The Dispatch Podcast - Battling Coronavirus

Episode Date: March 26, 2020

Sarah and the guys discuss the latest as the U.S. experiences the deadliest day yet of the coronavirus outbreak. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined as always by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. Today, how is America doing responding to the coronavirus pandemic? What's going on with the stimulus bill approval ratings, Joe Biden's campaign from the basement? And we'll end with coronavirus cocktails. Thanks for listening. Let's dive right in. It has been another very unusual week in America. Hard to know exactly where to start, but I think we need to start at the big picture. Overall, the performance, what's happening? Steve, I'm going to go straight to you.

You have, you've been following some of these numbers more closely than I think almost anyone else on the planet, perhaps. Let's hope that's not true. Fair. For everyone's sake. What grade are you giving America's performance so far? I think we're at about a D, maybe a D plus. I would say that we're improving as we go. We started out so far behind.

And I think if you listen to virtually every epidemiologist and biologist and public health expert, they will say we really missed our window of January and February. We even missed a, we were a little bit lackadaisical into March. And now we're scrambling to make it up. And I do think, you know, there are, we're seeing. seeing in news reports every day and the things that we read and we see, sort of the fruits of American ingenuity every day and scrambling to catch up. And I think because we're the richest country in the world and because we have so many

technological advances that we're going to be in a better position to catch up than many other countries, but we relate. And I think there are basically three main factors here. One of course is China. was, you know, hid information from the WHO, didn't disclose a lot of highly relevant information to the international community broadly about what was happening in China and why, even when they had answers to many of the most important questions. The second was the bureaucratic ineptitude and infighting, particularly between the FDA and the CDC. You're a little bit reluctant to

criticize folks who are there now because so many of the people there are working, you know, hours a day to try to help us get ahead of this thing, or at least catch up. But the story that we ran on our website at the dispatch.com by Alex Stapp of the Progressive Policy Institute detailed exhaustively the many bureaucratic failures that we've seen in the lead-up to this, and it is an absolutely maddening read. And then the third, I think, has to be put at the feet of the Trump administration. I won't go over all of the different quotes that people. people have rehearsed or relayed again and again, but Donald Trump was late on this. He said that it wasn't a problem, that it wouldn't be a problem, that a miracle would solve it,

that the number 15 was going to go to zero, that we had it under control. His top people were saying it was contained repeatedly. His amplifiers in the media were, I think, crucial to giving people the impression that this was nothing to worry about when everybody in the public health community and many people around the world were saying that it was something to worry about and to raise it. to get ahead of. And we didn't do it. And I think we're paying for that now. David, you introduced me to a movie, I believe, from 1976 that I had not heard of before, called Logan's Run. Yes. I know you're writing on this, and so I don't want to spoil everything,

but can you sing us a few bars from your Logan's Run rant? Yeah. So for the listeners who don't remember Logan's run, and many of you probably don't. It was a movie and TV series from the 70s, and Jonah, you're my fellow nerd. You may know the details better than I do. It was Farrah Fawcett's Hollywood premiere movie. She was in it for like two minutes, but I mean, it was a massively important bad sci-fi movie that has had an incredible impact on the culture, and there's an amazing backstory about why they've never been able to do a remake. But again, I know we don't care about cultural literacy or the canon around here anymore, but the fact that Sarah had never heard of it until David brought it up, really, it saddens me.

It was Michael York's probably greatest movie, which is like saying the best toilet wine in Leavenworth. I mean, it was, I guess, anyway, I don't want to get going on this, but I'm very upset about this. I'm talking about Logan's run for a while now, but anyway, go on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I've heard you riff on Logan's run many times. But basically it's a film that posits a dystopian future in which people are killed when they reach the age of 30. And as I recall, the basic story is Logan is about to hit 30 and he goes on the run, which is kind of self-explanatory title. But so a bunch of us have been resurrecting this film, Logan's run, because we have been seeing this very strange thing coming up, mainly on Twitter, but now it's leaking off of Twitter. It's been on Fox. You've seen the lieutenant governor of Texas in a very viral clip on Tucker talked about this. Britt Hume has talked about this. Glenn Beck has talked about this. And that is that we should, that older Americans should be willing to sacrifice.

to reopen the economy. And that what is happening essentially is that for the sake of older Americans, we are destroying the American economy. And so what we need to do is older Americans need to suck it up. If necessary, be willing to die for their children and grandchildren to reopen the American economy. And you just see this sort of leaking out all over. And it is so nuts on so many different levels. I mean, so there's the, the moral, there's just the basic moral question of demanding that grandma and grandpa sacrifice their lives so that I don't lose my job, which has, it's fraught with its own moral problems. But let's just, let's just set aside morality for a moment and just go utilitarian about this and ask if this makes any sense at all. So a lot of this

is built on a number of assertion, a number of presumptions. One, that all we have to do to rescue the economy is just to go ahead and open up and quarantine a certain number of people. Well, that's highly debatable. This was going to be the initial approach of the Netherlands and Great Britain. And they abandoned it very quickly because they saw that it wasn't tenable. Second, it posits that really the coronavirus isn't that big a deal for anyone who is sort of under 60 or not already immunocompromise. This is how, you know, you hear people who advocate this call, who persistently call the coronavirus like the woo flu. They keep trying to compare it to the flu. No, it's a lot more serious than the flu when it gets symptomatic. I have friends who have

this disease and it's more serious than the flu and they're younger than me. It also posits that you can really contain the 60 million or more Americans who are at greater vulnerability, because it's not really the 60 million or more Americans. It's also the 60 million or more Americans and everyone who regularly interacts with them, like children, like grandchildren. What you're talking about is this very weird, incoherent aspect of performative bravado Twitter that is leaked outside of performative bravado Twitter and is thankfully not being taken seriously by Republican lawmakers so far as we can see. But it really is astonishing. Another aspect of this is this sort of conviction and you just see it repeated all over the place that, well, you know,

there are going to actually be more people who die from their recession who will die from coronavirus. Again, completely totally speculative. But what's interesting, You know, again, so much of this is people, it's performative Twitter, zero research, zero thought. It's interesting that when you actually look at the data regarding morbidity and mortality in during recessions, oddly enough, traditionally it's gone down. In other words, recessions do not lead to increased death in the United States. And so on every level, this is weird, strange, silly, evil, and yet it has spread to a degree that I never thought I'd see. Like, if I was reading the advanced scripts for 2020 to adopt Jonah's construct of various TV seasons that we're in these days, if I'd read an advanced script for 2020, and part of it was, oh, in March, a chunk of mainly the MAGA right is going to be resurrecting Logan's run themes to save

the Trump economy, I would have said that's just too far-fetched. And yet, here we are. Jonah, do you feel like that was, A, I mean, a acceptable narration of Logan's run, but also, B, that is some of the more extreme conversation being had. I will note, I mean, the lieutenant or Dan Patrick in Texas did speak to it pretty bluntly, but setting that aside, it's mostly been pundits, not officials. That being said, there's a lot of people on the right who are giving the lesser version of that, which is that there needs to be some balance between guns and butter on the economic scale, you know, versus saving every single life possible to save at the expense of all of the economy that you find some balance in between, but see New

York. Yeah, so I don't want to do a moral equivalence thing here, but I'll start with the Logan's run part. Just to point out one important plot thing that David got slightly wrong, Logan, if memory serves, and it'll be really bad if I got this wrong. Logan is what they call a Sandman, who's one of the police who, in fact, forces the mandatory 30 or 35-year-old cutoff for automatic euthanasia. And the euthanasia rituals are kind of awesome.

They put you in the body bag while alive and swing you around from the ceiling and blow you up, which does not seem cost effective in a society worried about scarce resources. Regardless, it turns out that a lot of people are run away, and so Logan has to chase down one of the runaways, and for him to go undercover to find the sort of underground railroad network of the people who escape, they have to set his body clock to expired. And so, like, he literally has to be, like, due for termination so that they'll believe him and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, like, the computer won't set it back and he gets pissed and whatever. But anyway, all right, on to the more important issues. I'm reading the Wikipedia. I'm reading

the Wikipedia plot summary right now. And your memory is uncanny. So I hereby retract and apologize for my faulty 30-year-old memory. That would have a big impact on me. If I added a DVR, I would have watched the Farrah Fawcett scene quite a bit. But because it came out at the golden age of Farah Fawcett, which is when I was like eight. But anyway. I think that Logan's run to y'all is what Gattaca is to me. I think that's about our generational gap.

Yeah. Gattaca had a big impact on me. Gattaca was great, by the way. Yeah, although anything that mainstreams Gore Vidal loses two letter grades with me. But anyway, okay, so where were we? I think in some ways, you know, our friend Jonathan last at the bulwark a while back made this case about how Trump was going to end up corrupting the pro-life movement. and I kind of think that he couldn't have predicted the exact means of the destructor in terms of the COVID crisis, but he made a very solid point in that you now have,

and let me back up, the thing that frustrates me the most about some of the, as you put it, the extreme conversation on Twitter and seeping into cable news, the thing that bothers me the most about it, and I plead guilty to. to arguing a little bit in bad faith here because I can't know every single person's motives. But one gets this distinct impression that they are more concerned about giving Donald Trump back his good economy talking point for re-election than they are in fact concerned with saving the economy. And the only reason I believe that is because the people who are racing out front to make this the economy matters more than old people argument tend to be the people who

defend Trump on everything and are otherwise considered pretty staunchly pro-life. The idea that Rusty Reno from First Things is out there saying reopen the churches for mass and that there are more important things than your life in this world. And there are more important things in your life in this world. But for pro-lifers to be arguing that it's, not worth these points to the GDP is really, really a weird turn. And it gives you a sense of the corrupting power that Trump has had in certain quarters on all of this. I am, and I brought this up on the dispatch podcast last week. I wrote a G-file about it. I'm actually very sympathetic to the arguments about the economy, but they're pushing me in more of a Jim Pithakukas area, which is to say,

let's blow away our concerns about deficit spending right now and keep people on payrolls. It is not to say, let's do the World War I equivalent of just sending the troops straight into a machine gun nest. And the more you look at the, you know, if this were, as David mentioned, if this was a possible alternative, you would see some other country in the world doing it. but it turns out that it just makes no sense once you look at it closely and the idea that you're going to order a lot you know millions of people to go out there and it's not just old people if you have if you have diabetes you know we got a lot of obese people in this country it's you have all sorts of people you have people who smoke are more susceptible to this there are all sorts of ways that you can die from this and or get gravely gravely injured by it um the idea that everyone is simply because when Donald Trump declares we're reopening the economy that everyone shows up to work, that or shows up to buy things is just ridiculous. And so it's this alternative reality, you know, it's like, as I often say,

when people come up with these great ideas, they're impossible, it would be awesome to watch Superman fight the Hulk. But, you know, that's not our reality. And this idea of like, we can just declare that it's like the same people who think that daylight savings times actually adds more. daylight to the day, seem to think that if Donald Trump simply declares the economy reopen and the virus over, that that's all you need to do, it's, it's, it's magical thinking. It's creepyly weird. Well, and the other, the other thing, Sarah, real fast, they, it's, you use this

phrase guns or butter. If you reopen too soon, you've got neither. I mean, you've just got neither like it's not the case that you reopen and then you're going to have your economy with just some extra deaths what you're going to have is a lot more deaths and not the economy and so it's what they're presenting is a false choice as i've been pointing out at least in my own household to my cats um the right now the economic underpinnings are more or less going to stay the same if you increase the death toll substantially that hits some of the economic drivers, you actually can take

away parts of the economy a la Spanish flu in 1918 actually killed off a significant segment of the working part of the economy. Therefore, the economy was going to take a hit. Right now, by voluntarily shutting off the economy, all

of the pieces and gears actually stay in place. They just have to be turned back on at some point. That's different than removing gears. Right. Steve, I want to talk approval numbers with you. Because on the one hand, they don't matter. And on the other hand, they do.

And on the other third hand that I magically have, they're not a totally accurate portrayal of what's going on. So I'm going to read you a bunch of numbers for a second, all right? So I have Reuters, Gallup, Monmouth, Politico Morning Consult, They're all showing about the same thing. Morning Consult went from 43 to 45% uptick in Trump's approval rating. This is, by the way, his approval, not the handling of the crisis. Monmouth went up to 46%, also not much.

Reuters had him going up 4% to 44%. Putting this all in context, after 9-11, George W. Bush's approval rating shot up 39 points. So 4 points, 39 points is one important aspect of this. Also on handling of the crisis, Gallup is now showing Trump with a 49, sorry, 49% overall approval rating, what I was talking about before, but a 60% approval rating of his response to the crisis. Monmouth has it at 50% said he was doing a good job handling the outbreak. CBS, 53% Trump was doing a very good or somewhat good job. Are these numbers real and do they matter?

Yeah, I would say the best way to answer that is to say that they're real. They matter right now, but they're likely temporary. I think what you're seeing, and certainly this is not an original insight, borrowing this from people who are a lot smarter about these things than I am, which is a lot of people, you're seeing something of a rally around the flag effect here. You know, for a long time, the president was telling people that there really wasn't much to worry about, that we didn't have to do this, that it was under control. And then suddenly, with that Wednesday night address in which he made several factual errors, he made the full turn and said, no, this is really important. We're all in this together. We've got to defeat this.

He laid out in that speech, you know, a couple of sort of baby steps of things that he would have. us do collectively to take on this challenge and then gave more details in his remarks that Friday and has now, with his daily briefings, continued to offer more. And I think a lot of it is just people, particularly people who are not paying attention to sort of minute by minute politics looking up, seeing the president on their screen, getting the sense that somebody's doing something, that this is a big problem, number one. And polling shows that increasingly people believe that this is a big problem and the partisan gap that we had seen among people who thought it was a really serious problem and people who didn't with Republicans thinking it

wasn't quite a serious. Democrats and independents thinking it was serious. That gap has diminished pretty considerably. So I think that's what you're seeing. Matt Grossman, who's a political scientist, also pointed out that part of what's boosting the president's numbers is an increase in the number of Democrats who are saying he's doing a good job on this and also in general. I think it's likely that you won't see as many as one out of four Democrats in three months or six months giving the president those kind of approval ratings. On the other hand, if somehow we navigate this successfully and minimize the deaths and escape what I think is likely to be a pretty significant economic crisis,

Maybe this temporary boost ends up being more permanent. I certainly wouldn't bet on that. And part of, I think part of the reason that we're seeing the approval numbers tick up is that the White House has adopted a new strategy, which is instead of sort of this haphazard statements coming from some people, sometimes you don't really know from where the president randomly giving an address in the Oval Office, they're holding these daily briefings. And the president sits at the White House press podium,

which we have not seen, basically for three years of his presidency, the White House press briefings in general were shut down, and he was talking to the press a lot, but it was fairly haphazard. So these briefings are now happening more or less daily in the evenings. Just to give you some of the ratings numbers, by the way, during five of last week's briefings, more than twice as many people tuned into the networks

than had during the corresponding time a year ago, Friday's lunchtime briefing reached nearly, well, over 8 million viewers on just Fox, CNN, and MSNBC alone. Normal viewership at that time would have been under three. Yeah, Sarah, just to jump in, just to jump in on that point, I think that's a very important point. People are paying attention, you know, this is a crisis, people are paying attention. They're hungry for information in a way that we haven't seen in quite a long time. But the key there, I think, is that the president is surrounding himself with public health officials and medical professionals, and he's letting them do a lot of the talking. Now, of course, the president comes out and takes shots at his enemies and talks about how nobody's ever done this any better, and he's really great at this and yells at the media.

But then, usually after that, but often interspersed with that, you hear from Deborah Bricks. you hear from Anthony Fauci, you hear from these folks who speak with great authority on these things and I think are reassuring in their kind of straight factual analysis of the problem and description of the steps that need to be taken to address it. So the president, and if you look at the approval ratings that people give those figures, they're in the 80%. you know so the president is doing well when he is i would say stepping aside and letting them talk to the public oh if i could give deborah burke's like 150% approval rating i would i am

i am such a huge fan on just like every aspect of her existence so david uh today actually k u o w which is an npr affiliate in puget sound said that they will no longer air those briefings live because of misinformation. I'm curious on your thoughts on how the media is doing right now with those briefings, with handling this in general. Well, I mean, I disagree with that decision. As Steve said, that Trump's bluster is frequently interspersed with a lot of very helpful information.

And if you pay close attention, sometimes Dr. Fauci will kind of very politely fact-checked the president in real time. So if you watch the entire briefing, you'll often get a pretty. accurate impression of what's happening, even if you have to skip past the president's bluster a bit. You know, I think overall I would look at what the media is doing. And I'm actually pretty impressed with the breadth and depth of the coverage. You know, the if you, one of the flaws of sort of broader conservative media is that every story eventually becomes a story about the media in conservative world. So, you know, the media reports U.S. strikes Qasem Soleimani. And within 24 hours, the conservative line, media line is U.S. strikes Qasem Soleimani,

media freaks out. And so there's always sort of this media story about the media that just permeates the conservative side of the world. I went and I looked at a previous newsletter because there was a lot of anger last week in particular over what to call the virus. and which was just lighting up the right wing side of Twitter and some of the intersectional left sides of Twitter. And so I did something that I hadn't really done before. And I went and I looked at New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC as sort of a representative, here's a representative sample of mainstream media. And I looked at their home pages and I counted up all of the stories that they did. And how many of them were about the what you name the virus.

and how many of them were about how bad a job they were claiming Donald Trump was doing. And what I found was across the four sites about, you know, 130, 140 stories at any given time about the coronavirus, of which maybe about four were about what to name it and about, you know, eight or nine or ten about the president's performance. And a huge amount of information about epidemiology, the possible spread, how to protect yourself at home, what is life like at home for those who are working from home, what are small businesses doing, just an enormous amount of information. And so when you look at the media as a whole, it's actually, I think, been pretty impressive. Now, you can nutpick all day long. You can find the one or two commentators who've been particularly irresponsible or the five or six

commentators who focus too much on what you name the virus. You can amplify that, all you want and say, look at how irresponsible the media is. But overall, from a standpoint of informing the public and instructing the public about what this is and the potential outcomes, the media as an entity, I think, has done a pretty good job in an atmosphere of real uncertainty and a lot of mystery, because how many of us knew anything about epidemiology? Two and a half weeks ago or about viral spread two and a half weeks ago. And so overall, I would say it's been pretty impressive with the caveat that you can always nutpick every single industry. Yeah, I want to go back to the press conference thing for a second. I think these press conferences

are almost a perfect example of how we have defined deviancy down. or rather up, maybe, when it comes to how Donald Trump conducts himself. And the fact that, as David put it, like if you listen really closely sometimes, you can hear Anthony Fauci correcting the president. Think about how outrageous that is that the CDC director feels like he must employ esoteric rhetoric to subtly correct the president without the president realizing fully that he is being corrected. We are at a stage now where you, you know, first of all, it is so obvious that he is craving his rallies. He is very frustrated that he can't do this, you know, run the

campaign against Biden that he wanted, that he can't talk about Mueller. You read his Twitter feed and you feel like some jilted lover is going through their box of old photos crying because he's constantly like retweeting Greg Jarrett and, you know, the guys at Breitbart about controversies he'd so much rather be talking about. And when he does these press conferences, he has to do his, you know, his own version of esotericism, which is like, you know, talking about nationalism and borders and all of these. kinds of things. He repeats himself constantly about all that. And that's all fine. I mean, it's not fine. A normal president who cared most about dealing with this crisis wouldn't be

doing any of that. But that's priced in. But the fact that he is up there basically filibustering and making people have to tilt their heads and squint and listen incredibly closely to figure out whether what the President of the United States just said in this raging crisis is bullshit or not is a real problem. And the fact that he seems more grown up than he ever has before is grading on such an unbelievably low curve. And, you know, it's one thing when everything is just about, you know, politics as entertainment. And I've been talking about that for three years and fine. And we're all used to that. This shouldn't be about politics as entertainment at all? And so the press has overreacted in a bunch of ways. It's done stupid stuff

in a bunch of ways. And my problem with this whole debate is that there's no dialectic to it. People don't talk about the catalytic feature here. When the president violates norms, it invites other people to violate norms. And then both sides just points at the other side's norm violations as if they're the only ones. And it becomes a race to the bottom. We've been seeing that for three years. And, you know, and that's it. It is what it is. We're not having an election about all that. But that it's still going on during a freaking pandemic where we end up having to, in order to show our fealty to a partisan narrative, start talking about putting old people out on ice flows, figuratively speaking, is outrageous, particularly for the pro-life side to be doing this. Righteous Jonah is my favorite, Jonah.

I mean, it's, never that scene in the dark night rises where the Joker sets fire to a pile of money, like two stories high? That is what pro-lifers are doing when they start talking about how these people should have the courage to sacrifice their lives to save the goddamn GDP. And Trump is encouraging it. He is not showing any statesmanlike instincts whatsoever. And the press are trolling him and he's falling for it. And the press loves the frisson of excitement they get from trolling him. And it is this destructive race to the bottom. And it is it is gut-wrenching for me sometimes.

I mean, I really can't watch these press conferences sometimes. Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. I mean, I think you could point to individual reporters in the briefing room who you know are doing this to make a show. I mean, Jim Acosta hasn't been in most of these briefings, at least not that I've seen. Caitlin Collins has from CNN. But by and large, I think the questions, if you're a reporter in the room and you hear the president say something that's just manifestly untrue, you have an obligation to correct him on it. And it's a weird phenomenon for me as somebody who's been pretty skeptical of the president from the campaign on, but has wanted him to succeed. I start every press

conference in that same place. I said this to my wife when we turned on a press conference the other day. I said, it's so strange to me that I start and I have such hope that he's going to actually do this right and he can get through it without peddling so much bullshit. And then you get the bullshit. And it is every single time. I mean, you know, David wrote very compellingly about that initial Wednesday night announcement where the president had basically three main policy he was rolling out and he got them all wrong. I mean, all of them wrong. Arguably, the most important job of a president in a crisis like this is to provide timely accurate information to a public that's craving it and then also to manage the response to the crisis.

And he's not only, as Jonas says, providing that timely accurate information. As often as not, He's providing information that his team has to go and correct. And that, I think, is having a demonstrable effect on the way that we are collectively responding to the crisis. I want to take a small nugget of that and potentially disagree, which is that I get frustrated when there are political reporters in the briefing room, asking political questions, trying to fact check in real time the president. For, they're not gotcha questions. I don't mean it in the Sarah Palin sense of, you know, who's the leader of whatever country. But they are for the purpose of being able to say later on air, the president misspoke on this or didn't say that right. Instead of, there's actual information that we need from the people on that stage, from Birx, from Fauci, from others.

And I would like to see more, either more questions or more reporters in there who are on the health beat ask. some of those, for instance, how is GM going to be making ventilators? Are they partnering with 3M, for instance, to be able to have a clean space? You know, some of these more fundamental questions than simply a debate over Easter. Even though I think the debate over Easter is relevant, there are other things that are as well. Well, jumping in on that point, I do think the Easter example is one where the press pressing a bearing down on that is is vital uh because the president it now seems pretty plain just pulled a date just pulled a date out of his head um and look we all won an end game to this thing we all want this to be we we all want to transition out

of our homes for those of us who are under you know the shelter and place type orders we all want this to end. And I got really tired of seeing all of this commentary after the president said Easter about how, well, it was hedged here and caveated there and there was some nuance and subtlety to it. Easter is the term that people are going to remember here. And if that's a date based on data, if that's a date based on what we're seeing in diagnoses and the trends, fine but share with us the data the diagnoses the trends why does somebody like dr fouchy think it's reasonable and he had to go back and sort of say this is all flexible but that word easter it still resonates with people i mean that's people don't hear the nuance they hear the top line and

so i think on that point it was absolutely absolutely fair to hammer that down because the last thing you want to do when people are already very discontent eight nine ten days into this thing the last thing you want to do is just dangle false hope right in front of them that's based on nothing i don't think i i disagree importantly i think the data is going in the other false hope the data is going in the other direction i mean it's not even that they didn't produce the data to support this supposition that we could just get out of this by easter to pick the date the data all is pointing very strongly in the other direction. And that's why you saw this sort of explosion and reaction from the public health officials,

public health experts, in response to the idea that we can just pick a date because we need to pick a date. And to bring this just full circle, and Sarah, I don't mean to jump in in front of you, but this goes back to why the beginning of this conversation was so important. It's not just that you have some folks, you know, that, you know, that, you know, know, might be outliers in a normal political context, floating ideas that might be dismissed in a normal political context, whether it's Dan Patrick or whether it's some of the nationalist populist right, making what could be self-interested arguments. The problem with that and the problem with dismissing that is that the president is listening. The president pays attention to those people.

And I think that early on, you look at the way that the president was reacting, it was very reacting, it was very clear that at some point he stopped and listened to public health officials who said, Mr. President, you know, sort of rhetorically grabbed him by the lapels and said, Mr. President, this is what's going to happen and you have an obligation to try to stop it. And he did that for a while, even if I didn't like the stuff that he was peddling in some of the briefings, if I didn't like the fact that he was getting so much of it wrong, he did that. and I thought that was important. I think what you saw was this rising cresting of the number of people that he thinks of

as in his base pressuring him to say, you got to give us a date here. You got to get out of this. You got to put the economy on similar footing. And then the president went out and amplified those sentiments. So it actually does matter what folks like that are saying because the president often goes out and says the last thing that he's been told. told before he does one of these briefings or, you know, a rally in an earlier part of his presidency. I guess my disagreement.

Go ahead, Joe. I just, so the, the, Sarah and I had a spirited tech exchange after the dumb people ate the fish tank cleaner or whatever that stuff was, right? And I agree, you know, in a calmer frame of mind, I agree with Sarah that at the minimum, the way, was it Heidi Presbyowski, whatever, Presbella, that can never remember how to pronounce her name, the way that was originally put out there was trolling and was sensationalistic. because when people actually take a substance, ingest a substance that only sounds like the substance the president is talking about because they are not too smart, the idea that the blame all belongs with the president, I think is unfair and wrong, and that's fine. But it's sort of like David's point about the word Easter being the only thing that people

take away. The president of the United States, despite the fact that his uncle was a really impressive physicist, has no friggin' business hypothesizing about effective drug strategies. And it'd be one thing if it was a different guy who actually listened to his science advisors describe a different scenario. And he said, well, what they tell me is that this could actually work and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the actual study that, you know, that a lot of this is based on was a study, quote unquote, study of six people who were, you know, where they were throwing everything but the kitchen

sink at, there was no control group for it. No one thinks it's like a particularly predictive study. And when you just start throwing this stuff out there based after spending three years convincing people that the greatest and most trustworthy oracle of wisdom is friggin Donald Trump's gut. And then you go out there freelancing this stuff. It is grotesquely irresponsible. And so the basic, my last been to my rant and then I'm done, I promise. The basic problem, and I have some sympathy for Trump, he's in a bad place and it's a bad position to be in and he'll be trying for any president. But his entire approach to life is maneuvering people in a semi-bullying way of promises and threats,

of BSing and over-promising and all the rest. along the lines of a real estate developer who says will tell you anything that you need to hear in order to put down a deposit on the condo. Of course you can get hardwood floors here. Of course you can get, you know, the sunken bathtub. You know, we can deal with that later, you know, just sign. And the way he is talking about this crisis is he's constantly like trying to inveigle people to get to yes about opening the economy or feeling good about things or talking the numbers down and it just is it casts a con it casts an amazing contrast on his first three years about how so much of his presidency was actually pretty susceptible to that stuff

and it's not anymore and this crisis is different and he has not let go of that basic approach to life which is that if you just keep selling and you know you're a bcing always be closing you'll you can like change reality around you and And it's not the right fit for someone to be dealing with this. And but that's where we are. It's why we can't have nice things. Okay, a couple points. I do want to do some quick fact checks.

Anthony Fauci's title is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He's not the head of the CDC. Deborah Birx's title, even though we didn't mention it, but I think it's worth noting. She is ambassador at large as the coordinator. for the U.S. to combat HIV-AIDS. Both of them are on the coronavirus response team. Second small fact check. So I'm aware of two studies on chloroquine. There's a current one going on with 800 people. There was one in France with I believe 40 people and one in China with 30. The one in China showed no difference. It had a control group. I'm trying to get the details of the

French one that had 40 people. That's the one that started all of this, which was that there was an uptick in the French one. But what was the one with six people? I remember reading that somewhere. I'm sorry for getting that wrong, but what was the one? I could swear there was one that had just had like six people in the city. I think there were six people who abandoned the French study.

Oh, that's what I'm misremembering. Okay. My apologies. Anyway. Thank you for that correction. This is what I'm here for. Now on to the debate, which I think is relevant, regardless of those facts, which is a weird way to.

phrase that as I say it out loud. David, to your point on Easter, there have been lots, you know, polls, et cetera, where people don't know how long this is going to go on for and there's a lot of confusion out there, whether it's going to last for a year, whether it's going to last for six months, or whether it's going to last for three more days. I think that saying, we're trying to make Easter work, that's April 12th. Now, we may get to April 12th and it may not work, sets a standard of where people's heads are who actually are looking at all of these numbers. I understand that it's a very relevant thing to talk about and I have no problem with

reporters trying to pin it down. I think they did. You have Fauci, you have the president, you have Burks, everyone weighed in that that is a flexible date, but it is a date that everyone would like. You know, I think that giving people some standard by which to judge when they might be going back to work when this might, you know, the stay-at-home orders might end, is a good thing, even if it's not April 12th, by the way. So to your point on false hope, I guess I do slightly disagree with that. I think that having some standard to judge by when people don't know whether they're stuck in their homes for a year is helpful. Second. But Sarah, you also know he can't do that because the governors decide. But that's different. What we're talking about is whether Fauci and Berks

and the president will stand up at that podium and say, we're looking at these numbers and we believe the curve is bending down. We suggest X, Y, and Z. I'm not saying they can, you know, order the governors to do something, but absolutely they are providing information to the public, including the governors,

on what is happening. For instance, the president said that he believes that everyone leaving New York City should self-quarantine for 14 days. That was not that every single governor then followed that. although Florida did Alaska has Hawaii has so there there's something in between an order to the governors and using that pulpit that he has with the ratings by which I mean the number of people watching to inform the public to gauge what is happening right now when again there are people

who think they're going to be stuck in their homes for a year so I think that's relevant two on the chloroquine point and I did we did have this text exchange I was very upset when the president said that, you know, everyone should take a moxacillin because I care deeply about us keeping our antibiotics, which we only have discovered actually very few antibiotics in the world and making sure that we don't render one of them totally useless. That being said, it's not like he went out and named some drug with absolutely zero information. There had been these smaller studies. There is now the 800-person study with a control group in France. They are using it as a experimental drug even in New York. So this idea that like he pulled it out

and it was not based on anything and he wasn't consulting with medical professionals isn't quite true either. It is something in between. I don't think necessarily you go out and say, hey, there's this experimental drug and it's definitely going to work. We don't know that either, which is what Fauci has said. But it's also not like he said take baby aspirin. Well, right. I mean, it's true that if there are things that if you squint and you look at them in a certain way, which is frequently the case with Trump, is it's what was, oh gosh, Jonah, was it Adam White who said, you don't want it, it's not taking Trump, literally, it's taking him hypothetically. that if you if you take Trump's words and you sort of say okay there's if I squinted this there's a way in which this similar point could have possibly been made better and that's the point well that's that's like the Ukraine call right I mean that was the

whole thing is that it was like reading into it what you wanted to be there that there was some strictly speaking textual support for it but no like actual support for it. Right. Exactly. And so again, with the Easter thing, look, I have absolutely no objection for President of the United States in an interview to say, you know, we are looking at numbers and we're all in this together. And if we do everything, if we do what we need to do now, if we lock down the way your governor is telling you to lock down now, I'm looking at trends that are very positive. Here are the trends. Here are the numbers. And here are the numbers we're hoping to hit. And if we hit this number, and if we hit this, you know, we hit this

slow the spread by a certain level, then we can start to think about Easter or May 1st or whatever day. That's a very different thing from what appears to have happened, which is a time Easter, and then the backfill. And that's the problem that I have. It is not a date. We all want a date. We all want to know when this could end. But the question is, what are the criteria that are being used? And when we have a, we're in the middle of, you know,

day, it was like day eight of the, quote, 15 days to slow the spread when this came out. And the spread wasn't slowing. The spread was increasing. Yeah, but the difference is, David, y'all only want to date if it can be totally locked up 100%. This is the date. And we have, you know, 27 footnotes to back it up. And I completely understand that that's not going to

happen, especially a day eight. What there's a difference between 27 footnotes and zero. How about five footnotes? Like, how about three footnotes? A footnote. One footnote. Okay. Real, I don't want to leave the stimulus bill, which has still not been done as of our taping. and the House isn't set to reconvene until 11 a.m. tomorrow, although they could have an emergency session today, which is Wednesday. But I want to take a specific aspect of this, which is as the, and Steve mentioned this earlier, as the partisanship closes, there was a, so 68% of U.S. adults agree now that the virus is a serious threat. This includes the majorities of Democrats, Republicans, whites, minorities, young, old, urban, suburban, rural.

The partisan gap has closed substantially. It's now single digits. At the same time, we saw, you know, Joe Biden held a press conference from his basement studio earlier today where he said that the second round of stimulus bills could include the New Green Deal that he's been proposing.

There was a discussion over the $15 minimum wage being put into this first round, emission standards on the left. On the right, Ohio and Texas use the vice president's statement that all elective procedures, medical elective procedures need to be delayed to put out an order with criminal penalties saying that no elective abortions could happen in Ohio and Texas unless it was to save the life or health of the mother as sort of I'm going to call that the Christmas tree of the right. So, Steve, do you think that either side is being effective? Will this backfire? Or is it just reindeer games that we need to get used to? I think those two things are totally different. If you look at what you've heard from those governors,

they have talked about not allowing elective abortions. And as you accurately just described, the operative word, there is elective, right? And that is the big discussion. And you're talking about bans on elective surgeries of all different kinds, elective procedures of all different kinds. So I actually think that that's consistent. I can see why people would object to it, but I think that there's a consistent logical argument there. I think what Democrats did, particularly in Congress, Nancy Pelosi on the House side, is attempts to just lard up a bill that they know must pass with a bunch of superfluous sort of Christmas tree items that they've wanted for a long time. And it's very instructive that

Joe Biden would say that in the next iteration of this, we can have a Green New Deal. I mean, that is, that's one of the more offensive things I've heard in this entire discussion. It's crazy to think that we would add onto whatever the next wave of this kind of government relief might be a pet project of not just the left, not just the center left, but the hard, hard left that has been roundly criticized and debunked. The numbers are insane. That we would include that in any part of this discussion in the middle of a crisis, I think is grossly irresponsible and suggests to me that Joe Biden shouldn't be doing the stuff he's doing. I can't believe Joe Biden's people have him out giving these sort of pretend president speeches and responses.

He's not doing himself any favors. And if I were giving you advice, I would tell him to step off the stage, to wait to let this all play out, and then to point to things in his background and his experience that he could use to contrast himself with the way that Donald Trump has handled of this. He can point to the 2009 economic recovery and the fact that he was put in charge by Barack Obama of handling that. Now, that argument won't appeal to somebody like me who thinks a lot of that was wasteful and it wasn't particularly handled well, but I think it could appeal to a broader range of voters. He can also point to the 2014 Ebola response, and President Obama put him in charge of that. I think there are things that Joe Biden could say at a later date

that don't make him look so small. Right now he's trying to get in the conversation and he doesn't look like a would-be president. He looks like a politician who's trying to get into the conversation. Yeah. Oh, just one quick point on that. I suspect that they're very,

I don't know about worried yet, but mindful that he is still like one minute. I mean, forget Bernie Sanders. He's done. I know he wants to be in the debate in April. But he is like one serious, uh, disturbing misstep, you know, something that really makes him seem like he's not all there away from a draft Cuomo movement. The, there's a new infatuation with Cuomo.

They think he's the man of this time. And in an age where, I'm not going to get on my parties rant, but in an age of the parties were stronger, I think you'd actually see a draft Cuomo movement before the summer starts. And I honestly think that if Biden cared more about the country and the party than he does about sort of his tunnel vision to be president, which is very understandable and human, he would actually entertain the idea of figuring out how to give the nomination to Cuomo. But that's just me. Well, Sarah, doesn't that echo our advisory opinions conversation from Monday? there's such a huge contrast between a person who speaks with the majesty of the presidency from the White House and a guy who's talking as a talking head on television or from his

new basement studio. It just, it's going to diminish Biden even if his messaging was effective, which is not. I think that's true. And they're trying to tell the numbers of what they're getting. They had four million views on one of their videos. Ron Clayne is sort of their Anthony Fauci figure right now for these Biden videos, who was the Ebola czar. And I totally agree with something that you said David earlier, which was that it's very similar to the State of the Union response. It's an impossible task, and then you fail at it quite predictably. But on the flip side, I understand why they don't want Biden disappearing. I think if I were advising that campaign,

what I would tell them is to give it a little more time. You've got a while until November. The nomination is locked up. It's okay to disappear for a few weeks. Continue holding Teletown halls with supporters, with, you know, fundraising, with young people. He's doing a Beers with Joe thing, I think, today or tomorrow over teleconference. Great.

But the idea of trying to hold daily press briefings to shadow the president has almost only downside at this point. Okay. Last question, very important. This one comes in from a longtime listener named Jonah Goldberg. What is everyone's quarantine five o'clock cocktail these days? Steve? Well, I mean, I think you probably all could predict what mine is, but I want to give people a range of options. I didn't even see this trap we were setting for itself.

This just gives me an opportunity to talk a little bit about how great Spanish wine is. I will note that we've had a number of emails asking for a Spanish wine podcast, and I will just say, hold on, we have not ruled it out. If there's popular demand, we could in fact go there. So I have three. Why does your wife bother emailing you this when you, can just ask you in person. These are not wives.

Did I not forward them to you because they're real? And I suspect that these handful of emails are speaking for tens of thousands of people across the country. So I have three different recommendations or at least telling you what I would like to drink. And they reflect sort of the ongoing economic uncertainty because I, Frankly, I can't afford to drink the kind of Spanish wine that I would like to drink anymore. So we have downgraded pretty dramatically. My fancy Spanish wine that was unaffordable before, but is certainly unaffordable now, is a wine made by Muga.

It's called Pradoinea. It was just named by James Suckling, who is a wine expert, as the number three wine. in the world this year, and I think it very much lives up to that billing. The problem with it is that even at total wine, it is $69 a bottle, so unaffordable for most people. The second one I've been drinking is Emilio Morrow. Very good wine. It was sort of a regular wine that we like to drink in. When we lived in Spain, it was about 18 euros in Spain. You can get it for about 25 at total wine here in the United States. And then the third one is a cheap one, a Monastrel, Old Vine Monastrel from Tarima Hill, also available at Total Wine, and it's only 14 bucks, give or take.

So each of those is good. And we've been sort of dabbling, usually staying on the cheap end of things because of this uncertainty. Okay, David, I hope you can do better because I'm really sorry I asked Steve. What's your cocktail? That was, man, that did nothing to help the dispatch street cred as men of the people. I'll tell you that. 14 bucks for a good bottle of wine? Not bad.

Well, I mean, all I heard was when I heard $69, I just, I tuned out on the other one. No, so just bringing us back down to Earth. My day is filled with entirely too much diet Dr. Pepper, the best diet drink. And then the evening cocktail is the same evening cocktail as pre-coronavirus, which is a small dose of maker's mark on the rocks, the brown liquors. That's, Jonah and I have that share that, that taste in solidarity with one another. Jonah? Yeah, I'm a brown liquor guy as well. I am less an American whiskey and bourbon guy than David is.

I like primarily the single malt, particularly the sweeter single malt. I do not like, although I'm trying to acquire a taste because if I can at least stomach it, it'll force me to sip it more slowly. But the sort of Lagovulin really pety scotches are not for me. They taste like you made some sort of, you made tea out of your lawnmower bag. I like the Glenmorangie, sherry cask finish, Balveni or Balvaney, people pronounce it differently, are great. Glemmerangi also makes these things called La Santa and Quinta Ruban. One's a sherry cask, one's a port cask finish.

They're really, really wonderful. also what you can do is you can put normal single malt scotch in a glass that you had that you had been drinking red wine out of and it kind of gives it that finish anyway that's as close to a mixed cocktail as I'm going to get on this and also there's always just the drinking to forget Irish whiskey Jamison's which sorry David it's the it's the Catholic of the two major Irish whiskeys and Bush mill is being prodigues of St. Whiskey, as everyone who's watched the wire knows. And I find that mixed coxed the worst thing about most mixed cocktails is having to tell your parents are gay. I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. I don't mean that. But I'm not a big fan of big frufey, clever mixed cocktails. I do like a good martini. But I find that to be a social drink, not a drink that you're watching the apocalypse alone by. Well, in defense of American bourbons, well, in defense of my, they don't need any defense for me, but in defense of my taste for them, I did grow up just miles from the bourbon trail in Kentucky. So for me to turn my back on those Kentucky bourbons would be to betray my heritage and upbringing, and far be it from a Berkian conservative to do that. And Sarah, before you go, can I jump in with one? I will say I grew up in Milwaukee drinking beer. Beer doesn't sort of work for me as much as it did when I was a toddler.

Body by PAPS. Yes, exactly. But for the beer drinkers who might be listening, there is a very, very good new dogfish head light beer called Slightly Mighty. that is outstanding, it's not sort of that in-your-face super hoppy IPA, but it's a very good light beer that doesn't taste like a light beer. And Dogfish Head is also transitioned and is making hand sanitizer, so good to reward companies that are doing good. Okay, I was just going to say, David, as a Texan,

we appreciate you drinking Diet Dr. Pepper, our national drink. in the Republic of Texas. So if you're a listener of advisory opinions, you already know this. But for our dispatch listeners, I am seven and a half months pregnant. So, you know, on the one hand, being quarantined, actually kind of nice. I feel like a meatball with toothpicks, you know, sticking out of me most of the time, moving around anyway. But when it comes to not being able to enjoy an evening cocktail as we're stuck in the

house all day, that's rough. However, I have invested in a fine, fine ginger beer and the giant hand-squeased OJ, giant grocery store, hand-squeezed OJ. And I have to tell you, having that on the deck in the afternoon when the weather's nice and the cherry blossoms are out, no finer cocktail, gentlemen, no finer. You know, when I had to do this class with my wife about, you know, expecting, expecting couples as if, like, somehow there's a distribution of labor that it's equal between the husband and the wife, they went around the room, they asked everybody, what's the best part, best and worst part about being pregnant, again, as if we were collectively pregnant. And my answer, my wife's answer, for the worst part, was not being able to drink. and my answer was automatic designated driver and now you've robbed your husband of that

I know poor Scott does not get a designated driver now except up the stairs you know like all right thank you all so much for listening again subscribe to our podcast at Apple podcast or wherever you're getting your podcast from please rate us it not only helps us

but it helps others find our podcasts. And we will see you again next week in our basements or otherwise.