The Dispatch Podcast - Arrogance is Folly

Episode Date: February 26, 2020

With South Carolina and Super Tuesday on the horizon, Sarah and the guys take a closer look at the Democratic field, examine the Trump administration's search for disloyalty, and weigh in on the Harvey Weinstein verdict and latest on coronavirus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, joined as always by David French, Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. We're coming at you on this rainy Tuesday afternoon in D.C. just ahead of the South Carolina debate. So we'll definitely get into what's going on in the Democratic primary Bernie Sanders. Then touch a little on the purge or supposed purge that's going on in the administration right now. And then we'll end with some potpourri, I guess. Some Weinstein verdict, coronavirus, a little of everything. Let's dive right in. So, Jonah, let's start with you on this.

Topic, is Bernie Sanders now the most electable, option for Democrats. And to back up a second, you have him really getting the highest vote totals in the first three. He's certainly the delegate leader at this point. We're heading into South Carolina, and the polls are actually looking pretty good from there. He had this huge rally in Austin yesterday. Now, because Democrats use the proportional system, there is some chance of him not getting to that delegate threshold and there being a brokered convention, but even there, it's hard to see

how he wouldn't be the delegate leader. That being said, he didn't have a great press week. His comments about Castro riled up some Democrats from Florida, including a congresswoman. But it keeps coming back to this electability question. Is he at this point their best candidate to take on Donald Trump? Yeah, so when you, first of all, lovely, to see you. When you initially asked a question, he says, is he now the most electable? I thought

there was a strategic ambiguity in the question in that I think he is the most likely to be elected in the sense of getting the nomination. I do not believe he is the most electable candidate to defeat Donald Trump. I think he can defeat Donald Trump and a lot of people who think it's a foregone conclusion that he'll lose against Trump are kidding themselves a little bit. But I think it would be harder for him than it would be for Amy Klobuchar. I don't know. I used to say Biden, but Biden is increasingly sounding like an outtake from a bad lip reading thing on YouTube.

But to push back on you a little, Bernie has shown that he has the best organization on the ground and the most high-energy followers. So maybe not, right? That's what you need in a base election going into November. Since you used a Game of Throne reference before we started recording, and I know David will understand and Steve will just have to sit and mute silence. Yes, he has the most passionate supporters, but it's kind of like the wildlings north of the wall,

just because they're the most passionate and aggressive. doesn't mean they can defeat standing armies and no wiling army has as conquered the South in Game of Thrones and 800 years of trying or something like that. So anyway, look, it just, it seems to me if you buy into the coalition of the ascendant argument that Democrats have been making for a very long time that women, young people, minorities, immigrants, first generation Americans, what Marx might call the lumpen proletary, that if they just simply organize en masse, that they can swamp the political system and sweep someone in, that has never been demonstrated to me.

I mean, the only example, in some ways, I think this is one of the things that really hurt the Democratic Party when Barack Obama got elected is that because he successfully used this churn-up-the-base strategy to goose the electorate in a way that people didn't think was possible, a lot of Democrats now seem to think that that is just simply the way every Democrat needs to get elected. But Barack Obama was a specific kind of generational candidate. He was the first African-American president. He was charismatic in the way that, like, Max Weber meant charismatic, which was that he, even though he never really pivoted to the center, he gave off this impression that you could project upon him any interpretation that you wanted. So he wasn't

particularly threatening to moderates, to evangelicals. He didn't win big slices of white evangelicals, but he kept his losses kind of low. And he churned up huge numbers from African Americans and from other minorities in ways that I don't think Bernie Sanders can. I don't think Hillary Clinton could or did. And it may be true that one day this coalition of the ascendant model will be an accurate appraisal of American politics. I tend to doubt it for reasons we can get into if you like, but it doesn't seem obvious to me that Bernie Sanders can do it in a way that Obama did. It just seems that the natural coalition for Sanders is smaller than Obama's coalition or even Hillary Clinton's coalition. And if you're a moderate Democrat, or a moderate Republican or an

anti-Trump Republican or an independent, all you're asking for is a candidate who gives you permission not to vote Republican. And Bernie Sanders is like he was designed in a lab by East German scientists to be precisely the kind of candidate that doesn't give people who want to vote Trump out the kind of permission they need to do it. Okay, there's a lot in there. I'm sure you guys have thoughts and feelings to jump off of. I mean, I just think right off the bat, an interesting point is Bernie is not seeing numbers in between 2016 and 2008 turnout numbers. much closer to 2016. Yeah, 2016.

You know, Steve, is that evidence of an enthusiasm gap that's closer to the Hillary enthusiasm gap? Or is it that they don't care who the nominee is because they're coming out to vote against Trump, so pick whoever you want. I'll spend my time outside of a high school gymnasium. Thank you. I don't think we know enough after just three contests

to make that kind of a judgment. I don't mean that as a Dodge. I just genuinely think that... It's true. California numbers as they're coming in. in actually look very high. Yeah, I mean, I think there could be, if you're just talking about somebody who will gin up the Democratic base, I think Bernie Sanders does that.

I mean, there's also a counterargument if you look at the entrance polls from Nevada that he could reach beyond what we think of as his base. He basically tied Joe Biden in the percentage of vote that he got from self-declared moderates and conservatives in Nevada. Although I want to caveat that in a caucus state, those numbers are far less meaningful than they would be if that happened again in South Carolina. Right, although a lot of early vote. I would also say Bernie Sanders turned out to have been more popular second choice for people in Nevada than most people thought. So when people do the, if you just add up Klobuchar and Buttigieg and Biden, and it's not inevitable that their voters, that their first choice voters would become.

whoever the moderate consensus candidate is. I think a good number of them will go to Bernie, and that, I think, is the dilemma for Democrats. I agree with Joan. I don't think he's the most electable Democrat at all in a general election against Trump. I think there are the people who are tired of, sort of exhausted by Trump,

they weren't enthusiastic about him before. Well, let me back up. The people who were reluctant Trump voters in 2016, the but Supreme Court people, are, I think, in many cases, probably enthusiastic Trump voters right now because he's delivered on a lot of those issues that got people to vote for them, even if they didn't want to vote for. It's the people, it's the other people who didn't vote for them, who stayed home, who voted for Democrats in 2018. who are now, I think, still getable for Democrats, but probably not with Bernie Sanders. And to Jonah's last point, I mean, I think what we've seen from Bernie Sanders in the last few days with this sort of doubling down on his comments about Castro and his sort of reembrace of what the Chinese are doing, lifting people out of poverty pointing to communist China,

this is not somebody who's going to moderate very easily because he still believes the stuff that he's believed all the time. And the question, everybody says, wow, there are these videos of things that Bernie Sanders said that were outrageous in 1985. There are videos for three weeks ago that have Bernie Sanders

saying crazy things. Last night. That's going to be his problem. You know, that's both a blessing and a curse. I think that's why so many Democrats like him. He has the maximalist position on everything. They know where he is, and a lot of them are there.

And there's a lot of authenticity to that. There is authenticity to it. The way that politicians are able to pivot in the general, is that they didn't really believe it a lot in the primary. I think that's exactly right. And he has, he will win the, among Democrats, he certainly wins the authenticity contest. But, you know, that means he will be, you can imagine him in a debate with Donald Trump,

mono on mono, Trump beating the heck out of Bernie Sanders on his embrace of, you know, fill in the dictator, and Sanders reembracing that person. Now, of course, Trump would have some troubles of his own that way, given the kind things that he said about it. Sanders actually shockingly good at pivoting and turning that around. I mean, like, in the 60 Minutes interview where he said, you know, look, I condemn Castro's authoritarianism. I want to caveat this. I think all of his answers are classic red BS. But it's an effective political pose to say, look, I don't write love letters to Kim Jong-un.

I don't, you know, praise Vladimir Putin. And so I think as a debate proposition, it's not clear to me that Trump automatically wins those exchanges because Trump has a thumbless grasp of issues of authoritarianism and democracy and all of that kind of stuff and could actually do very badly in those debates. Well, David, this is to exactly that point, the Trump versus Bernie election is what makes this interesting. It's not that it's Bernie against some hypothetical Republican that we're talking about being electable. You know, I'm not sure in a debate that the two really talk to each other about anything in particular. I think in such a base election, you have totally different conversations going on with a moderator who might just be perplexed about the answers to their questions. How do you see that playing out? Yeah, I'm so glad you said that because I'm envisioning this thing right now where a question is asked.

And you know how Trump will always pivot to, we've rebuilt the military, I mean, almost no matter what the topic is, he'll sort of pivot to the greatest hits, and Bernie pivots to his greatest hits. And they're both characterized by not backing down. I mean, this is, you know, everyone's like looking at Bernie and saying, oh, you didn't back down from what you said about Castro. Well, has Trump ever backed down about what he said about almost anything? I mean, this is the way it's done now. You don't yield. You don't yield. You. You don't give an inch. And this idea that you could have somebody who comes in with some pretty wild policy ideas, a pretty aggressive verbal style and never backing down, it's so preposterous to think that person could become president. I mean, you know, so all of these Republicans who are sitting there going, ha, there is just no way. I do think that Bernie does not recreate 2008.

We had plug for our other podcasts. We had a, I thought, a really good discussion about that on our advisory. opinions podcast. I don't think the model for Bernie is Obama 08, but he doesn't have to have Obama 08 to win in any way, shape, or form. I mean, remember Obama 08 was the biggest route in a generation. He needs Hillary plus 250K. And I say 250K instead of 80K in these three key states, just to give him some margin for error. But he basically just needs to have the Hillary vote plus about a quarter million extra people, or the Hillary vote with a quarter million more people staying home in some key states with Trump. I mean, this is the level of confidence that I'm

seeing from members of the GOP that people won't possibly vote for a socialist. I'm just frankly puzzled by it. I don't think that Bernie is their best candidate. If you're going to grow a candidate in a lab to beat Donald Trump, I don't think the lab produces Bernie Sanders. But I think that burnt, anyone who's looking at this contest and saying it's just going to be an absolute pushover doesn't understand the dynamics. I think he's not the best candidate that they have, but he's absolutely electable. And I think the worst thing the Democrats could do is try to engage in some additional shenanigans over and above 2016 for the sake of electability to try to block Bernie. It will only supercharge him. It will only supercharges his followers. But look,

I mean, we've just seen the pattern of a very fervent base with a very authentic, aggressive candidate in an era of negative polarization is going to start with a very high floor of support. Now, they won't have the highest ceiling that they could have, but they have a very high floor. And with the Democrats have a slightly bigger base than the Republicans, it's just hard to write him off, I think. so Jonah on that you look back at 2016 Trump didn't win Iowa his ceiling increased over the course of each of those early contests I'm not sure that it was wrong that he had a higher ceiling the whole time I think the ceiling itself moved partly because the field stayed so large for so long in

the Republican side exact same thing happening this time. I think there's a lot of differences between 2016 Republican side and this now for even just how the Democrats run their primaries different because it's proportional. But. And badly. But, you know, South Carolina, Biden's still in the lead. Sanders creeping up to him. The pressure on Klobuchar, Warren, Steyer, Bloomberg, you know, has had it the whole time. Wouldn't your money and time be better spent doing something else, getting out of the race now before Bernie has, you know, really before March 3rd, which is at this point around the corner. Is it too late? Is March 3rd too soon at this point? And will the pressure,

is there any chance that that pressure works after South Carolina? I think it's possible that Biden eaks out a very weak win. There's this polling that came out. Half of it was done before that debate and half of it after. And Biden was ahead 10 in the first tranche and then only tied in the second, which shows you where the momentum is going. And, but yeah, look, I mean, I think the same Belling the Cat problem that we had in 2016 on the Republican side is obviously going on on the Democratic side. And for listeners, you don't know the phrase, Belling the Cat is, it's in all of the mice's interest to put a bell on the cat.

But it's in no individual Mouse's interest to be the one who's told you're going to be the one to go put the bell on the cat. Well, and you can see how insulting that is to a Klobuchar, a senator, with a lot of credentials to say drop out when Steyer's going to stay in the race. Right. Or how, you know, some of these people are being told attack Bernie Sanders, attack Bernie Sanders, which is more the bell in the cat problem, which, and they're all like Elizabeth Warren either wants to be his VP or has this pipe dream fantasy thing about being the unity candidate that

comes out of a brokered convention. which, you know, put down the crack pipe. But if she attacks Bernie, she's toast with the people that she thought was her own base. And so it's interesting now, of course, Bloomberg is determined to make my brilliant in Los Angeles Times column out of date because now it seems like he is actually willing to attack Sanders in a way these other ones weren't. Although they deleted those tweets. They put out these fake quotes from Bernie praising dictators. and were attacked roundly for sort of creating, you know, literal fake news.

And they have now deleted those tweets and sort of a confusing... The other problem there is, I mean, in addition to the fake news problem, is that they weren't funny at all. They were supposed to be funny. They were not funny at all. Funny is always its own justification. Right. But if it's not funny, then you've got a lot of explaining to do.

So, yeah, I think Tim Miller, our friend who was the Jeb Bush comms director, wrote a good piece for the bulwark, talking about how. Now, if you wait till after South Carolina, if the analogy holds to 2016, it's too late, there's going to be this enormous pressure to rally around the punitive nominee and unite the party and all that kind of stuff. And I mean, it's a little off topic, but one of the things I am sort of fascinated by because I have been getting, you know, this criticism about how, and so is the dispatch or whatever, that pundits are simply supposed to reflect the majority view of the party

they're associated with. And I think that's, to use a term from political science, hot garbage. But nonetheless, that is a widespread view, is that, you know, conservatives should be pro-Trump in all of their regards because they're there to give expression to one side of the polarized country. And my only point is it'll be very interesting to see if, you're not. the Democrats nominate Bernie, if all of a sudden people like, you know, like Washington Post liberal op-ed writers are all of a sudden, actually, I've always loved socialism. I've, you know, socialism, you know, if socialism becomes for leading liberals, what nationalism became for a lot

of leading conservatives. So I have an obvious follow. Jonah, look, the, the big problem with all of the folks. There was a Washington Post article advising the Democrats. You should drop out. You should form a coalition. You should settle on one person. You should pick somebody to just take on Bernie. The problem with all of that talk is that it assumes that these politicians running for president are doing it for reasons other than themselves. Most of them are not. Most of them are running because, you know, he or she firmly believes that they're destined to become the next president of the United States. And they can look at, you know, a 5% in the last contest and rationalize why that didn't work out for them and their next good step is coming. I mean, they sort of do this forever.

So I think it's in addition to the fact that it's not obvious that all of these other so-called moderates or centrist Democrats will. go to whoever the consensus centrist person is. It's also just not the way politics works. So Jonah made the point about the role, the correct role of pundits that I think is interesting. You're on TV from time to time, let's say. He thinks that the pundit should represent themselves. Is that fair, Jonah?

I think people in my line of work should tell the truth as they see it. So here's my thing to you, Steve. But shouldn't they be able to explain the majority of their party. Sure. And that's not hard to do. That's so easy to do. But like MSNBC, for instance, came out yesterday and said that they were going to invest

in more pro-Bernie surrogates might be the wrong. Bernie's supporting pundits to start putting on air now. In part, I think, not just because they want people who support Bernie, but to be able to explain Bernie voters. And I think we saw that after 2016 as well. It's not just having pro-Trump people, as people who can explain a Trump voter. Sure. I think that's right. I mean, I think it's possible to explain what Trump voters are thinking without being pro-Trump. I mean, I think, you know, if you spend a lot of time talking to Trump voters or interviewing them or learning about what really matters to them, you can explain that without necessarily having to carry water for Trump. I do think,

I mean, we've seen, I don't want to say that this example is some of this, but earlier we were talking about whether you're going to see the, you know, what we've known as the Democratic establishment turned and start to rally behind Bernie Sanders. And I already think we're seeing the beginnings of this. You're hearing people, including prominent Obama spokesmen, who are suddenly, as it looks more and more like Bernie might be the candidate, suddenly finding virtues in Bernie that they've, maybe didn't see a while ago. And I don't want to say, Dan Pfeiffer was on, who's Obama's former communications chief, I don't know what Dan thought about Bernie Sanders before this. And I don't mean to suggest that this is not a, not Dan saying anything other than what he believes. But he was on Meet the Press this weekend. And he said, look, Bernie Sanders is basically where most Democrats are on policy. Look at where Democrats are. Look at where Bernie's policies are. And those two things match. The problem is that Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist. And

that doesn't pull well. I think we're going to start to hear, Dan is, I think, one of the smarter sort of Obama Bros. I think we'll start to hear that a lot more if Bernie has a good showing in South Carolina, and certainly if he does as well in delegates as it looks like he's poised to do on Super Tuesday. David? So two things. Going back to the pundit point, I have turned down many television opportunities where the format was going to be, I was essentially going to be either the prosecution or the defense for the GOP because there's different ways that this is done. You have the host and you have one person from one side and one person from the other side and they're designed, the whole segment is designed to present sort of a prosecution and

defense sort of format. And from that standpoint, I can totally understand why a network would say, we want people if this is our format and this is our programming, which I have problems with. but if this is our format, we want prosecutors or defense attorneys from the different sides and not literally attorneys. I'm just using an analogy. But there's also this whole thing called analysis. You know, I can understand both sides well enough to evaluate and to come to conclusions about the validity of underlying arguments, about the way in which they deal with facts, about the match between arguments and ideology, all of these things.

And that's the idea, that's where I begin to have problems with the way people talk about pundits, that as an analyst, say, of the quality of an argument, as an analyst of a Supreme Court case, if I don't fit into a specific box, if I don't have a constituency that can be identified by, you know, Gallup, then what am I doing there? I think that's the real objection. So on the one hand, it's like, sure, MSNBC, if you're going to have people making arguments about the Democratic primary from particular perspectives, sure, have some Bernie people. I tend to think, just go ahead and have the elected officials on or campaign officials.

So everyone knows that what we're dealing with here isn't some sort of like from Olympus sort of analysis, but real partisanship. And as far as sort of the left-wing pundit class, I think there's going to. to be a couple of defenses of Bernie, even from the people who are most alarmed by him. One is, I think I talked about it on the last podcast, you're going to see a lot of anti-ante Bernie commentary that is just taking aim at the target-rich environment of Republicans who are suddenly very, very angry that someone would embrace an authority or any aspect of an authoritarian regime. And they'll do the but Erdogan, but Putin, but Kim Jong-un kind of commentary. The other part that's going to be interesting is you're going to have people who are going to say he's the last

choice that I have, but unlike Trump, he is not a threat to the rule of law. He's the last choice that I have, but unlike Trump, he is not wildly incompetent. Or unlike Trump, and so they're going to draw these distinctions, some of which I think are highly dubious. I just had an exchange with a friend on the progressive side of the media world, and we had a sort of a back-and-forth about that where I said, wait a minute, you know, Bernie has surrounded himself, and Noah Rothman at commentary has done a really good job of talking about this. Bernie has surrounded himself with some really, really unsavory characters. And one of the problems that a lot of people had with Trump, me included, was that it wasn't just Trump. It was sort of the most icily canteena

of people that he was bringing along with him. Well, Bernie has his own canteena. And that group of people, the Linda Sarsoures of the world and others, have real problems, some of them with anti-Semitism and extremism. And so I'm not so sure that if you have a Bernie Sanders presidency, it's some sort of new dawn for the rule of law and respect for our constitutional principles. I don't, I frankly just don't buy that at all. So, Jonah, Steve, I don't think anyone truly believes that there will be a never Bernie movement the way that there was in 2016 among Republicans. But David raises an interesting point about Bernie's supporters,

the most virulent of them, perhaps, turning off voters, including Democratic voters. You certainly see from time to time women in particular in the Democratic Party saying they don't quite know what to do with this because his supporters are so aggressive and so over the top, they reflect poorly on the candidate. They wish Bernie would do something about it. It doesn't look like he's going to. So could there be a different type movement, not a never-Burney movement, but I'm going to stay home because Bernie's supporters scare me movement unless Bernie does something. I mean, there was a story last night about one of his own campaign staff creating a fake account that I won't repeat the name of here made to attack Pete Buttigieg in unsavory terms, I think is fair.

Yeah, one point I just want to get out there because I'm the fly. the flag for the dispatch guy today. David's point, I think, is very well taken about the way that liberals will make arguments in favor of Sanders. Let us just put a little flag down that if the response from people like that is but Erdogan, but Putin, you know, look at what Trump did with Xi and Kim Jong-un, then people like the four of us are actually, as a... matter of debate in very good shape because we criticized all of that and that is one of the

reasons why maybe it is helpful to have people who have a strong point of view and don't just simply take a party line offering punditry and analysis out there because having a someone who has has a credible voice to criticize Bernie on that stuff because and who also because they also criticize Trump is a useful thing for conservatism. Okay that said I think I think I think you raise a real possibility. The only thing I would quibble with it, I think the word movement is probably wrong. I think it'd be very small, but so is never Trump. Yeah, but I mean, but, but I very much doubt there's going to be, you know, for me a movement means you can imagine there being a panel on something or a conference or a, or a symposium of

contributors to a magazine. And the women who were turned off by burning. Bernie bros and therefore are just going to stay home thing. I think you identify a very real dynamic, but I don't see a lot of symposia on that. And also, you know, you forget that Bernie has this ability to counteract some of the obnoxiousness of his followers with women because he himself is just so damn sexy. Oh, God, Jonah.

Oh, I get to re-up my usual Jonah. It took only like 30 minutes. It took only 30 minutes. I was excited to hear what Jonah had to say, Because it's a first time and a long time anybody's told me that I'm in good shape. So that was a great moment. Figuratively. Look, I think this may be a too inside the Beltway discussion that we're having.

There is also this huge sense. And it's sort of coming through, at least anecdotally, in my experience, of people around the country who are saying, wait a second. We're going to have Bernie Sanders against Donald Trump? What? What? And, you know, I can always tell, and again, you don't want to extrapolate too much from what you're seeing personally or what's in front of you, but it's also not smart to ignore it. You know, tons of my friends who are not political, don't follow this, you know, go off, they live their lives, they check in every once in a while. You know, they're all reaching out and sending texts or sending emails or giving a call and they say, like, is this really going to happen? Is it really going to be the case that we're going to going to have Donald Trump against Bernie Sanders. We're going to have to live with this campaign for the next eight months and the results of that for the next four years. Can't somebody get in? You know, why isn't there a smart businessman who can get in as a third party independent? You're getting a lot of that. I think there will be, that's a big chunk of the country. And it's not hard to

imagine that if that is the race and we go through and see these kinds of attacks and we start to see, you know, the kind of, I think, nastiness that we all will expect from that kind of a race, you'll have a huge chunk of the country just tune out. I mean, I think a lot of people have tuned out already. They're tired. They're exhausted. I think you'll see a huge chunk of people tune out, which would be consistent with sort of what we've seen in our moment of negative of polarization, where you have sort of the fervent bases of each of the political parties grow more and more attached to the parties themselves, even as the parties sort of shed ideology in some cases, that would not be the case with Bernie.

And those people are more and more active, and everybody else sort of shrugs their shoulders and says, like, gosh, this doesn't represent me. I think that's such a good point, because while the two parties shed policy and ideological goals, it becomes then purely a team sport. Some people love the rabidness of being on a team and supporting the team no matter what. And some people are very turned off by it. And it sounds too simple, but that's kind of what's happening, David. What you said, Steve, just completely echoes the research from the more in common project, this hidden tribes research that says essentially what you're dealing with in the United States right now is an exhausted majority. You have, it's not a

moderate majority, because moderation is people are trending away from moderation. It's an exhausted majority. You have the devoted conservatives on one side, you have the productive and traditional conservatives on one side and the progressive activists on another, and this exhausted majority that's really weary of the whole thing. And I totally agree with you that this way, a Trump Sanders battle would increase that exhausted majority. I don't know that. it necessarily would depress turnout because a lot of the people in the exhausted majority still vote. But they do tune out politics. They do tune out the day-to-day, minute-my-minute, blow-by-blow, story of it all. And that actually, frankly, has worked to Trump's advantage. I mean,

people are not familiar with the back and forth of his Twitter feed, besides those who are deeply engaged. And it will work in some ways to Bernie's advantage, because people won't be familiar with the ins and outs of his honeymoon in the Soviet Union or his history of comments about Castro. There's just going to be a D there and there's going to be an R there and people will vote according to the D and the R much more this is exhausted majority than they will vote according to the policy. And I mean, it's a real problem with our body politic right now. You have this increasing radicalization in the actual primary voter and increasing exhaustion in the general election voter. And it's not a good combination. So I think that's a perfect transition then to our

next topic, leaving the Democratic primary, going to the Trump administration, some news Sunday night, but it's been percolating for a while, that the president deputized his head of PPO and his former body person to basically root out the deep state office of personnel. To root out the deep state, to find people in each of these departments, whether it's state, justice, anywhere, and move them. This was sort of portrayed as this deeply sinister move. And I think some people that on the right, defended it as, why should the president be dealing with people who don't support his agenda

internally? And on the other side, it's, this is a witch hunt of the truest form, and we're finding people and then determining whether they float. Jonah? I caught that. I caught that, Sarah. That's a good reference. I caught that. Steve, yeah, never mind. Small rocks. So, churches. I don't understand why both things can't have some truth to them, right? On the one hand, when Trump does these kinds of, I mean, look at the Rick Grinnell pick, right? I like Rick Grinnell personally. I know him a little bit. I think he's a smart and capable guy.

I think he is, whether or not he proves to be a good pick for the head of DNI, the reason why he was picked is obviously because Trump sees him as a partisan lawyer. to him. And his qualifications were a secondary consideration. That, I think, is the sort of crux of the issue. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to root out people who are openly hostile to your administration and willing to color outside of the lines to screw with your administration. The problem is that, and maybe it's just because of the bench that is available to Trump, he tends not to want to put people who are simply philosophically aligned, which is one thing. That's what Reagan would try to do, is finding people who were professional and good and capable, who were philosophically aligned with the ambitions of the administration,

but he wasn't going around looking for, you know, basically de facto Michael Cohen's, pre-jail Michael Collins, to infest the bureaucracy and basically, turn it into his own personal political operation. And I think that's the tension there. And sometimes I think probably Trump is completely right to be doing some of this stuff. But the proof is in who he replaces these people with. And most part, I'm skeptical. To what Jonah said, which is sounds so eminently reasonable. It's not like Bobby Kennedy was the most qualified person to be attorney general. Correct. But he's sure. as heck was the most loyal to the president.

Right. And who had good enough qualifications, maybe. But we also passed a law to prevent that from ever happening again. Fair. There's a balance. I mean, to me, this is sort of the perfect controversy. It's a perfect sort of Trump-era controversy, because on the one hand, you have Democrats making accusations that, as often as not bear little resemblance to reality.

I mean, the fact that Donald Trump prefers loyalists is a republic-ending moment. Well, it's not. It's not great. I think it's bad, as a general rule, the way that he's going about this. It's not a Republican-ending moment. And you have Republicans defending things, this process of choosing loyalists over more qualified people and leaving many, many jobs just unfilled in a way that Republicans would never defend under another administration. I mean, I think if you look at the person that the president chose to do this, that I think is potentially pretty problematic. I mean, this is This is somebody who was pushed out of the administration because of questions that were raised about some of the things that he had done in his past. He was born in 1990. He does not have the kind of experience to make the kind of judgments about picking senior people in government to lead things like a pushback on the coronavirus and senior officials to help run the government. And that would be true whether he was a Republican or a Democrat or a Trump loyalist or a George W. Bush loyalist. It's just it strikes me as an underwhelming pick made for the wrong reasons, as Jonah suggests. David?

Yes. I mean, it's hard to really add anything to that analysis, which I agree with. Well, then let me jump on you on something else. I wanted to talk briefly about the Weinstein product. Oh, that's a topic. And I wanted to get your take on whether you think this is a vindication of the Me Too movement, which really coalesced after the initial stories about Weinstein, or was the verdict a stepback?

So I think it was a success for the Me Too movement. I think the Me Too movement in many ways has already been vindicated and to a large degree because of the way in which the Me Too Movement wasn't about just Weinstein. It triggered an avalanche and the avalanche, you know, caught up perhaps too many people at times, but it also caught a lot of bad actors and that a lot of bad actors were exposed as a result of the Me Too movement. So I think the Me Too movement has already been vindicated. I think it's a success, although I would say this, it was definitely not the outcome that the prosecution was reaching for. It wanted to have him convicted on the more serious counts. But as I followed this prosecution, I had reached a point towards the end where I thought they may not get any convictions at all. And the reason why I said that is because the defense had very effectively,

introduced a series of defenses that have been traditionally quite successful. And those defenses include, well, how could it have possibly been rape if you had a relationship with the attacker after the rape? That's traditionally a very effective defense. Also raising questions about mixed motive. This wasn't rape so much as it was a transactional relationship. You were hoping to get something from him. He was hoping to get something from you. Everybody knew what the score was. And so these are defenses that have traditionally been quite effective. And what happened is the jury said no. The jury didn't say no in all caps, but it did say no. And it does raise, it does introduce a, I would say a more potent side. So we often say he said, she said, who can possibly know

is the way people who are sort of outside observers often look at these things. When the fact of the matter is competing testimony, and he is often resolved by jurors. That's the way the system works. They look at two people and they decide who they believe is telling the truth. And this is the way our criminal justice system has gone for a really, really a long time. And many episodes of Judge Judy. Many, many episodes of Judge Judy. And Wapner. Yes, we understand this. We get this. I don't know why we don't understand this and don't get this in the context of sexual assault and rape. But I do think what it did is it was an incremental move towards saying, look, a jury can in fact credit both the woman's testimony

about what happened and can in fact credit the woman's explanation as to why they didn't behave the way the defense demanded that they behave after the incident, if that makes sense. It does. And one of the things I think that's important about that, and this is something that my wife has written about, is that there are many times in which after an assault, a relationship continues because the victim wants it to mean more than it did, that the victim is trying to redeem some kind of relationship out of this awful, awful, awful event. And that it is perverse to then

say, although not irrelevant to make the argument or not wrong to make the argument, but it's then perverse to then say that a woman's desire to redeem an awful event is therefore count, it means that it wasn't an awful event from the start. It's a kind of a... Or confusion around that event or... Exactly, exactly. So from that standpoint, I think, think from a Me Too standpoint, from a dealing with the real way in which people live their lives in the aftermath of awful trauma, I think this was a success. I also think it's an interesting moment that we will look back on about journalism as trust in journalism declines, as fractured media occurs more and more, and people getting their

news sources from their own places. This was a moment for journalism. This story. This story story about Weinstein would not have come out but for journalists. And the Me Too movement then launches and coalesces around it. I think you would be hard pressed in the last several decades to come up with something that has changed our culture more than the initial stories that won the Pulitzer Prize about Weinstein. Can I ask? I mean, I want to, I would be very careful here because it's kind of a jerk question. It's coming from you, Jonah. We already knew. But I've noticed that, at least on MSNBC and CNN, the victims of Harvey Weinstein, and I think they're victims, I have nothing but sympathy for all that stuff, you know.

And but they describe them as whatever their name, you know, call them Jane Doe, comma, Weinstein Survivor. the word survivor maybe I'm just being wildly pedantic and insensitive here but there's something about the word survivor sexual harassment survivor or sexual assault survivor or sexual assault survivor if there was if there is evidence in the record and look I'm I'm perfectly happy you see Weinstein die in jail so I mean there's no sympathy for Weinstein here but there's just something about the language that it bothers me and I you know normally a survivor means is someone who like a cancer survivor or a plane crash survivor it's someone who survived death and there's nothing in the evidentiary record that says that Weinstein was trying to kill these people Jonah have you

seen the morning show I have not David I think we should prescribe to Jonah the episodes of the morning show that we have discussed. You know, that's, I think you, I think there is, that word has been overused. I've heard it describe, I've heard it used to describe people who have endured what would best be described as office sexual harassment, for example, which is unlawful. It violates civil, it's very bad. It's very bad. I think it is an entirely fair way to describe a person who has endured a sexual assault. I think that what you're talking about in that circumstance is deep, long-lasting, life-changing, and sometimes in suicide and self-harm, life-ending trauma. So I think that one...

And the fact that the trauma didn't, you know, for instance, the mental health trauma, the risk of suicide that increases dramatically, the fact that that wasn't caused by the attacker directly, but rather indirectly, I think is irrelevant to calling the person a survivor. I do think, to go back to the point about the press that you are making, I think that's true. And there was some really outstanding reporting on this issue and then subsequent Me Too cases. I do think that whatever restored credibility that the press earned on some of this, they lost or at least had it eroded. with the coverage of Brett Kavanaugh and the allegations made against him, many of which were not backed up by contemporaneous accounts or real evidence,

and yet were treated like the allegations that were raised against Harvey Weinstein. And I think, you know, particularly if you look at this through a political or ideological lens, many of the people who were following the mainstream media coverage of the Kavanaugh case looked at those allegations and said those allegations aren't supported by evidence. Why are you writing about them as if they have been? I have another data point for this. I wrote about this at some length at NR when the Me Too stuff really first started to roll out about the Matt Lauer things and all of that. Fox News had significant problems in this regard, you know, with Bill O'Reilly and some other people.

The mainstream media covered it the way so much of the mainstream media covers Fox. Oh, look what those subhuman, strange people do. This speaks so much to conservative misogyny and sexism. That's what conservatives do. That's what conservatives think about women. Bill O'Reilly is terrible, yada, yada, yada, yada. And it's sort of like Brian Stelter at CNN, who calls himself a media critic and really what he is is a Fox News critic most of the time.

And all those stories, the NDAs and all that stuff, those broke about a year and a half or so, before, two years before the NBC stories and all the others broke out, the Mark Helpern story, all that stuff. And it turns out that, no, this is a cultural problem that isn't a conservative problem. It isn't a Republican problem.

It is a Fox News problem. It's a cultural problem. But the sort of virtue signaling, were better than those people attitude of the mainstream media didn't see this as a potential thread to pull about the rest of the media. Instead, they cordoned it off

and they said, see, that's what those perverts and weirdos do. And if they had just treated Fox News at the time with a, and this is not, you know, this is pre-Trump, right? With a bit more sort of respect that this is an institution like any other in America, they would have had a two-year head start on the Me Too story.

But instead, they were blindsided because it turned out that Matt Lauer, you know, America's buddy, was a pig too. And I thought it was interesting. I think there is something to what you're saying. But on the other hand, when Ronan Farrow originally went to run his story with NBC about Harvey Weinstein, he was shut down by NBC on a story about Harvey Weinstein. So to some extent, I think this was a hesitation across the board from, frankly, men in power, not wanting to pull that string. To the extent they had to do so, they needed to coordinate off to Roger Ailes at Fox News, I think I would agree more, but for the Ronan Farrow part, which has gotten a ton of attention and pushed back from NBC, and there's been this huge back and forth. I wouldn't be surprised if we have a nice Netflix special someday on why there was pushback, how that worked, and how Ronan eventually ends up going to the New Yorker to publish what becomes the definitive take and wins the poll.

Yeah, I mean, I actually agree with parts of what both of you are saying. I think that part of the reluctance about Fox was it a reluctance to turn, sort of turn the camera around, right? I mean, you have, I think this is, obviously, the Me Too phenomenon in the power dynamics go well beyond just the television and entertainment industry. But I would argue that they might be more acute in the television and entertainment industry than they are in many other places because of those power dynamics. I mean, people who work in television, not all of them certainly, but many people who work in television, particularly those who are on air, think they can do no wrong. and they are in a position where they're sort of worshipped wherever they go, whatever they say, whatever they do, and it feeds that power dynamic that I think exists in many other industries. So I think I think Jonah's right that there was a political element,

but it was probably as much self-preservation or self-denial as much as anything. So can I – I'm going to use this as a segue to talk about a personal pledge that I've made try to keep. I'm trying to limit my use of the term the media. Okay. And here's why, because it's made of individuals and institutions. And while there are commonalities in culture, when you ascribe negative developments to, quote, unquote, the media, you not only overstate the problem in some ways. You also remove accountability because it's people who report things poorly and people who report things accurately. And so Ronan Farrow, it wasn't the media that finally policed itself. It was Ronan Farrow blew open a huge story. And Megan Toey and others, for example, at New York Times,

blue open, big stories. And these people who are part of the media set the tone. And when it's the media that covered for Brett Kavanaugh, I mean, who attacked Brett Kavanaugh without evidence, there were specific names by those blue check marks who came after me with both barrels when I said, you know that Michael Avanotti client and that story that doesn't add up. It wasn't the media who came. after me as specific people. And I feel like one of the things that's very important for accountability

purposes is elevating the names who have courage and who are accurate and they get things right and noting when individuals do not have courage and are not accurate and they don't get things right. Instead, we just sort of speak often. I'm not talking about us at the dispatch. I'm just talking about in the larger world, the media. How many tweets begin with the words the media and then did dot, dot, dot. And they mean three people at two publications or five stories in three publications. And so, you know, one of the things in the aftermath of Me Too, as you saw the mainstream certain individuals in the mainstream media absolutely torching some of the most powerful

people in the entire industry, I kind of had this thing that says, you know what, the media there is a culture, but it's also individuals. And it's one way to exalt the people who do a good job and to deal with the people who don't is to stop describing them like we describe the Borg in Star Trek. I had a friend, Peter Beinart, I can tell the name, who when he was the editor of the New Republic, Playboy, which was still a thing back then,

reached out to him to see if he wanted to be basically their words guy because pictures were much more important to Playboy but basically the editor of the articles which in the Playboy hierarchy is like the seventh person most important person and he always brought it up because when he went to his wife he was like, honey, it's not that big a deal

it's just the media. It's another job in the media. and I'd be out of just another magazine in the media. It's just like, no, you're not taking that job, but it would have paid really well. Many people say they read it for the articles, I hear. Okay, last quick question to you, Steve. Coronavirus, the International Olympic Committee has at least raised the possibility

that they would cancel the Summer Olympics this year if the virus is not under control is enough being done. I would say internationally, is a pretty clear no. You're seeing new reports every day of additional escalations in the number of both the number of deaths and the numbers of those infected. You're seeing government officials in some cases in very dramatic and public ways, not doing the right thing, not taking steps. There were videos circulating today of a senior Iranian health official who was giving television. He was, has coronavirus, giving television interviews, wiping his brow, coughing into his arm.

I mean, this is really, was really a big mistake. I think it could have actually longer lasting effects on the regime itself, potentially, because it will be so embarrassing. But no, I don't think enough is being done. Here in the United States, you know, President Trump tweeted yesterday that we have the coronavirus under control. He said it was now as an opportune time maybe for him to get into the stock market because the stock market had lost a big chunk yesterday. There is some tension, I would say, that the head of the CDC or the head of immunization at the CDC was out today with something that was in tension with what the president said, not directly contradicting what the president said. but she said that we should be prepared for significant impact on the way that Americans lead

their day-to-day lives as a result of the coronavirus and said that she expects that we will continue to see communities being affected by this. She told a story on a conference call where she said, I had a conversation with my family over breakfast this morning and I told my children that while I didn't think they were at risk right now, we as a family, need to be prepared for significant disruption of our lives. Now, I think she was saying that as the mom, not as the head of the CDC who's going to be monitoring this, because of course she would have significant disruption in her life. So, you know, look, it's not time to panic.

I think if what the president was trying to do yesterday was trying to sort of reassure people and calm people, those are probably, that's probably the right instinct at this point, but it can't be done in sort of a blithe or glib way that doesn't take into account the seriousness of this. And there is some tension between what health experts are saying, what the president's saying, and the fact that he made this request for $2.5 billion in funding to help bolster our defenses. Not to make everything into a partisan lens here, Jonah, but Rush Limbaugh has said that he believes that coronavirus is an, you know, a fake thing that it's the common cold being used to bring down Donald Trump and that it's

basically a left-wing talking point. Do we run into a problem if things like an international pandemic become partisan, you know, bats? I, for one, see no reason why international pandemic diseases should be immune from the same phenomenon that poisons everything else in life. I mean, it's like, oh, the diseases, they're so special. They shouldn't be turned into partisan weapons, you know, tell that to the Supreme Court. Everything is a partisan weapon now. And so, you know, so be it. I having not, you know, Rush has this uncanny ability to say things that when you see them on the page sound really outrageous. And then when you hear of them in the context of clip, you get more of a context of the sarcasm. I don't know one way or the other which way

to interpret what he said, but on the face of it, it's an outrageous and dumb thing to say. And, you know, one of the things that has been remarkable that the Trump years is that so far he truly hasn't been tested by a real crisis. I have no idea if the coronavirus is going to turn out to be that crisis, you know, never mind a Katrina moment or anything. like that. But if I were, I don't even know who that would be, but the, some of the more sober serious people in the Trump campaign, I mean, maybe you guys know the name of that person. I don't. I would be watching this with sort of like, you remember when Apollo Creed's manager is watching Rocky beat up the side of beef? And he's like, huh, maybe we should take this kind of seriously.

Because if the stock markets continue to churn and drop, and international trade is, if we can extrapolate into the future, the trend lines we've seen so far, and it gets much worse, and Trump loses his talking point about the economy, I'm not saying that's fair to Trump because he didn't create the coronavirus. We all know that this was created in the lab by the Chinese to turn occidentals into zombies. But my only point is that this is a pretty unpredictable scary thing as a matter of just public health, but it could have huge political valence if it goes a certain way. Yeah. David, parting thoughts? Yeah, you know, I think it's it really shows the futility and frivolousness of arrogance because, you know, everyone's been running around talking about how the economy is great because we made it great. And through no fault of our own in the United States of America, a virus can develop on the other side of the world. It can shut down or seriously degrade the economy of the second largest industrial power or

the second largest economic power in the world. And the ripple effects can come crashing down upon us. We're a hostage to fortune much more than we like to think. And that includes in politics. And I think that there will be, even if it's unjust, there will be negative fallout if there is a negative economic turn in the United States politically, even if it's unjust. It's also the case that people get the credit for positive economic turnabouts, even when they haven't necessarily done much to make it happen. The American economy

is a mighty engine and has proven to be a mighty engine for centuries now. So so much of politics is hostage to fortune. And when you're so hostage to fortune, it strikes me that Humility is an order in arrogance is folly. A great ending. Thank you so much all of you for joining. And thanks for listening. If you have a second, go on to Apple Podcasts or wherever you're getting your podcast and consider giving us a rating.

They're very helpful to us when you leave comments, but also it helps other people find the podcast. Appreciate your time. We'll see you next week.