taxes, does that make them less patriotic? It's just a very weird way to think about things. On the political front, my take is the relevance of the story has nothing to do with his taxes. So long as he didn't break the law. And so far, he hasn't broken the law as far as you can tell. the relevance of the story is that he's a lousy businessman and that he lied and that he said he was going to bring his expertise at building businesses to government um it turns that he has no

expertise at building businesses and the reality is as he has as i put it in a column he is probably the most successful american and american history at persuading people he was incredibly successful at something he wasn't successful at um he is not a successful businessman and um And if you're going to re-trigger the tax code to make it impossible to write off business expenses just to say what Trump did was wrong, you're going to screw tens of millions of business owners in the process. So it's not a way to think about it. The only other thing that I think is politically relevant in the time story, other than the

fact that, you know, all this other stuff that we knew, that he still has ongoing businesses, he has all of these debts, is that he's making money from corrupt authoritarian regimes. and he's even admitted that he has conflicts of interest with those regimes because they have his buildings there. And the conversation has been so blunderbuss and scattershot that I think it's going to have almost negligible to no impact because no one's going to change their mind on any of this stuff, which is not an argument against running the piece.

It's an argument against hyping it as much as people have. Any disagreement? I think Jonah nailed it. it, you know, I think if you're going to write sort of the financial history of Donald Trump, it would be the squandering. He had a giant inheritance that he, and, you know, look, he's a relentless self-promoter. He has a knack and a talent for staying in the news, but he had a giant inheritance that he turned into casino bankruptcies. And when you look at this really helpful Washington, I'm sorry, New York Times graphic, you see pre-apprentice. You see pre-apprentice

he's kind of struggling along by, you know, billionaire standards with not a lot of income and quite a few losses. And then you see this giant spike of money from the apprentice, which we now know was sort of built on a total fiction that Trump was this supreme businessman. So he gets this giant spike of money from the apprentice. And then what do we see? Bigger losses that follow that. So it's sort of like he took one inheritance squandered it, took another, windfall squandered it and then became president of the United States, which, as, as Jonah said, was completely contrary to the narrative that an awful lot of his voters possessed about him when they went into the voting booth.

Yeah, so I have a slight disagreement on the potential political impact of it. I think Jonah's exactly right on the philosophical case. There's no obligation to pay taxes. If you're following the law and minimizing your tax burden, kudos to you. I'm for it. One of the first. I'm four at one 100%. The inverse of this is that group, the detestable group, the patriotic millionaires who want everybody else to pay more in taxes because they want to pay more in taxes. But there's no indication that they check the box, which you can on your tax form, so voluntarily send more money to the U.S. Treasury. You can do that. They don't do that, but they want to tax everybody else at a higher rate. I think the potential damage for Donald Trump.

Let's just say, as a general rule, I don't think the tax part of this is the earth-shattering story that the Times positioned it as. So I agree with David and John on that. I do think that there is a potential for it to resonate to a certain extent if it can kind of penetrate everybody's information silos and it breaks through. because it's Donald Trump not doing what everybody else is doing. I mean, there was a, there was a David Feren told who's done really fine reporting at the Washington Post on Trump org finances and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work, posted a blacked out paycheck of a woman who works for the Trump organization who paid more in 2016 than Donald Trump did in her tax.

And I think those are the kind of things that could break through, particularly to Trump's blue-collar base that he's cultivated and that he won in 2016, that he's cultivated since and that he's counting on in 2020. So I think that's the one place where I think it could, the double standard, even if it's a permissible or understandable double standard could have some political negatives there. the other part of this story that I find in particular very troubling is the national security angle on this. I mean, he is doing business with hostile foreign governments. He is in debt $420 million, apparently according to the Times calculations. And we don't know who has that

leverage on him in any great detail. Now, he claims that he's filled out his financial disclosure reforms, but that's not included. We don't have those details. And I think it's really important. You know, if you are a young wannabe FBI agent or CIA analyst, then you're going through the process of getting your security clearance. And you have lots of debt, personal or otherwise, that's regarded as a national security risk, because people can leverage that against you, can use that against you. It's a problem that we don't know this. It makes me concern. Now, I will say the Times reporting on this wasn't, I don't think it was entirely fair because, as Trump himself has pointed out subsequently, they don't take into account or they don't emphasize

as much his assets and the value of things that he has that he's gotten by taking out so much debt. But the debt itself is a problem. And I don't think we've heard the last of that part of this story. I think that's the part of the story that likely continues. And with that hanging out there, Steve, we have a letter from the DNI. Tell us about it a little. Yeah, this is a, this strikes me as a pretty extraordinary development that got buried in the avalanche of news that came out of the debate last night. But yesterday afternoon, less than six hours before that debate, the director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, sent a note to Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who's been investigating,

who's been looking for information about the role of the intelligence community and potentially the Obama administration in launching and starting these investigations into Donald Trump and his alleged collusion with Russians during the 2016 timeframe. I won't, I'm tempted to read the whole thing. I won't read the whole thing. Let me just give you quick summaries of the three bullet points in Ratcliffe's letter to Lindsay Graham. He talks about in late July 2016, the U.S. intelligence community obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis, alleging that Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against her opponent, Donald Trump, by tying him to the Russians and the hacking of the DNC.

Ratcliffe importantly says the intelligence community does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication. So that's bullet point number one. Number two, Radcliffe notes that John Brennan, then CIA director, briefed President Obama about this deal and about the alleged approval by Hillary Clinton. And point number three, Ratcliffe says that the U.S. intelligence officials forwarded an investigative referral, saying, in effect, we need to look into this.

what is remarkable about the letter. I mean, there are, I think, a number of things that are remarkable about the letter. But the most remarkable thing is that in the letter itself, Rackcliffe is saying he doesn't know if this information that he's sharing with Lindsay Graham and obviously subsequently with the American public is accurate or not. So he's surfacing analyses from Russian intelligence six hours before the first presidential debate without any understanding of whether those claims in that Russian intelligence analysis were accurate or not. John Rathcliffe is a smart guy. I think he's been in some ways unfairly maligned by resistance Democrats, but that that's an extraordinary thing for him to do and a reckless thing

for him to do. On the second bullet, you'll remember that John Brennan, for those who have made the argument that there were improper actions undertaken by the U.S. intelligence community and federal law enforcement to go after Donald Trump. And I think, look, in the Inspector General's report, we've seen that there were some improper actions taken. But John Brennan is sort of the central figure in all of these theories. And he is sort of the mastermind of this effort to go get Donald Trump on behalf of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But in this instance, John Rackcliffe is releasing information suggesting that Brennan was

briefing Obama about this Hillary Clinton approval of this operation. If it's the case that John Brennan was working in cahoots with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and all of these others to perpetrate this injustice, why would he be briefing President Obama and Hillary Clinton about what they presumably already knew? It seems to me like not all these things can be true at once. And then the third bullet, it may be the case that Hillary Clinton approved a plan to tie Trump world to the DNC hack. And she may well have done this if this Russian intelligence analysis is correct. She may well have done this without knowing the full details of what had happened. But we now know pretty clearly that Trump World was indisputably tied to

the DNC hack. I mean, Roger Stone was in communication. We know what happened there. So at the end of the day, that third bullet is partially true. I'll close with this shortly after the letter was released, DNI, John Ratcliffe, felt compelled to put out a statement that he saw as a clarifying statement. And he said, in effect, this was not disinformation, not Russian disinformation. Here's the exact quote. To be clear, this is not Russian disinformation and has not been assessed as such by the intelligence community. I'll be briefing Congress on the sensitive sources and methods by which it was obtained in the coming days. that to me might be the most extraordinary part of all of this.

And it was the first thing I thought when I read the initial Ratcliffe letter. We're disclosing this raw intelligence about a Russian analytical product that we somehow obtain. It's likely that the Russians have some idea how we obtained this information. And by talking about it publicly, I'd say there's a high probability that we're compromised. either sources or methods or both to make this information that has not been verified that we don't know the veracity of public six hours before a presidential debate and five hours before a presidential election. I find that part of this absolutely extraordinary and basically indefensible. But David, what's so interesting is it then didn't really matter at the

debate. No, it didn't. It didn't matter at the debate. Which is surprising to me because this is absolutely one of Trump's primary obsessions of his entire life. It's that is this very controversy. And it, you know, he did go into a short riff sort of towards the end about, you know, Obama, Biden and the Russia investigation. But I think where you, where this fits in and, and I, I, when you think of the Russian investigation and you think of the quote unquote Russia hoax, You have to, there are two Russia hoaxes. And so Russia hoax number one is that the maximal Trump Russia conspiracy allegation, sort of the maximal Trump Russia conspiracy narrative, which is laid out in the steel dossier.

This apparently fabricated in very key material aspects, allegation of a longstanding, close relationship and conspiracy between Russia and Trump, Russian intelligence and Trump. That's the Russia hoax when you hear the words Russia hoax that you most frequently think of. And that is the discredited narrative of this close intelligence relationship between Trump and Russia. But then there's another one. And the other one is the only controversy, the only real scandal when you're talking about 2016, is the actions of the intelligence community and the Hillary campaign.

That's the MAGA Russia hoax. That there was literally nothing there that Trump did at all that was problematic. And if the steel dossier is sort of a key document of the maximum sort of resistance Russia hoax, this kind of document is a perfect example of an irresponsible advance of the alternative Russia hoax.

And what's interesting is in both the steel dossier, which BuzzFeed just, like, vomited into the public square, there was a key statement in the BuzzFeed story, which is that they hadn't been able to verify any of it. So we don't know if any of this is true, but here you go, here you go. Can I ask the question? I'm sorry, go on. Yes. No, go ahead and finish. Yeah, and I was just going to say on this one, you did much the same thing. here's an allegation, we're going to give it to you, and we just don't know if it's true.

What are the American people supposed to do with either one of those things? Okay, I feel a little bit like Tom Hanks in Big at the toy marketing meeting saying, I don't get it, but so just just bear with you for a second. In the Radcliffe letter, it's how I'll read the whole first bullet point. late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis, alleging that U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. President candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The IC does not know the accuracy of this

allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration fabrication. Okay, now, I, again, am just a simple, unfrozen, caveman national security expert, unlike you guys. So maybe I'm just missing the terms of art here, but as a just a layman pundit, I read that. And my initial reaction is, of course, right? It's an analysis. It's not like, so I provided analysis, we all provided analysis of the 2016 campaign as it was unfolding in the summer of 2016. And Hillary Clinton was, in fact, saying that Trump was indebted to Russians or tied to Russians or had shady dealings with Russians. All you to do is read Slate or the Atlantic on any given day to find the same analysis that supposedly

Russian intelligence was doing. That doesn't mean that what the Clinton campaign or what Slate was writing, it doesn't mean that stuff was untrue. It just seems to me, when I read this, it's basically saying Russian analysts have concluded that Hillary Clinton is trying to tie Donald Trump to Russia for political advantage while running against him in the 2016 campaign. I don't know what that's supposed to prove. I don't know. I don't know. know why the usual suspects and the sort of pro-Trump broom behind the elephant squad are claiming this confirms any sort of skullduggery by Hillary Clinton or anybody else. I also don't know why it's outrageous to reveal an analysis that college newspaper columnists were offering at the time

about what Hillary Clinton was doing. So explain it to me. So let me start with the second part. Let me start with the second part. The reason it's, the reason it's outrageous to reveal it is precisely because of the textualist analysis that you did at the beginning. It's because, if you're, if you're judging motive here, it doesn't tell us much, but what it's being used to do is to distort the argument. This is all smoke, right? Oh, no, no, I agree with, I'm sorry, I should take it back. That's why it's outrageous to reveal it. My point is, is I don't get why. Trump people think this is a bombshell or why it is supposed to be proof that Hillary Clinton made up the Russia collusion stuff when all it's saying is that she's going to talk about it, which she did, which we knew she did, which doesn't prove that she was put up to it by Russia. I mean, I'm listening to people on Twitter and on TV say that she was the one who was really working with Russia.

because of this letter. And I cannot, it's like one of those paintings where you're supposed to see the flying saucers amongst all the dots. I just can't see it. I don't know what they're talking. You read the letter though. You read the letter and thought about it.

David. Can I treat, please translate this from the original MAGA? What they're saying is that this, that bullet point one, U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying them to Putin and Russia. This is the steel dossier. So that essentially what this is referring to

is Hillary's direct role in creating the steel dossier, which is the real Russia scandal. So what this is is sort of saying, okay, we've closed, we now have connected the dots and the director of national intelligence has connected the dots.

that the real Russia scandal is, and this is what I was talking about when I go to, you know, the alternative Russia hoax is the Russia scandal is the use of federal law enforcement to essentially investigate Trump for what was actually Hillary's crime.

And Hillary, and this is evidence that Hillary engineered the dossier, Hillary. And so that's, you know, that's sort of the magaverse spin on this as opposed to, you know, when I read it, I read it much the same way you did, Jonah, which was, wait a minute.

I mean, wasn't the, weren't people screaming this argument from the beginning? I mean, Trump was saying publicly, you know, hack more or, you know, we need to see those documents. And Hillary's saying, look at that. That's, you know, in plain sight. He's, you know. So, but the sort of the MAGA translation is, aha. No, that's helpful. I mean, that makes sense.

That makes total sense. I just, I missed it because. Well, you missed it because it's not there, right? I mean, that's the problem. Look, I mean, the challenge is this is an extraordinarily complicated story, and there are parts of the broad case that you're getting from the Trump defenders that are true. We have seen in the IG reports revelations of, I think, very, very troubling behavior by federal law enforcement, by the FBI, that were rewriting. FISA applications that were, you know, either horrendous incompetence or I think in several cases bad faith actions that have been taken place. And I certainly don't put it past John Brennan

to have been involved in something untoward. I mean, John Brennan was involved in a lot of really bad stuff during the Obama administration. He was a snake. The guy was as dishonest as you could possibly be in several different circumstances. But that's not what this letter says. And David is exactly right. What they're doing is trying to conflate. They're taking this statement from John Ratcliffe, where again, it's important to note, he is saying they haven't judged the veracity of this raw intelligence that they have gotten about, supposedly about a Russian analytical product, he's not judging it, but their argument assumes that what he's saying is true and that it necessarily means that there was all of this coordination between Hillary Clinton

and the producers of the Steele dossier and John Brennan and Barack Obama and Joe Biden and senior national security officials. The letter doesn't say that. but it allows people who want to believe that to believe it and to make that misleading case. Quick break to hear from a sponsor today, Gabby Insurance. When you've had the same car insurance or homeowners insurance for years, you kind of get trapped into paying your premiums and not thinking about it. That makes it really easy to overpay and not even realize it.

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your infos and no annoying spam or robocalls. It's totally free to check your rate and there's no obligation. Take a few minutes right after this podcast and stop overpaying for your car and homeowners insurance. Go to gabby.com slash dispatch. That's gabbi.com slash dispatch. Gabby.com slash dispatch. And with that, last topic. What is a movie that came out before you were movie age. It doesn't need to be before you were born necessarily. But a movie that came up for you were the appropriate age for it that was, you know, had an outsized influence in your teenage years, cult classic,

whatever that is, you knew all the lines to, et cetera. Jonah. There are so many. You know, there used to be this TV show on Fox called, about a guy who was actually raised by a television set while he lived in a refrigerator box and he just watched TV all day through the eyehole in the refrigerator box.

Whoa. I'm like two notches below that. And I guess I would say um, gosh. So it's a movie I had, I didn't, I couldn't say, I was too young to see in the theaters when it came out. Yep. this all comes about because the kids these days

are super into movies that they actually did not experience at the time I'm wearing a mean girls meme shirt right now and like all of our younger staff knows mean girls even though they in no way saw mean girls when it came out but they know all the lines clueless like these movies that were part of my life but were not part of theirs they know better than I do yeah I mean there are a whole bunch of comedies

Animal House Fast Times at Ridgemont High Which I could quote ad nauseum Which I was too young to see in the theater Mr. Had And I guess though If you want to do really obscure cult stuff There was a movie called Dark Star by John Carpenter

About Essentially it was the plot of alien But with a killer beach ball with feet On a spaceship which I loved more than some of my relatives. It was fantastic. But I haven't seen it in a long time. I'm terrified it doesn't hold up.

I'm going to go ahead and guess that it is not. David? It's an easy answer for me. It's Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which for a certain generation of college student, especially college guy, was just, it reached the point probably by my sophomore or junior year,

at my college that if you could not quote virtually the entire movie, there was something wrong with you. And you could just kind of pick up in any given random spot in the movie and start talking and somebody beside you could pick up in the dialogue immediately. And maybe that was just it, it just captured my college because as I discussed in the green room beforehand, we had an 11 o'clock curfew and then a midnight curfew on Fridays and Saturdays. So we had a lot of time to watch movies in the dorm. It could be that it just Monty Python and the Holy Grail just captured our school. But it was amazing at the extent to which all of my peers

could repeat every scene in that movie. Steve, now let me explain what movies are. So it's this thing. That's good. I was actually going to take our listeners sort of behind the scenes here to let them know exactly why we're having this discussion. There's one reason, and it's to embarrass me. That's what's going on here. You guys want to make me out to be some Rube who never watches movies, who's totally unpop-cultured, if that's a word or a thing. This is so Trumpy of you.

The system's rigged. It's totally rigged. You guys are against me just because I haven't seen Jaws. You think that that's somehow an indication of my. Pop culture knowledge and understanding. Yeah, this is a hard one for me. It should probably be an easy one because, admittedly,

there are a lot of movies I have not seen, still haven't seen. I never watched Monty Python's the Holy Grail. The whole thing. Wait, did you just say that it was called Monty Python's the Holy Grail? Oh, whatever it is called. What is it called? Isn't that right?

Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Okay. Yeah, there are lots of movies I haven't seen. The irony is to answer your question directly, the one that I'd probably have to answer is top secret, which is in the sort of airplane genre made by the same guys. And the great irony of that is my parents were pretty strict about what we were able to see. We had a no TV on weekdays family. You know, if they caught me sneaking an episode of Three's company, it was a big scandal it was a problem did you ever see the one where someone misheard something and there was an

misunderstanding um so what's what's ironic about top secret is my dad took me and a number of my friends to the movie theater to watch top secret so we got the full you know not the tv version not the edited version and my friends i think it was like my 12th birthday or something. My friends, when I were looking at each other, like, I can't believe they're, you know, talking about female anatomy and using words that they're using because my parents were known not to allow any of that. So that's my answer, top secret. Still a great movie. I won't yet yet let any of my kids watch it. As I'm sure they're begging to. Okay. So the correct answer is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Although y'all might have been old enough for Ferris Bueller. Yeah, for sure. That's a big girl's my daughter, by the way. Yeah, my kids have seen that.

Yeah. I mean, I didn't even know that Ferris Bueller's day off was as old as it was because I had seen it so many times. I just assumed I'd missed it in theaters, but that in fact it had come out in the 90s. No. It's just this amazing movie from 1986. But the true cult situation is I definitely have gone to many Rocky Horror Picture Show Midnight Showings.

So in that case, I have seen it in theaters. Yeah, this is as shocking as you saying that you've drank water many times in the past. I mean, it's not shocking. Did you go and just watch or like the dorks in my high school? Did you go and dress up and participate and throw stuff? 100% dressed up through stuff, et cetera. There it is. There it is.

I do think it's it. It was like the cool. It was like the cool dorks, though, right? Like, I mean, I understand. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Definitely.

For sure. Of course. We all wanted to hang out with them. Oh, man. You know, it says the guy who found top secret to be so edgy and transgressive. You got to straighten the rug, Jonah. I do think that it's sort of just a broader culture point. This point about like all the, the young ins watching these movies that were,

before their time, but are, in fact, not old movies, right? I mean, we're not talking about Casablanca here. But I think it's kind of interesting in a stream, and this is one of the things that's going to have a long shelf life past COVID, is that in a streaming culture where the media landscape is so flat and like you look at how popular office, the office is probably more popular in the last two years than it was when it was ever on air, same thing with Parks and Rec, that these kids are growing up,

like my daughter, I see it, you know, they're growing up in a media landscape where it's just all of these shelves of stuff and you never look at, and none of them are expiration dates and you have no idea when they came out on the market and you're just pulling stuff into your card all of the time. And, yeah, all my college students, pre-COVID, all of my college students, whatever, 80% had watched all of the West Wing. Do you mean the ones tied up in your basement? Sorry, but the college students that I teach, to be clear. When are we going to have our Cobra Kai podcast?

Yeah. Oh, we're not having that. No, we're having that. I'll have you on my, my, my, sounds like a perfect remnant. Fully functional podcast to address these issues. So that you guys know, we're doing the Paris Hilton documentary on advisory opinions. So, be jealous.

I'm fascinated if I know what the legal issues are there. All right, listeners. Thank you so much for joining us. Tune in next week for our next podcast on whatever topics managed to come up over the course of the week. You'll notice that the Supreme Court happened. Amy Coney-Barritt was nominated and so much it happened since then. We didn't even get to it this week.

So, and join us for you. for Dispatch Live. Steve, when does the dispatch.com slash 30 days free expire for the free trial period? You know, it's soon. We're, I think, within 10 days. I don't know down to the day exactly, but now's the time if you're thinking about trying out a membership, do it now. It's free, no risk, cancel any time. We'd be happy to have you. See what you can get from several additional French presses and G-files in addition to the full morning dispatch, special editions of Sarah's sweep election newsletter, which is outstanding. The number of emails I've gotten from political professionals who have told me that that's must reading is high. So join us,

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