The Dispatch Podcast - Biden’s Big Beautiful Cover Up | Roundtable

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Sarah Isgur is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and Michael Warren to discuss Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s new reporting out of Original Sin on Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.  Plus, Dispatch Capitol Hill reporter Charles Hilu joins to break down the House's "big beautiful bill." The Agenda:—Big beautiful explanation—No tax on tips?—Biden’s Original Sin—Media accountability—“The media gets a C minus at best.”—NWYT: Is AI taking entry-level jobs? Show Notes:—Rep. Keith Self on the “big beautiful bill”—Scott Lincicome on AI and jobs The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠⁠⁠The Dispatch⁠⁠⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—⁠⁠⁠click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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What a run! This champ is picking up speed. But they found a lane. Phenomenal launch into the air! Absolutely incredible! Air Transat! Fly the seven-time world's best leisure airline champions, Air Transat. Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Sarah Iskir. We've got Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and the Mike Warren. plenty to talk about today, what was the big beautiful bill passing.

We'll also talk about jobs. And who knows what else we'll get to today. Well, let's start with the breaking news. We have our reporter, Charles Hilloo, here to explain that bill that has now passed the House. just barely squeaking by taxes, spending. Charles, will you give us just a quick read on what all is in this bill that has passed the House and is now expected to pass the Senate?

Sure, Sarah. So this is basically the entire legislative agenda for Donald Trump's second term. It has taxes, spending, funding for other types of things that the federal government does. And I'll start with the areas of agreement. It has stuff for border security spending. It has stuff for defense spending.

Those are things that Republicans broadly agreed upon. So those were the easy list. But then there's also the permanent extension of the Trump tax cuts, which were set to expire at the end of the year. Should this bill be enacted, it will extend the Trump tax cuts permanently, and those tax rates will be locked in basically in perpetuity. And then, but also on the tax side, there was another bit of controversy. back in 2017, the Trump tax cuts, they cap the state and local tax deduction. This is basically a tax write-off that benefits people living in blue states with high city and state taxes. And it capped that in 2017 at $10,000. But these Republicans from those types of states, they noticed

that they had this, they have more leverage, basically. So they pushed leadership to raise that cap. And that's now a $40,000 cap. So that's basically the tax side. There's also, also some other stuff in there that Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail. No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, as well as this sort of tax write-off for seniors that's supposed to be his promise of no tax on social security. And then the spending battles were sort of the big things. In addition to extending the Trump tax cuts, what they wanted to do was put forth one and a half trillion dollars in spending reductions so that they could appease the spending hawks in the House GOP conference. And the primary lift was $880 billion within the jurisdiction of the

House Energy and Commerce Committee. And people were afraid because that would, because that committee has jurisdiction over Medicaid. They, they, they didn't want to touch Medicare and Social Security, but they, they realized they kind of had to make some changes to Medicaid. So some of the main things in there are work requirements that now begin in at the end of the year in 26, December 31st, 2026. And then they also do make some changes to the way that the federal government reimbursed the states and the share of how much federal government pays for Medicaid versus how much the states pay.

So those are the main things in there. There's also some rolling back of a lot of the Biden green energy tax credits that they put forward in the inflation. Reduction Act from a few years ago. So that's basically Donald Trump's second term legislative agenda. And what's expected to happen in the Senate now? What's expected to happen

in the Senate is basically the Senate probably mangles this and they might need to do the entire thing this whole song and dance over again in the House. Because they've, Johnson, Mike Johnson has insisted that the Senate and the House

are working very close together on this, that they're almost in lock step, but there have been a lot of senators who have said that they really don't like what's in the House package right now. Like Ron Johnson, for example, says that one and a half trillion dollars in spending reductions isn't enough that he wants to return to pre-pandemic spending levels, which would be a much bigger net reduction. So he's threatened to vote against the bill in its current form. Meanwhile, on the other side, Josh Holly, Republican from Missouri, he wrote this op-ed in the New York Times, objecting to the Medicaid reforms that the bill does.

make. So he's threatened to vote against the bill in its current form as well. So there's definitely going to be some changes that the Senate's going to make. And then they're going to have to send that back over the House and then we'll see what the House does. And then one thing I should also mention is that in this whole process, another thing that's in the bill is an increase to the statutory debt ceiling. What is that basically the debt ceiling caps how high the national debt can be. And that and every so every few years in the face of a growing national debt, Congress has to raise that debt ceiling to avoid the country defaulting on its debt, that would lead to financial and economic catastrophe. And what we're waiting for basically is the ex-date. That's the

date when the government can no longer take on any more debt and it absolutely has to raise the debt ceiling. There are a few factors that go into this, revenues, cash and the Treasury Department's bang, basically. So we're not exactly sure when it's going to be, but it's thought to be sometime in either August or September. So if it happens in August, that's when Congress is out of session. Both houses, they're back home in their districts and their states. So Scott Bissent, the Treasury Secretary, has asked Congress to raise the debt ceiling by by mid-July, basically, in order to make sure they have enough room to do it and also to

avoid a financial shock to the market that would come with a last-minute raising with the debt ceiling. So they kind of have this deadline of mid-July. They've said they're going to get to the president's desk on July 4th, but now that the house has passed it, they have. have to send it to the Senate, then it's going to make their changes, and the House will have to approve those changes. Whether they can do that in about a month and a half is an open question.

All right. Charles, thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you. Go get some sleep. Thank you. At the dispatch. That was a big, beautiful explanation. It was good. Yeah, golf flaps all around. I've been following, I've been eating, living, and breathing this for the past two weeks.

All right. So, Mike, I'm going to start with you here because. I don't know. Maybe I'm speaking for the audience. Maybe I'm not. But I feel like covering Congress at this point has gotten pretty pointless. Like, really, the debt ceiling? They keep arguing over this. And then they always raise it. And the threats and everything from both sides never end up coming to fruition. This is like kind of like government shutdowns. It's all turned into Kabuki theater. Like, why do we even follow this anymore? spoken like a true judicial branch supremacist I am now I think on the whole I tend to agree with you right I mean this is all of the theater of will the Republicans in the House pass it seems to be I don't know it seems to be theater right because they end up passing it there I will say I you know to defend Charles and his coverage of this Hill for us as worthwhile. I mean, where the numbers actually fall on these questions, how, say, the salt deduction actually gets hammered out, what cuts to Medicaid. Those things do matter in a sense that those are programs, and that's money that is going

to be spent or not spent. There's their tax rates that are either going to be jump back up or not. that affects real people. And Congress does have this actual role here. They will pass something, presumably. The president will sign it, and it will become the law. And so it does matter. This is the state tax deduction idea.

State and local tax, yes. Right. So if I owe $10,000 in state taxes, I can deduct those from my federal taxes. but if my state decides to charge me $100,000 in state taxes, I would like to deduct all $100,000 from my federal taxes, and that ends up being a federal subsidy of state taxes. So that's what the argument's about is where exactly that number should be somewhere between $10,000 and all the money.

I guess Jonah as a conservative, what am I supposed to feel about salt deductions? because remember, I'm from a state, Texas, that has no state income tax. So why am I subsidizing California and Illinois and New York to charge all of these taxes to their folks that just gets taken out of the federal treasury? Because states like New York and California have historically massive congressional delegations and they got this into the tax code. Look, on the merits, there is just no justification for it, certainly not full deduction.

I mean, like, I don't know if someone can have a nuanced case for like some marginal sort of defraying of cost, but like all the federal government has been doing is, or taxpayers have been doing, have been subsidizing the profligate, inefficient, bloated bureaucracies of places like New York and California, which has been bad for New York and California. I mean, that's the thing. It's like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, where, um, where, where you hide the real costs for stuff. It's like, like, like, why healthcare in part got so expensive in this country. If we gave everybody a hundred percent, uh, business lunch tax right off, uh, expense account at the dispatch with no cost cutting to it whatsoever. So, like, you got reimbursed 100% for surf and turf or for sandwich. People will be ordering a lot of lobster. And the lack of accountability for these

state governments is one of the reasons why they have gotten themselves into such a sort of bureaucratic mess. So there's no, on the policy grounds, there's no argument for it. On the politics grounds, the future of the Republican hold on Congress, which is in doubt anyway, goes through New York State. And if New York State loses the five or so Republicans that are there who have very vulnerable seats, and those guys claim that they will lose if they lose on the salt stuff, that's their clout. And so as politics, it's really easy to understand. As policy, it's just really stupid. Steve, let's talk about no taxes on tips. To Jonah's point about Lobster, isn't everything a tip now if that passes?

Yeah, the dispatch will be moving off of JustWorks and paying everybody just in tips now so that we can reduce the actual total amount of... My babysitter works for free. I just pay her in tips, you know? Thank her, you know, as a gratuity. Look, I mean, there are sort of, first of all, it's solving a problem

that didn't really need to be solved because not a lot of people paid taxes on tips, if I can say, before this. Second, it's going to complicate matters tremendously for companies who are looking for workarounds. Anytime you make a change like this, it opens things up to creative accounting or to loopholes, and we'll see, I think, lots of creative accounting here. Steve, I think you've hit on part of the issue here that causes this, which is people didn't use to pay taxes on tips because tips were in cash. The problem now has become that tips are not in

cash. So when you pay a tip in credit card and there's this paper trail or you pay it on Venmo and there's a trail, now a lot more people do have to pay taxes on tips because the company can now see that you got a tip and they don't want to, you know, have the IRS banging down their door. There's been on and off threats about going through Venmo to crack down on this sort of cash economy that's, again, no longer cash because you're doing it with a paper trail. So I do think that's where it's coming from, that basically we were all okay with people not paying taxes on cash tips because there was sort of an inherent limit on what that could look like. But not really if we're doing it with Venmo and credit cards and everything else. Yeah, I mean, I think that's sort of the retrospective rationale.

That's not really how this came to be. Donald Trump had a conversation with a service worker in Nevada. during the campaign, who apparently mentioned for her frustrations at having her tips taxed, and I think literally went out on stage after that and said that he would eliminate taxes on tips. I don't think this was, I don't think anybody did sort of the kind of deep analytical dive on this to rationalize it the way that you have. Look, even if you think that there's, that there's some rebalancing to be done because of the changes in the way that people are tipped. Explain to me why somebody who's working in the service industry and makes most of their

income on tips now doesn't pay taxes, whereas somebody working in landscaping who gets paid the same amount of money is going to be subject to taxes on the work that they do. I mean, why, where is, how does that make any sense? Make that make sense to me. It doesn't make sense. Like, I think, I think more broadly, I mean, there are problematic parts to this bill. There are some good things in, in this bill, as is always going to be the case when you have something of this magnitude. But the big picture here is that this is a failure. It's a failure of government Washington. It's failure of congressional Republicans. It's failure of the Trump administration. It's a failure of congressional Democrats. It's just a failure of Washington. And what we're doing, I say this is somebody who has basically never met a tax cut he doesn't like. I'm for tax cuts, pretty much all tax cuts at all times, because I think the government is too big. And cutting taxes allows you to make a more compelling case to restrain spending. But at a certain point, that argument doesn't work. It sort of collapses under its own weight

when you have the kind of profligate spending that we're seeing here. And that's what we're seeing. This isn't a serious discussion about spending restraining. I mean, I understand why you had Chip Roy and others making the case for Medicaid reform and for spending cuts or at least reductions in the rate of growth to Medicaid into some of these other programs. But this is not a serious effort to actually challenge Washington's spending or to be serious about the debt. I want to read the beginning of a tweet from one of the Republicans who opposed the spending. And just put it in broader context. This comes from Representative Keith Self, who represents Texas' third congressional district. He's a Republican.

He was skeptical throughout the process of voting for the bill. And he tweeted, this morning I took what may be the toughest vote of my career by voting yes on the House reconciliation bill. I came to Congress to fight Washington's out-of-control spending. It has been my top priority since my first day in office. We must save America's future generations from financial ruin. Congress took President Trump's incredible policies and paired them with more Washington spending in another must-pass bill. Let's just say, like, that is not what happened here. The idea that this guy is presenting Donald Trump as the champion of fiscal restraint is nonsense on stilts.

Donald Trump is the candidate who in 2016 announced that he would not reform entitlements and went after Republicans like Paul Ryan and others who favored entitlement reform. Entitlements are the reason that the debt is on the trajectory it's on right now. Unless we get serious about reforming fundamental structural reform to those entitlements, we are not going to be serious about debt and deficits. The fact that Republicans took that off of the table and then picked and made little tweaks around the edges suggests that they're not really serious about entitlement reform or the debt and deficit. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden. and loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people

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Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. all right so this is past the house it'll go to the senate then it'll go back to the house we've got a ways to go here which is what makes congress so beautiful and so frustrating if they were doing their jobs i want to talk about the next big story of this week which is the release of jake tapper and alex thompson's uh book original sin this was about the decline in Biden's mental acuity, starting much, much earlier, you know, maybe before his presidency, but really coming to a head in the fall of 2023. And the people in the White House and Democratic strategists and operatives who covered it up and hit it from the American people, boy, is there a lot in there. But Jonah, I just want to start. you know, Jake Tapper has said he brings a lot of humility to this conversation that he feels

like he was not as tough as he could have been on this question. There's been plenty of clips of him on the one hand asking tough questions about Biden's mental with itness. But on the other hand, there's also clips of him sort of shrugging it off. You know, an interview he did with Laura Trump where he pushes her, you know, saying that it's a conspiracy theory, basically. What grade do you give the media, all the media, whatever media you want to define it as, based on what we know now? You pulled out of the problematic phrasing at the last second there, because, like, one of the things that's frustrating me is, you know, Jake Tapper is a friend of mine.

I'm a colleague at CNN, all that stuff. But the way in which a lot of people have turned Tapper into, the media, which is really kind of crazy when you think about it, in part because his co-author is like the guy who just won an award for being the guy who was really aggressive in covering Biden's infirmity and age, right? So like, like is tapers, if tapers the media, what is Alex Thompson, right? And so look, I got a little over my skis last week on this because I am so tired of the way the right talks, a lot of people on the right talk about the media these days. At the same time, the media screwed this up. I think that the easiest charge and the

easiest one to prove isn't that, I don't think you can say that the whole of quote unquote the media was in on a cover up. You can make that claim about, I don't know, Joe Scarborough. You make that claim about a whole bunch of liberal pundits, you know, like Jen Rubin and that kind of crowd. is obviously the case with which Jake has clearly copped to is that they just really weren't that interested or that aggressive on this, right? Well, there's the Fox News effect side. As soon as Fox started diving all in on every gaff that Biden made, you could bet that the rest of the media then was going to not only back off of it, but pour cold water on it.

We've seen this happen over and over again on the origins of COVID or anything else. and they've even, there's been some reporters who've said, who've described the Fox effect that like there's a lot of pressure that once Fox starts covering something to make sure you're not part of that. Yeah, there's also the, you know,

Hadass Gold, who's at CNN, and then, you know, I'm going to get in more trouble with CNN. She had this line, you know, she's like a media correspondent, and she had this line a while back saying, it's really difficult to cover the president's old age

when his opponent is a lying felon, yada, yada, yada, yada. And it was like, That's supposed to say that quiet part out loud. And whether you hate Trump or not, really should have no bearing on whether you are aggressively covering the senility or alleged sinility of the President of the United States. And it's just obvious to anybody who's paid attention in the last 45 years that if Biden had been a Republican, that the media would have been far more aggressive on this. far less grudging. What I don't think is very convincing, and this is part of the thing that gets me frustrated with a lot of the right-wing media criticism these days, is you can't have it

both ways. You can't call it a really successful conspiracy or cover-up when we've had polling for over two years saying that the American people, including a majority of Democrats, think this guy is too old and not fit to run for president again. It is a really remarkably unsuccessful. successful conspiracy, if that's the conspiracy. So you can't have it both ways and say the media is incredibly powerful and controls the narrative and say, this is proof of it, when in fact, the narrative got completely away from them in that debate was for most people paying attention to politics, not a revelation so much as a confirmation of what they suspected and believed for a long time now. And so media gets a C-minus at best, if not an F. I mean, it depends. Again, I hate

locking everybody into one catch-all on this. But the, if you're going to, if you're going to pool the grades, it's like a D. So in hindsight, of course, the media, and again, we'll just footnote that term. I mean, we're the media and we were very good on this topic. National reviews, the media, and they were very good on this topic. The dumbest thing they did was not lean in on Biden's problems because, of course, he would have failed to run for re-election or at least had some real challenges for the nomination if they had been covering it properly the whole time. I think that's part of what people mean by conspiracy. They don't mean that literally nobody knew about Biden's health problems because obviously Fox News was covering it. Their point is that that's

the only way the American people were learning about it was because of Fox. And that's why then their argument would be like you have to listen to Fox because nobody else is telling the truth and you know you can roll your eyes at that or push back on that but there's this interview

that Alex Thompson did that is jaw dropping where he has these sources from inside the White House you know remember this moment he has where Biden messes up you know again foreign leaders names and you have the

cons guy come out and say you know he doesn't doesn't have a Ph.D. in foreign relations. He's just that effing good. And everyone's like, what? And those sources for Alec Thompson inside the White House were saying they couldn't believe how gullible and how willing to go along these reporters were. They were sort of like hoping that someone would actually figure out what they had to do for their jobs they felt like, which again, that's a whole separate, like, issue about government service that was not your job. You worked for the taxpayers, not the campaign. But they were basically, like, trying to wink

at the reporters and be like, but you know, you know you need to dig into this, right? But the reporters wouldn't. That's a pretty shocking moment, I think, Steve, where it calls into question that even in our era of so much transparency and cameras everywhere how could you have so many people who were so blinded by partisanship totally by the way as I say mistaking their own interest because their own

even if you wanted to defeat Donald Trump the worst thing you could do is what they did which was try to pull Biden over the finish line and then failed to do so. They elected Donald Trump as much as anyone else. But wow. I mean, really? Yeah, I mean, Sarah, I mean, that's a really important point, I think.

I think there were so many different explanations of sort of the media behavior in this context that it, you know, we're wise not to sort of fall for the monocausal explanation. the if you you've mentioned several of them the fox effect things of that nature i also think a big part of it is access um people who are working on the white house beat didn't want to be cut off by the biden administration for reporting on this and asking these questions and uh so a lot of them didn't um and when they were told the president's fine they sort of took it and and run with it and shared that. I do think, you know, if you look at the sort of broader media failure, I think Jonah's exactly right, if this were a Republican, this would have become the obsession story, right?

I mean, we all know what it looks like when the Washington Press Corps is obsessed with something, and there's sort of no escaping it. If you're the subject of that reporting, whether it was Iraq and WMDs, you know, we can come up with any of a number of examples. And this was never that, and this was never really close to that. I do think, to Jonah's point, you know, some of the attacks on Tapper and Alex Thompson have been unfair. Not only was Alex Thompson given an award for his coverage in raising these questions early, he also, in his speech accepting that award, took the Washington press court a task for missing it and for not getting this earlier. Tapper has been the subject of some

really unfair things. The clip that you mentioned earlier, Sarah, of his interview with Laura Trump was from the 2020 campaign. And she was saying, you know, Joe Biden's sort of obviously senile. And we all know that. And Tapper says, you can't make that claim. How do you know that? Well, I think Joe Biden in 2020 was certainly showing. signs that there were problems, and it was fair for Republicans to suggest that there was more there than we were seeing in public. But I think it was also fair for reporters to push back and say, like, hey, we don't have evidence that this guy is actually senile at this point. You know, there was another attack on Tapper for...

Although worth noting, Tapper's also said he's called Laura Trump and apologized to her for that interview and said that he was wrong. Yeah, he was very aggressive. in his pushback for sure and said that it was inappropriate. Yeah, he said that in several interviews. But he's also been attacked for supposedly taking a shot at the Wall Street Journal because in an interview he talked about the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal published a really good piece, a well-reported piece by two of its reporters, that got at this in a way that other papers didn't. And the fact that that, as our friend Megan McArdle wrote in her Washington Postcom, the fact that that story didn't get a bullet surprise, I think is a shame,

is an oversight. But when Tapper was interviewing somebody about that Wall Street Journal report, he asked a question about the Wall Street Journal and has taken a ton of grief for seeming to throw an elbow at the Wall Street Journal, but they've taken his question, they've edited it selectively. He was quoting a White House communications director who had taken. a shot at the Wall Street Journal and Tapper asked Adam Schiff in an interview about what the White House Communications Director had said. His quote was taken, it was sliced and diced, taken a little piece of it, and used as evidence that he was hostile to the story that they were reporting. I would argue that he was not, in fact, hostile to the story that he was reporting. So I think on the one hand, there is this big media failure story. It's a big part of the story. We shouldn't lose sight of the bigger scandal and it is a big scandal, which is the White House. and what they did for years and years and years. And this book, Names, Names gets into details.

This is, I think, one of the biggest scandals in recent American political history. It should be discussed. As such, the Democrats who defended them, I think, should have to answer for it. They should not be sort of given a pass. And I do think this is a forward-looking story. It's a backward-looking story for sure, because we're now understanding the gap between what we knew publicly and we knew a lot because we have eyes and we could see what was happening. But now with this reporting, the concerted effort on the part of the White House senior Democrats

and others to deceive the American public to reelect a guy who had no business being near the Oval Office is a scandal of the first order. Mike, that is the story here, really. Like, how did it get so close? you have Mike Donlan going out publicly and saying these people don't spend time with Joe Biden I spend time with Joe Biden he's being paid $4 million while the campaign manager

is being paid $300,000 because Joe Biden said pay him whatever he wants you have Adam Schiff I mean trashing Rob Herr's reputation who had been the special counsel who in his report said he felt like even though there was evidence that Joe Biden

had retained classified and national security information that he did not believe that they could win in a criminal trial after Joe Biden left office because a jury was likely to find that he was a well-meaning elderly old man with a poor memory. I mean, Adam Schiff went on TV.

He went on congressional hearing saying that Rob Her was naive or a partisan hack, that he clearly had political ambitions of his own, that he was a MAGA prosecutor, gone rogue. You had the White House making calls privately to try to destroy Rob Her. Rob Her's report looks like maybe he undersold it in hindsight. And again, full disclaimer here.

I worked with Rob at the Department of Justice. Rob is a friend. So I'm not sad to see the vindication of Rob Her here more than a year later. But this is outrageous. Yeah, I'm outraged. I mean, I want to concur with Steve that the bigger story here, I mean, you don't need me to add on the, you know, the media should have done better pile on. And it does get a little much for me because a lot of the people who do that are in conservative media and like, it's like they're complaining about it. Like, pick up a phone, go to the White House and do your own reporting.

Like there's nothing stopping you. It is not, it is not difficult in the, in the big picture. of it to ask people questions. Also, just one quick brief, one quick gripe about that point. There are a lot of people who call themselves media critics who are basically right-wing Brian Stelters, right?

Brian Stelter, the gripe against him was that he calls his old media critics, but 80% of his old CNN show was about Fox News, right? There are right-wing media critics who would not dream of criticizing the favorable softball coverage of Donald Trump of Fox or Newsmax or any of those things, but then hold mainstream media rightly to a standard that they will not hold their own team to. And that's the

thing that I find so frustrating. But anyway, go on. I'm sorry. No, no, no, I agree. Look, again, as I said, Steve is right that the bigger story is the actual cover-up by people close to Joe Biden, by people in power in the Democratic Party. And I think that this book that Thompson and Tapper's reporting really gives us the names, the color, the, the whole shape of what was going on. And people should remember Mike Donnell and Steve Roshetti, Valerie Biden, Jill Biden. I mean, I think there are a lot of villains in this story that it doesn't. make me scratch my head that all the sort of right-wing media critics seem to be missing that point because I think it's more comfortable to go after the media, but that the folks around Biden

who propped up this man, I think for their, you know, it's clearly for their own personal gain. This was, but Joe Biden was their ticket. I mean, the Biden Inc. moniker is real for that close number of advisors who frankly aren't sort of the top tier. Like those were. all those were all with Obama in 2008 and 2012. This is sort of the B team of Democratic advisors, and they, their, you know, their nut was being made by Joe Biden being president. And I think that their incentives to do the right thing or so warped here, and as well as the Democratic officials within the party people, you mentioned. Adam Schiff, but, you know, people like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer were just a little,

they were just Johnny come lately. Johnny's come lately on, on this. And I think that this book is going to do a lot to expose that. The question I have, the looking forward question, is turn it back to the media. Will we in the media, will others in the media learn the lesson from this? do not take the vague Baghdad Bob answers to your questions as a given. There's a lot of problems when people in power don't give you access, that they don't answer your questions, and maybe this, the lesson here, I hope, probably hope against hope,

is that people in the media will be much more critical, much more, will not take those answers at face value and will push harder because they've seen now what the circling of the wagons has. Yeah. And this is especially true when what you're being told is a direct contradiction of observable reality. Yes. And can I say real quick about Alex Thompson, real quick about Alex Thompson, which is that-

Can not get reporters to stop talking about the media side of this? Okay. No, no, but he is proof, actually, because this book is full of sources. in Biden world that talked to him. He has proof that if you are critical in your reporting, that you will not lose access to those people. In fact, they will talk probably even more. Okay. So, no, no, I have a question. Yes. All right. Fair enough. Jonah, in a, first of all, anyone who's interviewing Adam Schiff, if he were a Republican, if Senator Schiff were Republican, every single interview he does for the next year would be,

are you prepared to apologize to rob her? And that's not going to happen. And, that just drives me crazy. But Jonah, in the wake of Watergate, there's some very similar stuff to this, right? The media felt duped. They felt like they bought the line that they were being given and they sort of had this like never again thing. And you have the rise of investigative journalism and sort of muck breaking is the wrong term, but this idea that like everyone is lying to you. And that kind of media relationship with government, on the one hand, has been good. We've learned more about the bad things our government does in the 50 years since Watergate. But on the other hand, it's also been bad. It's driven down a lot of trust

in the institutions of our government. There's been a lot of sort of false muckraking. And then at the same time, they're not even getting the big story, which is the President of the United States is not compisementis. So when I think about this story moving forward, A, I'm not so sure that even the logical result of this, more skepticism towards government is a good thing for the Republic. But also, the Democrats who should be held most responsible for this, first of all, there's the Biden Inc. team. They're gone because Joe Biden's gone. That's the whole reason they were part of this is because they knew they would be irrelevant

as soon as Joe Biden was out of the White House. So they couldn't let him be out of the White House. Then you have that next layer, as you say, like the Adams shifts, the Nancy Pelosi's. But they have no problem now saying that Joe Biden shouldn't have been president, that he was bad. Because again, Joe Biden has no power. So in that sense, it looks really different

than Bill Clinton in 1998, where... A, Democrats are, you know, vilified Monica Lewinsky, feminist said that Bill Clinton was somehow the real feminist in this story. And then even when Bill Clinton left office, he maintained that power over the Democratic Party really up until just a few years ago. Because of Hillary, because of Bill Clinton's age, he remained a very powerful figure in the Democratic Party. That's what sort of, I think, should have led to the extreme. embarrassment and discreditation of so many Democrats who, for decades after Bill Clinton left office, refused to say that he had done anything wrong. But then once he didn't have power anymore, now they're willing to say that we mess that story up. I think you'll see plenty of

Democrats say, oh, yeah, Joe Biden, terrible. And all of his aides, terrible. Oh, my gosh, we were fooled, too. I wish, you know, I saw Representative Rocana. He was on ABC on Sunday. And he said, yeah, I really regret that. I wish I'd done more at the time, you know, and said more at the time. There's no political downside to doing that. So it's not like I think there's going to be a lot of bravery out there. I think we'll see Democrats say Joe Biden sucks. And then everyone's going to be like, oh, wow, how brave, how authentic. When in fact, there is zero cost to that now. Going back to your original point about hounding Adam Schiff, I agree with you entirely, the best analogy in semi-recent memory is the way the press covered Valerie Plame.

And any official of the Bush administration, that was the first question, the second question, and the follow-up question, the second question. In press conferences, on Sunday shows, you know, are you going to apologize? Are you what, you know, who's responsible? Is anyone going to get fired? That kind of stuff. And you're not going to see that about Rob Hur. I thought it was interesting that you went back to Watergate because I, one of the things I'm really kind of shocked has been left out of this conversation, not on this podcast, but in D.C. in the last, you know, two weeks is that this is not a new story. This does not mean I'm trying to forgive or or excuse anything the Biden people did, but, you know, there's a wonderful book called Splendid Deception about FDR's,

cover up of the fact that he was in a wheelchair, full disclosure, my mom was the agent for that book. And over hundreds of thousands of photos of FDR were taken. By the time that book was published in the, what, the 80s, there were only two known pictures of him in a wheelchair. Now there are four. And the press willingly went along with it, even as he got in worse and worse shape. It's a little more forgivable in the middle of World War II, I guess, right? Different kind of time. Also, it didn't go to his ability to do the job. Being in a wheelchair for the previous. Right. But I mean, his polio did get worse and he suffered with these bouts and stuff and all that kind of stuff. But the wheelchair isn't the point. He'd been in a wheelchair

for decades. Right. Yeah, no, yeah, progressively worse. Right. But like JFK, he had his Miracle Max Jacobson, who was also called Dr. Fieldgood, who was shooting him up with amphetamines all the time and was high as a kite for a big chunk of his presidency. We didn't find out about that until 1972 in the New York Times reported on it. Woodrow Wilson was president of the United States and he was in a frigging quasi-coma for a while, you know. But those are all examples of failure of the American people to get the information that they needed. But in the immediate wake of them, it's not like reporters were like, oh, we need to do a different job. That's what was different about Watergate, is that you actually saw a change.

in the media environment. You didn't see that after Wilson, nobody thought they'd done anything wrong or changed what they were doing. You didn't see it in the wake of FDR. That's why it took 30 years, 40 years for a book to come out, 10 years for the JFK

story to come out. Nobody was really going to change what they were doing. It was Watergate where the media suddenly felt embarrassed. Now, you can argue that's because it was a Republican. Sure. No, I think that's absolutely right. I mean, I think that part is right. I think, I saw somewhere, I don't know if it's

confirmed or anything like that, but someone was talking about how Nancy Pelosi might run again, is that right? Like, it is time for that whole, you know, like Thomas Coon, right, has this theory about scientific revolutions that basically, he's the guy who coined the phrase paradigm shift. And he found that the way that science advances isn't with like some breathtaking innovation. It's that you have to wait for the old guard to die and the new people to move up. And so I'm in the weird position of despising David Hogg with the incandescent fury of a thousand sons. But I think he is right that the Democratic Party needs a lot of fresh blood. I just don't think that the blood that he wants to put into it will help fix the problem.

I think it'll make it worse. But they need to move beyond a lot of this stuff. And so does the press. The press is a big chunk of what we call the mainstream media is there's this weird thing, right? where a lot of people on the right think the mainstream media has this immense power to manipulate perceptions and narratives. And really the only people who agree with the right about this are people in the mainstream media. They like this story of their immense power. And the problem with it is like sort of have the Spider-Man problem. In Spider-Man, he's told with great power

becomes great responsibility, they start second-guessing themselves because they can't handle the idea of reporting things that will make the narrative, that will make events going away they don't want it to go. And so they start trying to steer things. Stop it. This, by the way, is the phone call that I got during the Russia investigation. I got a call from a high-level reporter at a major outlet who said, we want to be really careful to get this right because this story would help Donald Trump. Yeah. And I think that's a huge part of the Biden story. I mean, it's just a massive, massive part of the Biden story. And I'm not trying to excuse it. I'm just trying to explain it. And I think that that is shame on the media for it. Also, like, I mean, like,

taking a step back, shame on America for getting into a situation where we've got a president that makes so many people crazy, either crazy for him or crazy against him. Right. I mean, like some of this has to do with the way Trump has screwed with people's brains. But the actual job the press was supposed to do, they didn't do. And that's shame on them. And shame on more importantly, the people around Biden in his administration. Okay. So my Mike, what cost will Democrats pay for this? If any, is there, will we see any effect where we'll go in five years and say, oh, yeah, well, you know what started all of this?

It was that cover up of Biden's health back in 2023 and 2024. No. Steve? No. Did you lock the front door? Check. Close the garage door? Yep.

Installed window sensors, smoke, and HD cameras with night vision? No. I... And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection, and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web. Uh, I'm looking into it.

Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from Tell Us for peace of mind at home and online. Visit tellus.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply. Calling all book lovers. The Toronto International Festival of Authors brings you a world of stories all in one place. all in one place. Discover five days of readings, talks, workshops, and more, with over 100

authors from around the world, including Rachel Maddow, Ketourou Isaku, and Kieran Desai. The Toronto International Festival of Authors, October 29th to November 2nd. Details and tickets at festivalofauthors.ca. I want to do a little bit of a longer and not worth your time. The unemployment rate for college grads has risen 30% since September 2022, compared with about 18% for everyone else. And one of the reasons that may be contributing to this is AI, right? This idea that a bunch of the jobs that those entry-level college grads were doing can be done better by a computer at this point. And Jonah, you wrote about a piece of this recently.

that if you're a factory boss and there's all these potential employees and some are hardworking and some are lazy, you'd like to look for a shortcut in hiring and a college degree, for instance, which takes four years and it can be hard to get and you have to be hardworking to get the college degree can be a nice proxy, a shortcut.

And so then you hire people with college degrees. But as college degrees become required for those jobs, they also in some sense become cheaper. And I don't mean financially cheaper. Obviously, that didn't happen. But I mean cheaper in terms of the labor, grade inflation, how many people are getting them. And so once again, it stops being a proxy and then you're looking for different proxies. I'm curious if you think, A, that the AI part of this is worth our time, if the idea of like an impending crisis of unemployment and young people and college graduates in particular is a crisis that's coming around the corner that we're not paying attention to because

we're so busy in culture war stuff that we don't see something that has nothing to do with partisanship. This is going to affect everyone across the board if this crisis comes to fruition. What do you think? Yeah. So in terms of everybody getting a college degree, Tom Sol said it well. You have a real advantage if you stand up at a football game. If you're in the audience if you're in the crowd, but you lose that advantage if everybody stands up, right? So if everybody is a college degree, then all of a sudden, the value of a college degree is sort of meaningless. I'm skeptical that this has to do with AI. Actually, our colleague, Scott Linscom, had a great piece yesterday. His capitalism newsletter about how there's reason to

believe that AI is creating more jobs than it's destroying. He's very, you know, he's humble about it and cautious. But how much of this is a little like the, you know, those coal miners should learn to code. It may be creating jobs, but for different people. For sure. Oh, for sure. But that's the story of innovation all over the place, right? Yeah, which is why innovation can cause huge disruptions to democracies, for instance.

Yeah. I mean, the printing press created lots of problems. For monarchies. For monarchies? We can argue about the printing press later. I suspect that a better argument for, Why the college education, employment for college educated, people with degrees is ticked down has to do with the quality and kind of degrees that a lot of people are getting. But I just think it's premature.

I am skeptical about a lot of the AI stuff, both on the upside and on the downside. but I think it's worth looking at for sure. Like the second we get driverless cars, then you're going to get the disruptions that you're kind of talking about because like one in 10 people make a living driving something in this country. Steve, I think AI is a pretty good editor.

Not perfect. You still have to edit it. And it's not Google, by the way. You can't ask it to do the writing. But for the people who have figured this out, rather than have your junior person do a first draft of that press release or that paper or whatever else, you can have AI do it faster and better

than a 22-year-old who needs training can do it. And I think, you know, obviously I come from law world, I guess. I think about legal secretaries. Legal secretary used to be a very high-paying, very stable job. A partner would have a legal secretary for 40 years. They'd be making six figures often by the end of it. And it was sort of like a, you know,

a great white shark and it's remora. They would have this, you know, lifelong relationship together. But as computers came online, if you will, those partners who had had those long-term legal secretaries kept them. But the incoming partners never hired one. And so today you'd be crazy to go to school to be a legal secretary,

probably even a paralegal at this point. And I just wonder whether we're on the precipice of some really big changes in the economy that we're not prepared for. Yes, I think we are. And, you know, it feels to me like, to use your example, we're sort of on the front end of this. And of course, this applies to journalism too. You have a lot of media companies who are using AI to write stories to cover local town hall meetings. You know, I think there's potentially some real benefit to doing that for those publications. And if it means that stuff that is, currently going uncovered would get coverage, you know, if you can stick a microphone in a local school board meeting that's not being covered because of the disappearance of local press and give people a reasonable summary of what happened and then link to a transcript, people who want

to get that are going to get something that they're not currently getting. I think that's all to the good. The challenge, I think, and certainly, you know, we've been talking about this a lot internally at the dispatch, because on the one hand, there's tremendous, I think, potential upside and AI can be a very helpful tool. But it also, I think, will inevitably lead to more commoditized news. And we are not in the commodity news business. We do the opposite. We believe in sort of going out and doing the work and doing the research and doing the reporting and being in the room and giving people something that they're never going to be able to get from an AI transcript of something.

I think, you know, there's still enough problems with AI at this point that we're on the front end of the kind of disruption that you're talking about, Sarah. Because to use your example of a legal secretary, you know, it's certainly the case that you could ask, chat GPT or any of these other tools to produce a summary of a relevant, the case law around something that you're going to be working on in the future and probably at this point get a pretty good summary of it with links to relevant case law. On the other hand, there are still, you know, AI makes lots of mistakes still. It is far from perfect.

it will link to things that don't exist, it will make up cases, it will cite authors who haven't written the things that it says it's written. And I think it would be foolish in the extreme for a lawyer to rely on AI without sort of the oversight of actual humans reading and doing the work. I suspect that's going to change and probably change pretty quickly. And at that point in this world, you'll see even greater disruption. Mike, you and I are fine. We already have our jobs. We already have our careers. We're the legal secretaries who already attached, you know, we're the Ramora that already attached to a great white. You know, the people who already have jobs are fine when an economy shifts. It's that you just don't hire more people

into those jobs is usually how it works. So I don't know. I think we're going to have a whole bunch of 30% unemployment for recent college grads is bad. And again, forget even the job market at this point. I think I'm more worried about the overall stability of governments and not just ours. Again, whether you want to use the printing press

or other sort of large-scale innovations, the effects were not limited to economic. Sure. I mean, I don't know. Yes. Okay, fine. Conceded. I do think we're over-indexing the threat that AI has to jobs and industries with which we are most familiar. I think that margins, AI and these large learning, large language models, whatever they are, LLMs, the chat GPs and sort of things, like we can kind of see and understand. understand and grok, like, what that could do in these industries, but it seems to me, what I know and what I've read, that AI will have much bigger effects on, whether it's biomedical or other engineering industries in ways that I don't even pretend to pretend to understand how that will affect things. So my response to sort of all of this question of should we'd be worried about this is, I can't be worried about it. A, I don't understand it. B,

it's an innovation like any other, I think. And the market will figure it out. I can't do anything about it because, and I can't have an opinion about what to do about it because I don't understand any of it. And so I just trust that markets will figure it out if there's a shift in the legal industry. There's a shift in journalism. I'll just have to roll with it. But that's kind of how people in white collar professional industries have had to deal with these kind of developments, right? I mean, like the internet itself was an innovation that created, like destroyed certain jobs, but created all these other jobs like internet marketing that won't be around in 15 years. But Instagram influencer, as Bill Belichick has now learned.

I guess. Yeah, I don't know. I'm sorry. Like I just love is love is love, y'all. Yeah. Yeah. So it's funny. I remember Tony Curtis, there was a piece in People magazine in the early 90s that me and my friends would talk about all the time. Tony Curtis was at some red carpet event in Vegas or L.A. And he was, you know, probably 70-something and had two absolutely drop-dead sort of showgirl Bucksum beauties on each arm, you know, just total elbow candy. And probably, by 22 years old, and he was asked, who are these young ladies? And I reported, and he said, they're my biographers. And I think social, Instagram influencer is the new biographer.

Oh, and I should say to everybody in the spirit of vigorous self-promotion, if you haven't gotten enough of Sarah on today's episode of The Dispatch podcast, she was my guest on The Remnant this week. and we had a fun time giving out life advice and talking about due process and other exciting things. And with that, thank you so much for joining us

on the Dispatch podcast. Thank you, Jonah, Steve, and Mike. And we'll see you again next week. You know what I'm going to do.