The Dispatch Podcast - America's Next Chapter

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

Joe Biden was officially sworn in as the 46th president of the United States on Wednesday. He assumes office at one of the darkest moments in United States history, when a global pandemic has taken the lives of more than 400,000 Americans and rampant polarization continues to test our nation’s character. Did his inaugural address meet the moment? Was his call for unity too idealistic? On today’s episode, our hosts discuss Biden’s day one executive orders and the once and future Republican Party before breaking down today’s inauguration ceremony, speech and all. Show Notes: -“Biden's Two Tasks: Repairing Deep Divisions and Defeating a Deadly Disease” by David French in The Dispatch. -Take our podcast survey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the inauguration episode of the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. Today, we are talking about all the things around the inauguration, but listeners, I'm going to let you in on a little bit of sausage making here. We normally tape at 10 a.m. Eastern time, which means that we taped some of this podcast before the inauguration happened. Then we all took a break from one another and came back after the inauguration so we could discuss President Biden's speech and all of the stuff around it. So there's going to be a little gap in the commercial break. You will not feel a thing, but we will have traveled through time and space.

And David, you have some notes of optimism. You have some notes of pessimism on this day where we swear in a new president of the United States for the next four years. Yeah, I'm going to be watching the inaugural and I'm going to be, and I've been thinking a lot about, you know, what are the reasonable best case scenarios for a Biden presidency? What are the reasonable worst case scenarios or bad case scenarios? And because I think a lot of the rhetoric running into the election was, well, this would be a shock to nobody, extremely overheated. Biden will destroy America. Biden will end America. No, he's going to be a mainstream Democratic president with a super, super, the narrowest possible Senate majority.

So what is this going to mean? And I think that there's a couple of things that we can hope for. One is a kind of cultural cooling that will just happen. by not being deliberately provocative, that if he sort of sticks to the normal knitting of a presidency and is not trying to be deliberately provocative on a day-by-day basis, I think we might be surprised at how much that cools things down, where we're having arguments about policy rather than outrageous statements or having arguments about policy rather than gratuitous insults. And I think that might have a cooling effect all on its own. And then the other thing is,

And this is something that I'm hopeful for, but I'm not necessarily expecting, is that if you fully staff the government, there are some things that you just need it to do competently. So, for example, could we have a competent, efficient, expeditious vaccine distribution? I mean, if you just do that, if we can do that over the next five, six months and then have it sustainable, where you can relate. liably get a new vaccine every six months or year, however often you need it, it's going to be an enormous gift, life-saving gift to this country. So if you can do those things, I sort of feel like cultural cooling and basic competence could go a long way towards, you know, not necessarily helping this country heal in a deep sense, but at least cooling some of the passions. But I think one of the things I am worried about is sort of the, what I would call the gratuitous culture

warring of the Obama administration. If that comes back, especially gratuitous culture warring of the second Obama term, the kind of use of pen and phone and regulatory mechanisms of the government to provoke fights, for example, with nuns who don't wish to facilitate the provision of contraceptives and abortive fashions to their employees. The overreaching of the regulatory state in hot-button areas like immigration, like religious liberty, if that sort of Obama pattern continues, you're going to see the cultural cooling will be, I think, still welcome in the sense of no day-to-day battle over totally unnecessary presidential provocations, but we're going to return to sort of the pattern of the Obama administration, where you have on the one hand

an administration that feels hamstrung and its ability to legislate the way it wants to, but taking as free a hand as it possibly can on the regulatory and executive order side of the House, which is its own provocation, leading to, once again, greater and greater emphasis on the judiciary. And also that leads me to the last sort of element

of my concerns about the Biden administration, what kind of judges is he, going to appoint. I know that they're not going to be the kind of judges that I would like to see appointed, but the question is going to be, how bad will they be? How much of this sort of on the left side of the progressive legal movement will they be versus sort of center left, Merritt Garland-esque? And I think that's going to be an interesting question as Biden's term unfolds. Do others have thoughts on the potential pluses and minuses?

Yeah, I'll pick up on one point David makes, which I think is right, is that, you know, there's a very difficult point to make among the sort of more intense resistancey Democrats and blue checkmark liberals and all that. But because the asymmetry of the problems are just so enormous. But one of the reasons why we got Trump, which is a form of punitry I really am tired of, is because Barack Obama was really good at trolling conservatives. And I think that there's a real danger in that because the... Jonah, give an example of something you think was a pure troll that was not, for instance,

a true policy goal of the administration, of the Obama administration. The mother of all trolls was, of course, the White House correspondence dinner where he just beat the living tar out of Donald Trump and inspired him to run for president. But there was more subtle things. He very deliberately let the birther stuff fester, in my opinion, because he thought it was so embarrassing for Republicans to buy into it. He could have put it to bed early on. These aren't policy differences. And frankly, I'm not talking about policy differences. I'm talking about its style points, which is there's a certain kind of fan service.

I mean, this is half of what Ted Cruz and AOC do now is subtle ways the cue that they're owning the other side on something that doesn't actually matter, but actually garners you attention in fandom. I just don't think that I would tell the birther point just because he's the President of United States. He was born in the United States. He doesn't need to pull out his birth certificate to prove a point. And the fact that he did so years later was not, I think,

because he had been trolling conservatives the whole time, but because of the absurdity and disgustingness of the initial claim. Lots of things can be true at once. And I think that there was a deliberate pattern. There's also all sorts of things, where he would often use a sort of clintonian phrasing about how all people who want good things, can see the facts as I present them.

And, of course, if you're badly motivated, you would disagree with me. This was his fundamental way of arguing for eight years. And, you know, he likened American conservatives who were against the Iran deal to the conservative hardliners in Iran. There was a lot of bad faith argumentation that, you know, you hear these stories from congressmen on Capitol Hill about how Joe Biden would come over and they would negotiate. And, you know, what do you need? what's your red line, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And if Obama showed up, he would, he would parachute in and say, okay, here's why you don't know your own self-interest. And here's why my position is actually better for you than you realize, because I know your interest

better than you do. And there are a lot of these kinds of things that he did that set off a lot of conservatives. In no way, are they morally or politically comparable to the things that Donald Trump did in terms of trolling, but you have an auto-catalytic thing where, you know, everyone wants to one up the last thing, like, or, you know, it's like shaving the legs of the table where one's legs too short, and by the end of it, it's just a table on the floor, tabletop on the floor. And I think that there's enormous pressure within the sort of blue checkmark liberal world for Biden to play a culture war finger in the eye type.

too. And if he does that, it will be like a Baptist and Bootleggers dynamic, where it'll be great for Fox and OAN and Newsmax. And it'll be great for, you know, the hardcore MSNBC types as well, but bad for the middle and kind of mess up his presidency. He should strive to be boring. Do you think that Biden actually has that personality in him, though? No, but I think he can be moved. I think that's fundamentally the problem with Biden is that he can be, he, he can be told, oh, this is, this is in your interest or this will make you seem cool. And I think he's persuadable on that kind of stuff, which is one of the reasons why I think

that some of the people around him are reassuring to me, not necessarily the cabinet secretaries, but these longtime Senate and vice presidential staffers who know. him and know how to like manage him and not push his buttons um but uh i think that they should just be careful about dabbling in these um games of of sort of owning the cons because it will set up an incentive it'll it'll expedite an incentive structure for the worst elements in the right who want to be pissed off at everything to be pissed off at everything Steve, there's a Joe Biden who we haven't seen, I think, during this campaign season, post-election. In fact, I don't think I've seen him since this event, which is the 2012 vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan.

That was a very different Joe Biden than ran for president. That Joe Biden was more peevish, aggressive, snarky even at times. Was that a put on or is this the put on? Which one is the real Joe Biden? You know, I think it's probably, as most things are, a combination of both. I think there he was certainly playing a role. He was playing the attack dog role. I think the example of a good example of what Joan was talking about with this sort of Obama era trolling involved Paul Ryan. And it's when President Obama had a speech about health care and debt and deficits and invited Paul Ryan to sit in the front row, talk about entitlement reform and these things,

and then extending an olive branch, in effect, at the staff levels, say, come to this speech, we want to have a constructive dialogue, and then savaged Paul Ryan at the speech where he was the president's invited guest. It was that kind of own the cons thing that I think Obama did more often than he ought to have, to be sure. Look, I think Joe Biden's likely to either be a successful president or a failed president based on big, big, big things, right? He came in now and he has to solve sort of the crisis of division that didn't start with Donald Trump, but was certainly exacerbated by Donald Trump. He has to address the crisis of the pandemic that went unaddressed and was largely shrugged off at times by Donald Trump.

Those are the big things. Those are sort of the known crises, the big things that are right in front of us. And some attempt of a return to normalcy, to restore, you know, there are a lot of bad things about the old Washington. And a lot of things I wouldn't want to go back to. But there are a lot of ways in which Trump so badly distorted, not how Washington works, but how we talk to one another, how we regard one another, how we attempt to solve problems. problems that I think Biden just by coming in and being a normal, quote unquote, normal president could go a long way to solve. I was struck this morning that there was an article, Axios, I think, reported, if I'm not mistaken, that Kamala Harris's niece, Mina, was warned that she can't profit off of her aunt because she unveiled some, this is from a Josh Krosho, tweet a collaboration between her company and beats by dray and it's improper to profit um because your aunt is the vice president it was the kind of quaint warning that you might have expected you know in in the pre-trump years not that washington washington's been full of corruption and and soft corruption for decades for as long as it's been a seat of power but it's a it's a stark change from the kind of aggressive corruption we saw from Donald Trump. And I think

marked especially by, you know, at the end of his term, by what we've seen with the pardon of Steve Bannon, what we saw with the rescinding of the executive order banning his folks in his administration from serving his lobbyists, it was all a, it was all a con. I think if Joe Biden can get back to some sense of normal that that's his big charge here. I think that's what the 2020 election was about. I think that's his big charge. And then, of course, final point, crises that we don't know about. There will be crises.

They're going to happen. Inevitably involving threats. You can see China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, jihadism. You can imagine that we will face real crises. in the next four years. And I would say Joe Biden handling the crises that we know and have in front of us and then handling the crises that we don't know but can expect, that's whether he'll be a successful president or not.

I do think a lot of the pressure is going to come from the left to do the kinds of things that Jonah worries about. You know, I look at it this way. There's two great weights on us right now. It's the polarization and division and the wave of death and economic devastation and devastation in our cultural and social lives due to the pandemic, and he has an opportunity to do something meaningful on both.

And if he can do something meaningful on both, then a lot of the rest of the stuff will just be sort of lost in the historical noise. Well, and speaking of that, we have a list of what President Biden plans to do on his first day, a flurry of orders, as the Associated Press referred to it. I want to regal some of them and get your reactions to this first day list.

Declaration that the U.S. is rejoining the Paris Climate Accord. Declaration that the U.S. is rejoining the World Health Organization. Ethical standards for his administration and an order prohibiting interference in the operations of the Justice Department from other parts of the government. Start a process to restore 100 public health and environmental rules that the Obama administration created and Donald Trump eliminated or weekend. start a process to rejoin the deal restraining Iran's nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief, executive action to end travel restrictions on people from a variety of Muslim majority countries, executive action to protect from deportation people who came to the country illegally as children, executive action to make mass mandatory on federal property and when traveling out of state,

steps to extend pandemic era restrictions on evictions and foreclosure, And then to legislative issues, legislation to go to Congress proposing to repeal liability protections for gun manufacturers and tightening some other aspects of gun control, and legislation to go to Congress as part of an effort to offer a path to citizenship for 11 million people in the U.S. illegally and to codify protections for people who came illegally as children. Jonah, where does that fit in to what you were saying? Are all of those valid policies? Are some of those trolls in your view? Are these the big things? I don't know that they're trolls necessarily. I mean, look, I mean, you can make the case that the Paris climate thing is trolling.

I don't think they think it is. They think it's like this very meaningful thing, but it's utterly symbolic, right? I mean, there are no external standards about reaching these climate goals. It's all aspirational in all the rest. I think that some of the executive orders have more merit than others. All of them are what you get when you live in an era of the presidency doing more by executive order than by legislation. And it's what you get when you lose an election or when the other side wins an election. So I certainly don't think, I mean, this is something we've been saying forever is that

If you live by pen and phone, you can die by pen and phone, you can erase. That's why Obama, so much of Obama's legacy, he got erased by Donald Trump because he did so much of it through executive order, and it doesn't have a long shelf life. I think some of it is, I mean, the one that's most consequential, I think, if it actually, if they follow through on in a meaningful way, is the Iran one, which I'm sure Steve would want to tee off on. but I generally think that this is just general coalition service kind of stuff. I wish we weren't doing it through any of these things through executive order that

should all be going through Congress. And there are some that I think are just much less defensible than others, but we knew they were coming. I mean, this was one of the consequences of the election. Steve? Yeah, I think that's right. I don't think that there's anything particularly surprising here. It's not like Joe Biden ran on one set of issues and then has unveiled a day one agenda

that's the opposite of what he ran on. This is totally consistent with what he said all along. It's what he campaigned on. It's the way that he sought to distinguish himself from Donald Trump on a policy level. And he's basically saying to the extent that I can do these things on the first day, I'm going to do these things on the first day. So not terribly surprised. Now, I disagree with a lot of them.

I disagree with virtually everything that's in there. But as Jonas said, you know, he won the election. It should be not surprising at all that the guy who talked up how important the Paris Accords were, basically a paper agreement, talked up how important the Paris Accords were, is going to come back and say that he wants to do that. You did see, I mean, I thought there were some instances in, Some of the confirmation hearings for his cabinet secretaries yesterday, where you saw some fleshing out of policies in a way for the first time that went even further than what we're learning from these day one issues. A couple notable things.

I mean, I think starting the path to return to the Iran deal, the JCPOA, even if it's tweaked and it sounds like they want to tweak it and reneed. negotiate. Some of it strikes me as a very bad idea. But there was an interesting comment yesterday from Anthony Blinken, the nominee to be Secretary of State when he was asked about whether he considered Iran the world's largest state sponsor of terror. He said, I do. And you know, on the one hand, that's totally uncontroversial because that's been the case for a long time. That's been the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community for more than a decade. So in that sense, it's not a huge deal. On the other hand, if you think about the way that the Obama administration talked about Iran,

downplaying, aggressively downplaying the nature of the regime and the nature of the threat with respect to terror, it is notable that he would say, even as we're looking at potentially reentering negotiations, we kind of have our eyes open about what kind of regime this is. Now, we'll see how long that lasts, but there were some, some, moments like that in the hearings yesterday that I think started to flesh out maybe a little bit different approach than we had seen from Barack Obama. David, I want to talk to you about the legislative issues here. So Joe Biden tends to highlight two legislative priorities later today. One is restricting liability protection on gun manufacturers and sending that to Congress.

And the other deals with immigration, which is calling it a third rail kind of, I think, misses some of the finer description that one needs to talk about immigration policy in the country right now. Now, what Joe Biden intends to introduce to Congress is citizenship, a path to citizenship for every, more or less, every person who is not currently in the country illegally. But, you know, we've talked about this already in the pot a little bit of Joe Biden's chief negotiating skills during the Obama years. And I'm curious how you think the immigration front will be received on the hill.

And where you think it could end up? Do you think this is DOA? Do you think that Republicans will see this as the way to get something for something, right? Like they lost the election, so you're not going to get everything you want. And a border wall is sort of the least interesting, least effective thing at this point

that you're going to get in exchange, can they actually do something on immigration policy in terms of, for instance, you know, path to citizenship for everyone in the country here currently, but ending chain migration. Like those are the sort of big, big compromises

that could be on the table. You know, first, let me say about the gun legislation. I think that is. is a DOA. I don't think His Royal Highness, the first Lord

of the Coal Soaked Hills of West Virginia Joe Manchin, is going to inaugurate his premiership over the United States of America through gun control legislation.

I think that that is not going to go anywhere. I'm not terribly concerned about that. Regarding immigration, I mean, look, the easy thing to say is that some version

of DOA also. so because every kind of effort at sweeping immigration reform has collapsed. However, the need for immigration reform has only increased. There's only been a greater need, and there are various sorts of compromises that could be potentially on the table. You talk about chain migration one, asylum reform is another kind of compromise, where he goes for less than the big, swing for that many folks having a path to citizenship and maybe the smaller swing of codifying DACA in exchange for some compromises in security or tightened up immigration enforcement. You know, there are things that seem to have been for years laying on the table

but have been completely blocked by the polarization of the base, especially the polarization of the Republican base. You know, there may reach a time where the need for it outweighs the sort of the partisan poll, the base partisan poll, and maybe that's now, I'm not, I wouldn't bet on it. I would bet that the initial compromise legislation you're going to see, and I do think you'll see some initial compromise legislation, will be related to coronavirus. I think there will be a big push for the additional $1,400 to make it the, the, the, The relief checks 2000, even.

There will be a big push for giant allocations of money for vaccine distribution and production and sustained vaccine distribution and production. State bailouts, city bail, I think you're going to see, that's where you're going to have your low-hanging fruit. Immigration, let me put it this way. If it does happen, then the hype about Joe Biden having a unique touch in the Senate will not be hype. I'll believe it when I see it. Anyone else on immigration?

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All right. So Steve, the once and future Republican Party. Yeah, if there's a future for the Republican Party. Um, very interesting developments over the past week. Um, as, as you've seen Democrats come together around Joe Biden, this inauguration. Again, I think that's likely to be somewhat short lived because I think he's going to get intense pressure from the left wing of the Democratic party. You see this as a, as a huge opportunity in this, this post-Trump environment to do some of these, these bigger things that have long been on their policy priority list. But you look at the, the, the center right and the Republican party and the conservative movement right now. And it is in tatters. The divisions that have existed for a long time, pre-existed the Trump era, but again, exacerbated by Donald Trump's arrival on the scene, are showing up in many, many, many ways. You have this movement by Matt Gates and Jim Jordan, the House Freedom Caucus, which used to be a limited government caucus and is now purely a partisan knee-jerk, Trumpist caucus to

push out Liz Cheney from her role as the number three Republican in House leadership. You have people like

Marjorie Taylor Green tweeting that this is Donald Trump's party. You're either with Donald Trump or you're not really welcome.

You have the Michigan Republican Party pushing out a Republican who certified the election in Michigan. You have the

Arizona Republican Party trying to censure its governor for refusing to cheat. in the presidential election, and you have word that Donald Trump wants to potentially start a new party. She's talked about, according to the Wall Street Journal, talked about starting a Patriot party. And the clashes, the divisions go even further. You have Sean Hannity, who speaks certainly

for a certain wing of the conservative movement, or what once was the conservative movement, basically teeing off on Mitch McConnell, suggesting that Mitch McConnell not be the Republican leader in the Senate anymore because McConnell in a speech yesterday accused the president of lying to his supporters along with other powerful people. A couple days ago, you had Sean Hannity saying, Liz Cheney should not be in leadership on the House side, seeking to sort of purge anybody who's not sufficient.

Trumpy. I guess I'll start with you, Sarah. Where does this go? I mean, is this, are we just seeing the beginnings of a much, much bigger division? Or does all this sort of fade away given that Democrats have control of the White House in both houses of Congress? At the risk of having a hot take, I actually think this is the exact time where a political party would fracture when they're out of power. Because when you're in power, there's all sorts of compromises you make to keep access to power. When you're out of power, you're not worried about the fact that if you leave your political party, you're going to lose a chairmanship, or you might not get appointed to whatever ambassadorship. That's all gone now. And I have said

now for quite a while, I don't see a future for a single political party that has Mitt Romney and Matt Gates in it. That doesn't make sense to me. I think political parties fracture slowly and then all at once, if you will. And so I think we've been watching these slow fracturing over, let's call it the second half of the Trump years. I think the election has accelerated it. And I think now when it really starts to sink in, that there is no power left, that even with this power sharing agreement in the Senate, which, as we understand it right now, Chuck Schumer will be majority leader, but then each of the committees will be evenly divided between the two parties. If there is a tie in a committee, let's say,

over a judicial nominee, that tie goes to the nominee, so to speak, and it moves to the floor. That is not being in power, right? Like, inability to stop things, inability to bring things, really. So I, you know, we've seen the rumblings of the Trump coalition wanting to start the new party, the Patriot Party. I think the only thing that has prevented the fracturing right now is that there are people within the Republican Party on the Liz Cheney Mitt Romney side of things who do not want to abandon the Republican Party, so to speak. There is a lot of infrastructure behind that. There's actually some even legal benefit to being a Republican that didn't exist, for instance, in 1854 that has grown up in sort of this

governmenty capture way where the two parties have entirely protected themselves when it comes to things like ballot access and stuff like that. So I think the sort of savvier, wiser, more hesitant folks would just as soon

be the ones to keep the Republican moniker and see if the other side will fracture off to form this Patriot Party. But, you know, regardless, I just, I don't see how this exists long term. I mean, the impeachment hearing in the Senate will be fascinating because so far,

almost every single Republican senator has said this is a vote of conscience. I'm dying to see what that means. There are reasons to be pessimistic, David, when it comes to votes of conscience. You remember Ted Cruz famously gave a speech at the 2016 Republican convention talking about the need to vote your conscience. and follow your conscience. And here we are in 2020 with Ted Cruz doing mop-up work behind Donald Trump. Does this, you know, let's just focus on the, on the Sean Hannity rants. I mean, on the one hand, there's an inclination to just dismiss Sean Hannity because he can be

and often is just sort of an absurd figure. And this was just a whiny rant. He was just angry that Mitch McConnell accused Donald Trump of lying. I think, you know, Hannity may have taken it personally, when McConnell suggested that other people, other powerful people had also lied to the people who listened to them, because certainly Sean Hannity lied quite a bit to people who followed him. Does he speak for a lot of people? I mean, he's got a couple million viewers every night. Does it matter? Oh, I think it matters. I mean, look, I think it is only just now sinking in to a lot of people as to how quickly building up up to the election and post-election how quickly so many people got so radicalized during this election fight. I mean, it shouldn't

surprise us now post-January 6th. And also how for an awful lot of people are, an awful lot of people are so shocked that so many people got so radicalized in this post-election phase. And I agree with what Sarah said. When you look at some of the individual human beings involved here, I remember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez distanced herself at one point from Joe Biden by saying, and outside of a two-party system, we wouldn't be in the same party. Well, the difference between a freshman congressman like Nancy Mays and Marjorie Taylor Green is the difference between Pluto and Mercury. I mean, it's about as wide as you can get and still be in the same solar system.

And, you know, and this goes for a number of personalities. I mean, the last Friday dispatch with Representative Meyer, compare him with Lauren Bobert. I mean, how are these people in the same party? It's really a, the division, it seems to me, is much greater than on the Democratic side. And then I can just tell you, on the ground, you know, here in red America, there's sort of this, wait, what do you believe now? What are you, what are you believing here that some people are just, uh, have really moved into a realm of thinking that is so completely divorced from

normal politics. I, I just got an email, or I'm sorry, a group me message from a friend of mine. He said, his father-in-law has been stocking up on food for days in anticipation of what's going to happen today, which so far has not happened today. Another friend, he sends me a prophecy that his mother sent him just two days ago about the inevitability of the Trump's second term two days ago. And so there is a radicalization that's occurred within part of the party that is incompatible. It's not just, you don't, it's weird, you wouldn't even just call it sort of friend. You would call it incompatible with standard governing.

just incompatible with normal governing and will place demands on the GOP that are incompatible with normal governing and it will be interesting to see if that fever passes after January 20th I'm not optimistic but if it doesn't pass then I'm kind of where Sarah is how does this work?

Also Steve, wait, we haven't even you mentioned this earlier but it fits in so well here Donald Trump as the leader of the Republican Party for the last four years and now leaving, and, you know, if there were this fracture, his last act in office, as far as we know at this point, was to pardon people who had defrauded his supporters.

Yeah. And wait, and also to retract the post-administration ethical guidelines prohibiting lobbying. By the way, they then served no real, purpose during the administration since they were post-administration. So that was all then fake. It was all for show. All of his people can now go lobby without any problem. So all the time where he said that wasn't going to happen, that it wasn't going to be this revolving door swap. He parted the people who were being charged criminally with defrauding his own supporters and then let

loose the swap monsters. Yeah, this is the kind of thing that in a normal information environment would be, you know, would potentially ruin his political future. He gave brief remarks before stepping on Air Force One and flying back to Florida and saying, I'll be back in some form. This is the kind of thing that if people paid attention would really matter because, in effect, I think what he was doing there is announcing the con. It was all a con. And you were the marks.

You were the marks. He's telling his supporters. The problem is, his supporters aren't going to believe any of that. They're not going to probably be, they're not going to, they're not going to encounter much of this information. To the extent that they encounter it, they'll just dismiss it. Oh, that's CNN, fake news. What, Joe, does this, if Donald Trump continues to be a presence in the Republican Party or the Patriot Party or American politics or on the center right, how significant a presence is he? after leaving office

and after leaving office in the manner in which he left office. Well, as you said, you know, he said this morning, I'm going to return not sure what form. I think if he returns

in the form of a dragon or a really, really large simian kind of thing that can climb buildings and smash planes, have a very powerful impact. No, look,

I, it remains to be seen now, right? If you, I mean, I've been saying this, so I'm blue in the face. If he had been just moderately gracious and conceded defeat within days of election night, he'd be the, you know, Sarah would be winning her bet that he would be the frontrunner. I know. By the way, speaking of that bet, I mean, I'm, I got to hold on to it now, but can we at least acknowledge that things changed since I made the bet?

Which is why I was so eager to make the bet. Unleashing, you know, Bain's army on the Capitol building, it changes political equations. I mean, you can look it up. But so I think we won't know for six months, to be honest, because it depends on what he does, how he behaves, what happens in the media climate that he is sort of trying to get into. But let me just sort of back up and say, I really, really. really hope he starts a third party. Yeah. I think that one of the reasons why

we're in the hot mess that we are in is that for four years, the only safe harbor to be a good Republican was to just simply put your faith in Donald Trump. And you weren't allowed to have policy differences with the Trump administration because that was disunity. Everyone had to fly under the same banner.

Everyone had to work from the assumption that Trump is right, and then reverse engineer their evidence backwards. And I tried to write about this in the Friday G-File last week, and I'm not sure how well it came out, but what the conservative movement has always thrived on is by having arguments and disagreements, and part because conservatism is not popular,

particularly our kind of conservative, or my kind of conservatism. You know, if you have a conservative politician and a liberal politician, and the conservative says, really care about the poor. I really care about people like you. I really want to make your life better. And then the liberal can say, well, look, he talks a big game and he says all this stuff about, you know, teach a man to fish, you know, well, I'm going to give you a fish. I'm going to write you a check. What's he going to do? And getting a check is always going to be more popular than not getting a check. And the only way conservatives actually can win arguments and can win elections

in this country is by having the arguments. And that's also what democracy is supposed to be about. But because of four years of basically an operational personality cult, you weren't allowed to have arguments about anything, except how awesome Donald Trump is. And whether or not he can create a bolder so heavy, not even he could lift it, right? And that was the extent of serious arguments on the right. And that's papered over a massive amount of ill will and argument and differences. And it's all spilling out now. And it's like in the Godfather. Every five to ten years, you've got to have one of these let out all the bad blood. And what would be awesome from my perspective is someone who cares about the conservative movement more than he cares about the Republican Party, but cares about the Republican Party because I care about America, we need two healthy parties, is if the people who only pretended to be an occult of personality for Donald Trump were forced to choose whether or not they actually wanted to join a cult of personality for Donald Trump and make it a choice. Either you're with the Republican Party and Mitch McConnell and

Lynn Cheney and Ben Sass and Mitt Romney. Doesn't mean you can't have people who disagree with them in it, but either you're with the Republican Party or you're with the Patriot Party and everybody, like a caddy day at the Bushwood Country Club, let them all just go running into the pool with Donald Trump as their dashboard saint and force people to come out of the woodwork

and take a position and defend a position on the merits rather than playing this Donald Trump is our fearless leader game. And it will be good for the conservative movement. good for the country, it'd be good for the Republican Party, because the only way you can actually communicate that you disagree with the alt-right or with goons to storm the capital and murder cops is if you condemn them and draw bright lines. And no one on the right wants to draw really bright lines right now amongst ourselves. And it's really dangerous and it's

going to ruin the Republican Party. And it may ruin the conservative movement, too, if people don't actually start having arguments on the merits of that. So let me push you on that. Because you and I, we've talked about this here before. We've had Congress with, I mean, we've had conversations with members of Congress in the Republican Party, you know, over the past several years, many of whom are privately disdainful of Donald Trump to say the least, many of whom are harshly critical of Donald Trump when they're candid, but who have gone along with this, who have been part of this personality count so long as he's been in power. You've seen, in the aftermath of the last two months of post-election Donald Trump,

you've seen his approval rating plummet, including among Republicans. There was a, I think it was a Pew poll where he went from, you know, 85% approval among Republicans to 65% or something. And I think it leveled off a little bit after that. But he certainly lost some support among the Republican base, and yet he still has that kind of grip on some percentage of the Republican base. So if we do the caddyshack pool scene and you line all of the elected Republicans in Washington up and throw in the governors too, they can run from the states to the pool, are you confident that those people who have been privately critical of, Donald Trump will distance themselves from him now freed of Donald Trump as president? Or will they look at the polling of the Republican base and say, you know what, it's not time.

I can't, I can't bail on these people. Because the impeachment vote in the House, I would say, doesn't give you much reason for optimism that people are going to start voting their conscience and saying what they believe. Right, which is why, you know, you want to heighten the contradictions, as a good Marxist would say. And I, you know, again, about Trump's role, I said we need, we kind of need six months. We've got to see, first of all, how many criminal charges he attracts in the next six months, right? We got to see, like, what unholy horrors the Biden people uncover in the file cabinets, you know, and they get in. We got to see who tells tales out of school once they're out of there.

Are there any more tales left to tell at this point? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. I mean, we've got to see if there actually is some sort of version of Trump TV, which would then create an interesting dynamic with Fox and how they handle a lot of these kinds of issues. But over the long haul, they're one of the great ways to get a Republican who's been on the fence about Donald Trump and by my lights profoundly cowardly about refusing to actually say what they believe publicly for fear of getting wrong with Trump voters. Nothing forces clarity of purpose and policy differences more than a

primary challenge from somebody from another party. And if you're running out as a Republican and someone from the Patriot Party says you've been insufficiently loyal to Trump, you have one choice defend being a Republican over being a member of the Patriot Party. That doesn't mean you have to dump all over Trump. But the more those institutional interests become codified and solidified, the more it's in politicians' interests to point up those contrasts. And you're going to have Trump, if he starts the Patriot Party,

which I don't think he will, because he's lazy. He'll be denouncing Republicans all over the place. And he'll be saying any Republican who doesn't join was never a real MAGA person to begin with. And he'll be heightening the contradictions and forcing arguments that I think everybody needs to have. It would be good for Democrats for a while if this happened. But I think in the long term it would be better for everybody

if we just had a knock-down, drag-out fight. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply.

Learn more at amex.ca. slash Y-Anex. Jonah, through the mysteries of time and space, six hours has elapsed, but also only 30 seconds. And so with that, we have Joe Biden as our 46th president of the United States. What did you make of the inauguration speech

and the surroundingness? Surroundingness, interesting. Yeah, I mean, you know, I had to rush to get out of my TARDIS, you know, my British phone booth to be able to watch it. But I actually wrote a G-file in the time since last we've spoken. about the inaugural dress. So I'm fully qualified to share my rank punditry here.

As a matter of political, just straightforward political punditry and analysis, I thought it was a pretty good speech. I thought it was a good speech. I thought he did a good job. I think the tone it set lined up with his presentation style these days. He doesn't do the shouty stuff like he used to.

As I argue in the G-File, I think that he is smart to sort of lean into basically America's grandpa as the role that you should play, not too much drama, slow to anger, more likely to express disappointment than rage, that kind of thing.

The only analog that we have, I mean, it's before all our times, even David's, but would be Eisenhower and who, you know, stood a little aloof from contemporary politics,

and that allowed him to be a more unifying figure and let the crazies on the, so John Birch, right, take aim at them, and see them and discredit themselves in the process. So I think that was all, it was all good. And then I went into a lengthy philosophical discretion about why as a matter of American rhetoric or philosophy, it's completely wrong. But no one will care about my argument. It has no bearing on day-to-day political matters. I think it was, it was, if not a home

run, close to it. But this argument that the only way we can get beyond our division is, by unifying is exactly 180 degrees wrong because forced unity is actually why our politics have gotten so ugly. What we need in this country is more disagreement, more healthy disagreement, more democracy, and unity and democracy don't go hand in hand unless you're at war or fighting a pandemic. Everything else, you know, as St. Augustine didn't actually say it, but he's often attributed to saying it, in essentials, unity, and non-essentials, liberty. all things charity. That should be the message. But if you're actually to do a close

Straussian sort of close reading of it, he says something closely opposite of that. I think that's flawed. But I'm the only person in America who probably really cares about that, and that's where I wrote my newsletter about it. What did you guys think? So, David, I have a thesis for you. Okay. Barack Obama's election was historic. And because of that, his inauguralness, there was just a lot that came with it, whether he even wanted it to or not, it was going to come with that. And so his speech and everything around it came with great expectations that had to disappoint in the end because nobody could live up to the expectations

of that inauguration. Backing up for a second, George W. Bush was sort of the last of, I think, the historical inaugurations where you're expected to make this grand sweeping speech for the ages. Donald Trump's inauguration was, I mean, everyone was just watching still stunned that we were having this inauguration. I felt like. And the actual inaugural address, as George W. Bush said, was some weird fecal matter. We can keep that in mind as well. The American Carnage stuff was unique for an inauguration address from a American president. Joe Biden, I liked how Jonah put it that Joe Biden's style fit the style of the speech, but also even the pandemic sort of affecting who was behind him and how people were seated.

And, you know, Bernie Sanders is off by himself, you know, with his little mittens. That's a great picture, by the way. It was a great picture. Yeah. Did you see the tweet? Oh, no. There was someone who tweeted this. John Podor had sent it to me, and I thought it was frigging hilarious.

the picture of him sitting by himself with his arms and legs crossed. That's the picture, Jonah. Yeah, Chandra Steele tweeted, in Jewish yoga, this pose is waiting for my wife at Lomens. My thought on this was I've seen this a million times in churches. It's mad at the pastor, but still here. And so Joe Biden's inaugurates. was like, other people said this, but I think they meant it differently than I do.

The man met the speech and the two met the moment, but that all of those actually were correct at expectation setting. Joe Biden did not deliver a speech where he said, we're going to fix everything and this is going to be great and don't you worry about it. And I thought that unlike any president in my life, lifetime maybe, he might actually be able to live up to what he was saying, which was this is going to be hard. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. My newsletters out into the world beat Jonas by mere minutes. But I think Jonah and I might disagree a little bit. But I kind of

went back to 1980 because I was asked to do an essay late last year on Reagan's. first inaugural. And dove back into 1980 in the context and the history and everything. In 1980 was a real pivot moment in American history. There were these big, two sort of big twin problems. One was American despair. You know, we were a year removed from the Jimmy Carter Malay's speech. We had had more than a dozen years of defeat and decline and corruption and failure and humiliation in the country. And so you had this problem of despair, and then right with it was this problem of decline. A lot of people, the Soviet Union was ascendant. It seemed to be a force of overwhelming power.

And so here comes Ronald Reagan coming into this. And those are really his two big tasks. He had to deal with American despair and had to deal with American decline. And the rest was details. And I feel like here comes Joe Biden, and he's walking into this, you know, you don't end the man's job. I mean, he's coming in 14 days after a capital uprising that is worse than anything we'd seen in the, worse than anything we'd seen in the capital since the British Army sacked the Capitol in the War of 1812. And 400,000 people dead of a pandemic, the pandemic

raging unchecked, vaccines rolling out slowly. And he has these twin problems of division and disease. And I think history is going to judge him on how he deals with division and disease and the rest is details. And I felt like what was effective about his speech is he seemed to be, as you said, Sarah, under no illusions

as to what the challenge was ahead of him. No illusions. And one thing, I'm going to mildly disagree with Jonah here, I actually found one thing that he said about unity to be really constructive. And I'm going to quote him from his speech. He said, I'm humbled by the faith you've placed into us.

To all those who did not support us, let me say this. Hear me out as we move forward. Take a measure of me in my heart. If you still disagree, so be it. That's democracy. That's America. The right to dissent peaceably within the guardrails of our republic is perhaps the nation's greatest strength. Yet hear me clearly, disagreement must not lead to disunion.

And I pledged this to you. I will be a president for all Americans and all Americans. He repeated that. Here's why I think that was important. He was laying down a marker that disagreement isn't a synonym for division. It isn't a synonym for divisiveness. That he understands that. And I thought that that was an important moment because if we're going to go back to the same old thing of,

oh, look, how can you say you're being unifying when you do something I disagree with, then, you know, it's kind of hopeless. But if it's, hey, we can disagree with each other within these particular guardrails, that's what this nation is built to do. So that's why I felt like he hit the aspirations. He knows what he's got to do. And that's how history is going to judge him, those big two twin challenges. Do I get my right of response or are we going to go to Steve? No, let me pile on first.

And then you can try to respond. So David is right. Jonah is wrong. I thought the speech was a good speech. It struck me as sort of quintessentially Joe Biden. I think he literally used the word folks in the speech. It didn't try to do too much. And you felt like he was just talking to you.

I will say, contrary to Jonah's claim, at the beginning of the speech, he was definitely shouting. It didn't have the shouty lecturey thing that so much of our political rhetoric has these days. but he was shouting like he was worried people weren't going to hear him and people were clearly going to hear him. I think David is right on the substance, though, and I think if you look at the speech itself, he wasn't holding out the possibility of, you know, an unachievable unity. I think he sort of approached the question with humility

and framed it in exactly the right way. And I would, in addition to the passages that David cited, I would just say, he said directly, politics need not be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path. Every disagreement doesn't have to be a cause for total war. And then he followed that section with something that sounds like it might have come out

of a dispatch newsletter. We must reject a culture in which facts themselves are manipulated and even manufactured, my fellow Americans, we have to be different than this. I believe America is better than this. I thought that was very effective precisely because he didn't try to do too much, because he didn't say, sort of unity or else, he said, look, this has been a crummy four years. It's been a difficult time. I thought he managed to convey that without coming across as overly partisan, but basically say what's on the, the mind of most Americans and then say, this is crazy. Why are we doing this? Why are we approaching

things like this? This stuff is important, but it's not everything. And that to me was, you know, of the important messages that were sort of built into the speech, that was among the most important messages. And then I do think the argument he made about truth and lies, you know, in another context, it might be banal. These might sort of like clank off the ear as platitudes. But in this context, at this moment, after four years of Donald Trump and the lies that he told, it's sort of saying something to say, we have to reject a politics of lies. And what was really interesting, I was watching Fox after the speech and Chris Wallace, host of Fox News Sunday, stopped to kind of highlight that part of the speech and said, you know, this is really significant. And Chris took it and kind of personalized it and said, this is really important for those of us in the media.

Our job is to help people distinguish between truth and lies and certainly not to amplify and propagate the lies. And I was watching Chris talk about that passage that it also struck me the same way it struck him. And I thought, you know, that's going to be a really controversial thing for Chris Wallace to have said. And that's crazy that it's a controversial thing for Chris Wallace to have said that. Of course the job of the media is to separate truth from lies. But you're going to have people listen to that, both in the Chris Wallace description of it and in the original Joe Biden narration. and react negatively to that. I think it tells you a little bit about where we are as a country

and why that call in this speech at this moment actually really mattered. And already Joe Biden is uniting this podcast against Jonah, which I think is a really good first stuff. So first of all, I don't really disagree with much of that. my point is that you're identifying two different points. One is his calls for unity, which he actually was pretty robust about when he's called for unity. For example, well, to read it in a second. And then his call for civility and comity. And I have zero objections to all your points about the civility and comedy, you know, about the use of shared, you know, about agreeing on

facts and all of that kind of stuff. That was all good. The two sentiments are in tension with each other within the speech. He says, you know, for example, no nation, this is our historic monument, a historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward. And we must meet this moment as this moment as the United States of America. If we do that, I guarantee you we will not fail. We have never, ever, ever failed in America when we've acted together. Fact check untrue. We were very, very, very united during World War II, and we put Japanese people in internment camps, and we refused to let Jewish refugees come to the United States of America.

Woodrow Wilson garnered enormous levels of domestic unity, unprecedented levels of domestic unity, and he did profoundly evil things with it. Unity often leads to the kind of group think that allows you to not notice that there are better solutions and better approaches and to tune out people who merely disagree with you about means and assume that they disagree with you about ends. And I think that's sort of a part of the problem. He says, where is it?

He says, a cry of survival comes from the planet itself, a cry that can't be any more desperate or any more clear. And now a rise of political extremism, white supremacy, and domestic terrorism that we must confront and will defeat. to overcome these challenges to restore the soul and secure the future of America requires so much more than words. It requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy.

Unity. Unity. So important, he said it twice. Now, first of all, just for example, this cry of survival comes from the planet itself. I believe climate change is real. But if you watch the Democratic primaries, all of them, I think to a person, described it as an existential crisis, an extinction level. event. It is not these things. And when they make claims that things like climate change are in fact

existential or extinctual events crises that face us, what they are often saying, and I can quote chapter and verse in this going back 20 years, they're really saying, drop all your opposition, there's no time to argue, fall in line. And so much of the reason why our politics are so crappy, so much of the reason why the Supreme Court nomination fights are so crappy is because government from both the left and the right seeks to impose a level of unity across the country, a level of buy-in to public policies that we should actually have vigorous debates and disagreement about in this country. And look, again, I said at the top, I think the speech worked for all the reasons that you guys state, I think the takeaways that you guys have of it are the

takeaways that most people will take from it. But if you read it as like an actual document of American history and philosophy treated as serious rhetoric, there is a serious tension between the two claims that he's making. And you can even take white supremacy. I take a backseat to no one in being against white supremacy if you define it the way I do. But if you define it the way every third guest on MSNBC defines white supremacy, we're going to have to have a friggin' argument about it. And that's what democracy is about, is about arguments, it's about disagreement. not about forced conformity and unity. And the more you seek that kind of force conformity and unity,

the more you make people think our politics are zero sum, that we must get power and have our way because the other side doesn't want to listen to our objections and they want to give abortifacients to nuns or whatever it is. And I think that that approach, which may not be in Joe Biden's head, but it's definitely in the speechwriter's head, and surely in large swaths of the rank and file of Democratic Party

will make things worse if they actually act on that's my point so so sarah let me ask you a question obviously jonah thinks that david and i have a rather facile surface level reading of this um do you agree with do you agree with our very simple reading of this or are you eight levels deep reading into it what wasn't there in the rhetoric like jonah you know what what jonah just said was deeply patriotic to me and i loved it And I want to put it on a bumper sticker on my car a little bit. That's a long bumper sticker. It's a long bumper sticker.

There's no bumper sticker that could do that even if you have an RV. She's from Texas. They got big cars. Go back to chicken sandwiches. Come on. That's not working. No, there is something kind of both historical, but also kind of beautiful about what Jonah said.

And on today of all days where we celebrate the peaceful transfer of power, there is something to it. The peaceful transfer of power. is born out of disagreement. If we all agreed, we wouldn't have an election. And indeed, in many countries, where they claim to all agree, they don't have real elections. And while our country, it's history and it's present and everything in between is and will continue to be incredibly messy. Do you know what, Jonah?

There's something really quite nice about that democracy is disagreement. I take back everything I've said about you. But Joe Biden says that in the speech. Oh, yeah, yeah, no. He says that in the speech. And my point is these two things are in tension because he also says other things in the speech. Yeah, no, look, Jonas wrong about. He makes a broader philosophical case, but I think he makes the broader philosophical case

in the context of his overriding argument, which is, hey, this stuff really matters, but it need not separate us in some kind of fundamental. way. I mean, politics need not be a raging fire, destroying everything in its path. That's the context. I'm going to get really tired of you. Always taking Joe Biden's side. I mean, it's just going to get really old, really fast. Of course. Of course. I do that. Of course. I said that his rhetoric might appear in a dispatch newsletter. I expect to be tarned and feathered. I mean, part of some of the sweeping, you know, the sweeping rhetoric about climate change. I'm with you, John. I'm somebody who thinks that climate change is a real thing and that human beings are causing negative.

consequences to our climate, a lot of that, I just sort of took us the kind of the boilerplate rhetoric of the Democratic Party, which is going to be followed up by notice of regulatory rulemaking from the Environmental Protection Agency regarding a nominal change in emission standards from natural. I mean, that's the kind of like meat and potatoes policy argument that we're going to have and we're probably going to disagree with Biden on a lot of that stuff. But I just kept coming back to the overarching themes here, which to me he was nailing it on the we can disagree without disunion. I think that that's, that is in nailing it on the emphasis on facts. If I had to, if I had to, you know, if I had to say that is there one, is there one thing

that really is completely polluting the public discourse around the unity point? Is it it's one of those things that is, disagreement is divisive by its very nature. The disagreement is disunion. We see this all the time online where if somebody could agree with you 90%, but if they're not with you on that extra 10%, you're 100% horrible. And this is sort of, this is one of the, this is the urgent call of the time is to rediscover, I can disagree. And, and, and, and, and, And but disagreement is, as you described, healthy for democracy and not inherently divisive within a democracy. And I thought he nailed that. In nailing that, he nailed the big thing. And I did say that we were going to talk not just about the inaugural address, but the inaugural nests.

And so we are going to leave the address and do the nests. And the nests includes, but is not limited to, that I mean I just I already feel kind of gross myself for having and not just agreed with Jonah but like poured my heart out in favor of Jonah and so I'm put a bumper sticker quoting Jonah on your car the good news is you got this out of the way in January and you won't have to do it again for the rest of 2020 that's such a good point so I'm going to pick a fight with Jonah about the poet laureate and her speech because I thought it was was wonderful and great. And I have a feeling that Jonah disagreed. I want to hear from Steve about Garth Brooks. And David, I know you have thoughts on some of the sartorial choices that were out

there. Or maybe Lady Gaga or Jalo throwing in her own tagline into this land is my land. And was Woody Guthrie really a good pick? I had lots of feelings on that. So Jonah, let's fight. I didn't think it was a particularly good poem. I thought she was a very charming and, you know, and charismatic person. And I think her reading of her poem, I mean, look, and I'm perfectly happy admitting, I tend to like things like iambic pentameter and whatnot. This felt like a lot of the cliches and bromides in it. Just leave me cold for some of the reasons that we talked about in the,

my stuff about unity and whatnot. And I just found it to be much less inspiring than a lot of people did. And a lot of people were very, very, very, very angry with me for saying I didn't love it. I didn't think it was terrible. I just didn't love it. And I stand by that. And I've tried to reread it. And I'm just not, I'm not moved by it.

I'm sorry. Well, Jonah, it's hard to fight with you about kind of a reasonable take of a difference in, you know, aesthetics. So I'm listening to this, and I'm deciding whether I like it, right? We're still kind of the beginning of it. And then, David, I mean, you know what I'm going to say, right? She goes all mica-4-4, and I am brought immediately to David. And this is one of your favorite scriptures, right, David?

Yes. Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we're to live up to our own time, then victory won't lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we've made. That is the promise to glade the hill we climb. If only we dare, it's because American is more than a pride we inherit. It's the past we step into and how we repair it. That's good.

The line I did not like is we are striving to form, we are striving to forge a use. We are striving to forge a union with purpose to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. I don't know what that means, but I don't like the sound of it. And, you know, it sounds like, you know, a mix of Le Miz and a Benetton ad. And I think different colors, fine, right? But my Berkian understanding of what conservatism and the founding are about is it's not about marching towards some end result in history.

It is about providing space for people to live and be who they are. And it just felt very cliched in a big chunk. But I could be wrong. I am not a great judge of poetry. I'm not either. But you don't get more Berkey than Micah 4 for crying out loud. Okay. This is George Washington's one of his favorite verse.

He referred to it almost 50 times in his writings as far as his aspirations for the new nation. And so it's also, by the way, repopularized by Lynn Manuel Miranda, speaking through George Washington, who was quoting Micah. But this is American pluralism. Every man under his own vine and fig tree. This is a vision of a nation that is both secure and just. And I think that that was very powerful. That reference, that moment was very powerful.

Also, you know, as Sarah accurately notes, it's one of the two sort of centerpiece conceptual verses in my book available in bookstores near you, that and Micah 6-8. And in that reference, I mean, I sat up straight in my chair when I heard it. I thought it was incredibly powerful. And, you know, maybe this is, Joan and I have this sort of constant when it comes to anything cultural. We have this distinction between the two of us. He's a critic and I'm a fan. And I was a fan of that poem, you know, I didn't parse every line, but the overall impulse of it, I thought was exactly in keeping with the overall impulse of the inaugural festivities. And we haven't even talked about bringing on Garth Brooks, one of the key pop culture avatars of Red America to sing Amazing Grace.

Like the, you know, the, probably most sung him in all of American churches, white, black, every background. And I thought that was fantastic. So, David, interesting that you mentioned that, though, I, we are all talking about the pieces we wrote today. So the piece I wrote today was about how I thought it was fascinating that Biden's inauguration had so many religious nods. The poem had religious nods. Garth Brooks singing Amazing Grace. Biden's speech mentioned God several times, faith several times, and Donald Trump's farewell speech this morning that he gave on the tarmac that was, you know, off the cuff, but it was quite long, did not use the word God or faith once. And I wonder as Christian nationalism is on the rise within the right, whether the left with Joe Biden as the head of the Democratic Party is trying to create some space after several decades of you know, running out pro-life Democrats, for instance, from the party, the little sisters of

the poor, unfortunate culture war aspects, the Biden clinging to their guns and religion stuff, that was this, was this an invitation? Maybe. I mean, I think it was a, it was a, perhaps an invitation. It was also a rebuke. It was a rebuke to those who argued that Biden is going to be just he's going to destroy america he's going to destroy the church this sort of kind of religious almost holy war mindset that animated a lot of the the worst parts of the right in 20 in 2020 and here comes a guy who um looks like a pretty normal american and with a very a deeply sort of historically rooted a vision of American civil religion.

And it was right there for everybody to see. All right, Steve. I know you loved Michelle Obama's wide pants with the big belt. I didn't notice and I don't care. I don't care about the fashion. I, um, so I agree with Jonah and I agree with David on the poem. I thought it was a little uneven. I mean, you have to stop and think for a second that she's 22 years old.

And just to have the poise to do that is kind of remarkable in and of itself. That said, there were moments where the poem I thought was really strong, even transcend it. And there were other moments where you just thought, this is sort of like a bad cliche that I would expect to read in a kid's English essay. But the good moments were good. I mean, she had a passage where she said, I don't know, I just lost it. I had it pulled up on my computer and I lost it.

And while you're looking for it, all I'll say is I've now learned that I can put together any poem I want. And as long as I quote Micah, David's on board. Look, I'm mostly, I'm not a big poetry guy. I'm mostly a Shell Silvestine kind of guy. So, so, I mean, that's, that's, that's my framework here. But she wrote, for there is always light, if we're only brave enough to see it, if we're only brave enough to be it. And the, the context of that was a broader argument about sort of speaking up and saying what you think.

And I thought that was, that was particularly good moment. Look, it was the metaphor for the whole thing and the line, the entire thing, two lines before that, which led into that, our people diverse and beautiful will emerge, battered and beautiful. And I love that. I'm with you. I'm a softie on that stuff.

I thought that was particularly powerful. I thought, you know, the Garth Brooks singing of amazing grace got a lot of grief on social media, which is not necessarily the way to judge it. I thought it was fantastic. I thought it was great. I thought it was wonderful,

a cappella version of Amazing Grace. I thought it was terrific that he stopped in the middle and said everybody stand up and sing whether you're here in front of me or whether you're at home in your living room. And you know what? Damn it, I did by myself, stood up in my living room and I belted it out. And it was a moving moment. And I don't think you have to be caught up in, you know, in Joe Biden or, you know, taken us or them view of how this all works to think like after all of this after this exhausting

four years to just have a moment where we could get carried away it was so refreshing and you know I guess I'm sort of a typical guy I think of myself as more alpha than beta and so you don't want to get carried away but sometimes it's just like screw it I don't care I want to get carried away. I mean, this is the moment. Like, thank God we have people who are making these arguments about not letting these little things divide us.

And thank God we have people like Garth Brooks who are willing to stand up and sing a beautiful song, even if we think he might have been Chris Gaines at one point. Like, it's all to his credit that he's willing to stand up and do it. And I thought it was a great moment. Can I heal the breach

between me and Jonah real fast. Yeah. I think we can all say that The Expans season five has been fantastic so far. Absolutely true. Fact. And that's how we will end this podcast.

Thank you all. Happy inauguration day to everyone out there and we'll see you again next week. This episode, this is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one.

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