The Dispatch Podcast - Dear Ambassador

Episode Date: January 20, 2026

Steve Hayes returns and invites Declan Garvey, Jonah Goldberg, and Michael Warren on to discuss President Donald Trump’s letter to the prime minister of Norway about not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, the future of NATO, and the end of the conservative movement.Plus: Are NFL teams firing coaches too quickly? The Agenda:–What is Trump thinking?–International reactions–Economic ramifications–Foreign policy plays–Douthat vs. Goldberg–The future of nationalism and conservatism–Stability over upside in the NFL Show Notes:–Douthat's NYT column: Trump's Second Term Has Ended the Conservative Era–Jonah's G-File: Beware the New Americanism–Douthat in 2020: There Will Be No Trump Coup 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

The Dispatch podcast is presented by Pacific Legal Foundation, suing the government since 1973. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss Greenland, Donald Trump's coveting of the Nobel Peace Prize, and a possible end to NATO. We'll also look at the possible end of the conservative era. And finally, and not worth your time, we will let go the intra-dispatch wars over not-worth-your-time. and instead have a conversation about NFL coaching tenures and why good coaches are being let go. Adobe Acrobat Studio, your new foundation. Use PDF spaces to generate a presentation.

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The Shakers, the Testament of Anne Lee, now playing in an exclusive Toronto engagement in theaters everywhere January 23rd. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues Jonah Goldberg, Mike Warren, and Declan Garvey. Let's dive right in. Gentlemen, let's get right to it. This morning we had news first distributed by Nick Schifrin of the PBS News Hour of a letter that Donald Trump had sent. to Jonas or Jonas Gar Stor.

I'm sure I'm saying that wrong. Store Stare. Prime Minister and leader of the Norwegian Labour Party. The letter at its top said, Dear Ambassador, President Trump has asked that the following message, shared with Prime Minister Jonas Nass Garstore, be forwarded to your name. And this is distributing it sort of beyond just the Prime Minister of Norway.

Dear Jonas, considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped eight wars, plus, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a, quote, right of ownership anyway? There are no written documents. It's only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, too. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now NATO should do something for the United States. The world is not secure unless we have complete and total control of Greenland. Thank you, President DJT. This letter has apparently been authenticated. I wavered a bit on whether to use it because it seemed like such an obvious parody of something that leader of the first.

free world would send, but alas is true. Jonah, your reaction. So first of all, I no longer think it's legitimate to say the President of the United States is the leader of the free world. That is a title that normally the two go together, but he's the single greatest divider of the free world. And so just we can put a pin on that. Then the second thing I would say is, I kind of love the letter in at least one regard. And I would be very curious to see if MAGA people can spot the problem. He is saying that up until the point he didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize, he wasn't fully putting America first.

He was orienting himself towards winning a personal prize and conducting American foreign policy and spending his time in doing the things that he claims to have done. He did not put an end to eight wars, but we don't need to re-litigate that. For his own personal aggrandizement. And now that he didn't get the prize, he is saying he can actually, in his mind, put America first.

Now, I just think that's an interesting confession to come from Donald Trump. I think it's all garbage on the merits. You know, it's also just an incredibly weird thing to say all he cares about, he spent a year saying all he cares about peace and then to say, oh, by the way, I was only really saying that and doing all that stuff so I could get a cool line item on my resume. And then the third thing I would say is what a small and corrupted soul this guy has

that he is willing to dishonorably bully a NATO ally with the threat of force in pursuit of another, you know, Cupidol for his mantle on his personal resume, right? He has said, look, Greenland, it's psychologically important that we own it. He, when he looks out of it, he said years ago, when he looks out of the map, he says, where's the best available real estate?

And that's what drew him to Greenland. And he wants this. It is quite obvious, quite obvious, that he wants it purely, not for national security. Like, if the administration was serious about this, it would put out some serious policy papers. It would have mentioned this BS in its national security statement. It's another example of this purely pretextual nonsense. And he wants, he. Someone has told him, I don't know if it's Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller.

Basically, we should just ban people named Steve from public discourse, I think. Careful. Someone told him that the way you leave a legacy is by expanding the territory of the United States. That makes it through his blood-brain barrier really quickly because he's a real estate guy in the first place. and he is bending American foreign policy, risking destroying NATO, destroying America's reputation in the world, behaving dishonorably, threatened to use the U.S. military as an imperial mercenary force for his own ego. And it's not good. So I usually line up with you on such matters, but I'm surprised at your initial response to this letter. isn't the correct response that we have a president of the United States who's absolutely

clearly demonstrably and frighteningly insane? I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but did you not say that because that's already a given and you've written about it for 10 years? Or, I mean, like, think about what this letter is. I didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize, so now I might invade Greenland. like it's totally insane that anybody would have such a thought and it's even more insane that you would commit it to paper and it's triply insane that you would have such a thought that you would commit it to paper and you would then distribute it to people to read yeah i mean i i hear

what you're saying and obviously i've never had a high amount of esteem for donald trump's composure and uh character i think that's fair to say i don't i don't i don't think, I just don't think insane is the right word. I think it's a reasonable objection and point that you're making. But if he had said, I have to have Greenland because Vests have no sleeves, or we must end NATO because the Martian threat is too great. You know, like, that would be insanity to me. This is pure, solipsistic and remarkably consistent narcissism. And I don't associate insanity with consistency. And I think Trump's the most consistent thing about Donald Trump for his entire time in

American politics, if not longer, is that he cannot make a distinction between his personal wants and desires and what is good. Like his yardstick for what he wants and will make him look good is the only yardstick he has. as in international affairs. Everything else is pretextual or pragmatic or cynical or transactional. And so I'm less shocked by this letter because I think it's pretty consistent with his past actions. It's just more cartoonish.

But you could be consistently insane. I mean, I guess that's what, in the absence of the previous 10 years, if this were just like the first indication that we've gotten of this thing, we would be, this conversation would be a 25th Amendment conversation. Oh, for sure. What? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The president?

What? That's totally crazy. Mike, when you saw, and I want to move beyond the letter, even though I feel like we could arguably spend the hour on the letter, when you saw the letter, did you recognize right away that it was real or did you have a moment as I did where you thought it might be a parody? And number one, and number two, should this? signal to people who have been inclined to downplay the president's rhetoric on Greenland as sort of fanciful, something he'd maybe get around to if you wanted to. I mean, shouldn't

everybody take this seriously now? And isn't it possible, given that we've seen Stephen Miller and Donald Trump, but Donald Trump and Donald Trump acknowledge that he's considering military force? Shouldn't we worry about that? I mean, really, we're going to have a conversation about the use of military force to take Greenland? So I will answer your question, Steve. I do think that what you and Jonah are arguing about is sort of, there's a distinction without a difference when it comes to the question of whether he's insane or narcissistic doesn't have much of a difference in the question of what does that

mean to have a person like that as president? I mean, the effect is essentially the same, which is, which is, which is, to have somebody who is, as people have been saying, people on this podcast have been saying for years, someone who's just unfit for the job. And I think we should just not lose sight of that big picture point. Whether he's crazy or whether he's just so consumed by his own ego, this is another example of how he's unfit for the job. I will say, and there are receipts for this because I shared this letter, the reporting of this letter, within our internal slack this morning,

and I should say Monday morning, I, my first reaction was, I can't believe this. This is Mad King type stuff when I posted it. I read it. I couldn't, you know, wow, this is just another example of this. And then I had the thought, wait a second, maybe I should be skeptical of this.

This seems so insane that there's no way it can be real. And then the New York Times confirmed, the PBS news reporting on it and confirmed what I what I've sort of been conditioned for, which is no longer to think there's no way something Donald Trump does or says can be real. Like it's so outlandish. There's no way it can be real. I've been doing this now for for 11 years, you know, following Donald Trump in his political career.

Like we should, none of us should be, we should assume now perhaps that if it's crazy, it's probably something that he did or something. said. So the other thing, your other question about we should take this seriously, yes, I mean, look, let's go back to the, let's go back to the letter. There are no written documents that Denmark should own Greenland. It's only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there also. I mean, to me, like, that tells you, like, he doesn't, he does not think of anything but sort of right is, might is right. And we're going to take this because we were also there. And what right do you have? We're bigger.

And you can listen to, by the way, what Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, who was on the Sunday shows, he said, he was on Meet the Press, giving a terrible defense. of this policy. It was, it was, it was terrible. And like, to be fair to him, there's, there's no good defense of this. But, you know, he said, he said essentially when we're pressed about, about this and whether this was a threat, she was asking, is this a threat, a real threat, or is this a negotiating tactic? He basically said, we're the strongest country in the world.

We're very hot right now. As a, as a defense for taking something that is not ours and that the people both who, who own the country that owns at Denmark and the people of this country, Greenland, do not want. And I think it is revealing, and we should take it seriously because this is how Trump views international politics and sort of international relations. It's might makes right. And we can take it. And who said that it's yours anyway?

It's finders keepers kind of schoolyard logic. So, yes, we should take it seriously. Well, but finders keepers applies. they found it first. Right, I don't, yes. Like, there is very little paperwork that says the French own France, right? Because the Gauls got it,

start gongle themselves French, you know, whatever, before there was much paperwork to generate. It's an incredibly stupid argument. And it's the kind of thing that Stephen Miller, you can hear him saying, it's Miller in that famous, now infamous interview on CNN last week or the week before, he says,

by what illegal authority do they have, does Denmark have sovereignty over Greenland? You can imagine Miller just hovering around worm tonguing this point saying they don't have any claim to it that's better than our claim. You know, they're just there. We should just take it. And he's susceptible to that because he's an unfit 80-year-old narcissist. Anyway, I'm sorry to interrupt that one.

No, so, I mean, Miller also, it should be noted, in that interview with Jake Tapper, said that America is a superpower and we're going to be enacting like one, which I think sounded at the time and certainly in retrospect, like a threat to do the kinds of things that we're contemplating the administration doing right now.

He also appeared on Sean Hannity's show on Friday and said that any country that doesn't have the means militarily, I'm paraphrasing here, to defend itself and keep hold of its territory, should expect to lose its territory. So this is not, there's no, reading between the lines. This isn't sort of what might they mean. This is we can get it because we want it. And I'm struck by the parallelism between the arguments that we heard from Vladimir

Putin with respect to Ukraine in the years leading up to, well, after 2014, but then in particular, in the year leading up to the February 22, 2022 invasion, many of these are just being repurposed for the potential U.S. invasion of Greenland. Declan, we've seen this pattern over the past decade from Republican elected officials where, I mean, from the Republican rank and file at large, but Republican elected officials in particular, where the initial reaction is, oh, that's crazy. The second reaction is some version of, that's great. He'll never do that.

the third is he might mean it um the fourth step is um the the fourth step is he might mean it um and i'm i'm not going to oppose it and the fifth step i mean there are probably more steps than the ones i'm coming up with is some version of it's not crazy he meant it it's brilliant and i'm for it where are we on that sort of scale, that spectrum now? We saw Senator Eric Schmidt do a long Twitter thread last week, sort of extolling the virtues of taking Greenland, kind of however we need to do it. Ted Cruz, who had mustered up some courage, maybe we'd call them hints of courage, challenging the president on some free speech issues, is now full-throated in defense

of territorial expansion. Senator Schmidt said territorial expansion is a long and proud history in the United States and sort of elsewhere. Where are we on that? And do you expect any Republicans other than maybe Tom Tillis to actually oppose the president

if he wanted to buy it at a time when we're $38 trillion in debt or if he wanted to seize it? I think we're seeing a split right now. Obviously, there's divided opinions here. you mentioned Eric Schmidt, you mentioned Ted Cruz, and their comments. Tillis did come out over the weekend and say that this would be bad for America, bad for our allies, bad for American businesses, which brings me to, I want to get back to the economic ramifications here at the end of this answer. But you also had Don Bacon, again, somebody who is not an ally of the White House, also retiring and willing to put some rhetorical difference.

he brought up the Vladimir Putin comparisons himself, a sitting Republican member of Congress saying, this is something that Vladimir Putin would do. You had a bipartisan delegation going to Greenland, in theory, to reassure leaders there that, you know, these threats aren't serious or we're going to work around this. And, you know, they're, I'm sure, having their arguments and cut out from under them, given the Trump's comments over the weekend. But yeah, in terms of the European response here, we got some news on that front this morning that we included in the morning dispatch on Monday.

France, led by Emmanuel Macron, is considering invoking this kind of first of its kind. They call it a anti-coercion instrument that was put in place a couple of years ago that is designed basically to, to prevent external actors from forcing EU to change policy based on economic threats. It's something that they've never done before. Macron is starting to build a coalition to call for it and use it against the United States,

not against China, not against Russia, use it against, in theory, one of their longest standing and strongest allies. And so that would be additional tariffs, taxes on tech companies, curbs on American investment, the EU. This is all coming from reporting from Bloomberg Monday morning, but expect to hear much more about that today. That will have real ramifications. We also saw any sort of, you know, tariff threat, which we've been focused on this letter, rightly so. But there was a post on Saturday from Trump imposing additional 10% tariffs on European countries, eight European countries, including the UK, Denmark, France, all of all.

it, and then an additional 25% if the Greenland issue is not, quote, unquote, resolved by June. And so that basically rips up the trade deal that his economic advisors and trade advisors had been working on for the better part of a year that they came to terms with. And in theory, you know, I think Kevin had a great piece. We did some great reporting in the morning dispatch on the flaws in that deal and kind of how it traded short-term wins for long-term growth. But that was something that the administration was proud of, and it's being torn up for what exactly?

I still have not heard a compelling pitch for what ownership of Greenland would do for the United States that can't already be done through existing mechanisms of adding additional bases, adding additional military resources. In theory, Denmark is an ally that would work with us on those questions. But it seems like the administration does not want to take yes for an answer there. Well, and at the beginning of the first term, the president himself, President Trump himself, praised Denmark for being such a loyal and steadfast ally over the two countries. I don't think he was probably doing that because he had a deep appreciation for the alliance over the years.

Somebody probably gave him some words that he read, but at least at that point he was reading them. I wanted Jonah push into this question of these tariffs. take a step beyond. The president announced these tariffs, as Declan says, over the weekend, it takes this discussion of the possibility of the United States moving, taking steps. It takes it from sort of the theoretical and the rhetorical to the real. The president is willing to do some things, to cause some pain, to further upset our European allies by doing this.

Does that, should we read anything into that beyond that he's serious? Or has this process begun? Well, I think right now their theory of the case is sort of like the Venezuela one, which was that they were trying to saber-rattle to make, in this case, our longstanding and most important allies, think we are serious. about using force if necessary, which I think you've heard me rant a million times about how frustrated I get when Trump defenders will make the mistake of thinking that if you, if you're, that an explanation is an excuse, right?

But they're, oh, well, look, he's just doing this for leverage and, you know, that's what he's trying to do or he thinks it's, he's very hurt that he didn't get the Nobel Peace. They say these things as if if you say it reasonably, but that somehow conveys reasonableness about it. It always reminds me, I dated this girl when I lived in Prague, and I took her to see Silence of the Lambs, and she had no idea what she was watching, and she was very scared, and she turned to me and said,

he eats people? And I said, yes. And she said, he thinks it is good to eat people? And I said, yes. Like, if you say it like that, you make it sound like eating people is just like, well, that's what he does. That's what animal elector does, right? And it's similar with the way Trump spinners do this. And so I don't know that in Trump's own mind, he's actually made the call that he's willing to actually use American troops.

I don't know if he's figured out whether he can get away with it. but me saying that is not an excuse threatening military force against our allies. As I said like three weeks ago is like Don Corleone telling Johnny Fontaine's band leader, I'm going to get you have a choice he can't refuse because either you sign the thing and get a thousand bucks or your brains are on the contract. That like under the law, under logic, under moral philosophy of every kind is the use of force, the threat of use of force. if I put a gun to your head and say, do X, that may not be violence in the sense that there's bloodshed. I'm going to say you're getting pretty close to speech as violence arguments here, Jonah. No, I'm not.

Not when you point a gun at somebody under the law. The threat of the use of force is the use of force? Yes. I mean that quite literally is a matter of law. If I hold you up at gunpoint, that is the use of force, right, whether or not I pull the trigger. And you can go to jail for it, which is one of the reasons why I'll, lot of petty, you know, robberies. They don't put bullets in the gun because if they get caught, they want to be able to say,

hey, look, it wasn't even loaded. I was just intimidating. They still go to jail, but just for a lesser charge, right? And by putting a gun to the heads of the UK and our other allies, it is, it is, the threat of use of force is really dishonorable and appalling. And, but I don't know that he's actually kicked in this process of using, force quite yet because he thinks he might be able to get away with it with pure intimidation. And that's disgusting.

It's disgusting. And to do it entirely for his own ego, that's the real problem here. If you told me that, you know, the ring of power was buried in the, some, believe, some mountain in Greenland and whichever country had it would be become, would be saved from some alien invader. Like, if you could come up with us in. where we actually friggin' needed Greenland? Okay.

Use whatever means necessary you have to get Greenland, right? We don't. Like, we can get everything we want through a treaty that exists. We can save the NATO alliance, which exists. And to throw all of this stuff, you know, into the woodchipper for his own ego is impeachable to me. I mean, like, I know people, oh, you have Trump derangements. It is obvious to me that in a country where, Congress took itself seriously.

They first of all would take these tariff powers all back. They would say, all right, this, you can't be trusted. You're playing with matches. We're taking them all back. I mean, like, you had Scott Besant on Meet the Press yesterday when asked, okay, what is the emergency? What is the crisis that justifies the use of these tariffs under the law? Because it has to be a crisis. And Besant said with a straight face, without fear of a lightning bolt, you know,

you know, taking him out. Well, the emergency is, the crisis is the need to prevent a crisis, which is just the most ludicrous thing ever and makes a complete and total mockery of Congress and the intent of the law. And the only thing that gives me a little hope is that in some weird way, like John Roberts and the guys in the Supreme Court were watching, are watching all of this. And they're like, damn it. And they just start tearing.

up the decision they were going to write and say, we cannot let this guy abuse these powers in this way. But I don't know if he's going to use force. It's bad enough what he's doing right now. Can I say something, Steve, because I think all of these arguments and discussions of the substance of what Trump is saying or could do or threatening to do are important, and I'm glad we're talking about them. But I do sometimes worry that the first thing, the first thing, the familiarity with this kind of behavior is inuring us to how out of control it seems. And what I say out of control, I mean, it's, it appears that the president himself sort of not even in control of his own, I mean, again, maybe this is not a surprise. This is not news. But he's not even in

control of sort of these impulses in ways that are not just simply, um, causing him to say awkward, embarrassing things at a podium in front of the media. He's not just sort of doing bizarre dances because he can't control himself when YMCA comes on the PA. There is, I don't know, between this and what's happening in Minnesota

and you're seeing sort of those warm tongues like Stephen Miller say, what I think are sort of absolutely outrageous statements. This is what Steve Miller said on Sunday night. Only federal, this is in response to these claims that in Minnesota local law enforcement

is impeding things. Is helping out protesters and is impeding ice. Stephen Miller says only federal officers are upholding the law. This is on X. Local and state police have been ordered to stand down and surrender. It just all feels like the chaos

of like, you know, created and stirred up by one person and the two or three people who are sycophantic and take advantage of the kind of adult state of the president to push their own kind of bizarre ideas about what they can do with the power that they've been given. It all feels like it's spinning out of control. That is such an old thing. People have been saying this since 2015. You know, it's finally spinning out of control. I don't necessarily think that means the end of Donald Trump's presidency.

But I just think we should sit with that and acknowledge that and appreciate. I think the Greenland, or excuse me, the Norway text message letter he sent to this prime minister, just kind of put that all in perspective to me. This is, whether he's crazy, this is all nuts. And it feels like it's getting out of control. I mean, yeah, I take that point. Go ahead, Declan. Along those lines, I'm going to read a line here from Tim Ross reporting.

in political Europe, but this morning, Monday morning, reporting, in private, dismayed European officials describe Trump's rush to annex the sovereign Danish territory as, quote, crazy and mad, asking if he's caught up in, quote, warrior mode after his Venezuela adventure. I've listened to David French on this podcast make the point that Putin has changed over the course of the last three or four years, that Trump is not negotiating with the same person that he was during his first term because the Ukraine war has changed Putin. It has changed his mindset, his approach to governance. Whether or not we think that is the case,

European officials and European leaders are acting as though Trump is kind of in the same mode at this point, which is crazy, scary, not ideal. And he's not doing anything to disabuse them of that notion with letters like this. I do want to do we know. do we know when the letter was sent? Because Trump now has a Nobel Peace Prize, right? He got one from Maria Carina Machado late last week. So this could all be moot.

But the Nobel Committee put on a statement basically saying that you can't sort of obtain one from anyone else. And in effect, it doesn't count. It was like, you know, the asterisk to Trump's wanting the Nobel Peace Prize. If it did count, we should give Machado a second. peace prize to, by averting this war, by giving Trump her. Just do this. Yeah.

Do the other. By the way, by the way, the factual question, the New York Times reported that the Norwegian prime minister received this text message on Sunday. So, yeah. I do want to spend a moment on the other implications of this. I've been troubled in part by, not in part, I've been troubled by what I think is a misunderstanding, both on the part of some European allies and the rhetoric that we've been hearing coming out of European capitals, but also some Republicans and people who have sort of raised

some warnings about this. One of the warnings that we see, and I think probably some people who are making these observations are just making the observations to make the observations. Some of them mean them, I think, as a warning directed at Donald Trump in the White House, is that, you know, would the United States do something like this, it could very well mean the end of NATO? We've heard that again and again and again. Why does anyone think that that's not the objective here? That seems to me much more a feature than a bug, particularly if you look at Donald Trump's history on the question of NATO for a long time. He's been at best, I would say, ambivalent about the continued existence of NATO.

And let me read a piece from the New York Times that suggests Donald Trump really never that enamored of NATO and maybe wanted to get out of NATO earlier. The lead is there are a few things that President Vladimir v. Putin of Russia desires more than the weakening of NATO, the military alliance among the United States, Europe and Canada that has deterred Soviet and Russian. aggression for 70 years. Last year, Donald Trump suggested a move TANAM out to destroying NATO, the withdrawal of the United States. Senior administration officials told the New York Times that several times over the course of 2018,

Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Current and former officials who support the alliance said they feared Mr. Trump could return to his threat as allied military spending continued to lag behind the goals the president had set. In the days around a tumultuous NATO summit meeting last summer, they said. Mr. Trump told his top national security officials that he did not see the point of the military alliance,

which he presented as a drain on the United States. The giveaway there, of course, is the year in that article. This was published in 2019. Donald Trump had apparently, according to New York Times, and we've seen this reported and repeated elsewhere, expressed desire several times to end NATO. He thinks we've been subsidizing NATO. He thinks they're freeloaders. We don't get anything from it.

Why should we not look at this as, I mean, let's assume he wants to get Greenland for the sake of Greenland, even though, as Jonah pointed out, the word does not appear anywhere in the 33-page National Security Strategy of the United States, which was just issued last year. You would think if this national security of the United States actually depended upon the United States having Greenland, they would have mentioned it when they put out their strategy. They didn't. Why do we think that this isn't, at least in part, a way to end NATO? And why aren't we having more of a discussion about that? I'm surprised as I look around that that's not part of the conversation.

Declan. I mean, this is for, I think, everybody. this podcast, and probably most people listening to this podcast, one of the most frustrating aspects of the approach here is there were legitimate criticisms to be had of NATO during Trump's first term. I mean, no institution is perfect. There's legitimate criticisms now. But with the threats that he carried out in kind of the first term to get other countries to increase their defense spending, accelerated obviously by the Ukraine-Russia war, but a lot of the problem that he outlined in his first term have been solved or are well on their way to being solved.

Germany is rebuilding its own national defense. France, UK, they're all investing in defense in part because of the threats Trump made in his first term, but in part because of now concerns that the U.S. is not going to have their back. And it's, yeah, it's a weird thing that these leaders are talking about this as a threat. I think they're obviously very embarrassing quotes earlier this year. Who was it the Supreme Commander of NATO who called Trump Daddy or something in a post over the summer Daddy's Home or something? Like these are all efforts to get him to care. It's a weird way to get somebody to care about a really successful post-war alliance is to call him the daddy of it. But if it works, great. But yeah, it seems not to be working. This has been a

very consistent throughline, no matter what these European allies do or say that Trump does not seem to think that this alliance needs to continue. Yeah, I'm going to disagree, Steve, just slightly on the way you phrased it at the outset. I don't think the point of this is the destruction of NATO. It's just that Trump doesn't care if that's the byproduct. The way you framed it makes it sound like Trump's a 3D chess player who has this really clever plan for how to destroy NATO. No, I think that's right. You know, and which does not necessarily jive with the why aren't we just calling him insane thing either, right? And so to me, it's sort of like, you know, did Kevin Roberts decide to destroy the Heritage Foundation? No. No.

No, it was a byproduct of ridiculous decisions that he made. Did Trump go into this as his secret plan to destroy NATO? No. When people said this could destroy NATO, he's like, his response is, so what? Or good, they should go anyway. Screw him, right? But he is not, not only seeing, there are credible arguments about, you know, whether NATO has lived past. I disagree with them, but they're credible.

There's serious people have made arguments for the last 30, 40 years about whether or not, you know, NATO has outlived its utility at the end of the Cold War. And you can have all sorts of arguments about it. I don't mind people who, I mean, I'll disagree. Again, I will sharply disagree with them. But I don't mind people who do their homework and figure out, okay, you know, this really isn't in our interest anymore. And maybe we should figure out a different way of doing things. That's not what Trump does. Trump, like, I have a real problem with people who don't understand what NATO is and how it works and what it's for.

And I've never heard Trump actually explain the economic structure of NATO in a way that conveys to me he understands how it works. He talks about it as if it's a country club and all the other NATO countries are in arrears on their dues. And they need, it kept saying we need to pay, they need to pay more into NATO. It's just not how NATO works. Like the actual budget for like NATO as the country club thing is pretty small. It's like it's a couple billion dollars in, you know, for headquarters and some paperwork and some stationary and whatever. The two percent of GDP thing is what you spend on your own military. And he constantly slips back and reveals that he doesn't really understand that point.

And if you, it's, you know, there's a moratorium on me saying Chesterden's. fence. But if you don't understand what NATO is for, and it makes it a lot easier to contemplate getting rid of it. And I think that's the problem with Trump, is that when people say you're going to destroy NATO, he's like, I don't care. You know, I don't know what NATO was there for in the first place. And which is, again, why Congress needs to have a backbone. I think that is the thing that's just screaming in here is that Congress is violating its constitutional oath. Congress is violating its role in our constitutional order, violating Congress is aiding and abetting the dishonoring of America and our alliances and the weakening of this country and the violation of its principles

for rank partisan self-interest. And it is outrageous. And I know congressmen listen to this and staff listened to this. You should all be ashamed of yourselves if this ends up going forward the way it looks like it's going forward because you will have given the permission structure for it or at the very least you will not have stood in the way and history is going to consider this castrate, Castradi Congress to be one of the most embarrassing and shameful institutions in American history.

Well, you now have people who are actually helping him make his case on this. I think you're right that it's not, this isn't some secret triple bank shot genius, strategic move of Trump to, primarily to get rid of NATO. I think he just wants Greenland because he wants Greenland, right? He said he wants it. He likes to expand territory.

He thinks it'll leave a long-lasting imprint if he engages in this territorial expansion. My point was a little different, and I may not have made it very well when I laid it out. It's not, I think it's not just sort of coincidental, however, that this would weaken or end NATO. I think it's more than that. I think he wants to end NATO. No, I think you were clear about that. It was just your initial phrasing when you said, is this the point? And I think, I don't think it's the point. Yeah, it's not, I don't think it's the point. I don't think the Kevin Roberts thing works because it wouldn't make any sense for Kevin Roberts to set out to want to destroy the Heritage Foundation. But I do think

that Trump would like to end U.S. support of NATO, maybe end the alliance itself. Yeah, I just meant incompetent and selfish leadership yields all sorts of ancillary knock-on effects. There's a very clear parallel there. Yes, absolutely. Declan and Mike, last word on this to you, you've seen the Trump administration, various spokespeople for it, make the case, falsely, we should point out, that Greenland is in effect surrounded by Chinese and Russian vessels. I mean, really, depending on who you're listening to, things are bad, could take it, take it at any time and suggest this is sort of a new line of argument. I don't know if they're going to continue it because it's so sort of preposterous on its face and it's being contradicted in real

time, but that hasn't kept them from making certain arguments before, suggesting that really what they're doing is to use this acquisition, prospective acquisition of Greenland as a way to fend off the Russians, that this is not actually. something the Russians would do, as they're doing in Ukraine, or would want by seeing the end of NATO. However, the case is complicated because the Russians themselves are saying the opposite. Vladimir Putin, in his speech on January 10th, talked about how he understands. And he, in the speech he gave, justifies Donald Trump's desire to own Greenland. And he, and he, in the speech he gave, justifies Donald Trump's desire to own Greenland. Kiro Dmitriev, who is by title CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, Special Envoy of the President of Russia for Investment and Economic Cooperation, and importantly has been, I think, the main or one of the main Russian interlocutors with Steve Whitkoff, as they've discussed the war in Ukraine and other things related to the United States in Europe.

Tweet it out. President Putin understands the U.S. rationale on Greenland and shares key historic facts about U.S. efforts to acquire Greenland since the 1860s. And he tweets out this speech that Putin has given. If the Russians themselves are telling us that they're excited about this, he also had another tweet. I don't have it in front of me this weekend where he says, you know, the collapse of the Transatlantic Union, finally something worth discussing. at Davos. So they're in effect celebrating the United States' appetite for Greenland potential moves on Greenland. Is this a time where we should take them at their word, or is there something clever that they're doing here with their rhetoric, Mike? I mean, I don't know how clever it is. It's pretty obvious what they're trying to do. One, there's a benefit to the Americans taking over Greenland by military. military force if possible, which is it weakens the Western argument against Russia's war against Ukraine. So, you know, it's a useful argument for them, and it's a useful situation for them to be able to say, hey, the Americans took Greenland. It was their right, just as it is our right. They're still making that argument regardless of whether we take Greenland or not, but it certainly

boosts them. And the Russians don't, they don't like names. NATO. They, they, they, they, they, they, they want it, they want it destroyed. So I mean, it just, it more just kind of tells you how the chief Russian kind of propagandists, of which, you know, he is, uh, Keir, is, am I pronouncing his name? My name, right, Keiro, uh, Kiro, uh, Kiro. Dimitriv. Um, um, he is, he not only meets with people like Steve Whitkoff, he meets with sort of useful idiots in Congress, uh, as well. and really kind of uses MAG arguments to get them on Russia's side. It just seems to me it's a pretty blatant and naked attempt to encourage Trump and his allies

to continue supporting and promoting this idea, which creates chaos throughout this very important transatlantic alliance. It's not more clever or sophisticated than that. Yeah, Declan, quickly, before we move to the next topic, do what do you think as we watch these events unfold? We're recording 11 a.m. on Monday, January 19th, what's the likelihood that elected members of Congress, you know, who might be more Reaganite in their disposition, speak out against this in a clear and unmistakably forceful way?

Or do you expect that this is like so many things we've seen before, a place where they just sort of collapse? I think it is likely, in part because we started to see rumblings of it over the weekend. I think even kind of senators who aren't knee-jerk to criticize the administration. I think I might be taking him a little bit out of context, but John Kennedy called this weapons-grade stupid at some point over the weekend in an interview. McConnell, Mitch McConnell is not giving a lot of speeches these days anymore. his health is deteriorating, but he made a point to speak about this late last week. I think that presaged a lot of the additional comments from other Republican members over the weekend.

And I do think before we move on from this topic, the administration and Trump himself seems to be doing everything that they can to basically get Denmark and Europe to surrender this unilateral. without having to actually use any American force. But let's think about what that would actually look like in terms, like, the United States invading and occupying an island against the wishes of European allies. Like Trump, I think, gets misnamed or mislabeled an isolationist. He's not an isolationist, but he doesn't like sustained military campaigns. He doesn't like troops on the ground, everything that he's done, you know, the Soleimani strikes, the Operation Midnight Hammer in Iran, Venezuela.

These are one-off minimal risk, or I mean high risk, but minimal likelihood of tons of casualties, tons of American body bags. If Europe decides they don't want the United States to invade Greenland, if NATO decides they don't want the United States to invade Greenland, and does that mean that Trump is really ready for a sustained military campaign against... you know, sophisticated armed forces. This would be unlike anything that he's ever done in his presidency. And the fact that, you know, as Jonah said, this is all, all these comments, all these remarks are being made with threat of gun at the end of it. It's just worth thinking about a little

bit what that would actually look like. No, I agree. I mean, I think my own view is that he's likely making a bet that they don't mean it, that they wouldn't actually stand up, that they're sending, you know, I forget which country it was over the weekend. Maybe it was Sweden. I could have this wrong. Said 15 troops. Probably, probably. I mean, they're doing it as a show of unity, not as a show of force.

I think he perceives rightly that the Europeans would be unlikely to actually fight. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters, and articles. You can sign up at the dispatch.com slash join, and if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get one month free. You can also avail yourselves of the new audio stream of all of the dispatch's textual content. And speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership, no ads, early access to all episodes, two free annual memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders and more. Okay, we'll be right back.

Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. I want to move to our second topic today. And for the second topic, I wanted to combine two, I think, very smart pieces pointing in very different directions about the state of the conservative movement as we contemplated here in January of 26. The first was Jonah's G-fow from Wednesday and loath as I am to give him praise particularly after he knifed me in the back late last week.

I think it was a good piece and I think it was worth discussing and Jonah maybe I could just ask you to kind of lay out the argument that you made in that piece. I'm looking to see what title we gave it. Beware the new

Americanism. You looked at sort of, it's actually part of the reason I thought it was brilliant is because these are ideas that I've been having for quite some time and haven't put them down on paper. Yeah, so... Go ahead. You could say what you're going to say. No, I thought you were going to make fun of me.

And then the second piece is Ross Douthit's piece published in the New York Times over the weekend on the end of conservatism, which was, I think, really interesting for a number of different reasons. In particular, I would say it's timing. So, Jonah, why don't you take us through your piece first and that if you're not you, you have any reaction to Ross's piece, we'd love to get that too. Yeah, I mean, just so I'm kind of curious what you think the inherent tension between the two pieces is, but we can get to that. I went down this rabbit hole because the Department of Labor ran this video that kind of went

semi-viral. I remember, I think I texted it to you when it came out with these, you know, weird slogans of, you know, one heritage, one people, whatever, that sounded a little Nazi, you know, or fascist adjacent. And then I was like, what the hell is this? And then you go down the Twitter feed of the social media feed. And, you know, this isn't just obsessing about something on Twitter. This is like the PR social media campaign for a major agency, which currently right now has a massive eight-story or five-story banner of Donald Trump's face hanging off of it, which I have to drive past every single week because it's on the way to CNN. Like a Saddam, like, can't, you know, poster kind of thing.

Yeah. For a while it was just him. And then they added TR, which I think they think immunizes them from criticism. It's very creepy. Anyway, these various social media feeds are very fiscistic. If by fiscistic, you mean sort of creepy. be fomenting the idea that we're at war, that we have an enemy within. One of the most interesting propagandistic tools that it uses is it never says Americans.

It speaks to American, like, be vigilant American, right? Which is a very subtle thing that gets at, like, regimes that talk about people, you know, like what it was trying to do is commodify vastly this of our problem. population into a pure identity thing. And it's a way, you know, like, you know, beware the hun, right? It's like any hun is a villain. Stand tall, American is a way to sort of echo in people's, and young men's heads. It's presenting all of this weird sort of young white men that look like they could be, you know,

posters from World War I in America, from Nazi Germany eugenics campaigns, from American eugenics campaigns. Anyway, it's super creepy. and seems to me that it's part of the larger heritage American program on aspects of the American right. This is the idea that if you, which has been embraced to some extent and pushed by J.D. Vance and Senator, what's Schmidt's first name? We were talking about him in the first half. Eric. Yeah.

He gave a big speech at a National Conservative Convention where he gets into this stuff. There's a guy on OAN or one of those Gibroni networks. Jack Posobiac, who's a big MAGA guy, pushing this. And this is just basically the idea that the more your ancestors have been here from the beginning, not counting black people, the more real of an American you are. And that, as J.D. Vance said, you know, if you have an ancestor who fought in the Civil War, I just think you have more right to say, you have more of a say in what America should be about than someone who just got off the boat.

I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it. And the reason why it always sticks in my memory is that he didn't say fought for the union, right? You could have fought for either side of the Civil War in J.D. Vance's estimation. And that makes you more of an American than somebody whose family has been here for a generation or a century even. And it's obviously ridiculous. And so it is a very nationalistic, you don't have to call it fascist, pose that they've got. And I think the way to think about it, because so much of this stuff is you cannot separate the trolling dynamic. They want people to call them fascists.

So then they can say, see, if you love America's heritage, they call you fascist. They hate America. They hate white people. They're anti-white. All this is is Norman Rockwell, best thing about America, yada, yada, yada, kind of thing. And sometimes that can be true. But I think the way to think about it is in the same way that we've spent a lot of of time talking about people who are not pro-Trump, they're just anti-anty-Trump.

The pose for a big segment of the new right with J.D. Vance on down is that they're anti-anti-Nazi or anti-Fascist. It's not so much that they celebrate Nick Fuentes. They just simply say, we need room for these people who love Nick Fuentes in our movement and the people who have a problem with it, Ben Shapiro, Neocons, whatever, they're the ones who need to go. Their code for Big Tent is fascists, Nazi cosplay, Grapers, all these kinds of people. They're part of the coalition. It's the fastidious old Reaganite types who have a problem with this stuff. They're the ones who need to go. And I don't think it's necessarily going to be politically successful, but it is ruining American conservatism's branding

in the American political discourse. It makes it all, it's like this Greenland stuff or the Venezuela stuff. Steve, how many times were we accused of supporting a war for oil? Yeah. And now, like, I can still say that was a lie back then.

How am I supposed to call it a lie right now? Because it's kind of, it's not even kind of true. It's true, right? And similarly, all of the, you know, for years we've dealt with people on the left who said, oh, all this patriotic talk and small government, limit government.

It's all just code for basically sort of racism and fascism and authoritarianism and conservatives aren't actual classical liberals. They just use that language because it works. I think that was a lie back then. I can't say it's a lie now. It makes defending conservatism so much harder because the people who call themselves conservatives are imbuing it with this ethno-nonexie. nationalistic BS. And it's it's it's very dismaying. Well, so you bring me, uh, directly to the

contrast with Ross Douth's argument. Um, because I think the, the, the through line is, is you're both talking about in different ways the end of conservatism. Um, you are doing it, very plainly lamenting it and worrying that there is this ethno-nationalist's potential next step. I mean, They're at least cosplaying this. Some of them are very sincere in, I think, doing what they're doing, mimicking the horrors of the past. And I read your piece as something of a warning without going too far and saying, like, you know, here we are. You know, once again, we're here in the 1930s. But saying, in effect, yeah, this isn't great.

And Ross's piece was seemed to me, in some respects at least, to be welcoming the end of conservatism and the sort of arrival of this kind of new nationalism. He begins this essay by the device he uses is, I guess it's a mansion, a Victorian mansion of the conservative movement. It's decaying. It's falling down, all these things. In the first term, Trump sort of let this all happen while letting mold and time do their work on the limited government wing, meaning he didn't actually go and destroy it. And then I'll read the second paragraph. Trump's second term has been a very different story. The smoke of demolition is everywhere.

Cranes are swinging wildly, and if the shape of the original building is still vaguely visible through the smoke, it's clear that the final renovation is going to be radical. More of the original residents have fled to nearby properties. you could see a bunch of them clustered in the Mike Pence gazebo, while others have barricaded themselves inside the capital T true conservatism suite, where folks are pouring tea and wearing earplugs. Mike, I wonder what you think about Ross's essay, having had a chance to read it, and the specific question I want to ask you is,

are we just now getting to the end of conservatism? This seems like an interesting piece and would have been more persuasive had it been written in the first term rather than the second. Sure, there were some tax cuts in the first. There's some things that we would have thought of as consistent with old school conservatism in the first term. But you're just seeing this now? I do think Ross's approach to this column and this question is certainly in response to some of the reporting that, frankly, we have done at the dispatch about the institutions. of conservatism sort of collapsing and this is, so there is a timeliness to it that I would I would sort of defend just from a, as a matter of editorial judgment from Ross and as editors.

And it's interesting, by the way, he mentioned the Mike Pence gazebo, a bunch of them clustered. I mean, that's almost quite literally true, the advancing American freedom, which is Mike Pence's group, has just added scores of scholars from the Heritage Foundation. who have escaped that sort of disaster. I thought literally true, are they working in a gazebo? Well, okay, so maybe not literally a gazebo, but they are clustered in a Mike Pence gazebo. I've been to the offices before.

It's, you know, there's, you can see inside. There's, you know, some lattice. No, there's no lattice. All right, but the, okay, I agree with Ross, and I agree with you, Steve, that this has been true probably for longer than Ross suggests, but I think it is true that basically the old style of conservatism is dead from an institutional standpoint. Those other smaller and less influential institutions notwithstanding, I also think it doesn't matter

as much as maybe we think. I wonder if, you know, there's a, this idea that it was this, as Ross says, like this big, beautiful Victorian mansion, and it's been allowed to deteriorate, I sort of think these things are, if they're so easily torn down, then maybe, you know, I'm not saying it's going to be easy to build a backup again, but it's the kind of thing where the political purchase of the nationalism that Jonah describes, it appears to be waning by the day. I mean, I think we can see what's happening in Minneapolis and the reaction to it in the polling to be a great example of this, that actually when people see it, I mean, we're sort of stuck

with it because it's what voters voted for in 2024. We're stuck with it for the next three years or maybe at least the next year until Democrats take control of Congress in the midterms. But it's not getting more popular. all of this sort of the posting that's going on, you know, from the Department of Labor or all these other places, like, it's not helping. And it's not helping nationalism or MAGAism gain some big foothold. The problem is in the institutions themselves, which are, you know, it's a smaller, it's a more sort of niche group. But these are the people who will be defining what, say, the Republican Party or conservative academia or journalism, looks like in the next 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 years. And I'm a little skeptical that the sort of free market,

I don't know, the sort of dispatch view of conservatism is, you know, it's gone and we will never see it again because it's, I mean, these things are, these things are cyclical and they depend a lot on what can win and what can, you know, and what loses. I do think Trumpism is losing and it's losing ground. And a couple of losses will do quite a bit to sort of diminish the appeal of this kind of politics. Maybe it doesn't look like dispatching conservatism. But I think these things are a little less defined and the end of such movements are less defined.

I mean, we're still talking about, you know, communism and sort of social. You know, growing on the young left, I mean, it's disturbing, but like you would have thought 30 years ago that that would be a dead letter. And yet here we are. So maybe that's not a great comparison. Yeah, now we're talking about communism and socialism growing on the right. Yeah, true. On the young right. I mean, that's part of the problem.

Also on the Trumpy right. Declan, it sounds to me like Mike might very well fit the description that Ross gave us of others who have barricaded themselves inside the true conservatism sweep. where folks are pouring tea and wearing ear plugs. Is that where Mike is, you know, hoping for, even if it's not a return to sort of dispatchy and conservatism, longing for days of the Halcyon days of conservatism and principal past? Well, it looks like he's wearing over-ear headphones rather than ear plugs, at least on our...

The better to obscure the ear plugs. Yes. Noise canceling. That's what I do. And I don't know. I haven't seen tea, but no, I think this is, you know, part of the reason the dispatch exists. We've talked about it on this podcast before. The need to, you know, keep the flame alive of Reaganite conservatism, free markets,

and classical liberalism more broadly until that time at which the world or the United States decides that it needs it again. And, you know, that's what we're doing. That's kind of what we're, our entire purpose is. That said, I think Ross's piece was more diagnostic necessarily than him advancing a particular argument. Kind of hears the world as he sees it. I like the frameworks that he referenced political scientists, Stephen Skoranick, the idea of disjunctive presidents. and reconstructive presidents.

So disjunctive being Jimmy Carter, Herbert Hoover, kind of bridging these changing eras or kind of changing the tectonic plates are shifting. And his argument was that in the first term, you could argue that Trump was one of those. He wasn't going to be the FDR or the Reagan to usher in a new era, a new worldview, a new kind of ecosystem, but he was revealing the faults with the one that was leaving. And he ends the argument or ends this piece saying he's not an FDR and he's not a Reagan

because he's not interested in building foundations and building something new. He's just kind of, you know, slapping on the techie Rose Garden stuff and, you know, putting his name on everything. And he's not all that interested in. what comes beyond him and that Ross's argument is that that's going to be up to 2028, 2032, new Republican candidates to put their own spin on nationalism. And we're already seeing that fight playing out between J.D. Vance and Rubio and Ped-Cruz and Holly and all these different potential contenders for that 2028.

And I agree that nobody is going to be perfectly dispatchian in 2028 and ride to a historic victory in the Republican presidential primary. There's going to be you're going to need to cater to what the new base of voters looks like. But there are people who are going to try to steer the movement on the margins toward a more. constructive, you know, populist conservatism. There's also going to be plenty of people who try to make it even more destructive, and we'll hear from them as well. But that's what's coming. And it's important that conservatives are in the fight.

So I haven't opined on Ross's opinionating. And I'm a little reluctant to do it because it's going to sound harsher than it is. I have a lot of respect for Ross. I've known Ross for a very long time, former intern at National Review. He's a brilliant guy and one of the best writers there is out there. But you know a butt is coming. Ross going back to his debut as a public figure has been, I don't want to say playing a game because that's ascribing to him bad faith.

And I don't think that's what you can ascribe to him. I think he's sincere. has a way. He is extremely gifted at writing in this space between saying what he actually thinks and giving suggestive credit to critics of and outsiders of traditional conservatism, of sort of running between the raindrops and avoiding getting wet with any ideological stain on themselves to come up with a really ridiculous metaphor on the fly.

But he has always had... He's a sincere Catholic and traditionalist in that regard. He's always had a much softer spot for populism than a lot of other people, going back to his Sam's Club. Republican stuff that he did with Ryan Salam, another friend of mine. So it's not shocking to me that he is softer on a coalition full of ultramontane Catholics, post-liberal types, populists who are critical of the old Reaganite consensus.

Because he didn't like the Reaganite consensus that much. he was at most a two cheers for the Reaganite consensus guy for the last 20 years. He just is very good at being subtle about it. And there's a lot I agree with in his op-ed. I think directionally, though, my problem with it is it doesn't take conservative ideas seriously enough. Like, there are a lot of things that are part of the Reagan consensus that are part of the Reagan consensus, and forgive me for saying this, because they're true. Not because they're value judgments,

not because their preferences for flavors of ice cream or something like that. It's that, you know, alliances are power amplifiers and they're good. The Constitution is good, right? It is correct to want to be committed to the Constitution. Not saying that Ross isn't committed to the Constitution. But you can go down a long list of things that free markets in and of themselves are more efficient and better

at increasing prosperity than industrial planning. You can just go down a very long list of things that aren't the conservative positions simply because they are, you know, revealed preferences or special pleading is because we actually believe them to be true. And if I believe them to be true,

that means I'm going to be proven right over time. And this idea that he may be right, that the conservative era is over. He may be right that the conservative movement has been dealt a death blow by a lot of this stuff. Time will tell. I think it is just as likely to see people pour out of that gazebo in other places and actually have a pretty impressive fight

for restoring conservatism to some extent in the Republican Party because none of these gibronies on the Magaside who actually run the party and have been installed by Trump know how to argue their case. They know, as Ross indicates, they know how to argue Donald Trump's case. Because they are organized around a cult of personality that defends his will to power,

his self-aggrandizement, his narcissism, as if it's an ideology, and it's not. And it will not survive beyond Trump. There will not be temples to Trump. And J.D. Vance will not inherent Trump's cult of personality. And he's going to have to actually argue with conservatives who have been spending their lives making arguments. And so I think this nationalism stuff is ugly and cruel that we saw coming out of the Department of Labor.

I think being anti-anti-Nazi is immoral. But I also think it's just really crappy politics. The idea that playing footsie with neo-Nazis and Groyper's and these guys wins you more votes than it loses is preposterous. And so in some ways, you know, all of this talk. about the new post-conservative era is the being greeted as liberator's happy talk of American intellectual life.

As of right now, things can change. I think the Democrats are poised to just sweep the House and maybe take the Senate, which is going to be this massive repudiation of Trump. I don't think they'll take the Senate, but I don't think it's impossible. Trump is unpopular

on almost all of his key issues. He is considered in the polls to be a failed president. And the idea that this stuff is the stuff that builds a new right by and of itself that, I mean put it this way, it's very plausible. That it's a winning coalition that holds on to power is very unlikely to me. And I think Ross is just way too gentle about the fact that what this new right is is a deliberate attempt. to be an ideological minority without ideological arguments to make that could win a majority for a very long time. So analytically, I just think there are real problems with it.

Yeah, I'm with you. I mean, I think the gentle is the, you're right. I think that is the nice way to put the way that he treats some of the excesses of this movement that he's analyzing in sort of a detached way. I mean, in some ways he saves the toughest barbs for the true cons wearing earplugs. And, you know, the excesses of what we're seeing on the NatCon right get sort of shrugs of shoulders. But it wouldn't be the first time I have to say that he's underestimated this. Ross wrote a column in October of 2020 assuring us that there would be no Trump coup

and that people who were warning about where those, where Trump's musings about remaining in power were overreacting. I think they weren't overreacting then. I don't think they're overreacting now. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. We're back. You're listening to the dispatch podcast.

Let's jump in. We have time for a quick, not worth your time today. I will say I'm not going to give a direct response at this point to the, we just call it disappointing discussion of last week. I have a pretty good idea of what happened with Mike acknowledging in his setup to the discussion that he was being brutus, stabbing. the guy who allowed him to occupy the chair. Jonah as a co-founder, trashing me as he's want to do. And Sarah, well, I'll save my thoughts on Sarah

because I think it's probably better to at least make an attempt to engage her in the conversation rather than trash her when she's not here to defend herself. It's more sporting. In any case, for this week, not worth your time. Joan, I don't think you'll probably have a ton to say, but we'd welcome your participation anyway.

This is your vengeance against me. No, no, my vengeance against you will be much more significant than this. Rest assured. But I did think it was something that was interesting, something that's in the news. For those of you who follow professional football, and I hate to bring this up, Declan, today.

We're talking again Monday morning. The Chicago Bears lost in overtime last night. You totally hate that. I hate to bring this up. You hate to bring it up. I do hate to bring it up because undoubtedly, because I believe in giving you a chance to respond, unlike some people on this podcast, I know that you can remind me that the Chicago Bears dispatched my Green Bay Packers last weekend. But the Bears lost in overtime last night to the Los Angeles Rams. By all accounts, it was a good game, a tough game.

I did not watch much of it. but it brought to mind a trend that we've seen in the NFL this year that I find curious, and that is the departure, either voluntarily or by firing of some of the most successful head coaches of the recent two decades in the National Football League. We saw Mike Tomlin, former coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, walk away. We saw John Harbaugh of the Baltimore Raven. be fired. There was talk of Nat LaFleur, the coach of the Green Bay Packers, who has a tremendous record,

but has not taken the Packers to a Super Bowl. There seems to be a new feeling among NFL owners that it's sort of Super Bowl wins or bust. And if you perform, if you have your team performing at a very high level for a long time, but don't not only make a Super Bowl, win a Super Bowl, you're out. haven't succeeded. Is this as new as it strikes me as being? And I've given you three examples, three makes a trend. Is this in fact a trend? And is this what we should be looking forward to seeing from the NFL and the coaching carousel in years to come? First, before I, just to bring this conversation full circle, I know that Nick Fuentes decided to root for the bears this weekend.

He made a whole big think about it. I'm going to disavow. We didn't want his support. We didn't need his support. And he has no place in Bears Fandom Coalition. But I also don't know why he picked us. But I think the situation with the coaching is a little bit more complicated than the quick summary that you laid out there. Tomlin had been there for almost 20 years in Pittsburgh. Never had a losing season. That's incredibly impressive.

even the Chiefs this year had had a losing season. It just happens. There are off years, there are injuries, whatever. At the same time, they hadn't advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs in something like 15 years. I could be getting the exact details of that wrong. But I think it was when they played the Packers in the Super Bowl. And so I think it comes down to the standard that the owners want to hold their organization. too. At some point, a message could be getting stale. Tomlin's been there for 20 years. The players are

very different than they were 20 years ago. They have different, you know, relationship to technology. The way that they come up in coaching is different. The college football ecosystem is different. And so it just could be time for a break. I imagine Mike Tomlin's 53 years old. He will take a year off and learn. about and spend some time diving into ways to fresh in his message and fresh in his approach and be back and have another successful run. But yeah, it's, I will just say for those organizations, the grass is always greener on the other side. I can understand it being frustrating to go nine and seven and losing the playoffs every year, but going four and 13 and not making the playoffs every year is a whole lot worse. So be careful what you wish for. I'm going to

add right now because I have to go. I have nothing to add. No, I just was going to ask you, Jonah, before you go, first of all, this is what it feels like when we talk about sci-fi stuff to me. This is you. But I'm going to let you off the hook before I go to Mike with a more substantive question. Jonah, who's your favorite current NFL coach? I don't have one. Can you name a current NFL coach? It's like picking your favorite kid. I got to go, guys. I'll say it. A mic. I love all 32 equally.

That's like when Rob Lowe showed up at the football, the NFL game wearing a hat that just said NFL. NFL, yes. Like not really in favor of a team. Mike, is it just, is this sort of the NFL manifestation of instant gratification culture? Like, do it, do it now or you're gone? I don't know. So there's 10 coaches who have been fired this season. Some of them midseason, right?

I think the Titans got rid of Brian Callahan pretty early. and pretty early or midway through the season. But yeah. Giants got rid of Brian Table after the Bears beat him. Yeah, that's right. And then, but then you had, you know, I mean, Rahe Morris was fired from the Falcons

at the end of a bad season. Kevin Stefansky for Cleveland was fired. The Cardinals coach, I can't remember his name at the time at the moment, was fired for bad seasons. Pete Carroll. Pete Carroll's with the Raiders. It's a lot, but I do wonder, I mean, I don't know enough about this, about whether we just sort of hit a kind of planets aligning cyclical moment where just a lot of the owners had the same kind of moment with bad coaches, you know, in their contracts, in their sort of long-term plans for these franchises where you just had a kind of piling on that didn't really have

anything to do with the other coaches, at least at first. Some of the other decisions, right, like John Harbaugh, getting fired by the Ravens or Sean McDermont, Sean McDermott. Yeah, I didn't mention Sean McDermott. Just fired after this loss this past weekend. You know, there is also a thing where, like, you know, people, coaches, you get a lot of coaches fired and all of a sudden the market for available coaches and how that fits into your plan, you know, expands. And then all of a sudden you start thinking maybe more strategically about

where do you want to go and do we want to grab somebody? I mean, Kevin Stefansky of the Cleveland Browns, now the head coach for the Atlanta Falcons. I'm not saying that they had anything to do with each other, but I just think, you know, this is not a, it's a, it's a, it's sort of a dynamic situation. So I don't read too much into it. I think there are people who follow the, you know, the sort of front office drama a little more closely who might be able to tell me why I'm wrong about that.

I do think the firing of these coaches who get to the playoffs and lose, that's new. I don't know what to make of that. But like maybe these owners are just getting more savvy and more unwilling to accept anything like you said, Steve, but a Super Bowl win. And when, if that's the trend, if that's the view, well, everybody's going to lose their job except one coach under that mindset. No, it's pretty interesting. So we've got a, I've got a friend, Tyler Dunn, who runs a substack called Go Along, which covers the NFL in great depth, a lot of great long form reporting in. He wrote this about Sean McDermott. McDermott. McDermott helped end the bill's 17-year playoff

drop before enjoying plenty of regular season success. He went 98 and 50. In the end, his inability to reach a Super Bowl with superstar quarterback Josh Allen proved to be his downfall. No coach in QB have won more playoff games without a Super Bowl appearance. And then I'll get to your point, Mike. Only eight head coaches in NFL history who have coached nine plus seasons have a higher winning percentage than McDermott. But only three coaches in the Super Bowl air. have won their first Super Bowl with a team in year nine or beyond. So it is sort of if you've been there for a while, the likelihood that you're going to win a Super Bowl diminishes, at least,

according to the historical record. This is, by the way, this puts me in mind of the McConnell rule in politics. You're familiar with that, Steve, right? This is John McConnell, the former George W. Bush speechwriter, who I believe it was not, his name was not. known at the time when, when this rule was established and it's later been established that this was John's rule. But something like seven years or less from your sort of debut on the national political stage to win somebody wins the presidency, that it's very rare

that you have somebody like a George H.W. Bush to sort of... Joe Biden? Or Joe Biden. Exactly. Like there are the exceptions that that's maybe perhaps prove the rule. Yeah. Right. This is Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton. You know, it's Donald Trump.

Sure, exactly. So maybe this is, there's a, there's a corollary or a parallel rule that we can maybe establish for NFL coaches. Well, that's it for today. This was a longer version of the dispatch podcast. We will attempt to revisit. visit the Not Worth Your Time discussion on Thursday if we can wrangle Sarah. But thanks for joining us today. Thanks gentlemen for a good conversation.

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