The Dispatch Podcast - But What Did Trump Actually Do? | Roundtable

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Yes, the first several weeks of the second Trump administration has feltchaotic. Many a crazy thing has been spoken, declared, and tweeted.But on today’s episode, Sarah Isgur, Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French discuss what Trump has actually done. The Agenda: —NIH cuts causing chaos in the medical field —Foreign policy shift during the recent UN security council vote —Political favoritism —Should there be kid-free spaces? —Anti-woke chili will have to wait Show Notes: —Yuval Levin's piece for The New Atlantis on NIH cuts 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

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isger, and I've got the OG crew, David French, Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg. And we're going to do this podcast a little differently than some of our usual ones in that there has been so much sound and fury around Doge, around the first month of the Trump administration. I want to take inventory, but instead of, you know, the usual, I don't know, whatever it is, I want to actually talk about things that have been done.

So rhetoric doesn't count how something might, something, something, something doesn't count. It has to be, in the first month, something that was accomplished. And then whether it was good or bad or anything else that we can talk about. And then also want to talk about chili and kid-free spaces. But we'll get to that. We'll get to that. First up, Jonah, can you tell me something that the Trump administration has done in the first month and your thoughts about it?

Sure. As everyone knows, I'm a deep and granular expert on health policy. And so the administration's announcement that they were going to wildly cut the reimbursement rate for NIH funding of basic research. We'll see like a caveat, right? So before I'm going to head off Sarah's thing. You already know. You started with they announced. It's all pending. Like it has to, there's stuff that has be worked out with Congress. There's stuff that has to be worked out with courts. The simple fact, though, is that the payments, large amounts of payments have stopped. Like just the simple transfer of funding is all gumbed up. And even to the

extent that the funding is still going through, the budget planning is all gumbed up. And people are freezing things, not knowing what they're going to be able to pay for and what they're not. As you can imagine, everyone's holding on grants, on approving grants, because they don't know what the budget pickers are going to look like. So now the grant proposals are piling up, and that's going to be a bottleneck that is going to play out for a very long time to come. I'm going by a couple things.

One, I have a relative who is getting a PhD, finishing a PhD in molecular biology and has read me in on what this is actually happening in elite schools. The chancellor of Vanderbilt University gave a great statement explaining a lot of how this stuff works. Will you sing a few bars from that, by the way, just so we can get some flavor from the Vanderbilt Chancellor? Yeah, so the basic gist is the administrative overhead or what is known as indirect costs. Right. So like if you've got 20 different research teams at a university and each one wants a grant for the thing that they're studying, you know, Alzheimer's, pediatric cancer, whatever, they still share a lot of resources, everything from like lab benches and beakers and fridges and electron microscopes and all that kind of stuff. And so there's a formula that has been negotiated periodically over the years between NIH and these various institutions about what their indirect. costs are, right? How much of the, and the reason for this is that if they don't want people asking for grants to have to work out the math about how much of the overhead should be, you know, how much of the utilities should be included in this, right? And so what they end up doing is

if you ask for a grant of $100,000, they give you $150,000 if you have a 50% indirect cost thing, right? And some institutions have that and some have much lower ones. They're gutting that part of it to the tune of about $4.8 billion in savings, is what they're saying. But it's like a $9 billion cut all in all. Anyway, it's complicated. It's a significant percentage. And they're dropping it to the maximum that you can charge now is 15%.

And this is throwing the entire medical research sector into chaos. In Alabama, in particular, they're really freaking out because they have all of this, they do an incredible amount of NIH-funded research there. The third thing I'm going off of on this is, Yvall Yvonne did a wonderful piece for the New Atlantis walking through all of this. And one of his core points is that this is a perfect example.

And USAID touches on this too. We can talk about that too. Because in that cabinet meeting yesterday, Elon Musk said, They temporarily cut off support for Ebola prevention, but we turned it right back on. That's just not true. The reporting says it's not true. It's not true on all sorts of things like PEPFAR. The checks aren't going out.

The waivers don't matter to people because they can't get someone on the phone and they can't get the spigots turned back on. All sorts of NGOs have been sort of left-ling lurch and people aren't getting all sorts of HIV drugs and all sorts of things with Ebola. Anyway, so Yuval's point is like, these guys aren't going into this with this idea about how to reform government, how to make government better or make government more efficient. It's about trying to do stuff to the government, that the government is somehow the enemy and that their tears are delicious, their whales in protest are hilarious.

The performative stuff is what they're going for. and the pushback is its own reward. The funny thing about this is that these are basically the same numbers that the Trump administration proposed in 2018 the first time around. And back then, the Republican-controlled Congress and the Republican-controlled Senate vigorously said, no effing way are you going to do this. This would be a disaster.

This is unserious and dangerous, and they didn't agree to do it in a budget. So what Trump and Musk are doing here, Even if they ultimately don't succeed, they are doing something directionally that is causing massive chaos and even if it's all worked out in three months will have caused needless harm for no benefit. They could have gone in from the beginning and said, prepare yourself. In six months, we're going to do a system-wide review of how we do reimbursements. Get your numbers together. Let's figure out the best way to do this because there's plenty of things.

I'm totally opening the idea that this stuff can be reformed. The point is they're not interested in reform. They're interested in the performative confrontation. Okay, I have a few reactions to this. The first of which is to just share a funny story because I feel like once you've heard Yuval Levin's name once, you realize that everyone in conservative world is just constantly stealing from Yuval.

That's why I always try to give them credit because everyone knows where you get some phone. And like someone will quote you, but then they're not going to give you, then they won't know they're quoting Yuval. Like, it is possible that the entire conservative movement at this point is only Yuval Levin's brain

and then the rest of us siphoning off little chunks of it. And the other day, I wanted to invite Yuval to dinner. I don't know him super well. And so I asked Jonah for his cell phone number. And Jonah responds and is like, hey, I think this is it. I don't really know and I don't think he texts a lot or whatever.

So I text that number, assuming Jonah, like, must have known. and it's like hey it's sarah like do you want to go to dinner and i get this like really effusive oh my gosh exclamation point yes exclamation point response and this says more about me than it does about you've all in that i don't think anyone should be that effusive about going to dinner with me so i decide it wasn't yvall there's no way Yuval's that excited about having dinner with me and then i freak out how am i going to uninvite this person to dinner who's some rando and jona phone. But it was you all. And it was a lovely, amazing dinner, as David French can attest. But you must have said, this is Sarah Isger, not just this is Sarah, right? I did say it was

Sarah Isgar, but I never said, is this Yuval Levin? Like, so for all I know, it's someone in your phone, like some, you know, I should have said, I should have given you Cash Patel's number. Right. The idea of Yuval Levin sending exclamation points over text is still more than my mind. wrap round. Okay, but substantively, I guess my question to you, or the Steve and David about this, about Jonah's one, is, doesn't every

administration have a version of something that they cut that we don't like or that people don't like that will have potentially consequences? And I guess, so how different is this, although I take

Jonah's point about motivation, in terms of actual substance, And do you feel like this is different? I will start with you, Steve. I do think it's different. I'd be hard-pressed to come up with things the Obama administration cut. I don't think they did a lot of cutting. They changed some policies that had implications, but I don't think they did a lot of cutting.

And you can make an argument, and, you know, the Trump supporters will make this argument, that the only way to affect the kind of change they're seeking to affect is to go, you know, move fast and break things, as people have said, and is to do it. this kind of disorderly manner, because if you play by the rules, you're not going to achieve the results you want. I believe that's partially true, but I'm broadly skeptical of that. And I think there are real consequences. And, you know, one thing I think the proponents of what Elon and Trump are doing have to acknowledge is that there are tradeoffs here.

And this is one of the tradeoffs. There are going to be consequences to doing this that they had never imagined because they don't know the system that well. They don't know how this works in many cases. You know, I think what Jonah laid out and having done, on a little bit of outside reading on this. They saw indirect costs and thought the government shouldn't bear, the taxpayers shouldn't bear those indirect costs, period.

That should be on the universities. Universities have big endowments. This is what universities should do. So you can understand if you don't quite know how the system works, why that would be the first step in this. And on a surface level, it's not unreasonable to ask universities with big endowments to help share the cost. Having said that, as Jonah explained, this will grind to a halt many things that I think most taxpayers and most conservatives don't want to see ground to halt.

And the immediate implications for that are awful, as Jonah explained. And I think that the medium and longer term implications are negative two because you're putting Humpty Dumpty back together again here, I think, is going to take an incredible amount of time and effort. that could have been spent, and resources that could have been used in better ways. So, David, before I turn to you, I want to, this isn't great pushback. Obviously, I know DOJ better than anything else in the government. But for instance, the Obama administration did cut gun prosecutions. They moved a bunch of federal prosecutors away from gun and sort of violent criminal prosecutions onto white collar prosecutions.

this was in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. I think there's a lot of reasons one can see why a presidential administration would want to reprioritize those resources. And I think we think of it as like people, but it's money, right? It's all money. You have a limited amount of money to spend on federal prosecutors. If you could just buy more federal prosecutors, you would. So they moved money away from gun prosecutions, illegal guns, which presumably cost lives. You know, we're never going to be able to prove.

that like but for moving those prosecutors, they would have prosecuted this guy who went on to shoot this person with this gun, but they did move resources away from things that other people would have prioritized. David, why is this different? Well, I think what we have to understand about this is that if you're looking for a rationale

around any given decision, like any given grant, maybe you can squint and find one. But what we've been looking at here, as Jonah was talking about, channeling you've all, Jonah channeling you've all, there's nothing about this that it betrays any hint of really, truly deliberate,

intentional, precise thinking. What you have here is really a smash and grab type operation. And so what we're dealing with is something that is not so much motivated by money and savings, because if we were talking about actually being serious about tackling the deficit, we would be having an entirely different conversation that would not include tax cuts that could increase the deficit by orders of magnitude more

than the savings that we're getting from these aid cuts, orders of magnitude more. So what we're dealing with, it really is a malicious attack on the federal bureaucracy, a vengeful attack on the federal bureaucracy, a perception that all of this stuff is sort of the category of enemy. And if there is an enemy that we know the Trump administration loathes the most, it is the enemy within. And look, let's just be real here for just half a second. If the Biden administration had defunded Christian ministries to the extent that Donald Trump has defunded Christian ministries, which, by the way, have become a part of the international relief effort, in large part because of the work of previous Republican administrations

and the work of Republican and conservative religious liberty attorneys, cough, cough, that if the Biden administration had defunded Christian ministries, evangelical ministries, to this amount, and to this extent, this would be the war on Christians. At the beginning of Fox News on every Chiron, on every segment, it's one of the largest defundings of religious institutions that I've ever seen. We should point out, just like people don't so understand, Christian Ministries works with USAID. Yes, Christian Ministries cooperate and work with USAID.

And part of this is out of a long process that was, as the federal government got more into poverty relief efforts, one of the things that we were realizing was that the government is much less efficient and effective than various private organizations. So it was more efficient and more effective to fund private organizations that were assisting, say, refugees

or people facing difficulties overseas. And some of the most effective at reaching these folks were religious organizations, which had been blocked from receiving funding in generations past because of a misguided interpretation of the establishment clause.

And so we did a lot of work for very many years, to open up funding for religious organizations on the same basis that secular organizations were funded. And that was very effective. It was one of the better things that America has done as far as effectively reaching some of the most vulnerable people. And that's just all chopped out.

And what you've seen is Maga Christianity turn hard against these ministries. And it's just, it's really astonishing, but it's just layer upon layer of malice. And what gives the game away is the absolutely blunt sledgehammer way these cuts have been inflicted with no real regard for the merit of any given program at all. It's just a sledgehammer. Yeah, see, that I think is the key point when it comes to the NIH stuff, right, is like this isn't saying, oh, this DEI thing is bad. Pull that out, right? Right.

Although there's been a bunch of stuff. There's been some reporting. the economists had some reporting that, like, again, you had some 25-year-old going through and found studies looking at race or gender and said, oh, that's got to go. Well, as Sarah just recently pointed out when she commandeered the Remnant podcast, there's a lot of important NIH work that should be done on the sex differences and how they impact health. But regardless, like, these, these, I should note,

Yesterday there was a temporal, there was a partial lifting of some of the freezes of funds from a federal judge on some NIH things. Already there are like 50,000 grants that were backed up. There were left, you know, stacked up because of what's already happened. But regardless, there are other things that are still frozen. But any sort of reasonable person interested in governing, right,

Anyone who has this idea that this is my NIH, I am the responsible steward for this, would say, you know, the stuff about pediatric cancer, that seems kind of important. Let's not cut that right now. Let's give them a heads up that next year things are going to be different. And this thing about avian flu, maybe we'll keep that one too. That seems like relevant right now.

But, you know, this weird stuff about paleo phrenology, maybe we can lose that one. There would be some sort of selection bias, the whole thing. Moreover, they're doing this before their own NIH director, Batachara, who's a respectable good guy and like on the right side of a lot of MAGA issues before he's even confirmed, right? So he, this is all being done creating an even bigger mess for their own NIH director, who that is, who's going to have a hell of a hearing when every single senator and

congressmen, including, you know, lots of people from red states who get enormous amounts of this money, are going to be like, what the hell are you doing? And he's going to be, well, I'm not doing it yet. It was Elon, right? It is just no way to actually do serious government reform. It is, it is just simply for the performative, hear the lamentations of the women kind of approach, rather than anything else. And just to piggyback on that, I mean, I think that the challenge is look, I think we could go, probably each of us could go through and look at the list of grants. And if we did take the time to study what the U.S. government is doing in some of these areas, probably we could come up with a pretty big list that says like,

eh, that's not actually the government's role. We shouldn't be doing this, whether it's USAID, whether it's NIH. I mean, I think that, you know, some of the stuff that you read, even in the context of what Doge is doing, but if you separated this from the Doge process, reasonable people who believe in a more limited government would say this is not the proper role of government. I think the problem is that's not the process at all at this point. That's not what they're doing. It is the sledgehammer versus scalpel. And so you're creating all of this extra work. And I think inevitably, all this extra cost at the end of the day when

some of these things are restored. It's going to end up potentially having the opposite impact that they think it will, at least in certain targeted areas, maybe not overall. David, anytime you're going to say, can I be real a second, you're going to need to do the whole bit from Hamilton. Can I be real a second for just a mill a second? Let down my guard and tell the people how I feel a second. So you're going to do that every time. So you can't stop with just the, if I can remember that.

That is a very strong disincentive for ever saying again, can I be real? Which, let me be clear, is also fine with me. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into

built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch. for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So Steve is getting on what I think is an important point, which is if you're a conservative

listener here, you're probably thinking to yourself, yeah, I hear what you're saying about this being important work, but frankly, everyone in the government is going to justify what they're doing is important in some way, but I think the federal government is too big. And if I have to take a chainsaw to it, instead of a scalpel, if the scalpel just isn't an option, then I'd rather the chainsaw than nothing. And so then I think part of the question becomes what money is being saved by Doge. So stepping away just for a second from Jonah's, the NIH or even USAID specifically to just what Musk has claimed they have saved.

So last week they published a wall of receipts detailing a list of canceled government contracts saying that they have found $16 billion in savings. That's a pretty good amount. Like, I know that there's always this pushback of like, well, but we have two trillion in debt. You know, like, well, okay, you got to start somewhere, man. And 16 billion here, 16 billion there. And suddenly we're talking about a huge waste of my taxpayer dollars.

But there was a bit of a catch here. Upon further investigation, it became clear that Doge had significantly overstated the value of an $8 billion contract that they were claiming they'd cut. The contract was actually an $8 million contract. So after that was discovered, they removed the screenshot of the federal contracting database, but maintained the position that the elimination of the contract in question saved the federal government billions. They have since updated the list to reflect the correct value of the contract, but made no effort to acknowledge the error. Musk, when asked about it, said, quote, some of the things that I say

will be incorrect and should be corrected. Nobody's going to bat a thousand. You heard, heard that from one of the government employees who you told to justify their employment, you'd fire that person. Like, that's a terrible response to, I thought it was $8 billion. It turned out to be $8 million. There's not even like a my bad in there. There's more like a doesn't matter. So that's all to say, I don't think we even have any grasp over how much money Doge has in theory found to cut from fraud, waste, and abuse. But we know it's not $16 billion, if $8 billion of that was actually $8 million. But also, I mean, look, again, as I said last week,

you could fire every single federal employee and replace them with X's grok, right? You're still trying to balance, trying to cut 40% of the budget by cutting 5% of the budget, just the math doesn't work. And I, in terms of rank punitry, I increasingly think that all of this is smoke and mirrors and light show stuff

to make it sound like we can afford all of Trump's tax cuts and spending priorities in the budget. And like, look what Doge did. Now we can not tax tips and social security anymore and rely on the general enumeracy of large swaths of the American people. I think that's a huge point. That's a great point. People don't get these numbers.

They hear $5 billion, and they don't realize, then they hear, like, the tax plan might cost an additional $5 trillion. And they don't get that that $5 billion is one-one thousandth of the tax cut cost. And so, yeah, that's what I constantly get, Sarah, is, well, you got to start somewhere. You got to start somewhere. The analogy is more like, okay, I just held a yard. sale because my family doesn't have enough money, and then immediately after the yard sale, I go buy a Ferrari, okay? Like the cost expense here that is being pledged to the American people to cut taxes, et cetera, is so far beyond any savings from Doge. They don't even belong in the

same conversation here. So any sale of Doge as dealing with the deficit is just bankrupt from the beginning. If I had heard Democrats talk about cutting taxes on tips, I feel like my reaction would be, how's that going to work? Everything's going to be a tip from now on, which is really obvious. And also that this was such an obvious play to a specific part of their base. And I wonder why conservatives aren't coming up with more creative. If we're going to have some tax-free stuff, if we're going to spend this money, for instance, and you're worried about natalism, in the United States, why not make child care tax-free? So, for instance, the dependent care credit that you get right now is $5,000.

Let me tell you about child care costing a lot more than $5,000 if you want to be in the workforce. I think we should pay for child care entirely through tips and overtime, and therefore it's entirely tax-free. There we go. And yet, you have all of these people, you know, I think the yearly amount is $2,700 before you actually have employed someone. So, like, you're looking at how much you've paid a babysitter.

And by the way, with inflation, you can get to $2,700 really quickly just on date night babysitters. I don't mean really quickly, like, in a couple date nights. But that's for the year. So your date nights over the course of the year with the same babysitter can't cost over $2,700 is, again, roughly my understanding of this. Oh, I like the idea of date with the babysitter. Joe Matt. Are you a new tape? That's how she said it

No, that's not how I said it You said date nights with the babysitter David, you're muted by the way It's the way you said it Jonah It's the way you said it The point being There are conservative ways And policies and incentives

That you might want to reach Where you could do this Making families easier, etc But the tips and overtime stuff doesn't make a lot of sense Because it doesn't work There's an answer to you your question. I think it's a very good question. And the answer, you hinted at it in your

lead up. This is a policy. The no taxes on tips is a policy that came about because Donald Trump had a conversation with a waitress, may or may not have been staged in Nevada, where huge parts of the population in the service industry make their money on tips. And she complained about taxes on tips. He said he thought he should eliminate it. They built this into policy. He then campaigned on it. I mean, this became a big thing. It was most certainly a giveaway to a certain slice of the population in order to win their votes, which of course, politicians in both parties have done for years. Trump did a lot of this. Joe Biden did a lot of this with the student loan stuff and some of the some of his climate policies were clearly targeted to win votes. But that's why

this happened. That is exactly why this happened. They didn't start and say, what is the best policy we could come up with to encourage families. And it was a pure political play, and this is what you get. All right. I don't want to miss out here on everyone else's. So, Steve, what is your thing that the Trump administration has actually accomplished? Not a thing that they've said or anything else actually accomplished that you think is substantively important?

Let me answer your question directly. the Trump administration won a U.N. Security Council vote on the Russia-Ukraine War 10 to zero with five abstentions last weekend based on the U.S. resolution on the war in Russia. Let me back up and provide context. I stayed faithful to the assignment, Sarah. You said, what is the thing? Will this actually matter? And my answer is an unequivocal, yes, it will actually matter. But it will matter less because of the actual thing that they did and more because of the implications of the actual thing that they did and the context for the thing that they did.

But let me speak specifically to this issue. So last weekend, the Trump campaign ended up, Trump administration, mounted this aggressive campaign to kill a Ukraine-led resolution at the United Nations recognizing the third anniversary of the beginning of the, war with Russia. And in the days leading up to the vote to provide some of that context, President Trump called Ukraine President Voldemir Zelensky a dictator, blamed him for starting the war. Trump repeatedly said that Russian President Vladimir Putin wants peace in Ukraine, suggests that he trusts Putin as a negotiator. As a consequence, the United States, of course, held talks with Russia and Russia only, excluding Ukraine on an end of the war. We talked about that much last week. After those talks, Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary

Crateria State spoke glowingly of the incredible opportunities for U.S. businesses to work with Russia once the war ends. I won't get into the details of what Russia has done in the three years of this war in the interest of time, but I will move to the news last weekend. So news broke over the weekend that the United States would oppose a Ukraine-back resolution at the United Nations condemning Russia for starting the war. It later emerged that the United States would not only oppose the Ukraine resolution but was working to convince our allies

to also oppose the Ukraine resolution and even going so far as to pressuring them to reject it, and they eventually, the United States eventually, offered an alternate resolution. The Ukraine resolution included language assigning blame to Russia for starting the war, assigning blame to Russia for the deaths that have happened as a result of the war,

strong language, but not unlike language that had been in previous resolutions at the United Nations, which the U.S. supported with 130, 140 other countries condemning Russia for its war of aggression and the consequences of that war. This time, however, the United States led the opposition to the Ukraine resolution. As a result, the vote was 93 to 18 with some 65. abstentions. And the United States found itself voting against this resolution with countries, including Russia, North Korea, Sudan, Belarus, Hungary, etc. The best countries. And the best countries. As noted, the overall support for the resolution still passed and passed overwhelmingly had dropped pretty significantly. The U.S. resolution basically some bland

the comments about the tragic loss of life in the Russia-Ukraine conflict and urging a swift end to the conflict and a lasting peace, sort of meaningless diplomatic speak that refused to assign any blame, refused to take sides at all. One ten-o approval in the Security Council with five countries abstaining, including Britain and France. So speaking directly to your assignment, Sarah, what does this matter? I don't spend a lot of time thinking and talking about UN resolutions. I think the UN has proven itself a pretty worthless body, even when you look at it in the context of some of what the UN does with respect to Israel. And it's platforming and elevating countries on the Human Rights Council that

don't deserve to be on the Human Rights Council. It's become an institution that has certainly earned a widespread mockery. It gets from conservatives and probably should no longer have the U.S. having said that, the significance of what the U.S. did with respect to this resolution isn't about the resolution. It's about other countries watching the United States taking the side of Russia, the undisputed aggressor, the cause of the war in Russia that has led to, by some estimates, a million deaths with Russia targeting not only military. sites, but civilian population centers, hospitals, kidnapping as many as 20,000 Ukrainian children, leading the international criminal court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin.

Horrible, horrible three years. And the United States is effectively with its lobbying on this resolution taken the side of Russia. Okay. Steve, here's my question. You know, at the end of the Obama administration, they abstained from a vote in the U.N., condemning Israel and declaring their settlements illegal. And this was widely seen as a parting shot at Israel,

that it undermined U.S. Israeli relations. That was the point that Obama hated Netanyahu in Israel. And so the point was to sort of use the UN as a weapon against Israel and to send the message that, like, maybe we weren't as close to Israel as everyone's been assuming this whole time. Fast forward to October 7th. Do I think that Obama's vote caused October 7th? No, but, you know, it's in that pile, if you will, of things that would lead the world to believe

that maybe the U.S. doesn't actually care that much. So I guess my question is, what you're describing sounds bad. But this Obama vote back in 2016 also sounded really bad to me and that it could have repercussions, again, to the extent, like, I agree. I think the UN at this point has lost all moral compass whatsoever. The fact that there were 14 to zero, by the way, condemning Israel was what that vote was. But basically, like, yep, the U.S. has taken bad U.N. votes before. So not shrug because I think bad things are bad things. I don't, and I'm not even really comparing the two. It's more just like, this is bad, but how bad is it? I guess is maybe the better way to phrase that? Yeah. Look, I think it's a fair question, and I think context matters, and arguably the

most important thing you said in making your case is that this happened at the end of the Obama administration, it was meant as a parting shot. I mean, we had seen throughout the Obama administration, certainly if you look at the kinds of comments that you hear from people like Ben Rhodes, who's central figure in Obama foreign policy, it's an overt, unhidden hostility towards Israel in virtually all respects. And we've seen this. Like this is, we've seen it. And I think, you know, the gap, the time, the distance in time between that rather meaningless vote and what happened on October 7th suggested that the vote itself didn't matter that much, especially given that you had a pro-Israel administration in the intervening. Yeah, but then Biden, the vice president from that

administration is in office on October 7th. Again, I actually, I want to be very clear. I do not think Hamas sits around thinking like Obama abstained from this vote in 2016. And I don't want to make the vote more than it was. And I really am not trying to do some what aboutism because I think that what you're describing is really bad. I also think there's a difference between abstaining and voting with the bad guys, all of that. But my overall point is on the substantive, like how bad is it when we take bad UN votes? Don't you also have to look at larger context because Obama had. a bad vote in the U.S. in, and in September of 2016, agreed to the largest arms deal in the

history of the United States and Israel, where many of the arms provided as a result of that deal were used by Israel to achieve arguably the greatest military victory in the Middle East since the six-day war in its triumph over Hezbollah and its humiliation of Iran. So if Obama, if Trump, let me put it this way, if Trump had. Did we send over Pagers in 2016? Because that would actually be awesome. That would be amazing. But no, more like, you know, all the kinds of heavy weapons. But the, yeah, but if Trump had abstained in the Security Council, as he also executed the largest arms deal in the history and history between the U.S. and Ukraine, this would be a very, very, very different kind of conversation. But that is not the world that we are in. Fair point.

Jonah, anything on this UN vote? Yeah, so I'm with David on the point about the larger context. Like a lot of these things, I just wrote a G5 about this is like what we end up doing is having arguments, smart arguments, where we treat the presidency as this abstract thing. It's an abstract academic category. Yes, the president has this power. Yes, the president has that power. Yes, the president has the ability to do this, that.

and the other thing. That's all fine. The larger context is why is this specific human being, this President Trump, doing what he is doing? And we're going to get into the law stuff with David in a second, so I'll save that larger point for there. But the UN vote was part and parcel of it was a tangible manifestation on the world stage of the larger approach to foreign policy

that Trump is bringing in. and the larger approach to foreign policy that Trump is bringing in is fundamentally dishonorable. He said yesterday that we're going to get back our money. Taxpayers are going to get back their money from Ukraine Plus. What he meant by that is we are now going to make a profit off of a country that was invaded by Russia where all the parade of harbils that Steve went through,

where literally rape and torture have been legalized for Russian soldiers and a democracy that cried out for help that we said we were going to help in part because we're the leaders of the free world we're now saying

huh sucks for you you better kick up a bunch because we want to make a profit off of this. It is grotesque and the UN vote is just a symbol of that

to me. I read UN votes are symbolic but there's significantly symbolic and you know one of the things that Steve left out is we bullied the crap out of Israel to vote with us on that. Israel has a vested interest not just as our ally, but as a tiny little democratic country

to be morally consistent about the importance of helping tiny little democratic countries. And we made them eat a whole bowl of crap just so that it would somehow make the roster of the Legion of Doom that we were voting with, more aesthetically pleasing. And this stuff will have consequences down the line. Just like I was talking about NIH officials

and academic researchers trying to plan, this uncertainty will have real consequences. If the world no longer thinks that America is a trustworthy country when it pledges its support, that will have a destabilizing effect all over the place and it will cause a lot of people on the, a lot of countries on the bubble

to say, you know, look, the Chinese suck, but they honor their commitments. Besides, we can't rely on America to bail us out anyway, so, you know, we're close to China. We've got to do what they say. This is, and it's all because

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What you got for us? I'm just going to go with all that criminal justice bull crap. That's my general arena. So let's start with... We have a degree from Harvard in that, right? Yeah. That's what I learned in law school. In law school.

All that criminal justice bullcrap, let's start with the pardoning of the January 6thers, including the most violent people who, and granted clemency to the most violent, who physically attacked police officers. Let's go with firing Jack Smith's team unlawfully. Let's go with pardoning Rod Blagojevich, for no apparent reason other than he calls himself

a Trumpocrat. Let's go with the decision to drop the charges without prejudice with Eric Adams from what looks like a quid pro quo enforce my policy or nice little criminal charges you might have reimposed upon you. And let's go with today's news of Andrew Tate, flying to America, released from prison in Romania. Why? Why? What wonderful thing has Andrew Tate done? Well, Entertaid has done a lot of vile, vile things. He's a pornographer facing charges for rape and sex trafficking. But I guess because he's a MAGA Manosphere influencer, he gets special dispensation. And then let's also talk for a minute about removing the security details from Fauci, from Pompeo, from Bolton,

and to make matters worse, publicly announcing that, like here, come get these people. And so what does it all that together mean? Friends of Trump have one justice system, enemies of Trump have another justice system, and that is about as plain and obvious as any of the moves that Trump has made to the point where, quite frankly, I'm fascinated. I'll be fascinated to see if a single serious magafigder faces any kind of real prosecution for corruption during Trump's term at all, at all. and whether it's going to be a genuine law-free zone for MAGA for the next four years.

So that's my, and all of those are actions, Sarah. They're all actions. Well, okay, I'm going to give you like half credit. First of all, fascinating. If you talk to white-collar lawyers at major law firms right now, there's huge question marks over how the next four years of their business development is going to go. because a lot of CEOs, etc., kind of think this is like a four-year free-for-all and that the Trump administration isn't going to prosecute anything, deal with any white-collar crime, basically at all.

Now, I'm not sure they're right about that because this is like a weird juxtaposition. Like on the one hand, David, what you're describing, and on the other hand, there's a lot of anti-corporatism in MAGA. And we're certainly seeing that at the Federal Trade Commission, in antitrust stuff. So I don't know that everyone should be quite as confident as they're all feeling that they're on the right side of this ledger, as you said. Okay, but here's why I'm only giving you half credit. I take your point that all of those things you listed combined, undermine the rule of law, and undermine the perception of the fair application of the rule of law without regard to. politics. However, that is more speculative, I guess, in some ways that's more in the ether than

like, this money no longer goes to X, you know, et cetera. So that's why I'm only giving you half credit because it is still kind of rhetorical, if that makes sense. It's kind of... Nothing is in the ether. Nothing I said is in the ether. Not one thing is in the ether. People are actually fired. People are actually pardoned. People have actually had charges dropped against them. People have actually had security tales lifted. Yeah, but that's not what you said was important about it. What you're saying is important about it is what other people take away from that. And that's what I mean is then there's a step there. No, no, friends of Trump received large-scale gifts that they were not entitled to and enemies of Trump have received incredibly punitive actions.

that all of that's real like all of that is actually true now you can then say all of that is bad full stop just right off the get go now are there conclusions you can draw from that these actual actions that occurred i mean that's just normally that's what you do that's what we've done for the last two analyses what are the conclusions you draw from the way that they have engaged in actions at a you know USAID what are the conclusions you draw from the actions they have engaged in similar here, but everything I articulated was an action along a very particular theme. All right, Steve, I'm going to let you react.

Yeah, I'm sorry, I've got to take David's side on this. I mean, I think these are discrete actions that in and of themselves have immediate and significant consequences, but also carry with them a broader message about sort of disdain for the rule of law that I think we'll have, I think it's fair to say that I think you could argue that the sort of follow-on consequences may end up having greater significance than the immediate, especially if you look at these as discrete acts. Yes, but literally what you're saying is, I am speculating. Look, I'm not saying this isn't bad, and I'm not saying that everything you're speculating

isn't a fair speculation and a likely thing. My only point is on the assignment was to find things that didn't involve. of that leap of, and so this is what's likely to happen next. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm still sympathetic to David because I think so much of what we're talking about, I agree with you and I liked the assignment. Like, I think there's a ton of sort of rampant speculation that goes five or six clicks down the road and makes assumptions about things that we can't possibly know. And that stuff is, you know, in an analysis of what Trump has done over the first month,

I think can be as muddling or confusing as it sometimes can be clarifying. Having said that, you can't also separate the individual discrete actions from the messages that they send. And this was true of what I said with the UN thing. I don't really care much about a UN resolution. But the message that it sends is unmistakable and real and has already caused countries to react to this. Trump people would say in good ways, Europe is stepping up.

But it's causing, like people are taking actions. People are changing policies as a result of this. So I think David's right. If you look at the actual things themselves, they matter. If you look at the immediate message it sends about the rule of law, that matters. If you look at the long-term implications, there we can get into some speculation, what does it all mean, how to people behave, what are the long-term consequences? You know, maybe that's a little fuzzier.

But I don't think that just because we're talking about secondary effects from these discrete actions that you can rule them out. Fair enough, Jonah. I think part of the problem that we're getting into here is, pardoning people who beat the crap out of cops is so self-evidently wrong that's kind of boring to talk about at this point. So we then say, not only is it wrong,

it also has these other bad things about it, right? Yeah, David found substantive things that were done. Like, nobody's, that's why I'm giving him, like, half credit, at least, like, because there's no question about the substantive thing and that the substantive thing was bad, to your point, Jonah. Yeah, so, you know, I'm confused about the assignment then, because I do not consent to an assignment that says, identify substantive things, and draw no conclusions from them.

Like, I never consented to that assignment. I'm out on that. Do you, did you have to consent to assignments when you were in school? Oh, absolutely. I'm not doing this assignment. This is not school. I didn't consent to this test. No, no, no, no.

David's a Kobayashi-Maru kind of guy, you know? Time is wasting and we haven't even gotten to the conversation I really want to have, which is about babies at weddings. Okay, okay, you're right. Babies at weddings, what about chili? That's going to be a seven-hour podcast. All right. A viral video of a bride becoming very,

visibly annoyed at a crying baby during a quote adult's only wedding ceremony has animated debates about the ethics of kid-free spaces. David, you jumped on this so fast. We didn't even talk about what we were going to talk about because you were like, I have thoughts. Yes. Oh, Sarah, I have thoughts. And here they're summed up in, I don't care. And you shouldn't either. And it would be a lot better if we cared a lot less about other people's choices about their weddings. That is not what I thought you were going to say to this at all. Oh, my gosh. This whole, like this morning, I've been thinking about what David's going to say,

and I had multiple buckets. None of them had this bucket. Libertarian David is coming out about the kid-free spaces. What? Yes, yes. So there is this really interesting conversation that arose out of this about this idea of, okay, wait a minute, we need to have kid-free spaces because we want to be super welcoming to everyone about kids

in all contexts, and this woman who didn't want crying children or a wedding, that's a problem on her. And I'm thinking, wait a minute, I think what's actually more of a problem is just the judgmentalism writ large around our parenting decisions, writ large around our social decisions. And the reason why I came to this is there's very interesting study showing that moms actually feel more lonely than other people, that moms feel more lonely. And that even that they feel more lonely, in part because they're spending less time with other moms. And when you begin to dig into this, one of the reasons why.

And even when we do spend time with other moms, we're not really spending time with other moms. We're spending time parenting in the vicinity of other moms. Exactly. But what was really interesting about some of this was that, Wait a minute. Also, there was a sense that moms judge other moms. This just in. I don't think that's true. What?

That people judge. And look, this has been enhanced in this sort of Instagram, viral social media era where people will film them with their kids and trying to show how they discipline or how they cook food. There's just this constant parade of this is what you must do. And when our kids were much younger, we were in sort of an early 1.0 version of that. There was this book out called Growing Kids God's Way, which was horrible. But for a while, in evangelical circles, if you weren't, quote, growing kids God's way, you weren't the right kind of parent.

And so one of the things that I've just been thinking a lot about about why we're just always at each other's throats is that we're constantly out there universalizing personal solutions. This diet plan works for my family. So this is the diet plan. This method, this way of doing weddings works for us or this works for me. And everything is universalizing these personal solutions. That's what influence are doing just at scale. And the reason I had thoughts was my thought, my singular thought is,

can we please chill out about other people's choices? So that's fascinating because Steve, I will tell you, I have almost like the reverse of David's. I really don't think there should be kid-free spaces. I think there should be responsible parents who know when you need to take your kid out of a space. But having kid-free spaces is really annoying and prevents you from being able to get to things if your babysitter fell through or whatever else. On the reverse side of that, I think it is really important for parents to have kid-free time. So mine is like you should make the personal choice and be able to carve out kid free time

but it shouldn't be forced upon you by someone else's decisions at a restaurant or at a wedding or anything else. So like we have a mom pod that goes back to COVID and our mom pod has a once a month mom pod dinner where the dads have to figure it out because we are going to dinner and the kids are absolutely not invited

for exactly what you said David. Otherwise we don't get to have uninterrupted conversations for more than 90 seconds because some kid needs something or we're off chasing whatever, they want us to play with them or watch what I'm doing, watch what, and like, we want to have serious conversations

for approximately two hours once a month. That's just not that hard on everyone to carve out that time for us. But I actually do judge restaurants that are kid-free restaurants, even though I also think you have to then have responsible parents in the community who are willing to take their kid out

when the kid is screaming and stuff and like be, polite to your neighbors in the restaurant, et cetera. All right, Jonah, thoughts, kid-free spaces, good or bad? Yeah, I don't love, I don't love kid-free spaces, but I also don't care that much depending on what the space is. Like, if it's a restaurant, you know, I'm in favor of restaurants bringing back dress codes. So, like, if part of that is, like, not having kids, that's fine.

I think it's kind of creepy to have a kid's-free wedding because part of the point of a wedding is to, like, stand up in front of, your family and your friends and it's recognized intergenerationally is this commitment that you're making. At the same time, I kind of, and I get it. And at the very least, if your baby is crying during the ceremony, get out. That's the thing I just don't get. It's like, I don't love the bride saying no babies, but you have to have some balls

on you to bring a baby to a baby to, a no baby wedding and then not remove the baby from the room when the baby is crying when she's taking her vows. I mean, what is wrong with you? That is the choice I will judge, David. Like, that is just rude. It's rude. Yeah.

Like to screw with somebody else's wedding video for all time, despite the fact that they didn't want babies there in the first place, is just just poor choice. And I'm going to condemn that choice. In fact, I think they should go to jail. Steve, get in here. You've got all the kids. yeah i'm i'm uh i'm with david i think i was instinctively with david before he began but i found his case remarkably persuasive like we should butt out like let people make their own decisions

and and respect the decisions that they make and we don't have to always have opinions about them so i'm sympathetic to the to the argument about kid free spaces i do think if You know, if, well, let me just, let me leave it at that. Let me leave it at David's thing. I can go on, but I worry that we're going to get into chili time, and I'd like to save chili time. And I have to, and I have to also say that not going to a wedding is like a gift for a guy. So like if you're going to say, no kids at the wedding, I'm like, well, dang, we can't get a babysitter.

Guess I got to watch football instead going to this wedding. So that is coloring my analysis. I think the only thing I'll add is I think it does depend to a certain extent. Like I'm an I'd be I don't know that there are a lot of kid-free restaurants. Is that a thing? We don't go out to eat that much. So like one of the restaurants in our neighborhood that just opened and Scott and I were so excited about it.

And I want to be clear, Scott and I don't take our kids to restaurants because that's unpleasant for us. But the restaurant like doesn't say they're kid-free, but they have no high chairs, no kids menu. Strollers are not allowed inside. Like they have all these rules making it. And the waiters pinch babies constantly. So all these comments are like, this is ridiculous. Also, you're in a neighborhood with a whole lot of young parents. This is obnoxious. So we actually haven't been back because I just don't want to encourage that in our neighborhood. So I mean, it's interesting. We, we decided earlier that we were going to take our kids to restaurants. And we were going to take our kids to restaurants a lot.

I mean, we don't eat out that much, but when we eat out, we take our kids. And we wanted to do that early and have sort of stayed consistent throughout because we thought it was important for our kids to learn how to behave in restaurants. So we disciplined them. They didn't get, they don't get, you know, they don't get tech, they don't get anything. They have to sit there. They have to talk with us. No, no, no, no, no, no.

They have to learn how to behave in a restaurant and keep themselves settled and not bang their forks on the plate and all this stuff. And we did this early, and we had it, this was actually sort of a big argument. You know, of course, now this is 15, 20 years ago among sort of our friend group because we had people who, we had parents who said, I refuse to take my kids to restaurant because they can't do it. And our argument was, how are they ever going to learn how to do it unless you take them to restaurants and discipline them? So Nate is a doll at restaurants. We don't give him screens.

He sits there patiently. You can, even when he was like two, you could get a good 35, 4. minutes out of that kid at a restaurant. And I thought, we're amazing parents. And then we had case. We are not amazing parents. Some of our genes, when mixed correctly, are amazing. But some of our genes, when mixed in the more probable fashion, I might guess,

not amazing at restaurants. What if you start taking Nate and don't take case and explain the case that he's not going because he can't sit still? He just handcuff him to a radiator. give him a bowl of water. 18 months. So, yeah, she just started doing that at six. Do you ever bring duct tape?

Keep me mind, I know I've told you this before, but my mom brought my brother in a bassinet to Sardis to interview George Pupard and checked him at the co-check at the restaurant. Oh, my goodness. She got a ticket. The co-check ladies loved it. I didn't know that was a possible. They took care of the baby.

and then when lunch was over and a couple of martini's later, she went and gave her ticket and got the correct baby back. That's unbelievable story. All right, well, bad news for Steve. That is all the time that we have here. So we are going to save anti-woke chili for next time.

If you've seen this video already, then you kind of know where this is going or I bet if you type in anti-woke chili to Google, you'll know what we're going to talk about. for not worth your time next week. And before we go, I also wanted to give an update to something we had talked about before. So right after Trump's inauguration,

we talked about the two sets of pardons. And I mentioned one of the quote-unquote nonviolent pardons from Joe Biden, a man named Genesis Witted. We actually do have his release date. The Bureau of Prisons has updated that. So instead of 2047, he will be released May 3rd. 13th, 2029. So in four years instead of 23 years from now. And just to remind everyone, he was the leader of a gang called Addicted to Money or ATM. He had a tattoo of a Pyrex

measuring cup and a box of baking soda on his chest because he was so good at making crack cocaine, incredibly violent. Think Omar from the wire. He would rob other drug dealers. He went into one Target's house, boiled water, poured the water in the male victim's ear. That caused permanent hearing loss, as you can imagine. He then ordered his guys to shoot that guy in the knee. He tortured and brutalized their girlfriends to find out where the cash was. The recommended sentencing guideline range for this guy was life in prison. The judge gave him 35 years, and instead he will be out in four years. However, when we talked about this guy back right after the inauguration,

I in fact said that he was getting out later that week. I said he's going to be released this week. That was wrong. However, I did see a bunch of people say that he was getting released in 2038, and it was so far off. Like, no, it's four years compared to a 35-year-to-life-in-prison sentence. Not that far off. but I do want to correct that and provide this update of when he is getting out in that community

after being the leader of this very violent drug gain in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And with that, we will see you next week to talk about anti-woke chili. I'm making chili this weekend with all the beans. Thank you.