The Dispatch Podcast - Are We Liberated Yet? | Roundtable

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

Liberation Day has come … and Sarah Isgur is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and Michael Warren to help figure out exactly what we’re being liberated from. The Agenda: —Party like it’s 1889 —Tariff myths, debunked —Liberating Republicans from a midterm win —Are the experts right (on tariffs)? —“Every word of Trump's claim is false.” —Democrats win in Wisconsin —NWYT: Third terms The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. www.ca.com. Did you lock the front door?

Check. Close the garage door? Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision? No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web.

Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isger.

That's Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and drum roll please, Mike Warren. All right. We're going to start with tariffs. This week, we had Liberation Day at the White House. President Trump imposed at least 10% tariffs on goods imported from most U.S. trading partners. 10% for the United Kingdom, 20% for EU members. Tariffs from China will jump 34%, 25% on all foreign-made cars, 24% from goods from Japan, 26% from India, 46% from Vietnam, 49% from Cambodia,

Here's some things the president had to say about that. This is Liberation Day. April 2nd, 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn. The day America's destiny was reclaimed. For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike. It's our Declaration of Economic Independence. Today we are standing up for the American worker and we are finally putting America first.

Now, people on the internet were able to look at the chart of countries and figure out this formula, which they said was the total of trade barriers, tariffs, currency manipulation, et cetera. That's what the chart that the White House handed out said. But it appears that the formula is actually much more simple than that. It is the trade deficit,

as in how much we impose, from their country minus how much we export to their country, divided by how much we import from their country. A pretty simple formula. And one that is kind of weird, because for a lot of countries, then it's in the negative, right? They take more of our stuff than we take of theirs, but we still impose a 10% tariff on them. And for many of these countries that use our services, for instance, services not included, only goods. There's the economic side of this, there's the political side of this, and there's the philosophical side of this. And so Jonah, President Trump said that America was the richest it's ever been in the 1880s.

Will you explain why they think it is good to go back to the 1880 U.S. economy? Is it like a gold standard thing? Am I wearing a crown of gold? What? Yeah. So it depends who you ask that question. you can get smart-ish but wrong answers and you can get dumb, profoundly dumb and wrong answers. I want the smart answer. I want you to like give me the best case for the 1880s being a good time in American economic policy. Well, because we were still, you know, we still had a frontier where land was incredibly cheap and land is essentially, you know, we don't necessarily think of it as a source of energy, but it's a source of energy, right? It's a source of

where excess labor can go. It's where it keeps the country on the move. It's constantly providing new raw materials. America was going west, right? So there's all that kind of stuff going on, and you're getting these massive multipliers due to technology. It's kind of like you know, there are a lot of pro-Soviet people who said how can you claim that the Soviet model isn't, you know, good? Look at the massive improvements in economic life in the Soviet Union under Stalin.

And there were some. And the reason there were is that even if at the point of a gun with lots of barbarism, you take people from plowing fields with ox carts and give them massive tractors, you are going to get multipliers, right? So you get the introduction of the railroad in America. You get all these, the steam engine and all that. Good times, right? We also had, so we had really serious economic growth.

and what a lot of people, including some smart people do, is they look at how the federal government was paid for through tariffs back then. And it was. Was it like a huge source of funding for the government? This is pre-personal income tax. We didn't have the 16th Amendment. So none of us would have been paying from our incomes.

There would have been other types of taxes. Well, we would have been paying when we, anytime we bought anything. Sales tax. Property taxes still existed. Tariff is a complicated sales tax. What's left out of that is that the federal government was like 3% of U.S. GDP at the time. It was a tiny fraction. So you could pay for some customs houses

and a Navy and that kind of thing, but you didn't have Social Security. You didn't have Medicare or Medicaid, right? You didn't have, you know, the vast complex of programs and entitlements that we have today, you know, all those transfer payments didn't exist. And they still wanted to get rid of tariffs.

Why? Because tariffs in the late 19th century, and Phil Magnus has a fantastic history of this over at Cato, we can put in the show notes, was a massive driver of corruption, just a massive driver of corruption. Everyone wanted their carve-outs, everyone wanted their special deals,

everyone wanted the tariffs that be applied full to their competitors, but not to them. I actually recently had to give a talk, and one of the things I did is I looked into the history of the phrase run government like a business, and it basically traces back to this, period because what was going on was that government was so corrupt, particularly like the custom

house in New York, where you imagine how much commerce comes into New York Harbor in the 1880s and stuff, that people said, you know, we should really run government with best business practices because that by which they meant good accounting rather than just wild bribery and corruption. And so one of the reasons you get the progressive era, one of the reasons why you get the income tax, which is, you know, one of the crown jewels of the progressive era. is of the rightly, and one of the reasons why Congress gives all of its power on trade increasingly to the president is they knew they could. It was basically, stop me before I kill again, you know, kind of attitude among Congress. They were like, we cannot police this because

there's just too many congressmen to bribe. It's too easy to rig the system. And so the concentration of power and the executive branch in many ways comes straight out of this. The income tax, in part because it was much harder to bribe and cheat your way out of it. And so it was in a much better and more reliable source of revenue as well. And just to back up a second, it's just a freaking lie that America was richer 110 years ago than it is today. By any normal person's understanding of what wealth means, you know, the standard of living for the average middle class person in the 1880s,

we would consider near-abject poverty today. During this period of us being raped and pillaged, according to Donald Trump, American life expectancy, American standard of living, GDP per capita, pick your indicator. They have steadily,

you know, with some bumps, they have steadily risen for over a century. It is just a manufactured, nostalgic maga myth to claim that the era of improving trade was one which emiserated

and impoverished this country. And I think a lot of people are going to realize that pretty freaking soon when the effect of these things, we're recording this, we should tell listeners, lightly before the markets open the day after Liberation Day. So by the time you hear this,

you may be fending off marauding gangs of motorcycle thugs trying to steal your commodities. But right now, we want this to remind you of what life used to be like before Liberation Day. Where do you keep your commodities? mostly in the pantry.

But, you know, I'm not telling you. Mike, talk about the politics of this a little bit, both from Trump's perspective. This feels like a big gamble. Because unlike Doge, for instance, where people will or won't feel it maybe in a few months, maybe in a few years, maybe not at all,

the terrorist thing either is going to work or it's not. And he's staking, really, it feels to me his entire presidency on this moment, And talk to me about what this sounds like on the hill with Republicans in the House and Senate as well as they look forward to getting ready for primaries and general elections. Right. And there's a debt limit fight that's going to be happening this summer on the hill. There's going to be budget stuff going on in the fall. That's all going to be happening against the backdrop of, look, what should we expect politically here? We should expect people to be paying more for things that they are looking to buy, whether it's a new car or any number of the kind of things that we buy all the time. Just go into your closet, go into your house, and look at all the things that say made in Vietnam or made in Taiwan.

Look at all of the things that you don't even realize are made from parts. And one particular aspect of the manufacturing process that happened somewhere overseas, all of that is getting tariffed and all of it is going to raise the prices. So I would expect that there is going to be the same kind of political backlash that Joe Biden faced when inflation started to go up. I mean, I think we can reasonably expect that on top of some of the other, I mean, we talked to sort of consumer prices. you do look at sort of the sell-off that already began on Wednesday when these, which has really been going on for like a month and a half ever since Donald Trump started talking about and implementing targeted specific tariffs, this sort of blanket tariff. I mean, I expect there to be a pretty massive sell-off. We'll see. That's a lot of people's retirement funds, right? I saw a very funny joke on Twitter. Liberation Day is about liberating people from their retirement savings. And I I think that's something, I mean, I'm not even looking at mine, just to save my sanity here. Yeah.

But can I say something about the various arguments for these tariffs? Because you have heard, right, this is where we're using this to, as a revenue generating source of income. You heard that as well from Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary was on CNN on Wednesday night, gave, I thought, a very, poor explanation of how poor is very generous that is very generous to call poor poor well you know I'm trying to be I'm trying to be I'm trying to be generous here somebody needs to be generous in this in this time of the lack of abundance I think for the first time in decades probably since I was a college student we're going to see a fair trade April 2nd we are going to disclose the reciprocal tariffs I'm not going to

to get out ahead of President Trump. He's going to announce him 3 o'clock on Wednesday. And I think for the first time in decades, probably since I was a college student, we're going to see fair trade. And everyone will have the opportunity to lower their tariffs, lower their non-tariff barriers, stop the currency manipulation, stop subsidizing labor, stop subsidizing, stop providing cheap loans and they make the global trading system fair for American workers again. So there's that argument. There's this argument that we were somehow losing, which is, which seems to be the Trump argument, right?

That, like, the reason why this sort of cockamamie calculus for how what each country is charging us for tariffs, that it's like our trade deficit, it's based on our trade deficit, seems to come from this screwed up idea that Trump has had in his head for decades that like a trade deficit, if the U.S. has a trade deficit with the country, it means we're losing like it's a, it's like it's a game or a competition.

And he thinks it's theft. It's like zero sum. Right. Yeah. Right. It's a zero sum. You're taking it from us. And what I want to see is

what are Republicans who, who know better than this. And I think that's everybody from like legit free traders in the United States Senate. Even somebody like J.D. Vance, the vice president, who I believe is smart enough to know that that that's kind of a stupid way of arguing for tariffs. And look, he's got this interview that J.D. Vance does in the, in Breitbart, an exclusive interview who Breitbart got with J.D. Vance. That's a really big get for them in which he says, He says this multiple times in the interview.

So for 40 years, America has been the piggy bank of the world. We absorb all of the ridiculous trade practices and economic practices of friend and foe alike. For the first time in probably 40 years, we have an American president who's saying no more, that it's not going to work, that he's not going to allow America to be taken advantage of anymore. It is the dumbest, most ahistorical argument for these tariffs. And I guess I'm not surprised that J.D. Vance's, sort of making that case. But my question on the political,

what will happen politically with these tariffs is people like that kind of populist talk, right? Hey, we have a president who's saying no more, we're not going to be used anymore. How long does it take for economic conditions in this country to get bad enough for that kind of populist, hey, we're going to win here eventually.

for that kind of populist argument to just hold absolutely no valence. Right now, it's like, it's still theoretical, but at some point when you're paying more for everything and your retirement is in the toilet, your retirement savings are in the toilet, like that just evaporates,

that kind of populist argument evaporates. And I'd like to see what people like J.D. Vance have to say about how this is going to work when the last 40 years were not. Yeah, if I can just one way to think about what the argument is that goes into the formula for these tariffs, as well as, which are just, we should be really clear with listeners, these are not reciprocal tariffs. These are wildly in excess of not matching, right? Like most of these countries have less than 10% tariff rates. We start at 10% and a lot of these go up into the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. It's a completely bogus thing. So when people say it's just reciprocal tariffs, based on Trump's chart, you should just understand that Trump is lying. to you. And the theory, the way of seeing the world at the heart of this, Trump has this theory that says suppliers should also be equal purchasers. So when you go to IHOP and buy pancakes, that's fine so long as IHOP agrees to buy your fan belts. And if they don't

buy your fan belts, then IHOP is stealing from you by merely giving you pancakes in exchange for money. They're eating your lunch while you eat your breakfast. That's right. Damn it. So it just it's just crazy talk. Steve, foreign policy-wise, it occurs to me that for a country like Vietnam, for instance, that is facing huge, huge tariffs, if America basically can no longer afford to buy Vietnamese goods and a third of Vietnam's economy is based on selling things to America and Americans, we've basically destroyed the economy of Vietnam and any other number of smaller countries. I mean, I think the Madagascar tariff is 67% or something. Now, I don't think Madagascar's economy is entirely based on imports into the U.S., but to the extent it is, we just

ended that. So if you're a smaller country, and I think Vietnam's a great example, because we have really asked companies, if you're going to offshore, don't offshore to China, offshore to Vietnam. And they have. And Vietnam was part of this agreement, basically. What happens when we destroy a bunch of economies out there intentionally? And yes, I'm thinking of like what China does and what Russia does to like swoop in, but also just the instability that causes in world order when you have a lot of people who are going to be hungry and unemployed and unable to care for their children. What does that look like?

We're choosing to make adversaries and enemies out of good trade partners and friends. That's the long and short of it. But I mean, I guess my question's almost bigger than that. Like, that doesn't sound good, obviously. Are we starting a worldwide recession and will their recession end up hitting us too? Right?

Like, we spit on them and it just bounces back on us because if we cause all of these countries to go into a great depression, when the world goes into a great depression, like what happens to us? I think it starts with the United States and actually flows outward more than coming, more than the other way around.

But if you look at what the projections have been since this announcement, and it's been scarcely over 16 hours since he announced this, you know, some of the projections of sort of, tipping the United States into recession have gone up to 35, 40, 50 percent. You have projections from University of Michigan and economists that this will cost the average household in the United States $5,000 each. You have additional projections about the long-term

impact on the GDP of the United States that have it cratering. It's very hard to find people who are not political allies of the president who are saying not only that, you know, that this is not good, but who aren't saying anything other than this is disastrous. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is, the consequences of not having life insurance, can be serious. That kind of financial strain, on top of everything else, is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple.

It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same day cover. and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of five-star rating on Trust Pilot and thousands of families already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch.

That's eth-h-o-s-com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. This episode 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. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience.

You can also tap into built-in analytics and see you. who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or don't. And by the way, can we just take a moment because one of the things that I think is true of

this moment for me as well is the idea that experts say crazy stuff and then turn out not to be right and aren't held accountable for that. And so I think back to, for instance, Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. And there were people out there that the White House put out saying like, this will reduce inflation when in fact we all know it caused inflation. But I do think it's Or exacerbated it. But I do think it's worth remembering there were actually a lot of people

including the president's allies who said exactly that at the time. Like Larry Summers comes to mind where they, you know, it was like, no, this is going to be a bad idea. And they did it anyway. Fair enough. So I just want to separate between like experts who keep catastrophizing

and getting things wrong and experts who probably feel a little more like Cassandra at the Gates when they keep telling administrations, this will be economically bad. No one listens and then it's economically bad. And then somehow people say the experts got it wrong, which must really suck to be those guys. Yeah. And I think what's notable about this is, you know, there were disagreements.

I mean, I certainly agreed with Larry Summers. We talked about it at the time. I thought the White House was foolish to townplay what he was saying. There was some history there, some economic history there that suggests he was likely to be right. And he was. But there were people on sort of both sides or all sides of that debate and people who have hypothesized that it would, in fact, reduce inflation. What I think is notable about this is the absence of economists who are making the pro-administration

case other than people who work for the administration. But you can chalk that up to being how economics works, or you can chalk that up to a bunch of economists hating Trump is the problem. I don't think so. I don't think so. No, I think it's not about a bunch of economists hating Trump because you have free market economists. You have, you know, liberal, I would say, you know, somewhat pro-statist economists. You have economists across the spectrum saying things like what we heard from David Beckworth at Mercatus. This has to be one of the biggest enforced economic policy errors in U.S. history. You know, they're making these projections based on what they're seeing. they anticipated this. And, you know, there is something emerging that is very close to a consensus view that this is disastrous.

So I think the way you, because I take your point. Experts have gotten lots of stuff wrong, right? The, in the past. And I don't think, but I think Steve is right that among economists, they do these surveys of economists about do you agree with this or that.

It's something like 89% of economists, like serious economists, regardless of ideological profile, agree that tariffs are a tax on consumer, you know, like these kinds of things, right? It's a general consensus. You get the two armed economists coming in when it's like, do they ever serve a beneficial purpose? And then you can come up with scenarios. Like, I personally think Trump could have tariff the crap out of China and China alone. It would have been a political win. There's a much stronger national security argument for it. Get those supply chains to Vietnam and places like that. That would be fine with me, right? But the point I want to make is in this and almost every other policy debate,

the best way to tell whether or not someone has serious arguments on their side is how much they have to lie to make their case. Because if you had a really strong case on the merits, You wouldn't lie. You would actually, like, cite the actual facts, not make-up facts. And time and time again, like, these guys defending this tariff stuff have to make-up things, have to lie about what they're doing, come up with weird, bogus methodology for stuff. Because if they actually go with the accepted, verified practices of math and economics,

they wouldn't have an argument. So they have to make up things to have an argument. And so Trump's history of trade over the last hundred years is nonsense. Trump's, you know, a statement that, you know, statements that America is incredibly poor because of trade. Like, seriously, go back four months and read The Economist series, you know, there's a special edition on how the American economy is the envy of the world that, you know, in like 2010, the EU and the United States had basically the same GDP or the same GDP per capita. This is direction right.

I'm making me getting the years off. And since then we've like literally lapped them. I remember looking up when I was in London in January, the per capita GDP of London cities. And once you get outside of London, the next biggest, the next richest city, I believe, was Manchester. I was trying to find a comparable, comparable city in the United States that had the same GDP per capita. I had to go down the list of U.S. cities 300 places to Brownsville, Texas, to find a place as poor as the second richest city in the U.K. in terms of per capita GDP. Like, we are doing so much better. That doesn't mean we can't improve things about trade and I want more shipbuilding to and yada, yada, yada.

But the argument that these guys make are just so full of lies and distortions and bad math that when the experts at least use real math and real facts, I think the tie, you have to they win in that context. Can I offer something that makes Jonas point here? I'm going to read a tweet from Jeff Stein, who's an economic reporter from the Washington Post, who was, I believe, live tweeting Trump's presentation yesterday in the Rose Garden or Wednesday. This goes to what Jonah was saying at the outset of the podcast.

Trump says that the U.S. was proportionally the richest it ever was in the late 1880s and early 1900s before 1913 establishing the federal income tax, quote, for reasons unknown to mankind, unquote, which he then says led to the Great Depression crash, which, quote, would never have happened if they stayed with the tariff policy, unquote. And in response to that, Phil Magnus, who Jonah had mentioned earlier from the Independent Institute, wrote, every word of Trump's claim is false. I literally did my doctorate on this exact question and period of history. 19th century tariffs were a corrupt and economically harmful mess. The income tax was adopted to escape the tariff trap and Smoot-Hawley worsened the

depression. They're just making stuff up across the board. And again, as Jonah says, like, a lot of this stuff is checkable. Like, you can go back and, you know, it's math. It's not, it's two plus two doesn't equal 78. And on the politics of this, this is another area where I think we're seeing just the culture of lies in Washington around these debates. And just and around this president, I think this president, he didn't create it, but he made it much more pervasive. There was a vote in the Senate last night about blocking Trump's tariffs on Canada. And it went down, I believe it was 5148, if I've got my, uh, uh, numbers correct, which included four Republicans voting with Democrats to block the president

from imposing, basically what ended Trump's Canada tariffs, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell. I can tell you without fear of contradiction that many, many, many more Republicans agree with those four Republicans who voted to stop Trump's tariffs. If we could take the Republican Senate conference in a blind vote and ask them if they agree with those tariffs and if they agree with President's trade agenda, easily more than half of the Republicans in the Senate would vote against Trump, easily. And none of them are standing up. They're bystanders. Not only have they given up, has Congress given up its ability to actually, you know, impose tariffs to create this, to end the president's authority on these taxes.

They're pretending their bystanders and they're helpless here, that they have no say. And rather than oppose the president on issues that some of these senators know will devastate industries in their state. They're just going along with the president because they're cowards. It's not the first time we've seen it, I have to say, but it's pretty stunning in this moment at this time, given the reaction that we've already seen

from markets and from, you know, from the business community. Can I say one quick thing, Sarah, about this whole experts thing? I agree that like the experts here have the goods, they have the receipts, they're able to make this case. You don't even have to appeal to the experts on this because the arguments that are being made by the administration and by their supporters, they don't pass the common sense test. They don't reflect reality as anybody who is aware of what is happening in America, whether

it's America manufacturing or American relative wealth to how things were 30, 40, 50 years ago. And I, you know, for instance, again, I don't mean to pick on J.D. Vance. Well, wait a second, I do mean to pick on J.D. Vance on this. You know, he's talking about, finally, we're going to bring more foreign manufacturers to build or expand their plants here in America, as if that hasn't been happening in the free trade regime for the last several decades. And all you have to do, just take cars. All you have to do is look at all of the foreign car manufacturers, who have opened plants in the last 30 years across mostly the southeastern states, go to the northern part of South Carolina, where BMW built a plant about 20 years ago

and talk to anybody who works there, all of the follow-on industry that is happening because of that. This claim that that's not been happening, it is just, it, it doesn't track with what anybody's experience who say lives in that part of that state in that part of the country, or in any number parts of the country. It's not, it doesn't track with their own experience. It doesn't track with the experience of Americans who are paying less. Okay. The point has been made.

I want each of you, though, to tell me a month from now, what, what. could have happened to make you say you are wrong. So is it the stock market you'll be looking to? Is it prices actually haven't really gone up? What's the thing that I can hold you accountable for where you'll say, eh, I was wrong about this. Jonah? Because there's a lot of conversation on this pod right now

that the sky is falling, that people are going to pay $5,000 more this year for goods than they would have without these tariffs, which is a huge, that will have huge ramifications that we will feel and see in short order. So I want you to tell me in a month what I can look to to decide whether you are right or wrong.

Yeah, and you raise a fair point, right? You can sound like we're catastrophizing a bit here. You know, in fairness, the single largest regressive tax increase in a recorded human history is something pretty worthwhile to catastrophize about. But the American economy is actually really strong right now. comparatively speaking, we are not as reliant on international trade as a lot of other countries

are. So I don't know that, I don't think, you know, it's not like the U.S. economy is going to come shuddering to a stop necessarily. The risk of like Great Depression style stuff is greater now than it was yesterday, but it's still not very high. I don't think. You're not answering my question. I know. Well, I'm trying to think it through. I mean, I'm just trying to tell people like, don't jump out the window or anything, right? I think if we don't see a major round of retaliatory tariffs in a month, right? Because what you're asking for is some economic indicator that I don't know there's time in 30 days to, like, you could see the stock market kind of recover a little bit

between now and 30 days from now. But shouldn't I start seeing prices go up? Yeah, you should start seeing prices go up, for sure. So like... Okay. So if the price of a Toyota is the same in a month as it is today. If the price of new Toyotas are the same as they are today, then this has not gone as planned.

At least... No, no, no. It has gone as planned. Right, right. It has gone as planned, right? As I expect. The price of new cars, right? Again, the Toyota thing is a little iffy because it could have been made in Tennessee, right?

But generally speaking, like when they imposed steel tariffs the last time, domestic steel prices went up as well. So I think we're going to see we're going to see prices pretty much across the board go up some more than others. Okay, Mike, what's the thing I can hold you accountable for? Prices. Of what? Give me a thing.

If prices don't go up. Give me a thing that I'm going to check the price of. Okay, I mean, I'm just going to repeat what Jonas said, like a foreign-made new, foreign-made car. Okay. You can go with avocados. From Mexico. I think that some people are going to

hear that and say, I have no problem if foreign-made cars go up. And if that's the thing you can point to that you're actually being held accountable for, then maybe we weren't talking about very much, Steve. Okay. Well, don't buy a foreign-made car. They can think that. They can think that. Domestic-made cars will probably over the long haul go up in price, too. Then let's do domestic made cars. You see my point? But I'm not saying that doesn't really happen in a month, right? But like in a year for sure, right? Because what you're doing is you're making something cars more scarce. When you make things more scarce, they get more expensive. And we're already seeing this in the used car market where, you know, the price for use cars is going up because people are

not going to be able to buy new cars. And so use cars are in more demand. So I think we're going to see prices across the board go up. And then we see Trump do price controls. Steve? Yeah, it's possible. I think it's fair for you to ask the question. But I think it falls into the trap of looking at this through the framework of the protectionists. Because so many of the effects of this are going to be the things that we can't see, right? So if, I mean, if you read Henry Hayes, let economics in one lesson read his chapter about taxes, I mean, about tariffs and his example about the sweater industry, some of the stuff that you, some of the stuff that will be the effects of this is stuff that's not obvious, not reflected in prices. I agree with Jonah

and Mike and I think prices is a good place to look and to answer your question directly. I'll get to that in a second. a lot of this is what money we won't have to spend, what cars or wines or things we won't have the ability to purchase. And it's just a lot harder to explain to people the unseen effects of these tariffs, which are, as in many ways devastating as the things that we're going to be able to see. So I spent the last several days, actually, doing some reporting on Spanish wine because those are the sacrifices

that's what we're calling in now reporting those are the sacrifices I'm willing to make for the dispatch and it's members, readers, and listeners. But I've been talking to Spanish wine producers. I've been talking to importers and distributors here in the United States. Talk to a guy who's got a wine importing business

in Alabama. And what he said is the what will immediately happen is he will have to raise prices. He's going to, you know, if this is 20% tariffs and these wine tariffs, actually, there could be more coming. But if it's 20%, he orders a container of wines from Spain, $100,000. It's shipped across the Atlantic.

It arrives at the ports here. And he's presented a bill for $20,000. And he has to just pay the bill, $20,000. He then immediately looks at ways that he can absorb some of those costs so that he doesn't have to raise the prices 20%. He might ask the producers to absorb some of the costs, but he can't do that if the wine's already been delivered. So in most cases, he's going to just pass these along to consumers and the price of wines might be higher as a result. Now, you might say, well, that's really the least good case you can make because who cares if rich people have to pay more

for their fancy wines. But it doesn't just affect rich people who are buying wines. It affects restaurants with low profit margins who serve the wines to rich people and not rich people

who want to have a good meal. You're sort of proving their point. You're right. You're not going to serve Spanish wine anymore. You're going to serve California wine at the restaurant. But you're probably not.

You're probably going to serve Spanish wine at a higher price at the restaurant. It's hard to convince people. Or California wine at a higher price. Yeah. I mean, California wines aren't going to likely keep their prices low if they have less competition.

And the effects on this are not just going to be for consumers. The effects on this will be for the waiter who works at the restaurant. Fewer people will go to restaurants because the prices are higher. Are you going to go to an Italian restaurant for an authentic Italian dinner experience and get a nap a cab? Maybe, but maybe not. I mean, you will because the distributor from Alabama has gone out of big. business because he can't pass on 20% higher prices against Napa cab. So there are no more Spanish wines coming into the United States and therefore they're not on the restaurant menu. So your

only choice is the Napa cab now. So I don't think that's likely to happen. There are people in places, especially the big ones. I think it is likely to put small importers and distributors out of business. And certainly if they go higher than 20%, it could be devastating to that section of the industry, which, by the way, there is sort of an undue burden on American businesses in that sector because of the legacy of post-prohibition laws requiring the presence of American importers and distributors. So the government creates this problem, requires these exporters to work with American importers and then imposes these tariffs that will have a disproportionate effect on American importers and probably drive some of them out of businesses. So that's

one way to measure. Let's look, I don't know if it'll be 30 days. We know our price is higher, our small businesses who work in these industries going out of business because they can't afford it. All right. So I want everyone to imagine the globe and their head. And from the southern point of Africa and the southern point of Australia draw a triangle to Antarctica. In the middle of that triangle, draw two little circles. Those circles, are called the Herd and MacDonald Islands. They have no human inhabitants. They have no imports.

They have no exports. They have a lot of penguins, and their seal populations doing pretty well. No predators have been introduced to the island. Sounds pretty great. Trump's chart says that this island with no humans has imposed a 10% tariff on United States imports, and therefore he is charging a reciprocal tariff

of 10% on these islands. So penguins suck it. No more freeloading and raping and pillaging America as Trump has described. Can I make just a quick semi-serious point about that because it's nice actually to have a moment of levity amidst all this misery. But that really speaks to just how tall,

Totally clueless these people are about this. They have no freaking idea what they're doing. If they're imposing tariffs on uninhabited islands, what does that tell you about their understanding of the rest of what they're doing? Totally clueless and should be held responsible. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures.

and see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, lease a 2026 X-E-90 plug-in hybrid from $599 bi-weekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com.

TD Bank knows that running a small business is a journey, from startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs. No matter the stage of business you're in, visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager. Okay, I want to talk about a couple other things real quick. Let's do the special elections that happened this week. there were two special elections for congressional seats in Florida. Both were won by Republicans by a 15-point margin.

It wasn't particularly close, but those were nevertheless drastically reduced margins from Trump's victory in 2024. The Democrat in one of those races raised a lot more money than the Republican and yet was defeated. I also want to talk about the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. In that case, the Republican, lost by a 10-point margin to the Democrat, and these aren't actually partisan races, but

nevertheless, the parties endorse candidates, even though those candidates don't run as partisans. If that makes sense. Elon Musk spent $20 million for the Republican candidate that again lost by 10 points. It was the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history. $90 million overall was spent. So what did we learn, Mike? in these special elections. Republicans won two in Florida. Republicans lost the Supreme Court seat in Wisconsin. Money was definitely not a predictor.

In fact, it was a reverse predictor for almost all of these races. Am I supposed to have some big takeaway here? No, you're not supposed to have a big takeaway, but you can mark it down as a marker, the first one, really, of the second Trump administration, to get an understanding of where the politics in the country are potentially moving.

So I know that's like a mealy-mouth way of saying it could matter and it could not matter. I just think it's, I think it's... Do you think it shows something? Do you think this mattered? I think it shows potentially that Democrats who were so demoralized after the November election that they might have some juice going into the next cycle. for the midterms. I'm not saying it's predictive. What I'm saying is these were seats held by Matt Gates, the former congressman from the Florida Panhandle, and Mike Waltz, who's now the

National Security Advisor for the White House. These are pretty Republican districts, and Democrats did better. In fact, I do wonder if, like, nobody had spent any money in those races, particularly the Democrats, and not put them on the Republicans' radar if the margins would have been even closer. I still wouldn't have thought the Democrats could win, but in a way it suggested that Republicans woke up in the last three weeks and realized, oh, crap, we've got to try to pull this out because this could be a surprise. I would love to know what the NRC's internal poll said three weeks ago. But, okay, but Jonah, to me, A, if I had, if someone had given me just these two districts

and the Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, I don't know, five years ago and told me to predict the outcome of the special election, I would have gotten it right, i.e., the fundamentals actually won out here. I'm not sure I would have gotten the margins right, but I would have known who was going to win. And that's because, and I might have gotten the margins pretty close, actually,

because this is what you would predict for the partisan outcome, and the two parties have switched their competitive advantage on voters from general elections and off-cycle elections because now Democrats are the party of high-propensity voters and Republicans have shifted to be the party of low-propensity voters. So Republicans used to overperform in off-cycle elections when there was lower overall turnout because they had a competitive advantage against Democrats in lower turnout elections. That has flipped. So overall, you see Democrats basically overperforming in all three races, two of which were in incredibly Trumpy districts. So they overperformed and still lost. And in Wisconsin, they overperformed and won.

Yep, that's what happens when you have high propensity voters. It doesn't tell you anything about what voters think about Republicans or Democrats in a presidential election. And it doesn't even tell you a whole lot about a midterm election, depending on the midterm election, so much as it tells you that, yes, the realignment has happened, something we kind of already knew. What do you make of my theory? Yeah, so I generally think you're right.

I think if you watch the MSNBC sort of reaction to this, or like Hakeem Jeffries, you know, who says, who read a list of the number of Republicans who won their districts by less than 15 points, right? As if to say that like losing a seat, are winning a seat that you won by 30 points in a presidential general election with massive

turnout by only 15 points is a real warning sign. I don't buy it. For a lot of the reasons you suggest and also just because the GOP coalition has a lot of, you know, as a lot of voters that only Trump can turn on. And if Trump doesn't, you know, isn't invested in it and isn't on a ticket, you'd expect to be fall off from, you know, Matt Gates' district in 2024. I think the actual more interesting intrigue bellwether here is whatever it was that the GOP and the Trump White House saw about a least Stefanic seat that made them say, hey, yeah, you can't be the ambassador to the UN after all. We need you in Congress. Because that's a more of a Bellwether district than those two southern, you know, it's a more interesting district than those

two Florida districts. On the Wisconsin judge thing, I mean, I defer to others on it. I do think it's more meaningful in part just because Musk made it so public for him. And he's been threatening all of these Republicans that he will get involved in their races. And let's put it this way, those threats would be far scarier if Musk had gone to Wisconsin, warned the cheesehead, and the conservative Republican-backed candidate had won decisively. Those threats just are now more ambiguous in their impact than they were beforehand. So I think that matters. But other than that, your point about the fundamentals is correct, which would also say that if you were just betting on the fundamentals, you would just assume that Trump is going to have a very bad midterm.

Yeah, as they tend to do. Yeah, as they tend to do anyway. And if Steve, Michael, and I, as well as the overwhelming consensus of American, America's leading economists are correct, the economy will not be necessarily conducive for the party in power either. Steve, what am I supposed to make of the must thing? Was this a referendum on Musk in Wisconsin? Was it a referendum on Trump? Was it a referendum on absolutely nothing?

I think we've got to be careful for monocausal explanations in a race like this. But Elon Musk's high-profile entry and millions and millions that he spent isn't nothing. I remember when my Republican friends in Wisconsin were outraged back. In 2000, when a woman, a fundraiser for the Gore campaign named Connie Milstein showed up in Milwaukee and distributed cigarettes outside of a homeless shelter as sort of an appreciation, some would argue an inducement for homeless people to go vote for Al Gore. And this was held up. I reported on it at the time as this major transgression, potentially breaking campaign finance

laws and had Republicans in high dudge and about it for weeks. And here you have Elon Musk coming to the state and promising to give a million dollars to people who showed up at a rally and who voted for his candidate. Pretty striking difference in 24 years. I generally buy your analysis of the Florida races. I don't think it's nothing that the margins. shrunk as much as they did, but I think it's easy to make too much of it. In Wisconsin, I couldn't disagree with you more strongly because it wasn't a low turnout election. It was a high turnout election. And if you listen to what Republicans said before the vote in Wisconsin, they said, we think we're competitive if it's a moderately high turnout election, and we think

we win if it's a high turnout election. This was a massively high turnout election for a spring election off year for a court case. Yes, but that's the point. It's still a low turnout election compared to a presidential election or even a Senate race in a midterm. So you still have the low propensity voter problem. But you don't, actually. Let me just read to you this analysis from Craig Gilbert from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

He's I think I would argue one or one of the two analysts. reporters who knows the Wisconsin electorate as well as anyone. In that sense, this wasn't just another low turnout election win for Democrats and defeat for Republicans. Roughly half of the state's voting-aged adults voted a turnout that obliterated the old record of 40% in 2023. That was a previous Supreme Court race, which had far outstripped previous contests. And then he says, this was far closer to a November midterm turnout than a typical spring

turnout. More than 2.3 million Wisconsinites voted, which approaches the raw number of votes, 2.42 million, cast in Wisconsin's 2014 race for governor. About 50% of voting age adults, the turnout in this race exceeded the most recent fall midterm turnout in most of the 50 states, a mind-boggling level for a spring election. That doesn't count. Okay, 3.4 million people voted in Wisconsin in the presidential election, 3.4. So you're just over a million shy of that and 2.7 voted in the 2022 midterm elections. So you're also shy of midterm election turnout as well.

I hear you that it's high for a special election. I know it's not considered a special election in Wisconsin, but an off-year election. It was very high for an off-year election. But when we're talking about low propensity voters, there's a million of them a little more that voted in the presidential that did not vote in this race. That's what I mean about low propensity voters. I get that it turned out... I think you just have to look at what Wisconsin Republicans were saying before the vote.

Like if you told Wisconsin Republicans before this vote that the 2.3 million Wisconsinites would turn out to vote, virtually everyone would have said we feel Brad Schimmel is going to be the next justice. don't know who their voters are now. They've, they've missed the realignment. I know they know some of the realignment, but they now think that these new voters basically are just like a, this is great, right? We got blue collar voters. We have more multi-ethnic voters. Like, we got all the good parts, but you didn't get any of the bad parts. And the bad parts of that are the low propensity parts. And they're just not quite willing to understand what that really means. And you know that, because they haven't really changed their operational structure in any of these states to account for what that looks like. I think, I mean, you might be right in other states. I don't think

you're right in Wisconsin. If you look at what happened in Wisconsin in the fall at the presidential level, you know, one of the reasons that Trump won was because they did identify and turn out a lot of these low propensity voters. They did the same thing, I think using a lot of the same tactics in this special election. And while they didn't reach presidential level turnout, it's notable to me that they reached that they were even in the same ballpark as midterm level turnouts and significantly higher than previous Supreme Court races. It's like, we need to figure it away for you guys the bet a stake on this summer. All right.

We'll give Steve the last word on that one. Let's do a little not worth your time on third terms. And Jonah, obviously, President Trump refused to say that he wouldn't seek a third term office. I'm very tired of the Trump refused to say driving news stories. But I want to start with the historical side of this because I don't know this for sure. You and I haven't

talked about it. But I'll bet you're not the biggest fan of the 22nd Amendment. Because most structural constitutionalists and people who like the history of America actually aren't. Yeah. I mean, I'm not a I'm not a rah-rah

22nd Amendment guy. I blame FDR entirely for Who else would there be to blame? Yeah, I mean, like, I routinely, when writing about FDR, refer to him as president for life FDR, because what he did was so outrageous. And in violating the tradition, you know, one of the reasons why he violated it was he picked basically a de facto communist dupe as a vice president and, you know, had to like get him off, get him out of the way.

But that's, that's neither here or there. Right now, I'm a big fan of the 22nd Amendment. And which is to say that, like, I'm all in favor if you have interesting tweaks about repealing it, replacing it, and proving it, I want to hear them. But I want to hear, I want them to go into effect somewhere around 2032. And I do have a question to throw back at you. I originally dinged Kristen Welker and other people for ignoring the 12th Amendment in all of this, which says that you cannot be vice president if you're, you're not eligible to be president to be president to be president right that's a big important word there and so the problem is is running are you eligible to run versus eligible to

be and yada yada yada and so lawyers have pushed back i hate it when larry tribe is right but it happens every now and then um and people are claiming that that the 22nd amendment was so poorly written that the 12th amendment thing is not doesn't kick in we're you come down on that? Yeah, I'm absolutely correct that the 12th Amendment refers to being president as in assuming the presidency, which is what, of course, the vice president is being contemplated for. So that's referring to things like the age requirement, the natural born citizen requirement, stuff like that. The 22nd Amendment only refers to being elected president. It says you can't be elected to the office of president twice. So they don't actually

interact. I think, you know, we've talked briefly about the 17th Amendment. I'm not a 17th amendment fan, but sort of like the tariff problems, when you actually go back and see why they did the 17th Amendment, you sort of start to realize that it wasn't all just like sunny, happy times pre-17th Amendment. We basically just turned our state legislative elections into referendums on who they were going to vote for for Senate and nothing else. And that was causing its own, like, drama, corruption, everything else. So hence comes the 17th Amendment, like the 16th Amendment, which was the income tax to get rid of the tariffs. But the 17th Amendment and 22nd Amendment changed the structure and incentives of the Constitution in ways that I do not think were

good or particularly healthy. For the 22nd Amendment problem and the two terms, you end up with guaranteed lame duck status for a president. Second terms have been really bad historically. I'm not sure I could have guessed that ahead of time, but presidents have run into trouble in those second terms, whether it's their exhausted or the power goes to their heads or whatever else, all of our scandals really have happened in second terms. I would vote for a single longer term, like six years.

So you don't have to run for election because another big problem in the 22nd Amendment neither helped nor hindered this. Though I could argue it hurt it by making it sort of presumptive that you would run again, that the running for re-election starts immediately when you assume the presidency and that that also has this

terrible effect on presidents and on their administration. So if I were changing the 22nd Amendment now, Jonah, you'd be very happy with my change because now I'm just going to change it to a single term for six years. Mike, do you care that the president likes to grab news

cycles by refusing to answer questions from reporters he doesn't like and then dominating the news cycle with the he refused to answer when he stopped beating his wife? I don't know how to answer that question. You refuse to answer that question. Well, I don't quite understand it. But all I'll say is I think this is worth our time because I think the idea is too appealing

for Trump to not take at least somewhat seriously. And I was told that somebody is running the traps on this to figure out how we could do it. And like, if you don't think that he's considering it, then I don't. don't think you've been paying attention to to Donald Trump over the past eight years. Steve, worth our time? Or giving Trump what he wants? I mean, if the theory is that Trump could

run again as, say, J.D. Vance's running mate, but effectively serve as the de facto president. The Putin to his medietta. It would be appropriate that it would be a Putin-Midiv model. Just to be clear, I mean,

I have nothing but simply for you, Sarah, and being exhausted with taking the, that Trump lays down to distract the media and move on and troll people, I get it and all that. But we should keep in mind that, that we are also allowing him to lower our standards for the president by ignoring it, right? When you do it, you're doing his political, when you follow it, when you take the debate, you're doing his political bidding and when you're not taking the bait, you're defining deviancy down

because I think all of us up until 10 years ago would agree that any second term president talking about how we're looking at ways to get around the prohibition on the third term, we would immediately consider that outrageous and beyond the pale

and contemptuous of constitutional democratic norms. And when we, hear it from Trump, we're like, of course he says that. Of course he thinks that. Of course he's saying it now because he wants to blah, blah, blah, blah. And so we're either, we're damned if we do and we're damned if we don't. If we take the bait, we're doing his bidding. And if we don't take the bait, we're letting him crap all over the institution even more. And so my only rule is I pick the fight when I feel like having it. I'm sympathetic to your argument to Sarah. And

obviously this is a recurring theme on this podcast. We come back to this a lot. I think one of the hardest things about doing journalism in the Trump era is figuring out what to take seriously and figuring out not. And it's one of the things that we sort of pride ourselves on on doing and doing well. But you remember back the famous quote that appeared in the Washington Post about a week after the 2020 election from a Republican operative. What's the downside in humoring him? That was a joke, right? Nobody took it. seriously, he wasn't, this guy, he doesn't want to, he's not going to try to stay in office. He doesn't really think he lost, you know, everybody at the White House thinks he, or he

doesn't really think he won. Everybody at the White House has told him he lost, just let this go for a little bit. Who cares? Or running on retribution in 2024. Like, this guy's not going to actually become president. And then he's not going to pardon the violent ones from the January 6th. Yeah, he's not going to use the government to go after law firms that he doesn't, like, he's not going to use the powers of the federal government to target his enemies and

opponents. Maybe he is. He's not going to disappear, Sarah Isker. I have a post script not worth your time. Corey Booker set the record for the longest speech on the Senate floor just under 25 hours. He beats Strom Thurman's record, but because it wasn't a filibuster, I fear we will still have to talk about Strom Thurman's terrible historical stain when we talk about filibusters in the future. But I think a lot of people are torn on whether this was helpful for Democrats to see someone, you know, literally standing up and not peeing for 25 hours, like standing for something. My take is that it would have been really effective if it had actually been a filibuster or at least have been legislatively related

instead of a 25-hour campaign speech for the Democratic nomination. Imagine a world in which he had spent 25 hours talking about that bill that Steve talked about that would have taken away the president's powers to impose this tariff on Canada. Or these Liberation Day tariffs were using the president's emergency powers

that had been given to him by Congress. Imagine a 24-hour speech saying, Congress, we need to do our job. Senators stand up. We control what powers the president has. We need to limit the powers of the presidency across administrations. This has gone too far. We must be senators again.

But it wasn't that speech. So, Mike, was it worth our time? I don't think so. Will we remember Cory Booker's speech? Will he benefit from this? Will the Democrats benefit from this? I don't even know what it was about, to be honest. And it happened.

he doesn't like Trump in a couple days ago um no but but if there if the benefit is that um liberals stop whining about how nobody nobody in the democratic party is doing anything uh for a little bit then i'll be happy because um this is a really stupid i mean i i don't i don't i feel weird defending chuck schumer but like like there's nothing chuck schumer can do right now republicans have control of the government in washington and you have all these these insane liberals who are just demanding that Democrats do something and it's annoying and stupid. And did Cory Booker give some, you know, let off some steam on their behalf? Then fine.

Now I don't have to hear about it for another week or so. Steve, my theory is that Cory Booker won't have a real political future in the Democratic Party, at least any time soon, because he was caught up in the fever dream of liberals in 2020. and that anyone who ran for president in that 2020 Democratic primary has no future because now they just can't backtrack far enough from the height of the far progressive fever dream where they're all raising their hands for stuff everyone has now woken up to say like oh that was a terrible idea no we don't actually believe that and if you're one of the unfortunate people who were on TV saying they believed it you're kind of baked but what do you think i think it's adorable that you think hypocrisy matters in today's modern politics. It mattered for Harris. She couldn't get away from it. I mean, that's in a general election.

I don't think, I didn't get a primary. Cory Booker's just fine. He'll wait. He'll say whatever is popular at the time. He'll run away from the things he's done. Just like Gavin Newsom issued strong condemnations of people who use Latin X, only to have videos of Gavin Newsom using the phrase Latin X. I don't think hypocrisy matters in our politics anymore.

I disagree with you on this one, Steve. with Sarah, I think that the hypocrisy itself, I agree to you, no one gives a rat's ass about it's bad for Booker because the Democrats are going to really, really, really, really, really want to win and they're going to think it's going to matter to other people. And Booker's not a good enough, he's not Bill Clinton, right? If Booker were a good enough politician to disown his hypocrisy and sell that he now wants to lock up illegal immigrants and give them sex changes against their wish, then Democrats would vote for him.

But, like, he's, I mean, my favorites, like, literally, I forget Cory Booker exists often. He's like a Chinese meal, like an hour later. You feel like you hadn't even talked to him. But, like, he said during the, I think it was the Kavanaugh hearings, where he said, I think this is as close as I'm, ever going to get to my Spartacus moment. He didn't say this is my Spartacus moment. He says this is as close as I'm going to get to it, which is like the most hedging kind of like, I want to sound as if I

am going to be brave and be self-sacrificing here, but I'm not actually going to be. And that is the kind of, he's sort of, there's so many progressives. I mean, I talked to so many like democratic, insiders these days because now it's CNN and the number of people who say you wouldn't believe how many serious progressives like progressive to the core progressives

are like I don't want to hear about a female candidate I don't want to hear about a black candidate and I think they're wrong but like they think that running women they think that was the problem which wasn't the problem And once again, we scapegoat the women and the non-white guys, which is exactly, by the way, what's happened, there was a whole study about this, about Fortune 500 companies that when they're doing poorly, that's when they bring in a non-white guy to be the CEO. And then when it goes badly, because it was already going badly, they're like, oh, see, we can't have any more women or non-white guys. And you're like, that's not what you just should have learned. Yeah. But my point, my only point is that Booker's association with the 2019 stuff, I think Sarah's right. And that even if he tries to be hypocritical, which is fine with me. I want more Democrats to be hypocritical and betray all of that, you know, show your hands who's here, who here is forgiving trees, rights under the Constitution, right? I want them to betray all that stuff and triangulate away from it. But like,

Like, he can't do it effectively. And I think that other people, the gatekeepers in the party, are going to say, no, he can't sell it. He can't win. And that's why his hypocrisy will matter. All right. With that, thank you all for joining us for this episode of The Dispatch Podcast. We'll see you next week. You know what I'm going to be.