The Dispatch Podcast - Caving to Trump | Roundtable

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, Sarah Isgur, and Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle debate whether Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Donald Trump exhibit similar authoritarian tendencies, discuss the role of elites in democracies, and explore the Democratic Party’s ongoing identity crisis. The Agenda:—Trump’s first and second terms—Can the president do whatever he wants?—Historical context of presidential power—Weak democracies and crisis—Is this all our fault?—The future of Democratic messaging Show Notes:—Nick Catoggio's Boiling Frogs newsletter—Megan McArdle's column on lawfare 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 access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss Donald Trump, claiming he's not a dictator, but that some Americans might want one. Is he right? Democrats are actually in disarray. They're more unpopular than they've been in decades. their plan to remedy that? And will it work? And finally, and not worth your time, we'll revisit our heated discussion of backer inners from last week in light of an overwhelming amount of listener feedback. I'm joined today by my dispatch co-founder Jonah Goldberg, our colleague Sarah Isker, and Megan McArdle from the Washington Post. I want to dive right in today by sort of

pulling back the camera, as it were. And this is probably a conversation that we could have had really at any point over the last eight months. But I thought we'd have it now because there was some joking in the Oval Office this week, led as always by Donald Trump, who mused about the possibility that he was a dictator. I kind of laughed at people who were concerned that he is assuming dictatorial powers and shrugged off the claims that I'm not a dictator, but hey, people might like a dictator. People want somebody you get something done, and if you need strength to do it, that's popular. It is the case that if you look at what's happened over the past month, over the past six weeks,

I think the administration has taken a much stronger authoritarian turn. There are many examples we can point to. We've discussed some of them on an individual basis on this podcast, but I want to just look at them collectively and get your sense on kind of where we are and how worried we should be. You have masked agents grabbing people off the streets, some with no due process. That's not necessarily new, but it's been going on for a while. You have armed troops patrolling the nation's capital. You have a president threatening his political opponents on a near daily basis.

You have his top advisors labeling the political opposition a domestic extremist organization. And you have the guy who tried to steal. one presidential election trying to rewrite the rules of how we'll choose our leaders in the future. Megan, I'll start with you. Am I right that this seems to have taken a darker turn in the past six weeks, or am I just paying more careful attention? I think this is the instincts were always there, right? Trump has always talked in these ways. And I think one thing that the progressive data analyst, David Schor, has pointed out, is that the public is just way more authoritarian than elites are. They are results oriented. They don't really have that much

respect for process. And Trump is playing into that. And the institutions that are meant to restrain that have frayed. And that goes for the courts, that goes for experts and so forth. And some of the fraying was in the reaction to him in the first term, right? I mean, there is this boy who called Wolf Problem, which is that people freaked out at every tiny thing he did, and that left them without language to describe the things that are really dangerous. And I was screaming against that at the time internally and externally in media organizations. And I think that we are now seeing the fruits of that. What he's doing is really bad. But we are left without a way to explain how this is different and worse.

from what happened before. Yeah, Jonah, we did a premium dispatch member town hall last night, and you made the point that I'd like you to expand on that the way that media organizations often operate, particularly those who cover news and breaking news, is to look at the things right in front of us and cover these things as sort of discrete events or discrete moments.

And you don't often take step back and look at kind of what's happening more broadly. This is Nick's boiling frogs argument, even though we know that that's not actually true, not literally true. Of frogs. It might be true of the President of the United States. What's your sense of where we are now and how alarm should people be? Yeah, so I struggle with this, which is what I was saying last night.

Insofar as there are instances where there are stories where people want to argue this is outright authoritarianism and it's not right it's aggressive it's ill-advised it's trolling you know all that kind of stuff but it is not you know authoritarian or or dictatorial or anything like that and then there are other things that are a lot closer and one of the things it bothers me is when you look at each controversy in isolation, you get to this point where you have to have this sort of, this kind of like, let's look at this between the four corners of the page on this instance. And then you go to the next thing, it's that, well, this is really troubling. Well, both things happen, right? And so at the very least, part of the problem is,

a further complication of this is that this is the first president, at least in my lifetime, I think probably ever. I'm open to correction about some of the things. as Andrew Jackson did, but this is the first president in my lifetime who wants people to think he's a dictator, right? He does things, I mean, Sarah can give you the chapter and verse much better than I can on this executive order about flag burning, but the executive order itself is a nothing burger. It's carves out all this space. It says you can't, we don't want to do anything that conflicts with the First Amendment or existing law and we'll only arrest you if you're committing some other criminal act

while you're burning a flag? So, like, who cares? You're already committing another criminal act? It's like, while you're robbing the bank, if you burn a flag, you'll get into more trouble, right? And so what Trump wants to say that he's banned flags, and the people he wants to believe it are his fans and his enemies,

because that way he can get, the fans think he's this hero, authoritarian hero kind of thing, and he's trying to troll and goad his enemies into burning flags so that then he can send in as a pretext to send in troops to someplace and all that and it's the first time normally presidents try really really really hard

to avoid touching things like about being a dictator and Trump likes to cosplay as a dictator as a strong man and at the same time there are some things that he is doing that a natural strong man would do a strong man would do like um fire the head of BLS for releasing

numbers that he didn't like uh getting rid of the head of the DIA uh this crazy stuff that's been happening in the last 24 hours with the NIH stuff um the way he's treating the fed firing lawyer lawyers and FBI agents who observe the law and rewarding people who break the law on his behalf, right? So there are a lot of things about consolidating power that if you're worried about authoritarianism, you have every right to be worried about. But picking and choosing and which ones to be worried about

and where he's just trolling and where he isn't, it gets hard. And when you look at these things in isolation, I think the concern for me is you're minimizing the forest to get into the weeds about the trees. Yeah, Sarah, I want to pick up on a point that Megan made. when you look, for instance, at what he's done in Washington, D.C., putting National Guard on the streets of Washington, D.C., arming them, having them walk around in fatigues, and you see

the Trump administration then go and boast about the results of this massive presence of police and federal troops, U.S. troops, you know, Washington, D.C. went more than a week without a homicide. All sorts of crime is down. That's not surprising. And when Trump goes and makes that case, don't people, don't voters, particularly his base, but I think beyond his base, look at it and say, you know, this is a guy who's just delivering on his promises. He said he was going to do this. He said he was going to keep us safe. He said Washington, D.C. was a hellscape and dangerous.

And look at how safe he's made it. And they don't really concern themselves, to Megan's point, with, you know, sort of the niceties of how it happened and whether he may have gone. beyond his power here or would be going beyond his power if he does the same thing in Chicago, this has a chance to be pretty popular, doesn't it? Absolutely. I would compare it to FDR after the crash. You know, the country really, really wanted someone to fix the economy and they didn't really care how.

And FDR was like, I'm your man. Think about the norms heading into FDR's administration. I mean, most obviously, that a president didn't run for a third term. That was a norm set by George Washington. There was a lot of hand-wringing over what it would mean for FDR to run for a third term. There was hand-wringing within the Democratic Party, you know, at the convention. And then here we are. He ran for four terms and all the things he did to remake the constitutional order of the presidency vis-a-vis the states, vis-vis Congress.

vis-a-vis even the presidency itself and the administrative state. So I guess let me say two things that are true at once. I don't like a lot of what Trump is doing and I don't think much of what he is doing is new in the history of the United States,

even including the thing that I hate most, him ignoring the TikTok law. Right? Andrew Jackson, Jefferson also had this view of departmentalism, meaning that if the Supreme court says the president can't do something, that it violates the constitution to do something, he must follow that. But if the Supreme Court says the president may do something, and maybe even if they say he must do something, he gets to make his own determination whether he thinks

it's constitutional. Does that make sense? That is not a new view in the history of the United States. So for me, this goes back to what the definition of dictator is. It has to involve ignoring the Constitution, in my view, right? It's someone who is not under the law. I don't think we can say that Donald Trump is not under the law at this point because so many other people have stretched and messed up the law.

To give one example, like the original theory of the electoral college looks absolutely nothing like what we're doing now. It was supposed to basically be a council that picked the president, and then over time, we sort of let populism creep in, and there we are. So, yeah, dictators are pretty popular, as I just said, he wasn't one. If you solve the problem, like FDR, you know, solving the economy, and I want to be careful

here because I'm not saying FDR. Back checks, Sarah. Yeah, you're triggering me and Megan here. But, look, Carly used to always say there's a difference between activity and accomplishment, but people actually care a lot about activity, you know? Let me push back on something you're saying. So fair enough, you can make the argument that some, maybe even much of what Donald Trump is doing, isn't literally unprecedented. Isn't the difference, though, that in those examples you're citing, other leaders, presidents, they did them in one moment and in one part of their presidency, whereas Donald Trump...

FDR did it for four terms. Taking the advice of Steve Bannon is flooding the zone with shit. He's doing this everywhere at all times precisely because it makes it more likely that he can get away with it. I would argue that that looks a lot like FDR. Yeah. So far, you're just describing FDR, except FDR did it more. Can I push back on the FDR thing a little bit?

Yeah. I've made this point. FDR was hostile to the constitutional, hostile to democratic norms. I wrote a book that got into a lot of this. At the same time, one thing that you know where the FDR actually had going for him, that Donald Trump doesn't, an actual friggin' crisis, right? I mean, one of the things that is definitional to a lot of theories of where you get fascism is making up crises to exploit them for, as a pretext for your rise to power.

The Great Depression was a legitimate crisis. Trump is lying about the crisis of crime. I'm not saying the crime isn't a problem. It's not on a level that qualifies as a crisis. he's lying about the crisis the nature of the crisis with a lot of the illegal immigration stuff some of it's a real problem again not a crisis he's lying about a lot of the foreign policy stuff to claim a crisis right Chicago is not a killing field as he describes it and so it is one thing to respond and I will I think Megan's on my side here respond badly but in a quasi authoritarian way

but with democratic legitimacy to a world-shattering economic depression that the New Deal made worse and prolonged, versus making up stuff about criminal gangs in the United States actually being agents of foreign powers and all that stuff? Okay, Jonah, here's where you're wrong. I'm going to tell you why you're wrong.

Okay. You're taking FDR at the high level of generality, but then you're taking Donald Trump at the low level of generality. the individual things that FDR was doing, many of which were not in response to any crisis. So take the gold clause stuff, for example. He wrote a speech saying that if the Supreme Court ruled against him on the gold clause, he was going to ignore the Supreme Court and, like, just basically declare himself dictator.

Mm-hmm. That wasn't a crisis. I mean, FDR was better in some ways. And one thing that Yvall Levin of the American Enterprise Institute just said to me, was that I think is really smart is that FDR wanted to tear stuff down, but then he also had stuff he wanted to replace it with. And Donald Trump just does not have, he wants to destroy all these institutions with no thought of what should be in their place. Also, can I just say that FDR was bad? Like, I'm sitting here trying to make like some comparison to FDR as if that's

a good thing. I want to be very clear. I don't think it's a good thing. My point is that America has survived bad presidents. And in fact, I might make the case that bad presidents have been the norm. I mean, FDR is an egregiously bad one. Wilson was egregiously bad in different ways. You know, we've talked about Jackson. My God, Buchanan nearly ended the country. Bad Nixon, I mean, we can name a lot more bad presidents than I think we can name ones that stuck to the model of Washington and that doesn't make them dictators. But bad presidents may be the norm. This level, this level of corruption, this level of power. We've had plenty of corrupt. presidents, God knows. Oh, yeah. Warren Harding, call your office. No question. It's so, it's so

aggressive and over the top. He doesn't even pretend that he's not corrupt. And the things he's doing are sort of in your face. And while we can point to bad presidents and we can point to abuses of power and we can point to presidents who have tried to accumulate and use power in ways way beyond what certainly what the founders would have imagined, isn't Donald Trump different because he's doing it all at once and he's totally unapologetic about it? He's doing it at a time where we gave up the constitutional order because of FDR, because of all these previous bad presidents. So the power that the presidency has is way out of whack. That's the difference to me. Not that Donald Trump is different. I don't think he is. You don't think Donald, stop. You don't

think Donald Trump is different? Come on. I just want to dwell for a moment on how bad FDR was right let's um look and now i i i credit where credit is due the fdic was a good idea so not not all that um but if he had done that one thing alone we could all sit here with our little golf claps and be like oh that was clever yes that was done trump banned plastic straws like put that in his column right but so but look he tried to pack the court and was stopped by his party but he absolutely wanted to basically make the court into a rubber stamp for his presidency. He wanted to be president for life and he was. What better definition of a dictator is there than that, Steve? He tried to basically create a fascist cartilization of the economy

where every company would be organized into these cartels and then they would negotiate with other labor cartels. This was like economically illiterate, bonkers and also the most incredible power grab in the history of the United States. Thank God, slapped down by this Court. But then he was like, but what if I just made the Supreme Court do things I wanted? I mean, these things, he was in many ways, like smart, also giving credit for World War II. He did okay there. But this was a bonkers power grab that was both on the practical level, worse than anything Donald Trump. I mean, if you imagine the kind of power that had he succeeded, first of all, if you imagine what it would have done to the economy, we would be, we would have emerged

from World War II had we been able to fight it at all as a total basket case. Second of all, if you imagine what this would have done, the level of government power over the lives of people, the ability, if you have these cartels going, you basically are operating, you know, the government essentially has power over every individual decision about almost anything in the economy because they're doing these regulations, right? They can always threaten retaliation if you don't go along. all of these things are really terrible. And I agree with Sarah, set the stage for some of the stuff that Trump is doing, right? Under the old constitutional order, this would had, he could not have gotten away with, with a lot of it. And we threw that out to deal with the Great Depression. And that has helped bring us where we are today.

Now, I think in many ways, Donald Trump is a man of lower character than FDR, not that I am giving FDR credit for being. Yeah, low effing bar. Yeah, indeed. But he is really a bad person who is willing to enrich himself, like openly use the presidency to enrich himself, right? Now, like, Lenin Bans Johnson basically extorted television licenses for his wife. I mean, for him, but they were given to his wife to maintain, I guess, plausible deniability for people who are really, really stupid. he abused his office, he cheated in elections, right? We've had a lot of bad people be president before.

I think part of actually what is unique about Trump is just that our institutions are so weak, our elites are so weak. Procedural norms are an elite thing. No one cares. Individual people, you cannot sell voters on a story about like, procedural norms are being eroded. They just, from Clinton, on, right? He committed perjury. Perjury is bad. He also abused an intern in his office who was 21. No one cared.

Those sorts of stories just don't resonate with the public. It's always had to be elites who uphold them. And they are not doing that. But Trump is not so much uniquely bad as in a situation where the norms are so weak, the institutions are so weak that they can't do any of the job that even FDR's party did of restraining him. Okay, look, I can literally bebop and scat on FDR longer than almost anybody I know. I am happy to do it. I can tell you all about Mussolini reviewing FDR's book, rendezvous with destiny. I can talk about Jacob Majed, the guy that the Roosevelt administration tried to put in prison for charging five cents less to dry clean a suit. FDR was an atrocity to the constitutional order.

I agree. I've been calling him president for life for decades. And so I profoundly resent having to get into this position of kind of like defending FDR. But I think Trump is obviously worse than FDR, in part because even though I think the elite, I think Megan's point about elites and institutions is absolutely correct, but FDR was legitimately rising or saw himself and the elites saw him as rising to the occasion of a global crisis, actually two global crises. First, the Great Depression, which again, I think the New Deal made great, but second, World War II, and, you know, the fight against Hitler and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you know, those are, I just think, not just differences in degree, but differences in kind. FDR also had, to Sarah's point about dictators being popular, massive democratic legitimacy.

I mean, go back and look, I think the high watermark in 34 or 35, FDR had something like, I want to say 89 or 90 seats in the Senate. and this was before Alaska and Hawaii were states, right? I mean, he could afford to lose 20, 30 senators and still pass a filibuster. They had massive majorities in the Congress who even the republic, even a lot of the Republicans in the House and the Senate had run as Republicans for the New Deal. So he had this massive Democratic legitimacy. Now, I think mandate is a. garbage concept and has no role in our constitutional order, but it's a political reality

because it's perceived as a political reality. And regardless, to the extent mandates exist, Congress had a mandate to do what FDR wanted. The country was all in on this stuff. And I think I don't like the nationalism and the militarism and all the things associated with the New Deal. I think Hugh Johnson, the head of the NRA, was a fascist thug. He actually distributed a memo early at the Democratic Convention calling for putting the Supreme Court and Congress on an island for 90 days so that FDR could be like Mussolini without any obstruction of any kind. But Donald Trump won, you know, he keeps talking about this landslide and this mandate from the people. And you have Stephen Miller, you know, channeling his inner Jackson and Woodrow Wilson talking about how the president is the only person elected by the whole country.

and therefore he has a extra special, super terrific mandate to do whatever the hell he wants. He won the swings. He won decisively, but he won by like one and a half points or something like that. Congress is as narrow as it has ever been. And he is asserting, based on lies about political, about the reality of the country, all his American carnage stuff, all the crimes of, like, FDR didn't have to lie about the state of the economy or the threat of Hitler. Trump routinely lies about the problems we're facing, calls trade deficits a crisis in order to use emergency powers anywhere and everywhere he can.

And that I do think is a significant and important difference between some of the things that the things that FDR did and the things that Trump is doing. If you look at what Donald Trump said in the Oval Office, this week. He was talking about Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and threatening to send National Guard troops to Chicago to control crime in Chicago. And after taking a few shots at Pritzker, he said, not that I don't have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States. If I think our country's in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it. He also said, I have the right to do anything I want to.

do because he's president. If you look at the Jonas' point about emergencies, our own Nick Catojo had a really terrific newsletter went out on Tuesday. We'll post it in the show notes. And Nick was basically collecting all of the evidence of Trump's authoritarianism and saying, as he's said many times, I think quite persuasively, hey, this is a big, big deal. I mean, he didn't get into FDR, but whether or not this has some precedent, whether or not other presidents have been bad, whether or not there's been corruption, whether or not presidents have abused power in the past. This is pretty bad. Nick wrote, you do not need to suffer from Rachel Maddowbrane to believe that this syndicate has no intention of handing out overpower to Democrats, even if they do win an election, he wrote of 2026 and 2028. as in all fascist regimes, the core ideological principle of Trump's administration is that the law must yield during emergencies.

And pretty much everything is an emergency, it turns out, especially the election outcomes that threaten to derail their national greatness ideological project. Is Nick and I overstating the problem? Should we be worried about that? I mean, we have, I would say, direct precedent from Trump in 2020, claiming to have won the election in 2020. Sarah, is that, am I too freaked out about this? I don't want to be too precious about the whole thing, but the administration has, at every turn, abided by the Supreme Court. So when it comes to sending National Guard troops, they did to Los Angeles, or whether they will to Chicago and you're worried that that's unlawful. If the Supreme Court says it's unlawful, I have no reason to believe that they won't follow that. And even the flag-burning EO, which as Jonah said,

is, you know, silly in many respects, goes way out of its way to say all things in line with the First Amendment, basically. And in doing so, they destroy their own EO. You know, people who like to light their hair on fire, keep trying to find an example of the Supreme Court defying courts. But they're finding examples of the administration basically appealing. And that's not the same thing. And even where they had a judge hold them in contempt, the Supreme Court disagreed. So it's like, which is it? Is it that you want to, not you meaning Steve, but that the people who believe this

want to ignore the Supreme Court and say, no, the district. court got it right, but then Donald Trump, does he have to follow the Supreme Court right? You can't really have it both ways. The Supreme Court is both illegitimate and he's bound to follow it. That's going to be a hard case to make. So, again, if the definition of dictator is someone who does not follow the law, we just don't have an example of that right now if you believe that the Supreme Court is the final word on what the Constitution says. And then we have to get into a whole thing of like, yeah, is the Supreme Court acting as a legitimate body? Is it a separate body? Is it caving to Trump all the time? I would commend Jack Goldsmith's piece to you,

where he runs through some of the statistics on that, make some of the differences on that. And Jack Goldsmith is no fan of Donald Trump, a Harvard law professor who served in the Bush administration, but has been incredibly critical of this president on policy matters. But on legal matters, he has mostly thought that the Supreme Court has gotten it right and that Donald Trump has had the better argument at that point. So I think that's all fair. And that gets to my, the second problem that I mentioned earlier, which is that Trump wants people to think he's more dictatorial than he actually is, which I personally think is bad.

Which is its own weird problem. Bad in and in of itself, right? I mean, I always quote this Wayne Booth thing about rhetoric being the, how men probe the question of what men think they ought to believe, right? The rhetoric of the presidency matters. and he like, because it makes him look strong like bull. He likes to talk about how he's a dictator or he could be a dictator or he can do whatever he wants and how he's banned this and destroyed that and all these kinds of things.

And there are lies, which is worth criticizing, but not all lies are equal. Lying to the American people about being a dictator is, I think, long term really bad for civic health and for our understanding of what the Constitution is for. And I think that one of the things he desperately wants is, I mean, he would love civil unrest, right? I think that one of the things he's trying to do is goad people into burning flags, right? There's a reason why he's picking Democratic-run cities for all of this stuff. He wants the pretext or the justification to do more dictator cosplay, which I'm perfectly willing to concede a lot of of it is cosplay. But that's super creepy and weird. And I think it's, it's more damaging than just

the PR, you know, the partisan stuff. But how do you know that it's cosplay? I mean, how do we know that? I'm just not comforted by the fact that you think it's cosplay. I think some of it is. And some of, well, that's, I don't, I struggle. This is what I said at the beginning. I struggle with this is that if you look at the totality of the things that he's doing, he's obviously subverting democratic norms, he's obviously corrupt, he's obviously deceitful, right? There are all sorts of really bad things that you can describe him as, whether they rise to the level of an authoritarian power grabber, the jury is just out on that. But like, you can definitely tell that story with the facts that we have. It's just very difficult. Once you do that, then you have completely

shut off persuading anybody out there who thinks that that's Rachel Maddowism. And it's something I struggle with. That's all. I think that there's a few things. Like, number one, I think it is fair to say that they are probing the weaknesses of the system and looking for ways to expand their authority in ways that violate the, like the sense of the constitutional order, right, even if not actually the written words. I also think that he is channeling. Like, most people think of democracy as like, I get to vote for president. And the much more expansive view of what a democracy requires, again, I just go back to it.

This is an elite thing. And so, well, I think what he's doing is super dangerous. I don't think it's, I think it's likely to be popular in a lot of ways, not with Democrats, right? And I'm going to go back to the elites, if you look at some of the stuff he's doing, right? It was the Democrats who were like, we need to pack the court. We need to do all these executive orders so that presidents have. They were channeling, actually, that same view. Penn and a phone.

Yep. Yeah. Well, and look at Biden's stuff on the ERA at the end of his administration. Obama with DAC. I'm not a dictator. I'm not a king. And then he does the thing that he says only a dictator a king could do. Can we just underline the ERA thing that Steve just noted?

because literally on his last few hours in office, Joe Biden tried to create through waving his hands an amendment to the Constitution. And we're supposed to say, like, well, because it was stupid, it's not lawless. No, no, it can be both. I mean, that's a lot of what Trump does, right? It's stupid and lawless.

And I think that the fact, I'm just going to go back to you, sorry, I'm repeating myself, but I'm going to go back to the fact that elites were not honoring and strengthening these norms. Because it's popular. Because what they wanted was it's not so much that they were against the idea that the president, like we should just channel everything through the president and then he should be like John Luke Picard and just wave his hands and say, make it so.

It was just they don't want Trump doing it. They wanted Biden and Obama doing it. And what actually needs to happen is we need institutions that have good norms about the constitutional order, about restraining the use of power. power. And then we need both sides to enforce them. And that is totally broken down. And well, Trump, this is, he is responsible for the bad things he's doing. It's not because, like, Libs made him do it. But I think the response to him cannot be to just scream and say, dictator. It has to be to go back to what the constitutional order that we want that restrains power on both

sides. That means sometimes you want something to happen and it doesn't happen because that's not how the system works, but the system needs to be in place and capable of delivering people who do not do this stuff, who are restrained by their parties and the institutions from doing that stuff. And that is like, he is a symptom of a much deeper problem with America. So one last point on this, because like this is one of the things that bothers me so much about the, and people hear me talk about this a million times, the rhetoric of American politics is that if I go out on CNN and I say, look, Trump's not Hitler. people say, how dare you defend him? And I'm like, but you do know you can be pretty bad and not

be Hitler, right? It's like, Charles Manson, also not Hitler yet. Not Hitler, right. I mean, there are a lot like, you know, so, you know, Hannibal Lecter ate what, like 20 livers and now you're calling him Hitler? Come on, right? So like my point is that, um, well, Hitler was a vegetarian, I just want to point out. And he loved his dogs. One of the problems we have is, like, I think the last three presidents we've had all did things that were maybe even the last four right uh did things that would be defensively impeached um and i'm not talking about the things that were actually impeached um now i think about the last five um and uh i think trump's behavior with ticot is impeachable um i think he's a lot of the things he's done are properly impeachable including the things he was impeached for

We have this thing, we fall into this kind of framing of things that says, so long as he's not a dictator, what are you getting so worked up about? And the truth is, is like, he's done an enormous number of things that you should be outraged by that don't depend on apocalyptic scenarios and don't depend on framing it in the worst way possible. I mean, I think Trump has received demoluments. I think that's impeachable, right? He's violating the will of Congress without any explanation. I think that's impeachable. There are all sorts of things that make him a bad person and a bad president that don't require us to weigh the question of whether he's a dictator. Not that that's not a legitimate question.

It's just that because he does all the stuff that invites the accusation of dictator, it kind of flattens and minimizes the normy violations that he has done that are worth condemning in their own right. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is, the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain, on top of everything else, is why life insurance

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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. Before we return to the roundtable, to let you know what's going on elsewhere here at the dispatch. This week on the Remnant, Jonah Goldberg speaks with Cass Sunstein on how liberalism is under attack. They delve into the historical roots and modern interpretations of liberal thought, discussing its impact on freedom,

pluralism, and security. Search for the Remnant in your podcast app and make sure you hit the follow button. Now let's jump back into our conversation. I feel like I maybe let us off in the wrong direction by using his dictator quotes. I mean, he himself said, hey, I'm not a dictator. This isn't about being a dictator, even though people might like a dictator. It's not so much that I or anybody else thinks that Donald Trump is today a dictator. It's that these authoritarian impulses that we had seen in the first term. I reject the argument that I've heard from some people that we really didn't see much of this. You know, Donald Trump was much more normal. He was, you know, whether it was that he felt like he didn't have the power, he was too new to the job, he was

constrained by guardrails or advisors. That's, it's nonsense. to argue that we didn't see these authoritarian impulses. And then we saw it again, I would say, in spades during his campaign in 2024. The man ran on retribution. This is what he said he was going to do. So on the one hand, you can't really be surprised that the Department of Justice is apparently investigating Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, one of Trump's foremost critics, for mortgage fraud. And that his Department of Justice is going after other officials for things. Two wrongs don't make a right. But how is it different than what New York did to Trump? They investigated Trump, not the crimes, right? They wanted to get Trump. They investigated him for years. They couldn't find what they wanted. They ran the statute of limitations on other things. And then they brought a charge that had to be baked on another charge that had never been brought as the primary charge in New York. How is it different? Yeah, Megan has a terrific piece on this in the post, so Megan, you can speak to that.

I mean, I would say in some respects, it's not different. I mean, we spent lots of time talking about the New York cases and what an overreach it was. But this is the, like, result when you, like, as Megan was saying earlier, when the Democrats have time and time again ignored norms and Ben Lawless, and then the Republicans are going to respond in kind. and now we're off to the races. And again, I want to be very clear. I hated the New York prosecution. I thought it was pretty lawless, all things considered. And now I think what Trump is doing is worse because it's the Department of Justice, because it's the federal government. I think there's arguments about that. But in terms of the actual thing, I guess I am a little bit lost as to why it's different in any meaningful way. Similar to the like pen and phone, you know, Steve, I guess, you know, your point is, this is what Donald Trump was always going to be. My argument overall, I think, this is what every president would be, but we, whether it's the elites, as Megan says, or simply America's constitutional drift, we have created a presidency where now this is far more possible, where the president has more emergency powers, where they have a larger

administrative state, where the institutions are gone because we destroyed the political parties through campaign finance reform, my favorite song to sing on this podcast. So we're at a moment where, whether you want to call them guardrails or institutions, the elites or whatever else, we washed those away before Trump came into office. Now, you have a president who at any previous point looks a lot like other presidents, who also are power hungry, bad dudes, but we got rid of all the stuff that kept them in their pen. Let me just push back on that, and then I do want to turn to the Democrats, and I'm going to come to you, Megan, on that. Fair enough. I buy the argument about institutions. I buy the argument about the gradual

fraying of these constraints. I don't buy the argument that Donald Trump is just like everybody else. We haven't had presidents do the things that Donald Trump did, say in 2020, after he lost an election, to try to remain in power. I mean, it was a soft coup. I mean, we literally had all the troops pulled out of the South during reconstruction so that Republicans could remain in power. I get, don't worry. I get the differences. But let's not pretend that every election has been run with, you know, tea and crumpets served for everyone. We literally traded away black Americans' rights in order to keep one political party in power. No, but Donald Trump systematically lied for six weeks about an election that his own advisors

told him he had lost and then triggered a riot at the Capitol to remain in power, told Mike Pence his vice president to defy the Constitution. Yeah, yeah, we all know the story. Go read William Rehnquist, yes, the Chief Justice William Renquist. he wrote this great book called Centennial Crisis about the election of 1876, and it's so much fun. I think I basically agree with both of you. So this is going to be like, look, I agree with Sarah. We created this. And what's maddening for me is that I think everyone on this podcast was like, don't create. No, don't do these power grabs because imagine if someone you didn't like had these powers.

That would be terrible. And they were like, no, that will never happen because this. the emerging democratic majority is demographic destiny is going to mean that they will never have that power and lo and behold. And similarly with the rule of law stuff, right? I was really worried about Trump's incursions on the rule of law in the first term. And I made common cause with progressives who then turned around when these incredibly abusive prosecution, there was a, there was both a civil case brought by the state attorney general, which was like incredibly similar to this mortgage fraud stuff. She literally ran on I am going to investigate Trump and sue him. And he should be afraid of me because I'm coming for him. She won office on that.

She goes and there's this pretext of, well, Michael Cohen gave this congressional testimony and now I have to go. This is total nonsense. This is triple distilled boulder dash. This is high test horse pucky. And the fact that the number of people I had these arguments with, and I would say, and then there's Alvin Bragg. I don't want to know Alvin Bragg erasure here. The New York City district attorney runs on saying, well, I'm great at suing Trump. You should vote for me. And then he goes and he finds this absurd case where he inflates, first of all, something that is not illegal, which is paying off a porn star to keep silent, might be illegal for her to extort the payment, not illegal for him to make it.

He then, because the payment, he records it in his books, which by the way are not a public company, no one is looking at this except maybe his wife. He records the payoff by saying it's like legal expenses, which by the way also doesn't have tax consequences because Michael Cohen ended up paying higher taxes on the, there is no friggin' felony here. And no one cares, and this is not, it does affect nothing. It's not an election violation because the payment was

made, was recorded after the election was over. All of the theories are wrong. He, because these payments were made over multiple months, inflates this by making every single, like, when you write a check and record this check stub, those are two separate crimes.

He, uh, but with this under, with this incredible stretch of the law, evades the flat statute of limitations by inflating it into a felony based on a predicate crime, meaning that it was done in the commission of another crime that is not charged or even described. He does not name which crime he thinks was committed. And then in front of a friendly judge and a New York jury, he gets a conviction. And people were defending this. They were standing there shouting, 34 felonies. He is a convicted felon. Like five minutes after they were like, we need to

it, we need to vote against Trump and we need to stop him to protect the rule of law. What did you people think meant the rule of law meant? Like, what did you think the rule of law meant? Vibes, papers, essays. The rule of law is when we apply the same standards to every defendant, we charge people for the same crime, not because of who they are, but because of what they did. And this was not just like thrown away. It was flung down and danced upon to quote Mark Twain. And then people are surprised that we've ended up here. No, the way to have the rule of law, as I wrote in my column, is to have the rule of law. And that means demanding it of your own side as well as demanding it of the other. And no one is doing that right now. And we will

not have the constitutional order we need until people get serious about demanding consistent rules that apply to everyone and not just the people on the other team. Sorority snaps for Megan. Jazz hands. Can I also, like, I just, I, I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but it. Oh, but the choir is so happy. I will also just note something we haven't mentioned, because we've been talking about the norms and the institutions and everything else wants in office. We also created a campaign system that made a Donald Trump inevitable, by which I mean, the two biggest predictors of success at this point, are self-funding and name ID. So it was pretty clear once we had celebrity reality TV culture that that was going to be

huge for politics. You know, when Survivor got on TV, basically, I think we were in an inevitable situation. So, Steve, to your point, that Trump isn't special. Maybe Trump's special in some way that I can't think of. But there was an inevitability to someone like a Donald Trump doing this because we have changed our election system again. so much in the last 230 years to create a world in which, again, like just look at the electoral college. That was like the first thing that we ditched along the side of the road. And then there's

been so much since then. Well, I would argue it's the election system and the speed of information made Donald Trump possible. I don't think just the election system itself would have would have had that effect. The only thing I'm 100% with Steve on on here is I think you guys are downplaying the unique succitude of Donald Trump? I am, to be clear, very not. I just think the way to restrain him... Oh, I agree with all that. Yeah, yeah, sorry.

He's unique in the sense also that I don't think it can be repeatable because many candidates have tried and they have failed for eight years so far. And when Donald Trump leaves the stage, we're not going to have another Donald Trump. There is no one else who can pull this off. So, Steve, in that sense, I totally agree.

I thought we were meeting unique in, like, uniquely lawless, uniquely norms breaking, uniquely, you know, rule of law, not caring-ish. Is that whatever? But Donald Trump, like, Steve Hayes is unique, too. You're a special, special flower, Steve, and no one else will be like you. If we're all exceptional, nobody is. I want to turn to the Democrats briefly, because we've gone on for quite a long time on this. Democrats held their summer meeting, their annual summer meeting in Minneapolis this past week. And the Democratic National Committee chair, Ken Martin, called Trump a dictator-in-chief,

to speak of the use of the word dictator. But then he laid out what he wants his party to do. He thinks, contrary to the arguments that we heard, most especially from Sarah and Megan, that Democrats have been too nice, that they haven't done the kinds of things that Donald Trump has done. And that in order to compete, they need to. They need to be more aggressive. He said, I'm sick and tired of this Democratic Party bringing a pencil to a knife fight.

We cannot be the only party that plays by the rules anymore. We've got to stand up and fight. Sarah, what should we expect from the Democrats, number one? And number two, in context, the Democratic Party is as unpopular as it has been at any time in the last three. decades. If people look at Donald Trump and see him as abusing power and see the corruption, see all of these things that we've been talking about, why have the Democrats been so ineffective at building an alternative? I mean, Donald Trump's, in some polls, 20 points underwater in his approval rating. Yeah. So the Democrats have an identity crisis. Nothing new to say that. But again,

look at that FDR example. Windle Wilkie was saying the same thing about FDR. When. he was running for a third term, BT Dubbs in 1940, called him a dictator and all those things. A bunch of good it did him. He had other issues. Great book, by the way, about the election of 1940. I'm forgetting who wrote it. But it's a delight. The Democrats can't decide whether they want to be Donald Trump or be the opposite of Donald Trump. And so they keep switching back and forth. And it's that lack of identity, that lack of, I mean, authenticity to lack a better word that has really screwed them over because on the one hand they're like we're the party of the rule of law and then on the other hand it's like die for an eye we're going to fight fire with

fire and it's like which is it you can't be both you can't say Donald Trump is the worst guy ever but also we're going to do it more um they also have a crisis of their whole theory of the case this goes back to the identity politics thesis um that people thought brought Barack Obama into office and that the Democratic Party figured they could skate on forever because demographics were destiny. They have then the problem of Joe Biden that you had basically an entire entire party apparatus lie to the American people like a lot in really obvious ways that was then like came crashing down at that debate. Joe Biden had made some changes that now they're not sure whether to double down on or backtrack on. Like just think of the mechanics. He takes

Iowa and New Hampshire off the map as early states because he'd never won those states despite running for president 56 times. And so now it's like, well, was that a good idea? Was that a bad idea? We don't really know. There is no leader of the Democratic Party. And at the same time, you have Donald Trump, as you said, all the bad things, but incredibly popular actions, activities, if not accomplishments. And he is genius at getting Democrats to make their worst arguments. So like we talked at the very beginning about the flag burning. So he has this EO that will do nothing on flag burning. And what is it going to get the Democrats to do? Burn a bunch of flags, something that is incredibly unpopular, if not criminal in the United States.

It's great. Crime talking about bringing the National Guard to Chicago or any of these other cities that do have a real crime problem, getting them to say, no, we don't. Oh my God, Stephen Miller gave his little weird address about how people in D.C. can now wear their watches when they go to dinner. And you had all these people saying, I've worn my watch the whole time. Oh, really? You rich white person in Chevy Chase?

You were wearing your watch to Millies? Great for you. Millies, by the way, also called Milfys. It's a great restaurant. I love it. I go all the time. So no shade on Millies. Their defenses, where they have to be the opposite of whatever Donald Trump's, says, gives Donald Trump the control. And I think that voters see that and like not to make this

in the most simplistic terms ever. But I mean, after decades of toxic masculinity from the left, they wiped it out of their party all right. So now the Republicans are the alpha male party and the Democrats are the beta party. And it's even in how they respond to Donald Trump. They give him the control to set the agenda and then there for the opposite of whatever Donald Trump says that's not a powerful position to be in. Jonah, if Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called you 10 minutes after we finished recording this podcast and said, Jonah, I'm at a loss. I can't figure out how we're going to win elections in 2026, much less 2028.

What are the changes you would recommend to Democratic Party messaging to make us successful? What would you tell him? So the messaging, I think caring about the words is good. There's a think tank, the third way, came out with this list of phrases you shouldn't use anymore. And it's like they had AI scrape mine and Megan's columns for the last 10 years to come to these conclusions. Like, don't call, don't call literally the most popular category of human being on the planet mothers, birthing persons, right? Just don't do that, right? Because there's a lot of data to show that people like mothers, including this.

big cohort called mothers, right? And then the other big cohort is people who have mothers. So like don't like get rid of the word mother. It's not as inclusive as you think. All right. So but I think that's all to the good. What the party definitely just needs to do is have a massive internal arguments, public arguments about serious things. And they need sister soldier moments. They need people like Rama Manuel to say, look, you guys are crazy. I wrote this column a million times back in the before times about one of the strengths of the American right was that it was willing to have arguments, right? The federal society loves to have arguments. Libertarians versus conservatives, think tank versus think tank. We would have,

we would debate our dogma. We would debate our first principles, all that kind of stuff. The left, because of its intellectual tradition, goes back to the FDR tradition, which is pragmatism and activism thinks that arguments are a waste of time. Jonah, who in the Democratic Party, name and name, or names, that can lead that, do that, that isn't afraid of their base, which they think is made up of 25-year-old rich white kids in Williamsburg? Yeah, so I think it's a great question. I think Rom is not terrible at it.

He could be better. I think he's great. He's not, but he's a staffer, which, and I mean that in the highest, highest sense. What's his face? Senator from Pennsylvania, he's not bad at a... Fetterman. He's not bad at a sort of a cultural wavelength kind of way, right? But more broadly, the fundamental problem, I think, that the Democratic Party had...

So Kristen Soltr-Sanderson makes this case all the time that one of the problems the Democratic Party has is that its electoral base and its activist base are two completely different groups. Yes. Right. The electoral base is, is fairly conservative, you know, mostly southern, mostly black ladies, you know, like ones who got Biden the nomination in South Carolina and the ideological base are trustafarian, you know, San Danista baristas from Parks Lowe. And they listen to those guys rather than listening to the old conservative black ladies. And I think. one of the fundamental problems that the Democratic Party has is, and this is why Trump is so good at exposing it, is the Democratic Party is fundamentally the party of urban liberalism. If it's not that, then I don't know if anybody could come up with something that better describes what they are. It's the blue state model. It's the big cities. It's the big blue cities. And if they can get

all tied up and confused about admitting that crime is bad, right that we about freaking out about the need for more housing um then you know what would you say you do here bob i mean like if they can't run cities well large metro areas well why do why does the democratic party exist and so finding people who can make practical arguments about how to actually improve people's lives with normal public policies every now and then be kind of not just dismissive, but a little contemptuous of identity politics stuff to signal to people that you're not going to cave into that crap? Right. I mean, that was the thing that killed more than anything else about Kamala Harris. It wasn't that she was pro trans. It was

that she signaled in every way she could when she thought it was the smart play, that she would be a client servant of the ideological base of the party rather than the electoral base of the party. Can I give just a really quick example of this that is happening right now? So the New York Times headline about the shooting in Minneapolis. Can I read you this headline, Steve? Minneapolis suspect knew her target, but motive is a mystery. So you kind of had to go out of your way to have to use a pronoun in that headline to get that point across. But that you're but they did explain that the suspect in the shooting at the catholic school is a biological man who identified as female and so the new york times has used a her pronoun minneapolis shooter

suspect knew her target but motive is a mystery um it just like wraps up i think the answer to your question in one tidy headline for the left talking to the left and having no clue how the rest the country sees that. That is a headline for a news organization that is obscuring the information that might be relevant to a reader. It would be very unusual for there to be a school shooter that's female, but this says her. So you're like, oh my gosh, a female school shooter. Nope. That's not the information that you need as someone who's trying to get knowledge about what happened, what little we do know at this point. It's, yeah, it's all of the things. I'll give you another data point just very quickly. A newspaper that will remain nameless, but occasionally one of our

podcast guests goes to meetings there, had a story about that, about this case. And a friend of mine sent me a text while we're recording and said, people can disagree about the trans issue and all that. But it's kind of preposterous that I had to go 35 paragraphs. I counted in the Washington Post story before finding out it was a trans shooter, right? Like most people don't read the job. to the jump. And this is, I think you're exactly right. This is the kind of thing that I think the Democratic Party, and I should be really clear about this, for for defensible reasons, often, gets itself tied up and knots about some of these issues. They are trying to do right by what they perceive to be a persecuted minority that is, you know, has a right to live the life,

the want to live and blah, blah, blah, blah. And we can run up to get into the merits of it. But it's not, it's not what Sean Davis from the federalist would call gay race communist. right? It's like trying to accommodate people and all that. The problem is, is it repels 10 people for every person it attracts. In fact, if it attracts someone, they're already attracted to that stuff. And the idea, the Democratic Party needs to figure out how to appeal to the median voter, not get more Bernie bros to the polls. And until they figure out how to do that, they're in the wilderness. Megan, is that the problem? Look, I think Democrats had two theories of what their job was for the American public and how they were going to win

elections. And the first theory was that we're going to do big, bold government programs, Obamacare, et cetera, right? Second theory was that we're going to do identity politics. We are going to lean into social justice and all the rest of it. The second strategy just failed. And it failed in a debacle-tacular way with Kamala Harris, who's, comments on that those subjects came back to bite her in the 2024 election. But this the first theory is also defunct because we don't have any money anymore. We've got these huge budget deficits. You can't borrow it. And I think policy makers do understand that at the high ranks of the Democratic Party, whether the politicians are going to listen to them and avoid

promising stuff that they can't possibly deliver on. I don't know. But I think, that leaves Democrats in a really hard place because the two things the parties were unified around are just not on the table. So they've got to come up with a new theory of what the party is. And Donald Trump has come up with a new theory of his party. And most of the stuff that he's come up with is pretty cheap. He did the tax cuts. I am in no way supporting them. They were huge. They were like, they increased the deficit. They were not funded. They were badly structured. All of those things. so don't, like, not a defense of Donald Trump as a policy matter. But, like, sending the National Guard in the cities, I'm against it.

I think it's unnecessary. I think it's a bad precedent for the United States in all sorts of ways. Doesn't cost that much money, makes a big splash on television and signals that you care and are trying to do something about an issue that voters really care about a lot. What is that issue for the Democrats? What is the thing, the equivalent of saying, I'm going to ban trans surgeries from my and I'm going to send the National Guard in. There are big symbolic issues that are going to hit the public in the right spot.

And again, this is not an endorsement of these policies. It is just an observation. What is the Democratic equivalent? As far as I can tell, they don't have one. Abortion was their big one. But abortion, because that has proven in the abortion, just I think what we found out when Roe fell was that a lot of people who said they were pro-life were not so pro-life. They were they were kind of sheltering under the fact that this was an entirely symbolic

belief. Practically, they didn't want it banned. But here's the thing is, like, as that law is settling down, first of all, the issue is moved down to the states, and that's not great for a party that needs a national election issue. But second of all, as I predicted, I think that the law in various states is shaking out and will continue to shake out as edge cases arise and are resolved in ways that are going to be pretty broadly consonant with what the local public wants. It's not an issue where pro-lifers have enough juice outside of a few state legislatures to maintain laws that are really, really upset the public. They just don't.

And while I think we got a lot of those laws, we got these trigger laws, when it was a symbolic issue and it was a cheap thing, I will pass this never-never law that will give the pro-life lobby what they want, that has. Now that those laws have bite, I think that that law is going to evolve locally to look pretty close to what people in the individual state want, or at least a majority of people, can live with. And even if I wouldn't want, it might be a strong word, but can live with, are not so angry about it that they're going to go vote on it, which leaves what for Democrats?

What are the issues where they don't have to figure out a way to find a trillion or so dollars or trillions of dollars to spend on something, but that will easily signal to the public. Like, I care about this issue. You know, education used to be one, and they have thrown that away. And higher education gave them an able assist, but they are now less trusted on education than Republicans are, in part because of the COVID school closures and part because of the way that the politicization of higher education has soured the public on it, in addition to the costs and other things and the declining value of a degree. They are just in a tough spot. So if the, if the DNC were to call me, I'd be like, um, toughy, uh, good luck with that guys, you know,

holding my thumbs for you. Well, they're, I think they're, they're reflexive move is to offer voters a lot of stuff, um, to promise more spending. But with Donald Trump at the head of the Republican Party, Republicans are doing that. It doesn't create much opening for Democrats to do it. You know, they can say, well, we'll do it more. We'll do it better. We'll do it to different people. But the sort of uniqueness of that case, I think they don't have any longer. Well, we'll have 14 months to see if the Democrats can find a message and can make an argument. I will say, just to close that conversation, Democrats still in virtually all polling, have an advantage in the so-called generic ballot heading into 2026. So they're unpopular. Donald Trump is

unpopular. The Republican Party is unpopular. But if you put them head to head, at least theoretically, in a generic ballot question, Democrats have a slight advantage. And don't forget what's going on in Texas, where Republicans are poised to nominate someone of Roy Moore levels of unpopularity statewide, which could hand Democrats a Senate seat in Texas for the first time. I mean, I was alive, but I wasn't, you know. Lloyd Benson? Yeah, maybe. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but this won't be, the difference is they're not, it's not turning Texas blue. It's Republicans.

Right. Electing a Democrat by nominating someone who's so corrupt, so unpopular, his own wife is campaigning against him. For biblical reasons. Soon to be X-Y. Oh, she's working on it. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back shortly. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast.

Let's jump right in. So I want to end today with not worth your time as always. ways, but doing something a little different last week. Sarah, I'm sure you've listened to last week's episode and have thoughts. But to bring you up to speed in case you missed it, we ended with a discussion about what I call backer-inners, people who pull into parking lots and rather than pull forward into the spaces, pull backwards, often executing roughly a 47-point turn in order to do Do you know how triggering this was for people? I wasn't on the podcast.

Do you know how many emails I got about backing inning? Yes. So many emails. Who knew that there was backer, inner clickbait? We did not intend to do that, but we did get an overwhelming response. Most of the respondents, both in the comments on the website and in emails to the roundtable email address, were defending David French. his policy of backing in. Let me just give you a flavor of a couple of them and then I want to ask

Megan and Jonah if they're persuaded by any of the arguments that we read. What about me? Well, I'll come to you, but you don't have to sort of walk away from your previously declared position since you haven't yet declared one. We got an email from Adam who said, David saved you from losing a dispatch subscriber today. I thought I could trust you guys, but this, this might be the last straw. Backing in is indeed connected to your fiscal argument. We spent some time talking about the debt last week. Like the debt, it is better to do the hard work ahead of time to avoid catastrophe.

It is the only responsible move. He then goes on to say, it's crucial to use your directional. Russ wrote, well, I was planning to join the dispatch until slapped in the face with the feted mudslinging about so-called backer inners and the shameful treatment of David French on the last episode. And then Russ actually makes the argument. Seriously, there's a simple reason that so many truck drivers, especially full-sized trucks, are the much maligned backer iners. Trucks have longer wheelbases and worse turning radiuses. My 2005 Tundra has a turning radius just slightly worse than the USS Abraham Lincoln. But I can dramatically improve that radius by steering from the

quote, back of the vehicle by backing into the parking spot. This strategy also works for boats, forklifts, et cetera, where the steering mechanism is built into the tail of the vehicle. Jonah, you read a lot of the comments. We talked about this. You were with me in the initial argument. Were you persuaded by any of the response that we got from these very excited, passionate backer-inners?

I have to say I was. I mean, again, I was a soft opponent, as I said at the time. I mean, I don't want to sound like Kent Brockman. I, for one, can work hard for our new backer inner overlords or anything like that. But I was not as adamant about it. And my point was that if you're bad at it or if you're doing it in a place where it's creating more problems, don't do it. And I still kind of, I still believe that. But I found some of the, I found some of the arguments more persuasive than I thought, look, I have a problem. I have a wife upstairs that if I go too soft on this,

I'll be in real trouble because she still despises backer-inners. And I will not back off, as it were, from my claim, the last major backer-inner rally that David wanted was actually January 6th. But really pissed off people. But, no, look, certainly the safety stuff that people were pointing out and the visibility being better backing in than backing out, I think that's a real thing.

And I had not really thought about that. And so the annoyance up front for more safety on the back end, as it were, I found actually to be a pretty persuasive argument. Megan? Let me try to definitely reframe this, see if we can unify everyone around a healing message. All Megan and I want to do is talk about parallel parking. Yes.

The real problem is everything is that parking lots are bad and everything should be parallel parking. No, I think that my message would be what people are really angry about is that you're sitting there watching someone who is bad at it, kind of back and fill for 10 minutes while you are trying to move. And that does take longer and it blocks the and I think what the real message should be is, especially if you are bad at this, right? If you can do this in one turn, follow your bliss. If you are bad at this and the parking lot where you are as crowded, drive to the far end of the parking lot, you will get some exercise, you will see a new part of the parking lot that you've not perhaps not visited

before, and you will not enrage everyone else who is trying to get to their parking spot. And I just think more people should do this in general. As a New Yorker, an early argument between my husband and me was about whether we were going to circle the parking lot. try to find, like, a close space in the mall, or whether we were going to just park in, you know, Alaska and then walk. And I have now won that argument, and he is now an avid fan of the Alaska strategy, as I like to call it. And I think more people should do that,

but especially don't block traffic unnecessarily. But that, with that caveat, you know, follow your bliss guys do unto others do unto others which which reminds me that even my pastor sent me a photograph of him backing into a parking spot and admitted that he too is a backer in her sarah do you when you park your bentley do you back in or do you pull in forward okay important things to know about my parking one i will not park in parking garages two i love parallel parking it is the thing I am probably best at competitive advantage across the population than anyone else. And the fact that they now have like that parking button on a lot of new cars that will parallel park it for you is the thing that hurts my soul the most because it's taking away

my advantage against other humans. I will circle forever. I believe in the parking gods and I worship them. So like when we're heading to a restaurant that's not going to have a parking lot, I will pull up to the door of the restaurant, believing that there will be a spot for me there. There often is. However, I will admit that if you combine that belief system with the no parking garage belief system, there was one time very early in our marriage where I had circled and circled and circled. And I got out of the car in the middle of the road and was just to Scott in the passenger seat. It was like, figure it out.

And I left. Okay. I totally get that. Scott is a backer-inner, but following Megan's rules, right? He's not a 100% backer-inner, but he clearly prefers to back-in. And I will say, I never thought about it until this conversation. I didn't know there was a word for it, all of that. I find it, like, sexy.

Like, it's attractive to me that he's a backer-inner. Backing in is attractive to you? I'm going to get so many emails about this. Yes, because it's like this, I don't know, it's like this masculine thing to do. Interesting. As someone who is also married to a backer and her, I, uh. Right?

There's something a little bit like take control about it. It's like, I mean, not to get it too sexual, but like, you know, he's got this, he's going to handle this, you know? Um, he knows how to fit large objects in a small way. I don't, I just don't, I, I don't, I, I, I don't, I, I don't, I, I don't know what to say. I told you guys, my pastor listens to this, right? Yeah. And this is where you, this is where you took us.

Part of God's plan for humanity. Unbelievable. So I actually, I think we just let something go right past us, though, as I try to change the subject slightly. Sarah, just has a blanket, no garage policy. Can you show us on the doll where the garage, the parking garage touched you, Sarah? What do you mean, no, you just won't park into parking garage? Like, nope, can't do it?

I don't, I've tried to think about. a lot. I spent a lot of time thinking about why I won't park in a parking garage. And you don't have an answer? No. What do you do at the airport? What do you do with Dulles? I take an Uber to Dulles. A D.C.A. So, D.C.A is a, so first of all, Dulles has a parking lot that you can park in. So that's what I've done when needed. That's true. That's true. Second, Washington Reagan, DCA has an above ground open air garage. No problem parking in that. Love parking in that. Don't take Ubers to Reagan because I enjoy the drive in the parking. So clearly it's below ground parking garages that I won't do.

I just can't park in the parking space. I can't like any parking garage that has the pillars. I will circle forever. I will go to the very farthest reaches to avoid trying to fit my car between one of those pillars and another car. But Sarah, is it? This is so unbelievable. Are you afraid? Do you not like it because of how they make you feel when you get.

out of your car, right? Is it like a safety thing when you're, you don't like feeling all the heavy weight concrete as when you're leaving your car or going back in to get in your car or is it the driving, is it something to do with your car or is it something to do with your human body? Yeah. Out when you leave the car. So I can give you really rational answers about all the reasons parking garages are bad, but like I don't know what is driving me and whether it's one of those rational things. I mean, there's the, the like, yeah, being underground, maybe that's not, great. There's the general safety that like no one's going to hear me scream. There's the Megan point about it's far more likely to damage your car. And they're just, they take a lot

more time to get in and out of because they're smaller or whatever. But I think, I think, like, I think it's about the air thing, right? Because I am happy to park in an open air above ground garage. Yeah, I think it's like a weird claustrophobia that I don't have. in other respects in my life, but that it's like a garage claustrophobia. Okay. All right. I think garage claustophobia. I wonder if that's an actual thing, like a diagnosable thing.

Maybe it is. This was totally worth making it the longest dispatch podcast ever. It is the longest. I've totally lost control and we need to end. Okay. We are actually going to wrap up here. Thank you for joining us for this dispatch podcast. Please come back next week.

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