The Dispatch Podcast - Confirmation Kabuki | Roundtable

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Sarah Isgur is joined by David French, Jonah Goldberg, and Steve Hayes to discuss the first round of confirmation hearings for President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet. Are they worth our time? The Agenda: —The Mount Rushmore of Putzes —Senate hearings and “transparency” —The stupidity of our times —The Laken Riley Act —Joe Biden's farewell address —The Joe Biden legacy —The Jill Biden legacy —California fires and policy failures —Should you attend a presidential inauguration? Show Notes: —WSJ: Tulsi Gabbard mixed up details about a key surveillance law 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 weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The original OG crew is back together. Jonah Goldberg, David French, Steve Hayes. Happy 2025, y'all. We have plenty to talk about. I want to hit Senate confirmation hearings, Biden's legacy. Obviously, per last week's episode, we're going to go back and touch on California wildfires,

maybe a little on the Lake and Riley Act, and are not worth your time attending the inauguration when it's 20 degrees outside. So just prepare yourselves for that question. Let's start with Senate confirmation hearings. Trump's cabinet nominees kicked off on Monday, and it's interesting. right? He's not actually president. He can't formally nominate anyone. The Senate confirmation

history, when you think about it, go back 100 years. Senate confirmation hearings didn't really matter at all. Go back 30 years. They mattered a great deal. And then fast forward to today. And I feel like once again, they don't matter at all, but for very different reasons. David, Senate confirmation hearings, worth your time? Worth your time barely. But I'm with you, Sarah. I mean, I mean, there was the 30-year period or so where confirmation hearings mattered a lot. Filibuster existed in this context. And now if you control the Senate, especially in this Trump era, if the Republicans

control the Senate, and look, bottom line is as much power and control as Trump had over the Republican Party in 2016 and in the period when he was out of office, winning again gives him all the more. I mean, this is, at this point, it's almost boring to talk about because you know Trump has enormous power over the caucus. And the bottom line is if any one of his nominees as rejected, that should surprise us at this point. I mean, we can talk about which ones might be possibly, but I'm going to be surprised if any of them are, quite frankly. Steve, this week we saw a defense secretary nominee Pete Heggseth, attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, and Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio

in their confirmation hearings, kind of the big three, if you will. What did we learn, if anything? I don't know that we learned anything specifically, but I do think that in these cases and in cases of people to come, these hearings will be worth our time. One of the things that kept coming up

in the questioning of Pete Hegeseth was that he apparently didn't make time to meet with Democratic senators. and they took great umbrage at this. They were very frustrated that they didn't have a chance to ask them questions in private. Now, I think they could have done a better job collectively of asking him substantive questions when they had the opportunity in the hearings themselves. But I think they were pretty frustrated.

There are a couple of other instances where I think the hearings may prove important, although I start, I'm not sure exactly where David is. I think, you know, the betting odds would be that Trump gets all or close to all of his nominees. But we've heard in recent days of some frustrations in the one-on-one meetings that Republican senators have had with Tulsi Gabbard, nominee to be Director of National Intelligence. She's not able to answer questions. She doesn't know the brief very well. She can't give much in the way of specificity. There was a Wall Street Journal piece this week that laid some of these frustrations out.

that echoes some of what I've been hearing from talking to folks on the Senate side on Capitol Hill. And I talked to one senior Capitol Hill aide this weekend about the nomination of Cash Patel to be the director of the FBI. And he said he thinks Patel's hearings are an example of hearings that whether he succeeds or fails will depend largely on how he does in the hearings. You have Republican senators who want to be for him, despite, I would say, his sort of evident lack of qualifications, the fact that he's a conspiracy theorist, on and on. There are all sorts of reasons to oppose him. They want to be for him, but if he doesn't perform well in his hearings, it will be harder for them to back him. Jonah, the hearings this week, I think, just really struck me

both substantively watching them and then what broke through after, because it was pure, partisan bubble. You know, after Pete Hegsess hearing on the Democratic bubble, it was, you know, Democrats crush Pete Hegseth, you know, Pam Bondi demolished by senator. And you watch the clip and you're like, this is, it's not even a war shock test anymore. It's just a kabuki theater. On the Republican side, Pam Bondi demolished Senate Democrats. Pete Hegs says up to their attacks and smears. In exchange with Senator Padilla from California and Pambani, the Attorney General nominee, he's trying to get out his talking points. She's trying to get out her talking points. They're talking over each other. And it is farcical, right? Because he's running out of time, clearly.

And so he's talking so fast and reading and just doing it like really forcefully because obviously he thinks this is a good clip for social media if he can read the thing that his staff wrote for him for the question. And he's pushing her on reciting the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. She's talking over him with her pre-written zinger about, she's literally looking at her binder to push back that California's crime rate has risen 87% since he became a senator or something. And they're like, they're not even engaging with each other.

It's like, it's my line. No, it's my line. It's my turn to speak. No, it's my turn to speak. And they're just both speaking. And I was like, what is this? I mean, Jonah, it goes exactly to your point on transparency. Once they introduced cameras into this process, and I mean the process of legislating and governing, really, it was always going to end this way, I now feel.

Yeah, so I was going to invoke this really sort of brilliant piece of work for the National Constitution Center that David French, Sarah Azgear, and this guy, Jonah Goldberg did about reforms to our system. And in that, one of the points that we went, we did it two years ago. one of the points we hammered on was this transparency problem, is that you get, I mean, everyone likes to quote the Heisenberg principle, but actually it's more the Hawthorne effect from political science, which means that participants, once a participant knows they're being studied, they change their behavior. And I think that this is, I mean, so I disagree with you a little bit about how the hearings don't matter. The reason that it's only a little bit is because you're right that the actual hearings don't matter. But for the existence of the hearings,

though, you wouldn't have any vetting process at all, right? And so... Is this a vetting process? Well, so what we stumbled into is this system where if a nominee is going to be withdrawn or withdraw, they do it before they get in front of the cameras. And for the most part, at least, right? It's been a long time since a hearing actually caused someone to get voted down because no one wants to lose. So Matt Gates gets pulled out because, or pulls out, whatever, because they knew he couldn't pass. And so, like, there's this ceremonial thing we call confirmation hearings that no one wants to go, that the new president doesn't want to go badly. So if they don't, if he doesn't think he can get a win, they pull out. So, like, but for the confirmation hearings, that wouldn't happen.

So, like, it does matter to that extent. The other thing I would say, though, is it's not just that it's transparency now. It's that that's the problem. The advent of not just social media, but YouTube and that kind of thing, everyone, it's not just that you want to cater to media coverage. It's that you want to curate your own media. Everyone wants to create their own little video that they send a YouTube link for, for donors, for voters, for their district that is, I don't know if it's selectively edited

because they know exactly who they're sending it to, who want to think that Masey, Rono destroyed something other than earth logic. And so everyone is being performative for their own purposes. And it gets to the point of parody, which I think you're right about. It kind of reminds me there was an episode of 30 Rock where Jack Donaggy sits in in the writer's room. And he comes up with the idea and it was clearly a shot at a few bad seasons of Saturday Night Live where he says, why don't we come up with the punchlines first?

Like the weird catchphrases first and then write the scripts around the cat's phrase. And so it's like, you know, what's up, McGilliguddy? And let's write a script around that or or beep, beep, ribby, ribby. Which is actually a line from the little robot from the Buck Rogers TV show. And they actually start writing a script around beep, beep, beep, ribby, ribby. They go into these things with these pre-planned sort of zingers. And it's so forced. It's like dad jokes at the dinner table where they're trying to steer the whole conversation just so they can get to the pun.

And believe me, I know of what I speak. And it is farcical, but this is the life we have chosen. I was trying to think of the last nominee who's made it through a confirmation hearing, but nevertheless failed. I think it's near a tandem for OMB director. I think that actually went to a confirmation hearing and nevertheless failed. I mean, the most relevant one is still Tower, right? Just leave at least in the context of Hexeth. But, yeah, no, it's very rare.

Yeah, as I recall with Tandon, it was a very cringy confirmation hearing because her tweets read to her. Yes, again, something that felt very familiar to me based on my story of Trump interviewing me in the Oval Office and pulling out transcripts of everything that I'd said and reading them to me aloud. It felt confirmation hearing-esque. David, what's going to replace this process? I mean, to Jonah's point, maybe we're still, the process is causing vetting. But I think we're one step away from that not being the case either. I mean, yeah, I guess we vetted these nominees. Many of them were found quite wanting, but the tribalism took over.

And frankly, the small dollar fundraising went gangbusters. The more bad stuff you found, so the more defense they needed to get them through this confirmation process, it seemed we would have been better off without the confirmation process. process. I don't know that all of these people would have then been the nominees maybe. I don't know. But then, I mean, set aside the Constitution for a second. This is an AO. Just from a political standpoint, if the Senate isn't actually going to do its function or kind of do a reverse version of its function, what would be a better process? Well, you raise a great question. And the bottom line is the better process is actually just a better Senate. And we have seen such a thing as a better Senate before.

I mean, let's be clear. I'm not naive. I don't think for a moment that American politics has ever had its platonic ideal form. There have always been grifters in the Senate. The process has never been perfect. Andrew Johnson's impeachment hearing back in 1867 is a pretty good example of that. Not a good process there. The Senate was incredibly partisan, although. Yeah. The YouTube videos of that are amazing. Chief Justice Rehnquist has a pretty good defense. of the acquittal of Andrew Johnson, despite Andrew Johnson sucking. Everyone agrees with that. Right. So I'm not, don't put me in the naive category, but there have been moments in eras of an American history that have been better. I mean, we have talked about, for example, we had about a 30-year period where these things actually did matter. But we're at a period

that I have never experienced before. And where I have never seen in my life, and I'm going to use the quote from Jane Kostin, vice signaling, where we're very familiar with and have been familiar for some time with the concept of virtue signaling that I'm going to sort of display my correct political opinions in public in the most intolerant way possible to show what a great human being I am, even if what I'm doing is either meaningless or actively counterproductive because I'm such a jerk. That's virtue signaling. But MAGA has perfected this thing called vice signaling. And I'm transgressive. I do bad things. I have done bad things. I don't care. And in fact, the fact that I am transgressive means in some ways you can trust me to be fully Trumpian

because transgression is kind of at the heart of, you know, Trumpism. And so we are in a very weird moment where one of our political movements actually is reveling for the present moment in its own transgressiveness. And so that is an unusual moment for the advice and consent power to be exercised, because this is sweeping through the Republican Party, it's sweeping through the larger right-wing culture in the United States. And so I don't know what structural systemic reform can control for sort of embracing transgressiveness. You know, this is where the check of the people has to come in, and this is what the people have chosen for now, for now.

And I think to that end, what happened early on in this process before the hearings was instructive, and I think was a warning. And that was when Joni Ernst spoke out raising some questions about Pete Hegseth and his qualifications. Joni Ernst, who's a survivor of sexual assault, who's served in the U.S. military, was talking aloud and asking some questions about Pete Hegs'est qualifications, didn't declare that she wasn't going to support it. him, didn't say she opposed him, but was just asking these questions. And immediately within hours, the full online power of MAGA came after her. They went after her chief of staff, right, et cetera, et cetera. And she was reported to have said, eventually, what do I need to do to get to make this all go away? And she announced just within the past 2448 hours that she's going to be supporting Pete Higgs out. Well, other senators were paying attention to that. And

what we've seen in the time since is that nobody wants to ask questions. certainly before the hearings. And I suspect probably in the hearings themselves, nobody wants to challenge. No Republican senators wants to get crosswise with Donald Trump. And sort of the most extreme example of this, I would say, at least at the moment, we'll give them, we'll allow for the possibility that it'll get worse, is Ted Cruz, who is out on social media, sort of actively shilling for RFK Jr. Right. As Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Remember, this is, you know, Ted Cruz, who's ostensibly pro-life. I believe you're sincere in his pro-life views, pushing for RFK Jr., who is most certainly not. RFK Jr., of course, has a history of conspiracy theorizing, et cetera, et cetera. But the biggest, I think the funniest aspect of Cruz's support for RFK Jr. is in RFK Junior's favoring of effectively single-payer health care. Remember when Ted Cruz talk about performative politics, nine months into his tenure as a senator did this 22-hour non-filibuster

filibuster to push for defunding of Obamacare. He called it to train wreck. You know, he warned for 22 hours. Very dramatic. You know, he said, I will say, standing here after 14 hours, standing on your feet, there's sometimes pain, sometimes fatigue that is involved. But there's far more pain involved in rolling over, far more pain involved in hiding in the shadows, far more pain and not standing for principle, not standing for the good, not standing for integrity. And then,

you know, yesterday he tweeted out this video of RFK Jr. warning about poisons in our food and red dye number five and wrote, this is exactly why the Senate needs to confirm RFK, as HHS secretary. It's like, come on, man. Did you believe the stuff that you said about Obamacare back when you stood for 22 hours had great pain? Or is this just all as part of the show so that you can demonstrate your support for Trump? This episode is brought to you by MewMeu. Introducing Mutein, the new feminine fragrance by the iconic fashion house.

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I want to stay in the Senate for just a minute to talk about the Lake and Riley Act. This is a Republican-led immigration bill, but that's getting pretty large amounts of Democratic support now. It would require federal officials to detain any undocumented alien who has been charged with any sort of theft-related crime, shoplifting to burglary. The upside of that is, hey, look, immigration. Finally, there's something at least. Lake and Riley was a student murdered by an undocumented alien in Georgia who had been arrested for theft. On the other hand, as David and I talked about some of the legal part of this in AO, we've got about 40,000 beds in the United States for undocumented aliens and one in, one out, right? They're all filled. So you're going to get someone

for shoplifting. They must have a bed. But then you're going to let someone go who was charged with assault potentially. Yet, Steve, this actually looks like it might pass here in this new Congress in this post-2024 election era where immigration was such a big part of why, at least the Democrats perceive that Trump won, it looks like they're willing to jump on board with any bill. And yet I feel like this moment could have been used on a much, much better bill. Yeah. I mean, Democrats have already voted for, many Democrats have already voted for a procedural move that would allow the bill to be considered. And there's speculation that many of those same Democrats who voted that way, we'll vote again for the final legislation. They're in the

process right now, Democrats are of offering a number of dozens of amendments, I think, so that they can improve the bill or so that they can say that they tried to improve the bill. But I think you're framing on this is exactly right. I mean, this is clearly response to the election and response to the arguments that Democrats didn't, didn't pay enough attention to immigration. I think those claims about Democrats are true. They didn't. President Biden didn't care about immigration, didn't do much about immigration until it looked like it was a real political anvil around his neck. And when he finally did something, it had some effect, which suggested that the arguments he had made to that point that there was really nothing wrong. There wasn't a crisis. This was all Fox News

were baloney and they knew it. Well, I think Democrats have woken up and said that's a pretty potent issue, both because of the issue itself, but also because it suggests that Democrats were sort of out to launch, that they, they didn't care about the law and order issues that a lot of Republicans do care about. Jonah, politically, does this help Democrats? Yes. I mean, I think so. I mean, it's, we, if, you know, if we had a dollar for every time one of us said Sister Soldier moment on this podcast, we could retire. signaling-wise, I think it is useful for the Democratic Party to be open to the idea of things

like the Lake and Riley Act, even if it's not well-crafted and all the rest. And so at the same time, I think it's kind of a rounding error given the Democratic Party's problems. And it just gets kind of lost in the noise. And I know we're going to be talking about Biden's legacy and his farewell address, which was last night soon, um, like this, this moment, the transition moment right before the inauguration, I mean, I think it could conceivably give Democrats some Democrats a good talking point come the midterms two years from now just to say, hey, look, go check my record, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but there's just so much that's going to happen between now and then that's going to matter more, that it's going to be more defining of narratives that

I think it's just going to be forgotten. David, this bill has been around for several years. It originally started out as one of those messaging bills that had a whole preamble about how like Joe Biden is the worst human to ever stride the planet. And then it got turned into a real one. And again, you and I have talked about sort of the, not just the legal problems with it, I'm not sure they're legal problems. They're ironies of how it will actually do the opposite of what the intention is, which is to make Americans safer from people who have no business being in this country and should be shipped out immediately. It's not really going to accomplish that compared to imagine a more, a larger bill. I mean, if you have this moment with Democrats, my God,

let's fix all of the problems in the immigration system. If they're this strained politically that they have to vote for this, think of what you could actually get done. Oh, Sarah, this is so, I think this is so symbolic of the stupidity of our times. So look, going back into 2024 Democrats realized it's almost like you could see the light coming on early and in 2024 that they were like, wait, we got a problem with immigration. We were led, you know, however it happened, being led by the nose by the various progressive groups, you know, that a claim that any kind of restriction on the border would be is racist or xenophobic or whatever, but they began to realize in early 2024, we got a huge problem.

And so they actually did work with Senator Lankford, remember, with Oklahoma, from Oklahoma, and created a bill that would make a difference in the real world in a substantial way. And then this was the border bill that reformed the asylum system that allowed for automatic cutbacks at the border when certain numbers were exceeded. And that got shot down.

That got shut down to not give the Democrats a win before the 2024 election. I mean, that was all very clear, very explicit. Senator Langford has said that in the most clear terms. So then, The Republicans win. The best guesses say, in large part, because of immigration. And so here you have perhaps your best bargaining position you've had in some time.

So do you bring back this really big bill that you rejected before and maybe even get a little bit better deal out of it, which could actually do something real in the real world? No. No, no, no, no. You go with the very poorly drafted messaging legislation that when it comes to illegal immigration in the United States, will be a rounding error on a rounding error on a rounding error and impact on the overall system. And that's where we are. That's where we are. It's poorly drafted. We've laid it all out in AO where the way it's drafted, you could actually see violent criminals being released from a detention to make room for someone who's shoplifted a case of Red Bull. I mean, this is absurd in so many

ways. And so, yeah, I completely agree with detaining illegal immigrants who have been arrested, but to do it in a way in which you don't have, you're mandating detention without enough beds. We've seen this movie before. It doesn't work. With no appropriation for new beds, no appropriation for anything. It's, it's Congress at its worst. In fact, set aside the immigration topic for me. This is Congress at its worst, where they mandate. mandate a new thing and appropriate no money for it because then they don't feel any of the tradeoffs if you will right like because the money is a very easy way to say what was that money going to before but in fact when you don't appropriate new money for something like this the

tradeoffs are much much larger because there's a set amount of resources that currently exist and those resources were going somewhere else so for instance to violent criminals because out of 11 million people in only 40,000 beds, I would like those really prioritized, and I would like more beds, and I would like more deportations, all of it. This won't do that. So I have a weird point I just want to throw in here. I have not completely thought through is to tell me if I'm crazy. In 2012, we had the autopsy, right? Yeah, the Republican autopsy run by the RNC. I believe it was called the Growth and Opportunity Report as someone who was at the RNC during that time. We did not like the word autopsy.

It was an autopsy. And one of the, you know, the thing that people remember about it is that Republican Party needs to mend its ways on immigration. And I remember Sean Hannity after Romney lost all of a sudden saying maybe the Democrats were right. Maybe we got to do something about immigration, right? And it seems to me that you get these weird things in politics. We haven't seen one like this in our lifetime to a certain extent. Maybe there was a brief moment under Reagan, where it was otherwise, where, you know, there's this concept in political science, the sun and moon party, where one party is the majority party, the other one's the minority party, and it orbits the other one, right? That system is sort of dead, and we've talked about that a million times.

We were basically a parity. But you do have these periods where one party fundamentally believes the assumptions of the other party and just tries to superficially differentiate itself from it. Um, you know, it's like both parties believed for a very long time that, uh, illegal or that, that immigrants were always going to vote Democratic, right? The, the sort of wrongly understood Roy Tashira, John Judas argument. They wrongly, they, they, they've, and so like, Democrats wanted to maximize immigrants coming here to become citizens so they could vote. And, and Republicans wanted to limit it. Both parties believed that if everybody voted, if you just maximize turnout, Democrats would always win because the low information, unwashed masses are just

inherent Democrats. And so Democrats did everything they could to maximize turnout as a matter of law and policy, and Republicans were accused constantly, sometimes correctly, of trying to restrict turnout, right, to make it more selective, sort of like Spinal Tap in Boston. We are now in a moment for the first time in really living memory where the assumptions about how about reality are Republican. And Democrats are sharing them and trying to figure out how to differentiate themselves from a reality that they don't like, but they're convinced is true.

And what would be better is if we could get to a place where maybe both parties had a slightly different epistemology and we're willing to defend it on the merits rather than just sort of, you know, Democrats are acting like it's the Republicans world we just live in it now and the way that Republicans for very long time acted as if it's the Democrats world and we just live in it. And I don't have, it just occurred to me while we were talking about this that it's kind of a weird moment. Don't you feel like that's what the 2024 election was, though, that both sides made their case for a different worldview? And that one side won, right? Republicans ran on the idea that the American people were done with immigration. And Democrats

were still running on the idea the American people were, in fact, very sympathetic to people who had come here illegally, didn't really want to close the border. And so we tested that theory and the Democrats lost, which is why they've adopted the Republican theory of the world. I agree with that entirely. But I would say, I mean, I think that's exactly right. What's weird about it is like Trump did not have an FDR style landslide, right? Trump had the 44th largest turnout in the electoral college in American history. You know, Harris lost by what, a point and a half, two points, something like that. The vibe shift is so much larger than the fundamentals of the election that I think it speaks to the fact that a lot of liberals have been, were gobsmacked, were just sort of stunned to discover

that their theory of identity politics had been falsified and they don't know how to talk in any other way. Can I, can I, I also think something is happening here, which is the Democrats are going through what a lot of us hoped the Republicans would go through if Trump had lost, which is that the Republican coalition, we've all, you know, we've talked about this, that there are the core Trump-based MAGA voters. He can do no wrong. And then there's a whole bunch of Republicans who've had some varying degree of hold your nose. And there has been some building resentment on the part of mainstream and establishment Republicans at the constant bullying of MAGA, just constant bullying. Well, that reality has actually been also.

unfolding from the center left to the left. There's a lot of long building resentment in the broader American left between the center left and the far left. And there's a lot of people on the center left who believe that in particular, young activist in philanthropy, young activists in the so-called groups,

the online activists were jamming an extremism down everyone's throats that people were uncomfortable with. And so it's not just that you're having a kind of normal every, you know, when you lose election, soul searching moment after you lose an election. This is also ripped the scab off of a lot of pre-existing internal resentments. And for years, sort of the whip hand was held by the online activists, the progressive groups, etc. And they were cowing the center left into submission. Now it's all flipped back around, and the center left is saying, this is what you led us to.

We acquiesced, and it got us Trump again. And so part of this is actually the reckoning on the left that a lot of people hoped for on the right if Trump had lost. You're right. I mean, it's very interesting. If you look at the race to lead the Democratic National Committee, you're seeing this. play out sort of in real time. And to a certain extent, it's not clear that they've gotten, that they've internalized this message. Ben Wickler, who's the head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and I think is the leading candidate. He's gotten lots of high profile endorsements, Chuck Schumer

and others. I think he's regarded as really as one of the best Democratic operatives in the country, and I hear that from Wisconsin Republicans who said, you know, some of whom said to me before the presidential election that they were giving Kamala Harris two points in Wisconsin because Ben Wickler and his operation was so much better than the Wisconsin Republicans. That didn't turn out to be true, but I think he's regarded as a as a leading contender for the job. And he had a tweet the other day that was, I think in this context, almost parodic when you look at the listing, he had this long, long list of the groups. And it was like, you know, maybe they get it. But on the other hand, if you want to lead the Democratic Party, what you need to do, and this is somebody who's sort of staked his candidacy on reaching out to rural Democrats, bridging the gap between urban Democrats and rural Democrats and has really emphasized sort of winning over rural voters, making them Democrats, when he's got to do something like that, when he feels the need to do something like that, I do think it's pretty telling.

There's also a race or an identity versus class battle that. That is it's been there. I mean, this has been happening in the Democratic Party, but I think we're seeing it again now, sort of in stark relief. You had just yesterday, Fas Shakir, who was a longtime advisor to Bernie Sanders, also, I think, regarded as a very smart operative, get into the race as sort of a late entrant and say, hey, this is all about class. The Democratic Party has to go back to being the party of the working people. This is all about class. And it's going to be interesting to see as that fight unfold, where Democrats end up? By the way, I think that's true. Like, if I were a Democratic operative, that's exactly what I'd be trying to move the party toward because I think there's at least evidence for that in a way that the identity politics, CRT from the 90s.

I mean, this is really a seed that was planted in the 90s, bloomed then in the late 2010s and wilted in 2024. Okay. Did anyone watch Biden's farewell address last? night? I watched it this morning. Okay. Yeah, I did not watch it last night, actually. Excerts. Okay. Well, that was the president's farewell address. It started with a tribute to the Statue of Liberty, which if you're a Republican operative, not, I don't think like a mainstream Republican, I don't think the vast majority of Americans would think anything of starting with

the Statue of Liberty. But if you're a Republican operative, there is nothing more grating than the Statue of Liberty because basically Republicans are against the Statue of Liberty at this point, right? It's French. It's not American. It's not from the founding. It's from this time of the progressive era,

basically, at least the rise of the progressive era, that maybe ruined the American constitutional order. Like, it stands for everything bad, in fact. And here he is, waxing poetic about the frickin' statue of liberty and listing all these American institutions that we have to respect, the courts, for instance, the presidency, the Congress,

all things that I think he deeply disrespected during his time of office. But he did it with a smile and he did it with a nice voice. And Trump didn't, even though I think they disrespected them both a lot. And, of course, Steve, there was the part of the farewell address where if he had given that before the 2020 election, he would not have won the election because this looked like someone who was not up for the job. Yeah, I mean, in that sense, I think it would. sort of the perfect encapsulation of Joe Biden's presidency. It was disingenuous. He was sputtering throughout. He didn't make sense. It was incoherent. I think, you know, if you look at the

way that he framed his presidency, I would say both on the bookends, both in that in that brief speech. Going back to his inaugural, this is a president who failed on his own terms. If you go back and look at what Joe Biden said. Remember, he quoted Lincoln and he said, you know, unity is in my soul. It's everything is unity. The United States can do anything it wants. If we all come together and he made a series of these promises, I will always level with you. I will defend the Constitution. I will give my all in your service thinking not of power, but of possibilities, not of personal interest, but of the public good. Where was that Joe Biden when he decided to run for re-election knowing, I think, full well that he wasn't up to the job, as he's since admitted.

You know, this is a guy sort of separate from the policy problems, and I think the failure is there. And I think there are many who just as a human, if he saw his job was to block Donald Trump from being president again in 2020, the decisions he made led directly to Donald Trump being president again in 2024. Nothing's guaranteed. Of course, it would have been a big race. But the fact that Joe Biden acted the way that he did made it far more likely that Donald Trump would be president again. David, I'm going to read you a line from Biden's farewell address. Democracy must defend and be defined and be imposed, moved in every way possible. I actually don't. It appeared that he was reading that, as in like, maybe that was real. But then again, hard to say. And I think that's like my purpose. encapsulation of the speech because I don't know whether that was a senior moment or just a nonsensical Democratic staffer overwriting a speech. Democracy must be imposed. Is that what Democrats actually believe right now? That seems weird. It is, it's almost sounds like a kind of word salad that the writers of Veep would have written about like, what does consultant speak sound like? Like a 5% parody of political consultant speak. Democracy must defend what and be defined by what and be

imposed. That seems like just not what they believe, not maybe what anyone right now believes, moved in every possible way. I don't know what it means to move democracy. I don't know what that means either. Yeah, I have no clue. Look, I mean, from my perspective with Joe Biden, it was one, two, three strikes and you're out. So strike number one was the Afghanistan. stand withdrawal. Strike number two was the total chaos at the border. And then strike number three was this long-running campaign that we now know was more elaborate than we even imagine to just conceal his decline from the American people. And look, I don't think your median Democrat necessarily understands how much in the real world, the Biden concealment and deception

around his age totally blunted the character argument. Yes. Because, look, you know, out in the, outside of your political hobbyists, millions and millions and millions of Americans don't, even, even by 2024, did not have chapter and verse on all of Trump scandals. They really didn't. They did not have chapter inverse on all of Trump scandals. I mean, yeah, they knew he wasn't, you know, a role model kind of guy, but that having that chapter and verse. So when you're making big summary arguments about he's corrupt, he's dishonest, And then you're saying that Biden is different from that when the kind of corruption that Biden showed was obvious to everybody because everybody, everybody has experience with age. And so when you were going to the American people and Biden and Biden's people trying to reassure everyone that he was just fine to tell them, especially after the debate, don't believe your lying eyes when I don't know about y'all.

but when I was watching the debate live, I literally wondered if Biden was having a health event. It was so bad. And so to tell us that to conceal that from us, then when it's all, it's undeniable. Like, nobody can even begin to rationally deny the decline. He still hangs on and hangs on and hangs on. This, that is going to hang over his legacy and it should. Because, you know, look, when we're judging politicians and we're looking at history and legacy. One of the things that you always look at is when the rubber meets the road and a politician

had to choose between personal good or pride and public, the public good. The ones that we really admire, the ones who, when the rubber met the road, when there was that fork, they chose the public good. It is very clear that what Joe Biden did was chose his own pride and his perceived personal good. And he did what so many politicians do, which is to sort of wrap it all together in his mind as my success is the nation's success. And people could see that. They could see it quite obviously. And I think that's going to rightfully hang over his legacy now and for all time. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures.

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could actually be worse than what the very bad things that have been discussed already on this pod and maybe that i've even seen anyone be willing to say because joe biden comes off like a nice guy i don't think anyone's really willing in the way that they would be with trump for instance willing to actually deliver the body blows that I at least think are the plurality likelihood at this point, if you will, that he was corrupt, that he basically set up his family to make money off of his office, whether it was proved that he was sort of personally involved or not. I mean, we have the pictures with him introducing his son to people. You know, he clearly was indulging his son in all sorts of corruption that, he was incompetent and maybe in like not compass mentis either those all being related that his accomplishments were double-sided at best right that he was warned again and again including by those in his own party that passing such a large infrastructure bill would lead to inflation but that he wasn't willing to say no to the Christmas tree you know spending spree that

various Senate Democrats and senators and House members thought they could go on. So because he wasn't willing to say no, which is again going to be a theme of his presidency, we had huge amounts of inflation in this country that, I mean, really hurt people and that, you know, David and I were complaining about this the way the media talks about inflation. Yes, the rate of inflation may have returned to relatively two to three percent normal levels, but things still cost a lot more than they did. has the rate of inflation is how much it goes up per year, not whether things cost more. And so, you know, I went to buy a sweater for husband of the pod at Banana Republic.

Whoa, it's really expensive. My babysitters cost like a full third as much. I was paying $20 before COVID. Now I'm paying $30 an hour. I mean, and then you have the sort of selfish aspects, the like, I'm going to be a bridge to a new generation, the not keeping his word, the generally lying, but doing it while looking nice. There's a piece of it, of that part, that reminds me a little of Obama, right? Like, he's so inspiring.

He's the hope and change guy. And then when he can't deliver on actually being the Messiah, it actually disillusioned an entire generation of Democratic voters. That's Joe Biden, except that there was never the, like, inspiration side. He promised to do something and time and again. He didn't deliver on his promises slash lied and, I mean, lost an entire party. Yeah, I mean, look, I don't disagree with anything that anybody has said. said so far, I just want to, like, I want to podcast nearly, not merely by the example of our power,

but by the power of our podcast. And for those who don't get the reference, it's one of Joe Biden's favorite lines is he used it as inaugural address. He used it last night in the farewell address. It's we should lead by the example, not just by the example of our power, but by the power of example, which I like the idea. It's fine. It is consonant with the statute of liberty stuff. It's which is not original to him. Like Bill Clinton used to say it all the time. I think he said it at DNC's speech a long time ago. I think, look, I think he's going to be remembered of the recent one-term presidents. He will be ranked towards the bottom of the list for a very long time. The thing that I have some caveats about is that it, you know, the future can change how we

look at the past. Jimmy Carter, who recently passed away, it's weird the things that now people look at him saying he's got this great legacy for, which were not things people were saying about him for a very long time. The prism can change on us. And so there are things like how the Ukraine war turns out will affect how we view him. How Trump's presidency turns out will affect how we view him. The bind he's got there is that he really only had one mandate, which is to prevent Donald Trump from returning to office. Right. And then Donald Trump returned to office. If Trump has a great presidency, what the hell was Biden about? Right?

I mean, and if he doesn't have a great presidency, he failed to do the one job that he had. So, like, he's kind of caught in this double bind. And the thing about that, Farrell, I think all Farrell addresses are pretty stupid. Everyone has to sort of name check Eisenhower and make it sound like they're picking up on this tradition by Eisenhower. But Eisenhower's farewell address was good. George Washington was good. That's about it. Reagan's was okay.

But okay, there's one piece of this farewell address that we haven't talked about yet that if it echoed Washington's in one respect, he issued a warning to the country, like Washington did. Washington was warning about factionalism. And Biden was warning about the fact checks. From factualism to fact checks. Biden warned about oligarchy. That was his warning to the country. Will that turn out to be resonant?

Will that be remembered? That could, right? I mean, that's sort of my point is like we don't know how the story is going to play out. So if Musk and Teal and these guys create some sort of private army or like Trump has a stroke and they become this triumvirate working behind the scenes to run the country, like that would make Biden seem kind of pressure. So he's the one who just gave what last week, George Soros? Yeah, he's such a hypocrite.

Everybody loves their own billionaires. That's right. That's the thing is if you're on the right, you love your right wing billionaires. If you're on the left, you love your left wing billionaires. it's like they like their own oligarchs. That's the way this partnership is like. Well, and it's not like none of the rest of us noticed what Musk was doing with Trump before Biden said it last night. I mean, if we had asked you this question yesterday at this time yesterday before Biden's speech, we wouldn't all be surprised.

Wait, what? Musk and Trump are close? What? Peter Thiel is buying elections? What? And so that just sort of like my overall impression, I listened to it a little bit in the car radio last night and then I watched the whole thing this morning. the image that kept coming to mind was from back to the future where because the past changes like Michael J. Fox's brother vanishes from the Polaroid. That's what I felt like watching Biden.

He was just sort of quietly evaporating from history as like a vestigial appendage. And I don't mean to be too harsh, but you guys have been harsher. And every time I try to be a little more generous, you guys come down on me. So, and the one person I think that we have not heaped any scorn or blame or finger pointed at is Jill Biden. Oh. And I think Jill Biden's going to come in for a vicious appraisal by history because I think, you know, there's this interview today or yesterday that, you know, she's she's really mad at Nancy Pelosi for forcing Biden out of the race to run again. And the vanity of that woman to, who's the one person who has the ability to persuade Joe Biden on things, to think that the country desperately needed him and the biggest mistake was not letting

him run again, just shows you how deep that bubble really is that they are living in. Well, all of the stories that you hear where he's saying he could have won, he could have done it. I mean, it's incredibly delusional. And it just really reaffirms the very concerns that made people want him to drop out. Many people have experiences with older people in denial. And that is like the worst of the phases because the problem is so, so screamingly obvious to everyone else. And then the actual individual who's in decline just refuses to see it and gets increasingly resentful when things are pointed out. These are experiences that are almost universal to the human condition.

So this idea that Biden could come out there and deny all this stuff. And we would believe the denials, it was farcical. But here's a question I want to ask. So, you know, if you're a real civics nerd, you know that the U.S. president combines the head of the executive branch with head of state. So there's these sort of two components, you know, in Britain it's divided, head of state as the king and head of government as a prime minister. Is Joe Biden, in many ways, the worst head of state president that we've had in a very long

time. In other words, totally incapable of rising to a moment and communicating an idea or a thought to the nation or creating a kind of emotional bond even with his own supporters. So, you know, Trump's a bad head of state, but there's no question that he has its bond with half the country. Biden never even had a bond really with Democrats. And so, you know, it really does illustrate, I think, there is a vacuum that occurs when somebody cannot perform that function of sort of being the public face of the United States government, sort of being the public face of the United States. He was less capable of doing that than any president in my lifetime. Yeah, although I will say he was better than Wilson after Wilson had the stroke.

Well, I'm not quite that old, Jonah. Like, Sarah would disagree. Sarah would disagree, but I am I do not remember the Wilson administration. Okay, let's move on to our next topic. As Bloomberg is now reporting, the dry, dangerous winds that have kept fire-scarred Los Angeles on edge for days are finally forecast to end. But a lack of rain, another round of winds forecast next week, has officials worried. We talked about this last week that it was too soon to really know what policies might have prevented these fires that have now claimed dozens of lives. At the same time, there are certainly policies. failures that we can point to, policy failures that are meant to help prevent forest fires

or that stop the prevention of forest fires, if you will. So I thought we'd go around the horn and each talk about our favorite policy failure that you think California should fix moving forward that you think could make a difference. Jonah, I'm starting with you. Oh, thank you, because everyone's going to pick mine. Other than the existence of L.A. in Southern California in the first place, which God did not intend for that many people to live in a desert, the insurance markets, right? We are basically, and Scott Linscom had a great piece for us sort of walking through the research on this. And our own James Sutton was on The Remnant talking about this a little bit as well.

We are basically undercovering people for potential forest fires or fire damage. or destruction, while subsidizing them to live in places that are more likely to have fires. And it is a, there is a kind of blue state populism that we don't call populism, that is nonetheless populism, which is just sort of pandering to a kind of middle class sensibility of thinking you have all of these sorts of entitlements and taking the rough edges out of life and taking all the market and pricing signals out of it. And that's, you would still get fires in Southern California because fire is natural to that part of the country.

But the damage that they would do and the costs that they would exact would not be born by taxpayers and would not be as severe as they are if you just had properly functioning fire insurance models. Florida, of course, has this problem with hurricanes as well or is developing more and more of this problem. Okay, David, what's your policy change that you'd make? Well, I mean, I'm in the camp of I'm extremely hesitant to talk about anything regarding the actual fighting of the fires because one of the things that I have been very cognizantous of is there's a number of people who have a long experience with fighting fires who say,

okay, yeah, in the abstract, you could say A, B, C, or D are things that are better ways to posture L.A. for fires, but wouldn't necessarily have made a dime's worth of difference in this circumstance. It feels like the mass shooting problem that after a mass shooting, everyone trots out their favorite thing that they're mad about that may or may not have had anything to do with preventing this mass shooting. True. That's a great analogy. You know, it's if it would be like if someone commits a mass shooting with rifles and then someone says, now we need to ban handguns. So it's a very open question in my mind, and we just really need to wait for the after-action review as were there policies that could have made a difference with this fire versus

policies that can make a difference with your more normal fires. Those are two different things. But since I don't want to jump on to Jonah, the one, even though I completely agree with what Jonah said, the one thing that I have seen that's a very compelling critique of the LA reaction isn't necessarily in the fire policy, it is in the public communication and that there was an enormous amount of confusion, especially early on, that it really did matter that the mayor was out of the country when the fire started. This really was consequential from a communication standpoint, from a public confidence standpoint. And you know what it tells me is one party

states, one-party cities, always devolved towards taking their constituencies for granted. It just strikes me that what you have in L.A. and what you have in California is something we're also seeing emerging in some of these very one-party states where I live, is just this almost assumption of entitlement to rule and sort of this kind of air of lack of accountability and a kind of arrogance in the exercise of power. and a number of California or L.A. residents I know were all just taken aback, especially in that first 48 to 72 hours by the lack of the coordinated response, the public response, the early divisions that emerged right away between the fire department and other parts of the city. And so I don't know if that's

a policy change so much as an observation that in times of crisis, it has to be clear from the first seconds where the absolute total priority of the government is. And that is not what happened in this circumstance. Okay, so far, no one's picked mine. Steve. So I'll just pick up on what David said there briefly. I think that's right. You know, the way that we communicate in public, the way that our elected officials communicate in public and how they lay out their priorities after something like this has happened is hugely important. I would just say it's also really important beforehand. And while I think, you know, there were some real cheap shots on the right in sort of meme culture and social media about the obsessions with DEI, I mean, you could

look at some of the memes that were amplified or created by, you know, high profile social media types on the right. And it almost seemed as if they were saying these fires happened because of California's focus on DEI, which of course is not true. But it is, I think, fair to say, you know, if you have leaders of Los Angeles, leaders in the city, either elected or unelected, who are saying in public that their top priority is DEI, is equity, it's fair to say, boy, shouldn't your top priority if you work in fire prevention be preventing fires, doing the kinds of things that you ought to be doing in order to do your job well. So I think there were exaggerated claims on the right, but there are fair questions

sort of underneath that. And those questions are questions that we ask before these things happen. On the question of policy, I mean, I do, I'll just piggyback on Jonas a little bit. I mean, I think if you look at what was happening, you saw Kamala Harris kind of instantly blame insurance companies for canceling insurance coverage and leaving. families whose property has been damaged or destroyed, defend for themselves. Well, that's not actually true. That's not what happened. The insurance companies aren't canceling policies after the fire happened, but insurance companies did cancel some of the policies or refuse to offer policies

beforehand, but they did so as a direct response to policymaking in California that politicized the risk by capping what insurance companies could charge for coverage. I mean, that's what insurance companies do, and they need to be able to make these assessments of risk. And you can't tell insurance companies, you have to operate at a loss and expect that they're going to continue to cover the houses they're meant to cover, or the houses that they would, in some cases, like to cover. And I think that gave people a false sense of security on the ground about what was covered and not. They figured, oh, I have insurance. I don't need insurance if I can't get it. And I think that ended up being hugely problematic. There are other things.

things that, you know, that have been recommended. This is not me. I mean, there are massive studies of these things, like for more far-reaching regulations on fire retardant building materials, the kinds of materials that you can use in your garden that would keep embers from igniting quickly. And, you know, there have been tests run on these things, and they they proved pretty effective. I'm not sure we'd want to be in the business of that level of regulation, but certainly those are suggestions that have been offered. There, I mean, there have been whole reports on this. There was this report of the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, 400 pages, sort of stakeholders from everywhere that said, hey, we should

do these things, we should do these things. Here's what we should consider. So I do think that's a place for people to start. You're all wrong. The correct answer. is lawyers. So many regulations in laws in California mean that anytime California tries to do anything it ends up in litigation for years. So this is true for so many problems that California and other large regulatory-friendly states have. But it's a real reason for California's housing crisis, for instance, because no matter which way you go, you're going to get tied up in litigation no matter what. And so you can have this idea for fire prevention or see something that needs to get done. And it's not going to get done for 10 more years if it gets done at all unless someone

gives up or changes the regulation. And then you're back at the beginning of square one. So lawyers are, as always, the problem. Okay, not worth your time. The inauguration is coming up here in D.C. And I got to tell you, the forecast is Monday's low is nine degrees. The high is 22. It's going to be one of the coldest inaugurations in modern history. Have you guys ever been to an inauguration? No. I kind of hung out at the Bush one. No, not at the Bush one.

At the Clinton one, I kind of checked out the crowds and then went home. That's about all I've ever done. Steve? Yeah, I covered, I believe I covered the first Bush inaugural, the second Bush inaugural and the first Obama inaugural. Okay, so you're my guy then. Is going to inauguration in person worth your time slash maybe a digit or two from frostbite? Well, of course, I have to preface my answer by saying I'm not scared of those cold temperatures. I've gone to Lambeau Field when it's been much colder than that. Wait, I just want to point out, this guy is inside his house right now wearing a winter hat.

Exactly. You're making my point. I know how to prepare. Our house is freezing, so I'm wearing a winter hat right now. Is this like a quintessential American experience? Is this like visiting the Lincoln Memorial at night? I don't know if it's that. But having gone to these, there is something cool about it. And, you know, I'll be, I don't know what the word is. There's something cool about witnessing the peaceful transfer of power in person,

especially if you're familiar with how rare it is, that this happens the way that it happens. And, you know, every once in a while, you can, you see something or you meet someone or you talk to someone that, you know, has sort of a lasting impact. And I, that happened to me actually at Obama's inauguration of all things. Not a president I was excited about in 2008, thought he was, I didn't like the way he campaigned. I was very critical of his policies. But as I was walking, Obama's inaugural had way, way more people than Donald Trump's inaugural, just to be clear about that. You can imagine the discussion that we're going to have after the inaugural, if not that many people go to it. It'll be sort of like Sean Spicer

all over again. And maybe they'll use the cold as an excuse. But they had to shut down basically everywhere in Washington, D.C. near the Capitol for the Obama inaugural. And you had to walk if you were going to attend it as a reporter or just a layperson, you had to walk great distances to get there. So I walked, I can't remember where I parked, sort of near Virginia, and walked through the third street tunnel, which leads to the U.S. Capitol. And as I was walking, it's minding my own business. I was there to report on the inaugural itself. There was a, I mean, it was almost like out of a book. There were, as I recall, three generations of black men in front of me, a grandfather, a father, and a son. And they were talking about, I'm a reporter, I was eavesdropping, they were talking about what that moment meant.

And the grandfather was sharing stories with the grandson about, you know, not being able to eat at certain counters or any certain estate. in the United States during his lifetime and the grandson getting to see the first black president inaugurated. And it was like I was, I'm emotional about it talking about it now. I was emotional as I watched it happen. It was an incredible thing to be able to observe, even though I was certainly not a fan of Barack Obama. So, you know, you're not going to always have moments like that if you cover the inaugural. But in that instance, it was really cool to witness. There you have it. Maybe it is worth our time. However, I'm from Texas and 22 degrees means I don't leave my bed. So I will not be there. Thank you very much. We'll see you next week. We'll talk about the inaugural address and who knows what else. You know,