The Dispatch Podcast - Are We the Baddies Now? | Roundtable

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Sarah Isgur is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Mike Warren, and Steve Hayes to discuss Trump's social media post calling Zelensky a "dictator," the downside of DOGE, and the White House's monarchy "joke." The Agenda: —Zelensky, “a dictator without elections” —Are we now a pro-Russian country? —Good guys vs. bad guys —Banning the Associated Press from the press room —AP name games —The downside of DOGE —Entitlement reform —“Long live the king” Show Notes: —Peter Baker: Trump flips the switch on Ukraine Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fly Air Transat! Seven Time winners! Champions, again! Fly the Seven Time World's Best Leisure Airline Champions, Air Transat. Maybe it's Mabelaine is such an iconic piece of music. Hit the track! Everyone in the studio that I worked on this jingle with all had childhood stories or memories.

Yeah, work. around either watching these commercials on TV or sitting with our moms while they were doing their makeup and it became really personal for us. Maybe it's Maple Lane. Maybe it's Maple Lane. Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Sarah Isgar.

Oh, look, it's Jonah Goldberg. Steve Hayes. Mike Warren. Oh, wow. Jonas and Steve's and mics. Oh, my. Today on the podcast, we are going to, yeah, you got to talk about Ukraine and Russia and Donald Trump. Well, all of it.

And then I also want to talk about this idea of moving outlets out of the White House press corps and moving friendly outlets in to DOD or Air Force One or otherwise. Then Doge, how does entitlement reforms going? And finally, of course, we'll end on the egg crisis. So let's start where we need to start here on Secretary of State Marco Rubio announcing this week that the U.S. and Russia have agreed to open talks to end the war in Ukraine. At least at this point, some of the things on the table include a ceasefire in exchange for redrawing of borders, Western recognition of annexed Ukrainian territories, and the removal of all sanctions. This comes, of course, after Vice President Vance's remarks at the Munich Security

Conference last week, where he chastised European leadership for ignoring concerns about immigration and free speech. I want to read Donald Trump's ex-posts about, well, I guess this topic. Think of it. A modestly successful comedian, Vladimir Zelensky, talked to the United States of America into spending $350 billion to go into a war that couldn't be one that never had to start, but a war that he, without the U.S. and Trump, will never be able to settle. The United States has spent $200 billion more than Europe, and Europe's money is guaranteed while the United States will get nothing back. Why didn't Sleepy Joe Biden demand equalization, and that this war is far more important to Europe than it is to us? We have a big, beautiful

oceanist separation. On top of this, Zelensky admits that half of the money we sent him is, quote, missing. He refuses to have elections, is very low in Ukrainian polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden like a fiddle. A dictator without elections, Zelensky better move fast, or he is not going to have a country left. In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the war with Russia, something all admit only Trump and the Trump administration can do. Biden never tried. Europe has failed to bring peace, and Zelensky probably wants to keep the gravy train going. I love Ukraine, but Zelensky has done a time. terrible job, his country is shattered, and millions have unnecessarily died. And so it

continues. Steve, I have a very basic question for you to start. The United States is negotiating an end to the war with Russia, but not with Ukraine. I don't totally understand how that works, what that means if only one side agrees to end a war and the other side doesn't. Yeah, I think you'll find pretty quickly that Ukraine will not agree to end the war and we'll be turning to Europe for more and more support. Look, I mean, I think this is the week, and I don't say, this is no exaggeration, when the United States switched sides in the war.

The United States is now squarely with Donald Trump as president on the Russian side of this conflict. You know, three weeks ago, Donald Trump said that he trusted Vladimir Putin in these negotiations. he more recently suggested that Voldemier Zelensky and the Ukrainians were the aggressor, that the Ukrainians started the war.

And then just last night on Air Force One, Trump was asked, do you trust the Russians to negotiate in good faith going forward? And he said, I do. I think the Russians want to see the war and echoing comments that he made a few weeks ago. What you just read, Sarah, was a pretty stunning critique of Zelensky and the Ukrainians. Petty, but stunning nonetheless. Let me ask you guys, when have you ever heard Donald Trump say anything remotely as critical of Vladimir Putin? Never. Never. I mean, his advisors, his other people in his cabinet, but never Trump himself.

But even that, I mean, this is what's also so interesting and why this week is so dispiriting if you believe in America, if you believe in a rules-based post-war order. You know, Marco Rubio was a pretty aggressive critic of Vladimir Putin, you know, as recently, sometimes in his confirmation hearings, certainly in his days in the Senate was a regular critic of Putin. And after meeting with the Russians this week, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and others, Rubio gave, I think one of the most disgraceful public statements I've heard from a U.S. official, as long as I've been doing this. We're going to point our teams, respectively, that have worked very quickly to reestablish the functionality of our respective

missions in Washington and in Moscow, for us to be able to continue to move. down this road. We need to have diplomatic facilities that are operating and functioning normally. The second point is that we're going to appoint a high-level team from our end to help negotiate and work through the end of the conflict in Ukraine in a way that's enduring and acceptable to all the parties engaged. He pointed to Russia as a reason for optimism. He talked about the opportunities the United States can soon take advantage of by collaborating with Russia, by working with Russia. We were going to be, it appears, easing sanctions, potentially lifting them all together, despite Russia's aggression in Ukraine. Donald Trump and Pete Higgseth preemptively offered

multiple concessions to Russia, giving Russia in public in advance of any negotiations, the things that Russia has been asking for from the West for years. And Marco Rubio defends this in public, and then he ends his pathetic statement by doing what everybody does for Trump these days, in which you would think Rubio would be sort of above, but apparently is not, which is the 30, 45 second, only Donald Trump could have accomplished this. Only Donald Trump could have done this. It's only because of Trump that we are in this position to end the war. anybody can end a war if you force your ally into surrendering. I suspect that we won't end up successfully ending the war because I don't think Ukraine

is going to just give up. But it's a dark day for the United States, but nobody should be surprised given what Donald Trump has said and done over the past decade. Mike, I want to hit rewind with you because Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky have history from Trump 1.0. This is what led to his impeachment. the first one. Yeah.

Will you run us through how this relationship started? Well, you know, I don't want to downplay all of the sort of, I think, twisted ideological underpinnings of this turn of the United States and the Republican Party. But, you know, toward Russia against Ukraine. But it is worth pointing out that a lot of this is petty personal beef. right? If we recall there was, so Vladimir Zelensky comes into office, I think like maybe 2018, is it 2018 or 2019? At some point early on in his term, there is the question of American, you know, foreign aid to Ukraine. And we now know of this famous phone call in the summer of 2019 in which, Donald Trump as president urged Zelensky to dig up political dirt on his, on Joe Biden, the former vice president, and who Donald Trump sort of identified correctly as being the likeliest, most difficult political opponent for him to face in the 2020 election. Dig up dirt on Joe Biden. Dig up dirt on Hunter Biden. It's there. It's out there. People like Rudy Giuliani were sort of, seeding the ground in the media that there were these sort of questions about foreign influence

and a national gas company, sorry, a natural gas company that was nationalized by the Ukrainian government. And so sort of trying to plant the seeds in the American media and what Donald Trump needed Zelensky to do was to essentially sick, you know, his investigative team, you know, their version of, I guess, the FBI, the Department of Justice on to find this information and conditioned it, well, this was sort of what was in contention during the impeachment inquiry and proceedings, conditioning it on U.S. aid for Ukraine in anticipation of what would end up becoming a war. So, Zeletsky refused, and this made Donald Trump very angry. And I don't think you can look at what's happening this week without appreciating the level to which Donald Trump viewed that as a betrayal and viewed Zelensky, since viewed Zelensky as, I don't know, a puppet of kind of liberal Western Europe, America.

like all of it is is sort of being backfilled by these ideologues who have an affinity for Russia, who hate sort of Western American involvement in Europe. But I think it ultimately comes from the sense that Vladimir Zelensky is unimpressive to Donald Trump. Vladimir Putin as a dictator, as a strong man, is impressive to Donald Trump. and Zelensky wasn't with him when Trump needed it. It's no more complicated than that. Jonah, now I want to go even further back. You're my armchair historian here.

Let me tell you about the armchair. It goes back to the early. No, sorry, go on. I did read a great book on the armchair, home by Bill Bryson. Yeah, Bill Bryson. So good. Man, that was one of his worst books. I loved it.

He's brilliant. Yeah. A short history of nearly everything is my favorite. One summer is great. Second worst book. What? I'm a stranger here myself is by far his best. You like the travel stuff.

You indeed like the travel stuff. All right. Look, Jonah, is it possible, I guess, for a country's people to be on one side for long when their leadership is on another side? As in, if Donald Trump puts America on the Russia side of this war, Will the American people buck that so that America won't stay on the Russian side? Or will the American people follow and become the Russian side of the war, historically speaking? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I'm trying to think, I don't think there are a lot of good examples of the country breaking with the government on a war prior really to Vietnam.

You know, Woodrow Wilson campaigned on keeping us out of the war, number one in the war, this country went nuts pro-war, maybe not some German-Americans who then got rounded up and put in jail by Woodrow Wilson, but that's a different story. For World War II, FDR, as late as 1940, promised American people he wasn't going to pick us to war because people didn't want to go to war, and part because they remembered World War I and how bad that was. And then America was all in for World War II. I'm sure someone will point out some, you know, like, it works differently in non-democracies, right? You know, like non-democracies, they can be brittle. Being strong but brittle and wars can break them.

I mean, Russia, historically, the way Russia gets new leadership is by losing unpopular wars. And that pattern is pretty locked in. So I don't know. I do, now I'm going to have to think about that question for the rest of the week, so thanks a lot, Sarah. But I do want to circle back on something that Steve was talking about here. I agree with everything Steve said, but I want to play the Abe Greenwald role here on the commentary podcast. Abe Greenwald has a patented phrase where he says, but it's worse than that.

You know, Steve said, it's a dark day for America, if you believe in a rules-based order and all those things. And I agree with that entirely. There is an argument based in a serious realism, not the sort of BS realism that a lot of people pretend is real and significant that says even if you think the war is bad, our involvement in the war, supporting Ukraine is bad in a mistake. it's worth still supporting Ukraine

because letting the world know that we stick with our commitments and we honor our promises and we follow through with our alliances has real cash value in international affairs. The idea of having personal honor and integrity, as it were, or national honor and integrity to our friends and our allies

is a real form of international power. And in the week that Trump has basically, I agree with Stephen Tyler, we are objectively, it is objectively true that we are siding with Russia now. We are giving Russia things for free in exchange for nothing that they would have made huge concessions to us

because they would have had to get. You know, we're actually now talking about pulling troops out of our, out of the Baltic. States, which is outrageous, and we're doing it without, in exchange for nothing, other than the fact that maybe Vladimir Putin will sit with Donald Trump in the high school cafeteria and be seen doing so. That's about the gist of this. But the same week that we're doing this, that we're openly siding with a country that invaded a neighbor violating its sovereignty, largest war, most bloody war in the European continent since World War II, where Russian soldiers

have been immunized as a matter of law for more crimes. They are allowed to rape and torture without facing penalty in Russia, and they are raping and torturing. They are abducting thousands of kids and brainwashing them to think that they're Russians and that Ukraine isn't a country. It is cultural genocide. It is borderline actual genocide. It is an absolutely heinous crime recognized by Marco Ruby and all these people up until

five minutes ago as a heinous crime. And we are just simply switching sides all for the vanity of Donald Trump and nothing else. I guarantee you if you did a secret vote of his own cabinet, they wouldn't be in favor of doing this garbage. So in the midst of doing that, you have the vice president of United States going and speaking in Europe and basically crapping all over our allies saying that they are insufficiently democratic and liberal. Now, J.D. Vance has carved out a space as being like this guy who says, we should have no moralism and foreign policy. That's a big part of what realism is, is saying we shouldn't care whether countries are good

guys or bad guys. And he's actually said that to Ross Douth in an interview. It's like this whole this talk about good guys versus bad guys is a silly way to do foreign policy. Good guy and bad guy does not matter according to J.D. Vance, which I think is a hot garbage position, but it's his position. And yet he goes, and he's perfectly willing to scold our allies in Europe for being insufficiently liberal, insufficiently democratic. And I may agree to some extent with some of his

criticisms, but he is reserving more criticism for our NATO allies than he is for a dictator that is threatening NATO. It is not an understatement. It's not an overstatement to say that basically these last 10 days or so, we'll see how history unfolds. But if this trend continues, it marks the end of an era of the most successful trans, the most successful multilateral military alliance of the last thousand years. And it's appalling. And at last point, part of the problem is in this Twitter age,

we're supposed to get outraged by whatever the outrage of the day is, and that's fine. There is an outrage every day. But over time, the process of this flattens everything out. So Donald Trump taking out a Sharpie and drawing on a map is the outrage today on cable news and on Twitter and okay. And then the next day, the outrage is something else. And then the next day, it's trying to destroy NATO and align with a dictator. And then the next day, it's basically completely gutting the criminal justice, you know, the integrity of the criminal justice system or whatever.

And over time, it has a tendency to flatten all these things out and make them all seem like they're equal. This is the kind of thing that if I told all these. wavering, you know, voting against Harris, not for Trump people. If I had told them he's going to do this. And if I could swear to you, he'll do this, would you still vote for him? A lot of them would have said no. And now they're supporting it because that's just another outrage of the day and you should get over it. It's demoralizing and grotesque. Steve, I want you to be able to weigh in on J.D. Vance's comments in Europe. I do think These are all tied together in some respects.

Why shouldn't you be able to speak hard truth to your friends? It felt like some of the outrage to me was more about Vance than it was about his comments. If Barack Obama had gone over to Europe and said free speech is important, we all would have been nodding along. I mean, I think there was some merit to sort of on a philosophical level, some of the arguments that J.D. Vance was making. I think the question was, is now the time to make them. I mean, if you're, if you're choosing things that are important, I suppose there's always, there's always, it's always the right time to make a strong case in favor of a free speech. It, and democracy.

It would be a lot more convincing if J.D. Vance wasn't doing that while he's working for Donald Trump, who's going after media companies, who's kicking media companies out of the press briefing for not using his silly language on the Gulf of, America. I'd be much more persuasive if Jady Vance wasn't arguing in favor of democracy if he wasn't working for the guy who literally called up the Secretary of State of Georgia and told him to find 12,000 votes so he could win the state and steal the election. These are not close calls. I think to go back to what Jonah said, the other thing that Trump has working for him is that, and this is, look, this has been sort of, I don't think it's strategic. I don't think he usually does it on purpose, but it's one of his

superpowers. The stuff he says is sometimes so shocking. You're not actually sure that he's, that he intends it the way that he's saying it. And you're not sure that it's likely to last. So, you know, this comment that he made three weeks ago where he said more or less, I do trust Vladimir Putin on this and Russia wants peace. Putin wants peace. You just think like, dude, he started the war. He's killed a half a million Ukrainians. Like the whole, this whole thing, the whole reason we're talking about this is because of

his expansionist territorial ambitions and because he wants to reconstitute the Soviet empire and is willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people to do this. And Donald Trump says, now that's the guy who wants peace. It's like so hard to process and it's so preposterous. And yet you have, you know, these Trump cultists who rush to get his back on that, to defend him on this stuff or to explain it a way or to tell us what he really meant. And there is this kind of like shock to the whole thing. Peter Baker had a front page news analysis in the New York.

Times the other day after, after the, you know, this sort of the final movement of this switch. And, you know, Peter Baker was, he worked in Moscow. We wrote a book about Putin. He has written books about Trump. He knows this stuff and knows this brief as well as anybody. And his job is to basically provide context to what we're seeing. And, you know, even he, if you're reading between the lines of the way that he wrote this was just sort of like, I cannot believe what I'm hearing and I cannot believe that I'm writing what I'm writing. 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.

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Go to Squarespace.com. 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 domain. All right, I want to move to our next topic, which is on the press briefing room. So Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary, has said, we will call you out when we feel that you're reporting is wrong or there is misinformation about this White House. So due to the Associated Press refusing to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, they have barred the AP from several press events and Air Force One. I was very upfront in my briefing on day one that if we feel that there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable.

And it is a fact that the body of water off the coast of Louisiana is, is called the Gulf of America. And I'm not sure why news outlets don't want to call it that, but that is what it is. This comes on the heels, by the way, of DOD, saying that it's going to switch out outlets in their press room as well. This is the case of DOJ, DOD, Department of State as well, where there is very limited space for a few outlets to have offices in the building.

And so you're always making sort of resource choices on which outlets can have those spaces. I think it's a really interesting question. Also worth noting, I think, just to go back, when President Obama was in office, he called Fox News destructive to the country, didn't take questions from Fox News correspondence very often, if at all,

and definitely excluded Fox News from interviews with top officials. I believe they were barred from the pool at one point, you know, where each outlet takes turns, covering the White House. So it's like so many other things, the water temperature was rising slowly and then all at once, if you will. And I think it's important

when people talk about any of these things to note that like the temperature started rising before. Donald Trump didn't make up the idea of disfavoring outlets that were mean to him. What I guess I think is interesting is that if you think that most of those mainstream outlets are against Trump,

have a bias against him in their coverage, then how is what Trump's doing particularly different than what Obama's doing? It's just that Obama only had one outlet that didn't like him, and Trump has a lot of outlets that don't like him. This is sort of like every Republican administration's dream in some ways.

Mike, I'm going to start with you because you've, you know, been out there on the road quite a bit in these types of environments. Is this okay? No, and it's not okay because Obama did it to Fox News and I should note that after

Obama did that to Fox News that a number of mainstream news outlets rushed to Fox's defense and the White House Correspondence Association pushed the Obama White House to reverse itself on those things and eventually it did there was a United Front

on behalf of Fox to reverse that because there was a principle at stake. I mean, maybe there's some information I'm not privy to, but all the reporting I know about what's going on with the AP indicates that there's not a push by whether it's Fox

or whether it's other more friendly pro-Trump outlets outraged on behalf of the Associated Press for this targeted, and it is targeted mistreatment of the AP. By the way, they had an explanation for why they're happy to call Mount McKinley, Mount McKinley instead of Denali. They changed the name when Obama changed it, and they're going to change it back, no problem.

They said their main reason for not wanting to change to Gulf of America is because the Gulf of Mexico was a longstanding name for 400 years or so. And so it's not just up to America what the name of it is, that it's an international name, it's a long-standing name. You know, they're sort of doing text history and tradition, if you will. And it's a global company, and they have clients, people who use their work, you know, around the world. But this is, I mean, this is almost this discussion, which I think is, like, you guys are correct. Like, it's almost beside the point.

Like, what, like, this is not about the AP calling it the Gulf of Mexico instead of the Gulf of America. It is about, it is about bullying. It is about trying to force this news organization, which is a membership organization, which is about as down the middle as you can get in terms of coverage. You can point out specific biases where it's had left leaning biases here and there and maybe a lot of it. But it is certainly not, I would not put it up there with even something like the New York Times or the Washington Post.

in terms of on the bias scale. It is about trying to bring this particular news outlet and all other news outlets to heal on something to show we have power and we are going to use it against you in ways petty and not. I just think it's a disservice not just to readers, to American people, and the AP provides, you know,

I think good work when it covers the White House. But I actually end up thinking that it's bad for the Trump administration as well to do this. This is a way to further isolate yourself by only talking to friendly outlets, by only letting them in. This is the sort of thing that can doom a presidency by being, by sort of making your own media, ecosystem and inculcating yourself from outside media influence. Jonah, another way that I think folks have looked at this, forget the AP thing for a second, but just the overall White House and some of these cabinet agencies trying to move in more new media, more podcasters, more websites, digital media, et cetera.

And yeah, that means that there's going to be fewer questions for the legacy media. It's not just a left and right thing. It's also a new and old thing. And what I hear from a lot of people is they're really happy that the new media where a lot of people are getting their news now is actually being recognized in the ecosystem. Yeah. Okay. I mean, fine.

On the new media stuff, I think that's a perfectly fine point. It does not seem to me logical to say out with AP in with Gateway Pundit and say, hazah for the new age. Just skip back up here. I think the name change thing with the Gulf of America is profoundly petty and stupid. It is a vanity play. It will not last beyond Trump's years. One of my friends at the editor's podcast National Review was saying it's, I think it was

Charlie Cook was saying, this will be remembered as like a freedom fries moment, moment, you know. And so I think it's silly, it's petty, it's embarrassing. It serves no purpose other than it's a sort of, it's a linguistic, way for Trump to acquire a new territory, which is what his big thing is these days. He kind of thinks he's now conquered the Gulf of Mexico and called it America, all because he's changed in name. I think the AP's stated reasons for not going along with it are fine with me, but I don't really care what their stated reasons are. The hypocrisy of, you know, again, the same week that Vance goes to Europe and says it's outrageous for the state to meddle in, you know, the hypocrisy of, you know,

in or choose sides in free speech, the White House is getting even more petty about the language used by a news service to describe this thing. And, but the reason why, there's another point here is like, I kind of think the AP has this coming. And it's not because they're this stayed thing and blah, blah, blah, blah.

The AP, and someone who's written a syndicated column for a quarter century, more than a quarter century now, we've had to, I've had to use the AP style book. They play games with language every year in ways that are disgusting and outrageous and petty and ideological. I'm here for this. They load up with this dog. You can't say illegal immigrant, right? You have to say undocumented immigrant, which makes it very difficult to distinguish from documented immigrants and undocumented immigrants. and a story about immigrants, right? Everything, they play all sorts of games

with transgender stuff. They insist that you can't use, I mean, like the language about abortion is so front-loaded to favor abortion rights. It's, I can't say pro-life, but I can't say, you know, pro-choice. And all of these games where they think they have this Talmudic,

Catholic, biblical, priestly power to change reality by designating what words the rest of journalism can use. It reminds me a little bit of like when dictionary, what was it, the, was it Mary, who was, it was the Supreme Court confirmation hearing for Amy Coney Barrett, where she had used like the phrase, uh, sexual preference, I think. Was it sexual, it was something like sexual preference. And in real time, various outlets, including I think, and I don't, if I'm wrong about

the AP on this, that I apologize, but dictionary sites and whatnot, in, real time changed the definition to say it was pejorative. It was not pejorative when Amy Comey Bear woke up that morning. But when Democrats tried to make it an offensive term, the blob of these institutions turned on a dime and said, oh, no, it is pejorative. And now, because we have papal authority to say this, we're going to put it into the definition and shame on you for not knowing it. And so like the AP has fewer legs to stand on because they've been playing political games with the language for a long time. Not always. Some of their name changes are perfectly fine. I don't know that this country is a more equitable and and kind place and more feminized

because it ruled out the use of the word manhunt saying you have to say search. And I don't know that it's somehow less sexist because it said you can't say mistress anymore because that's somehow puts, you know, women in a second class place, but they overestimated their own power and now they're gobsmack to find out that other people don't recognize it. And so I say pox on all of these people. Ah, Steve, get the final word on this topic. Pick your, pick your choice. I'm sympathetic to the, to Jonah's critique on the AP. I just don't think the appropriate thing then is to boot them from the, from White House. Oh, I agree with that. Again, I think what Trump is doing full spectrum, I think, is stupid.

Yeah. And look, I think sometimes it's easier to, it's easy to overcomplicate these things because you take what the White House is saying and you sort of walk through their rationale and it's, you know, I think it's been evolving. But again, this is one of those instances where they're not really, they're no longer really dressing it up or pretending it's something that they're not. They're just like, we want people who cover us who like us. That's basically it. And they don't like that the AP won't cowtow to them on this dispute over the Gulf of America. You can just see where this sort of goes from here. But I do think that there's a, Mike's point about, or maybe it was Jonah, empowering new media. That is part of

the strategy here, part of the White House strategy here. And this, I do believe, is an actual strategy. And this, I do believe, starts with Donald Trump. Remember when Donald Trump gave an interview to Leslie Stahl in 2016. And she asked him about why, she asked him off camera about why he constantly bashes the press. And per Leslie Stahl, he said, you know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all. So when you write negative stories about me. No one will believe you. I think that's what he's doing. And they, they want to bring in places like the Gateway Pundit. You know, there was another story today about Jack Posobiac, who's a conspiracy theorist, writes for human events. He's sort of a MAGA

influencer personality. He was a Pizza Gate guy. He was one of the main amplifiers of the Pizza Gate conspiracy, which was the crazy stupid conspiracy that Democrats were Satan worshiping, Satan worshipping baby eaters who operated out of the basement of a pizza parlor in Georgetown. I mean, that really was the thing. And this guy was amplifying. He amplifies stuff like that all the time. And he was brought along on some of these trips and apparently had time with people. There's a story about his winning the approval of cabinet secretaries this week.

Nobody should really be surprised by this. I mean, Cash Patel, who is likely, were recorded. this Thursday morning, Cash Fetel is likely to be confirmed as FBI director. He was a regular contributor to Gateway Pundit, which you just mentioned in passing as sort of like the most outrageous crazy conspiracy site on the Maga Right. And it is all that.

I mean, they had to apologize for their bullshit a bunch of times. Cash Fetel contributed to that site. He was proud of his contributions there. He used to go on Trump's true social podcasts with Devin Nunes and spew these crazy conspiracy theories. So it's not just that Trump wants these kind of people to have seats in the White House briefing room. And remember, they're going to feature, Carolyn Levitt is going to feature these new media sites

and bring them in and tell people about them. They also are employing similar kind of conspiracy theorists in the administration itself. So, again, nobody should be terrible. surprised at these developments. This is the way Trump has operated for the better part of a decade. Actually, in his case, for a lot longer than a decade. All right, let's talk about Doge for a second. Elon Musk has

continued doging. So, Steve, I'll start with you on this. You've written about this. There's certainly been a lot of fact-checking. For instance, it turns out that Elon Musk wasn't distinguishing between people marked in social security versus actually receiving

social security checks. But some of my reaction to that is, okay, they're not receiving social security check, so it's not going to save us any money. But yeah, it's still probably not good to have millions of people in the system who are, in fact, dead. And this is something that technology really could solve

and clean up those roles. That seems like a great thing for Elon must to do. On the entitlement issue, we're for entitlement reform. We're also for getting rid of fraud, waste, and abuse. If these guys are going through and basically using technology and coding and AI to find fraud,

waste and abuse are likely fraud waste and abuse. Again, it feels like some of the outrage here has been knee-jerk outrage rather than, oh, well, okay, maybe this works, maybe this doesn't. What if we try this rather than like dunking on Elon Musk for a tweet? I don't know. What am I supposed to make of this? Yeah, so I'll answer this for three buckets. One, I do think it matters that they present accurate information to the public as they're doing this. I mean, so much of what they've put out, I mean, we know this by now. Elon Musk, he doesn't take the time to actually look and make a determination or do any research as to whether the things he's sharing with his tens of millions of followers is actually

true or not. And it matters whether this stuff is true or not. I mean, you know, there was this myth about $50 million in condoms going to Gaza. that was never true, always came out of nowhere. There was some question about whether there was funding from USAID to condoms that were going to Mozambique, but it was never $50 million. It's just all, it's, it's all either sort of made up or a gross exaggeration. And yet, it's now been kicking around despite it having been fact-checked and thoroughly, and I'd say convincingly debunked, kicking around for the past three weeks so much that the

President of the United States used it again earlier this week making this claim. And, you know, when you live in a world of information bubbles where people are in a choose-your-own-reality information environment, as we were discussing on the last topic, there are a lot of people who probably believe that we sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, and we didn't. And that matters. And Elon Musk has made this mistake again and again and again. I think on the social security number that the detailed explanation is that... that there is a default that codes people as being over 100. If they don't, if they're dead or if they don't know, they can't determine their age.

And so it looks like there may have been tens of millions of people who are on these roles, but in fact, they're not because the people who work in these systems understand what the coding in fact means. So one, I think it's important to be accurate. And unfortunately, they've sort of sowed misinformation. again and again and again throughout this process, and I think it's bad. The second bigger problem, in my view,

and I say this as somebody who, I am an enthusiastic sort of cutter of waste for HUD and abuse. I mean, this has been, you know, maybe we talked about this before. I'm the guy who as a young reporter used to wait up excited for the day that Citizens Against Government Waste released its pig book.

I loved doing stories about pork barrel spending in Congress. I look at the GAO reports on the kind of government waste and overproduction or missed payments. I love covering the stuff. I've written a bunch of this over my 25 years in journalism history. So if that's what this were primarily about, I would love it. It would be great. And there is waste, fraud, and abuse. And these are not small numbers.

This figure I put in my piece was more than $200 billion in flawed payments that the general accounting office found in fiscal year 2023. That's a lot of money. 74% of them were overpayments and only 5% of them were underpayments, but the most curious category was 19% that were unknown payments. $44 billion of unknown payments. I mean, how do you even do that?

So again, applaud any effort to get a grip on this and to fix it. And I think a lot of this stuff is fixable. You're never going to have a system this large and expansive without waste front. but to the extent that we can reduce it, great. My biggest problem is this. There's one thing that has to happen to reduce our annual deficits

and to reverse the trajectory of our debt. And it's structural entitlement reform. Donald Trump has been an opponent of structural entitlement reform for as long as he's been talking about debt and deficit. When Barack Obama was demagoguing Paul Ryan for actually including structural entitlement reform in Republican budgets in 2000, 11, 2012, Donald Trump was demagoguing him using the exact same language that Obama.

The only thing that will seriously address these problems because such an overwhelming percentage of our year-over-year spending is on these entitlements, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, now it's interest on debt, which is not an entitlement, but it's another automatic mandatory payment. That is the only thing that can actually address the problem and reverse this ever-growing trajectory, and Trump has ruled it out. But you have in his public comments and in Elon Musk's public comments

claims that they are going to balance the budget. They are not going to balance the budget. It's not possible. It can't happen. You can't do it with waste, broad and abuse. 1.8 trillion dollar deficit this past year, $230 million or so in flawed payments that the GAO discovered.

I mean, it's just a massive, massive gap. And my concern is the effect of Doge, the lasting effect of Doge, will be to give people a false sense of security that we're actually tackling these real problems. And as I've said, a million times on this podcast and elsewhere, even if nobody seems to care about a debt crisis now, everybody's going to care about a debt crisis, what it happens.

And it's going to happen if we don't take this seriously. But I think by talking about Elon Musk's, tweeting that we'll have a balanced budget, Donald Trump claiming that we'll have a balanced budget. All of these people suggesting that if we just cut a little waste here and if we kill this USAID program there and stop subscriptions to Politico pro, we're going to have a balanced budget, it's all complete bullshit and yet a lot of people who don't get their news elsewhere are going to believe it. And I think it'll make actually addressing the real problems, the real drivers of the debt, that much more difficult. Mike, you're

we're basically the same age. You're a little bit younger. Do you think that you'll get social security? No, not even counting on it. There's, that's no question. And if you talk to younger people, you know, there's, it's not even on their radar. It's just an accepted fact that we won't, that we won't get social security. So figure out a way to pay, you know, play for your retirement on your own. So that's my experience too, which is weird because there's, you know, know, somewhere around the age of 50, everyone below that age already has baked this in that we're not getting Social Security. So I'm kind of confused why we can't do Social Security reform when the old people think they'll get it. Fine, give it to them. And the young people

don't think they'll get it. There's not much political cost to then telling them something they already think to be true. In fact, telling them that they'll get Social Security is the not believable thing where they kind of know you're bullshit them. So I don't really even understand the political benefit to this pretend game. Yeah, I will object to what you just said

and what I sort of lay the groundwork for, which is while I may feel that way, I actually don't think that's true for maybe the majority of people under the age of 50. I think I could say that we are sort of, you know, as college educated and sort of paying attention

very closely to these sorts of things, to politics, to these policy debates. Maybe we are outliers in that sense. And regardless of whether we think it should be the case, it is a, it is a contract, if you will, that we pay into Social Security and into Medicaid. And there is a sort of, there ought to be an expectation that we pay into it. We should get something out even if we don't actually expect it. But look, I think what is so, Steve's piece is fantastic and is worth a read. And what's so frustrating is how clear it is that Donald Trump is playing on a, what is I think is sadly sort of an American condition, which is we want everything and we don't want to pay for it and we don't want to cut anything. It's, it's how to

we have sort of massive credit card debt in this country, it's how we have run up a national debt, that's how we sort of, you know, get concerned every once in a while about budget deficits, but then keep spending money that we don't have. And my concerns about what Doge is doing here, beyond the fact that they're not focused on, the real problem, is that they are setting, considerably setting back any effort to actually rein in federal spending by doing this slash and burn. I mean, like, I'm in the middle of doing a sort of woodworking project here at my house. And I live by the phrase that my dad taught me, which is measured twice, cut once. That is not something that Elon Musk seems to understand.

to really care about. And why should he? Because if you look at his business background, he's not he's not a guy who measures anything. That's for other people to do. He comes in and sort of blows things up and other people, other investors, whatever, are the ones who sort of end up having to clean things up. So this is sort of his MO, but it's maybe it works in Silicon Valley. You can find some more angel investors. You can figure out a way to move things around. It doesn't work in government because something that is so important for anything you want to do in government, whether it's expanding the state or reducing the state, is accountability and transparency and real transparency means telling, as Steve said, telling the truth about what you're doing. And

You can't tell the truth if you don't even take the time to figure out what the truth is, whether the thing that you were spouting on the Internet has even any basis in truth. At the end of the day, it is just telling people what they want to hear that all the DEI and woke, bad stuff that the government is doing, the fraud is all that matters. And if you can just come in and clean that up and clean out the corruption that is allowing that stuff to occur, then everything will be fine and dandy. And it's a lie and it's pernicious and it's going to set everything back in a way that the people who put aside their differences with Trump on this, that or the other, because he's going to, hey, at least he's blowing things up and cutting back on government spending. They're going to, I would hope, rue the day that they sort of put aside their principles on this because it's making things worse. Speaking of measuring twice and cutting once, I used to pride myself on being really good at math.

And for some reason, hanging picture frames, like I do all the math. And then the holes are in just totally wrong places. And I don't. And then I go back and look and like I've made very obvious errors in my math once it's actually... physically there. You need to put up a guide. Use some paper, tape it on and just use that.

It's hubris, Mike. It's hubris. We'll talk about this off here. I've got lots of thoughts on this. I'm so good at math. I don't need to put up the, but I do. That's the lesson.

Yeah, you do. Jonah is, let me put it this way. Maybe this is all a bundle of sticks. That's a term that they teach us in law school. The idea is that you can't just pick out the thing you like and get rid of the thing you don't like if they all come together. Maybe Doge is a bundle of sticks.

If you want to cut fraud waste and abuse, you're going to need someone who doesn't care and is a little bit nuts because there does come so much criticism and so much pushback from the bureaucracy. So here's the bundle of sticks. Would you like to try to cut fraud waste and abuse? with this bundle of sticks or you can not have all the crazy and all the tweets that have things

that are incorrect or inflammatory, but then you're not going to have anyone willing to go do this that all comes together. What do you pick? I get it. And I have been trying to give Musk sincerely more of a benefit of a doubt on a lot of this stuff because I am totally open to that point that, like, you need someone who can be uncowed by the catterwalling, right? And I will say, in defense of all these people before I launch into a tirade about this, I think it is hilarious how many pieces I've seen about how it's a replay of the same thing you see it get during government shutdown arguments. How many pieces I've seen saying Americans will really turn on all of this?

come this summer when the national parks are closed. And politically, I think there's some truth to that, right? People get pissed off when their summer vacations are screwed by the national parks being closed. That's why in budget government shutdown fights, they always close the government parks first because that's like the only interaction millions of Americans have with the federal government, right? It's sort of like... And you get sad kid crying at gate pictures. Right.

It's sort of like a kind of bug that has all of the... its vital organs on the outside of its exoskeleton, right? I wanted to see the petrified wood so badly. It should be, it should be a real, like, wake-up call for progressives that you can go in and yank and slash, yank wires and slash cables in the machinery of government for weeks on end, sending pink slips to all these people, and no one will notice until they can. can't get into Yosemite, it does suggest that a lot of the stuff the federal government does isn't as vital as you claim it is. Or it's just something interesting that people should think

about. That said, I know like Steve now makes me put a dollar in the jar every time I mention Chesterton's fence on this podcast. But like if you are going to, you know, like if you're going to fix your car, yanking out wires to see what they do is not the way to do it, right? Musk time and again declares he's found the proof that what he's doing is working. And then the true squatters go in and say, actually, no, that's, you know, and like on this social security thing, one of the ironies of this is that a lot of those, or at least some of those social security numbers for these 150-year-old people are bogus because they're being used by illegal immigrants who are paying into the social security system. And they're never going to be

able to collect on it, but they need a social security number to get jobs. And you should know these kinds of things before you start slashing into the thicket. And you should certainly check out this stuff and have it explained to you before you run to Twitter and say, aha, we found it. A friend of mine compared this a little bit to, and I don't want to trigger Steve on this, to search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It's like every single time, every day, Musk is like, we found it, right? Here's the warehouse.

Here's where they are. All of this was proven right. And then they're like, no, that's paint thinner. It's not the weapon, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. and I agree entirely with this problem that it's going to create a false sense of progress. And the real, I mean, the rhetoric of the balanced budget stuff, all right, so two points on that and then I'm done, because I'm feeling very irresponsibly ranty today. One, the total U.S. payroll of 2.3 million federal civilian workers that for pay and for pay

benefits totals 476 billion dollars. If Elon Musk created some AI program to run the entire federal government so we could fire all of them, the savings would be just shy of a half trillion dollars. In 2024, according to the U.S. Treasury, the federal budget deficit was $1.83 trillion. dollars. So firing every single employee would cover one third, give or take, of the shortfall from one year of our budget deficits. And our budget deficit are going to go up under Trump. I don't think any reasonable person disputes that, right? So meanwhile, second point, there are now reports that Donald Trump wants to take some of the savings we're going to get from Doge and turn them into direct cash payments to American citizens.

Because, you know, we have such a huge budget surplus. You can afford to, like, get wagons full of bread to throw to the crowds at the Coliseum without worrying about the cost of it. It is all such BS and so transparently unserious, but they talk as if it's serious. They sound as if they're serious. And there are just an enormous number of marks and cons out there who so desperately want it to be serious, that they get mad at you for suggesting that it's not serious. Yesterday on CNN, I said, look, Musk is making up a lot of this stuff as he goes along.

People read me the riot act as if I was some sort of sucker. They're the suckers for taking all of this stuff at face value. I still am a little bit stuck on the bundle of sticks thing, though, because I see Trump absolutely as a bundle of sticks, right? You're just not going to have someone come in, for instance, on, let's just take immigration, a normal politician just isn't going to do that. They can't risk the politics. And so if you want someone who's actually going to go in and do crazy stuff on immigration, then you're going to have to take the rest of the crazy with it.

And for a lot of Americans, I think that was a deal they were willing to make. That was a bundle of sticks that was better than the alternative status quo bundle. I don't know how the story is going to end on that one in particular. I will note. That's where I mean, I take your point. I just, I think that's kind of wrong, right? So like the position at National Review for a long time, I don't know who gets full credit for this because I think it was sort of in the water, was that if politicians don't take immigration seriously, if responsible politicians don't

take immigration seriously, irresponsible politicians will, right? Because the American people are going to want it solved. And I think that's absolutely true. And that's how a big part of how you get Trump. I think that's absolutely right. But I don't know that it's true that you can't have responsible politicians. You know, I have a lot of criticism of Bill Clinton. They'll do it incrementally. They'll... Yeah, well, like, Mitch Daniels did all sorts of, like, really impressive reform stuff

without talking about, you know, weird conspiracy theories or, or whatnot. Or Bill Clinton, right? He, I think I'm well established of having my disagreements with Bill Clinton. But he was convinced to do pay-as-you-go on budget stuff in the 1990s. And that was one of the reasons we got to a surplus. us. And, you know, he turned down the left wing of his party and said, no, no, no, we're going to, like, every new initiative, we're going to try to, like, pay for with higher taxes or, you know, offsets or whatever. I may disagree with some of the taxes and some of the decisions,

but that was responsible government. You know, we used to have a pretty good consensus about, you know, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, was kind of heroic about the saving the loan crisis. You know, he, it cost him his presidency, but he went back on his no new taxes pledge in order to be a responsible person. I think the problem has more to do with voters who get bored with responsible politicians who, you know, in the words of Bart Simpson, who said, my opponent says there are no easy answers. I think he's not looking hard enough. They want crazy and they get crazy. and but I think there are responsible people out there that if they were given the opportunity

or they had the political jobs could do a lot of good. It's just that the way between the media and the rampant populism out there, people want more crazy than they should. And so I just think the voters deserve a chunk of the blame too. 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?

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I'm not feeling eggs today. And I don't think that I have the world's three or most egg experts on this podcast. I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not sure I'd take that insult lying down. She went there. Use me? I probably eat more.

More eggs than the average neighborhood. Okay. Instead, I want to talk about the, what should I call it, flirtation with monarchy, rhetorically, that we're seeing from the White House. So this week, the official White House account tweeted out, congestion pricing is dead, Manhattan, and all of New York is saved. Long live the king. Quote President Donald Trump with a picture of Donald Trump with a crown on his head. there's Donald Trump tweeting out a man who saves his country,

breaks no laws, the not Napoleon quote. So I responded, in America, the law is king. Quoting Thomas Payne, common sense. So many of the replies are like, oh my God, he was joking, why can't you take a joke?

In America, humor is king. You totally took the bait. He's trolling you. I think that might scare me more than anything else I've seen in the last month. And I can't quite, verbalize

why I find that so scary but there's something about it starts as a joke it gets normalized as a joke and then what if it's not a joke what if I'm not joking

but I'm still joking but I'm not joking but am I still joking I don't know I'm starting to think of like what my what the actual red lines are we are like oh okay

this is where ahead of time if X happens then I think we can all say this isn't a joke anymore and stuff like that. I also, at a very deep level and just deeply, deeply offended by even a joke about America

as a monarchy. It's the whole thing we're doing here. We have tried something basically entirely new in history to have self-government. It's not a joke to talk about ending that. There is no funny joke. I hate people who do royalty,

stuff and care about the British monarchy and the crown and what Prince Harry is doing because we don't have a monarchy. We are so incredibly blessed to be part of this experiment. Don't joke about ending it. And especially not from the official White House Twitter account. So in this

not worth your time, I am answering it is very much worth our time and I would like each of you to offer your own rants about why I'm right. I think this is, yes. So I share your outrage. We used to be a proper country where you would accuse your political opponents of being a king rather than taking on taking

the crown quite literally putting it on your head i don't even like children's books for children that are like princess based king based we don't have those in my house i'm against you may have a problem you may have a problem then with the uh likely incoming FBI director uh cash the tub we definitely don't read that book we don't watch princess movies all of it is bad we don't believe in monarchy in this house I mean, literally, we believe in it. We think it is evil. This is the man who's coming for mommy. Okay, that book I will read.

But there is something bigger here besides the monarchy cosplay, which is there's a glipness to the way in which Maga World. And when I say Maga World, yes, it's all of the sort of people online, the Jack Bosobiac types. But it filters all the way up to say someone like the vice president of the United States, where they speak in an online language that minimizes and flattens, as Jonah was saying earlier, sort of flattens out everything so that anything that gets anyone outraged having to do with Donald Trump or MAGA. is sort of pounded out by a kind of glibbness and, yo, you're overreacting. It's just a joke. It is the way in which online MAGA speaks. And the vice president of the United States is born into this, is molded by this kind of way they're speaking. And I want to bring up the White House Twitter account posted a very very important.

video that has outraged me, and I will not allow the glimus of MAGA online MAGA to flatten it out of me. It is a video in which they describe ASMR. It's like ASMR deportations. ASMR for anyone who doesn't know is, it's an acronym that stands for something, but it's basically this genre of video. I think everyone knew that. that's the depth of our explainers here at the dispatch who knows what it actually stands for i'll tell you what it means autonomous sensory meridian response okay yeah but that doesn't tell you what it means and i'm going to tell you what it means uh what it is is a genre of video in which sort of uh hyper microphone sounds are used in a sort of like as a way to sort of soothe and the listener

So you will see, like, on the internet, ASMR videos of people, you know, clipping, you know, using scissors on paper or using their fingernails to touch certain, it's sort of just a sensory overload. Joy. It's supposed to provide happiness, joy. It's supposed to provide happiness, joy, and calm.

And so they have this video, ASMR deportations. And it shows, it is a video of illegal immigrants being put on a plane. You don't see their faces. What you see are the chains that are being brought out to shackle them, to put, you know, the, I guess they're not manacles, but whatever goes over your feet and over your ankles, that being sort of locked in, these illegal immigrants being sort of pushed. up onto into the plane and it is it is sort of treated with the same kind of it's very serious policy and this very serious act which I'm not necessarily opposed to but that is dealing with the you know individual human beings in a way those lives are being ruined right you know

like that's part of the point right is like this is why judges say sentencing is so hard it's the hardest part of a federal judge's job is doing criminal sentencing. You know the person deserves it, but you know what you're doing, you're doing to their lives. And so you take it seriously. It's a hard thing. You lose some sleep over it. You don't take joy in doing this thing that is necessary to do. And here is the White House trivializing it, taking it not seriously or using it as a, something that they claim is very serious. Is a cornerstone of the Trump administration's domestic and national security policy. And they're making it into internet content.

And it is, I think it is a perfect distillation of the way that the MAGA movement trivializes, flattens out everything, and is entirely unsurious about these things in a way that is horsening the culture and, I don't know why how do we even get started on that I'm just so blind with rage I'm like blind with rage about this yeah so I'll go back to I remember how we got started on this yes but this sort of cutie I'm joking I'm not joking kind of thing we've had friends romantic partners who practiced the art of you know there's an Italian proverb that says the truest things are often said in jest right it's a it's a way you get out what you really believe but you you you're a little humor asterisk on it so that if it offends your wife or your friends you can say, well, I was just joking, I'm just joking, right?

And it's this cowardly way of pulling back. That's not always cowardly. Sometimes it's like legitimately the only strategy you have to point out that someone really needs to, you know, chew their food with their mouth closed or something, right? I mean, like, I think you know, the closest similarity to it that are the thing that comes to mind when you first ask the question

because I agree with you entirely. There are so many of these things where it doesn't have to necessarily be joking where Trump floats something and people will say he's not serious or that's not what he said or whatever and then when it turns out he says it again they're like okay so he is serious and I disagree with it and he says it the third time and say he's absolutely right we've got to do that right we've seen that over and over and over and over again and sometimes the defense is he's not serious sometimes the thing is he's just trolling and sometimes the defense is he's joking but it's still the same pattern every time and it's it's these mild corruptions of

people that are so dismaying. And, but the thing that came to mind when you were describing it is John Stewart. John Stewart, back in the day, whenever he would say something really pointed and ideological and partisan and get called out on it being inaccurate, he would say, oh, I'm just a comedian. My show comes on after a cartoon. And back in the early days of blah, and the blogging days, We used to call it clown nose off, clown nose off, because he would use it as a way to immunize himself from any serious criticism. It was like, I'm a very serious person and I'm going to make

very serious arguments about why Republicans suck or conservatives suck or whatever. And then the second I get any criticism, he would run back across the border to comedy stand and say, you can't touch me. And that sort of rhetorical approach to politics is gross. enough in a comedian pundit. It's very different from the United States president. And it is his way and the Trumpers way of floating trial balloons. And so when you're floating a trial balloon about being king, you should take it seriously, right? That's the whole point of trial balloons is you shoot down really bad trial balloons less people get the impression that it's a good idea. and the MAGA world wants nothing to do with shooting down any Trump trial balloon because

they're terrified that it might turn out that he's serious and they want to stay on his good side. So you get politicians saying, oh, I didn't see that tweet, right? Or you're saying, you know, I don't know, I'm sure he's, you know, I'm not going to answer hypothetical, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because they're terrified of actually criticizing something in advance and then finding out he's serious about it. So they just assume everything could be serious, and it causes utter paralysis in the healthy antibody response of politics. And it's kind of scary.

Steve, ending with you. Yeah, I think you're going to wish that we went to eggs, right? Because this is all serious, and we've all got ranty stuff to say about it. Yeah, not surprising. I agree with Mike and Jonah. I mean, I think part of the challenge is Trump, he often does do this, right? He'll introduce things as a joke. Then he'll make them serious. Then they become policy. Then he does it. Then he tries to do it. I mean, I remember in the early stages of the 2020 election stuff, that summer before the general election and Trump started raising the possibility that the entire election was going to be stolen. and that it was all going to be rigged. And, you know, it started out sort of jockey. You know, this is going to be rigged. It's the deep state.

And then he kept making the argument. And he kept making the argument. And you had people in New York Times columnists were scolding us who would take him seriously. What? He's not going to try to steal the election. Calm down, you people. You're hysterical.

How dare you take him seriously? And then, of course, after the election, he did make the argument that the election was rigged. And there was the famous, like a week after the election, the famous comment to the Washington Post from this anonymous senior Republican official, what's the downside for humoring him a little for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. He went golfing. It's not like he's plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on January 20th. He's going to leave. You know, this is all like, ha ha, he's joking. We shouldn't take him seriously.

And then, you know, January 6th happened. And he tried to remain in office. And he called. secretary of state of Georgia, demanding that he find votes to help steal the election. This is sort of who Trump is. The other reason I think you have to take this stuff more seriously, and I will admit, I think it's a challenge because it is definitely the case that you can't go chasing after every outrageous thing that he says because he says so many outrageous things. But the other reason that you have to take this seriously, particularly in the context of of monarchy, is that you have somebody who's in the ear of the Vice President of the United

States, you know, I don't even know what to call him, a philosopher of an influencer, bronze-aged pervert, Curtis Jarvin, who is an actual American monarchist? Like, he makes the argument, right? He's the one who says it. He made it in the New York Times the other day. And J.D. Vance himself is on the record of predictive. that Trump's going to have to get a little crazy if he's reelected in 24. J.D. Vance says this to Vanity Fair in 2022. I think Trump's going to run again in 2024.

I think that what Trump should do, if I were giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. He goes on to say, we are in a late Republican period. If we're going to push back against it, we're going to have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with. So you listen to that rhetoric. You put it together with the fact that he regularly consults and is a good friend of this American monarchist. You have Trump saying this thing. You're seeing Trump defy the rule of law on a near daily basis. You've seen it in his history. At this point, it'd be stupid not to take it seriously. I'm a friend.

can we Sarah can we can we can we coin a phrase here it's a it's basically a modified limited trolling hangout that's that's what is going on with that thank you listeners we'll talk to you next week You know what I'm going to be.