The Dispatch Podcast - Did Trump Cross the Mendoza Line?

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

With new polls showing Donald Trump losing his grip on the Republican base, Sarah, David, and Steve debate the do's and don'ts of gauging Trump's political altitude. They also discuss Ron DeSantis' attempt to court the vax-skeptic voter, the recent COVID outbreaks in China, and what the implosion of Sam Bankman-Fried tells us about America's cult of the CEO. Plus: Should we be talking about MTG? Show Notes: -Josh Kraushaar on Trump's declining position Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by David French and Steve Hayes. We'll start with some politics. Trump's polling decline. And then what's Ron DeSantis up to down in Florida? We'll also talk about Sam Bankman-Fried, his arrest, his congressional testimony postponed, the legal, political, and cultural aspects of the crypto collapse. And we'll end with a little.

Was it worth our time? Let's dive right in. First things first, Steve, I'm curious. Were you familiar with the Mendoza line? From Seinfeld? No, baseball reference. Obviously not. There were a lot of stories this week

looking at Trump's polling decline. I wrote the sweep on it last week as well. There have been, we're closing in on 40 polls just since the November election, looking at the 2024 Republican primary. Most of them looking at Trump versus DeSantis and head to heads or Trump versus a field of Republicans. Some are all voters, registered voters,

etc. But I thought Axios, Josh Croshauer and Xios, did a more fun write-up in some ways. He was looking at Trump's approval number and noted that for the first time, really, in Donald Trump's emergence as a serious person on the political scene, he has fallen below the 70% favorability among Republican voters, which is viewed as the Mendoza line, for support within a candidate's own party. I had to, I mean, I sort of knew the reference, but I actually went to go look it up.

It is a baseball reference, and it referred to a baseball player whose batting average was 200, and occasionally, I think, for five seasons, it dipped below that, and that was seen as the, you know, if you fell below the Mendoza line, you were not going to be a major league hitter.

Since then, by the way, It's been used in fun ways, including the Mendoza line in How I Met Your Mother for how hot a girl has to be based on her crazy scale. So it's used all over the place, but in politics, it can be fun. My takeaway, when I looked at these polls, was that some of the Trump's polling collapse headlines

have been overblown. That, yes, if you look at these head-to-head polls with Trump versus DeSantis, DeSantis is leading in a lot of them. But that's not actually how the Republican primary is going to work. It won't be a head-to-head between Trump and DeSantis. And if you look at the larger field polls, Donald Trump's winning almost all of them on the national side.

Now, you can argue that they won't be national primaries either. They'll be in these states. And so in some ways, there's not a good way to realistically poll what it will look like to have, you know, Iowa, then New Hampshire, and like walk through that. At the same time, it meets with common sense. If it's a two-man race, Ron DeSantis does really well. But if it's a large field, Donald Trump's support kind of stays solid

and he has a plurality and everyone else is splitting the not Donald Trump vote. But that's why I found crosshours right up in Axio so interesting because in some ways tracing favorability might be, a better indicator of where Trump actually is with Republican primary voters than any of those polls that are in the larger field are asking that just head-to-head Trump versus DeSantis.

So in the USA today, Suffolk poll, Trump's favorability among Republicans dropped from 75% in October to 64% this month. Quinnipiac favorability right at 70%, his lowest mark since March of 2016. And the Wall Street Journal had him at 74%, and 11% decline since March. So he is certainly losing altitude in the favorabilities.

David, do you think this will stick? Or is this what we saw after January 6th? And then, you know, by January 15th, once it was clear that he had a certain percentage of Republican voters, everyone kind of came back around. Yeah, you know, the thing that was striking about post-January 6th, that seems different now, is that post-January 6th, if you are looking at Republican favorability only with Trump,

Pence and McConnell dropped far more than Trump did after January 6th, which is a problem considering everything that happened, but Pence and McConnell did far worse post-January 6th than Donald Trump, which is mind-blowing, but very real. And yet now, now what you are seeing is Donald Trump doing worse. And the polling is weird, Sarah. I was looking at it before the podcast. And, you know, I'm used to seeing a lot of polling that will say,

say, you know, a Senate primary or a Senate election that might say, Warnock plus four, Warnock plus three, Herschel Walker plus one, and that's your range. Some of the stuff you're seeing here is, in one poll, Trump plus 18, the next one, Desantis plus 20. There seems to be an enormous amount of volatility. But one thing is clear is that Trump's in trouble. And I've never really gotten the sense that Trump,

Trump is in real trouble with Republican primary voters and those based Republican voters really since late 2015. And when you go back to late 2015 and just sort of roll forward, there was never a point. There was always a point where people were incredulous that Trump was doing as well as he did. But there was never really a point where he's in real danger with Republican primary voters. and, you know, he sailed to the nomination. Of course, it was a split field and he had a plurality, not a majority.

And then especially once he secured the nomination, he was secure with Republican voters. And he is definitely, the one thing you can certainly say is you cannot look at all of us and say he is secure with the Republican primary voters any longer. And what I'm seeing is a number of people just sort of experientially saying things that I never heard before like that's the last straw or I'm tired of this or you know I really hope it's not

him you know things like that that really I just hadn't had hadn't heard that kind of sentiment sort of in the air until really that let it until really this past November. Steve one of the things that I find very interesting is echelon actually ran four poll questions in the same poll, echelon insights run by our friends, Kristen Salta Sanderson and Patrick Rafini. And they did both head-to-head and larger field, and they did registered voters and likely voters. And so you ended up with four pieces of data

that you could really compare to see what was going on. Not surprising, Trump led DeSantis by 12 points in a head-to-head, 11 points in sort of that larger field with registered voters, registered voters who leaned Republican, basically. But when you move to likely Republican primary voters, head to head they were tied, and in the larger field,

Trump then moved ahead by one point, meaning almost the opposite of what we had seen in previous iterations of this, the more you were paying attention and the more hardcore of a Republican primary voter you were, Trump's numbers are going down with those folks, which is fascinating because to what David just said,

to me, that is more about their belief of who can win a general election in 2024. They may still like Donald Trump okay, you know, wish things were different, but reality is really setting in and even, you know, I wrote about the R&C chairmanship race. Ronna McDaniel is going to sail into re-election as the RNC chair,

which might be surprising for anyone who's paid attention to the last three cycles and have seen Republicans give away easy races, even though it's been kind of a mixed bag success wife. They've done well in the House, but then they've lost the Senate, things like that. And you look at some of the letters circulating among R&C members. There's only 168 people who get to vote on this question of who should be RNC chair. and the letter that was most interesting to me of someone who had endorsed Rana McDaniel was

the job of the RNC is to turn out Republican voters. That happened. Republican voters turned out in record numbers in 2022, but they split their tickets when they actually got to the polling booth, which means candidates matter. And he said, we did our job. And the implication is that any of these losses aren't Ronna McDaniel's fault, dot, dot, dot, and this is the part that he doesn't spell out in this letter, they're someone else's fault.

That's just fascinating to me. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I would dispute the claim. I don't think the job of the RNC is to turn out Republican voters, primarily. The job of the RNC is to help Republicans win races. So you can't separate the two as conveniently as this McDaniel supporter. would have us believe. Yeah, look, I mean, I think, and I, it pains me as I, as I sit here on this, as a guest on this rogue advisory opinions podcast with two of you, it pains me to, to, I think

I'm going to compliment Sarah. I think this is like the fifth podcast in a row. But the best thing I've read on this was your sweep last week, where he went really in depth on the way to think about these primary polls and it had the effect of doing what the best, I think the best kind of writing does. It changed my mind on these things. Because I'm, you know, I'm following the polling as it comes out. I'm certainly interested in Donald Trump's standing in the Republican Party. And there is reason to believe, as you ended your little soliloquy with Sarah, there is reason to believe he's losing altitude. He's, he's, he's, struggling, or he's not as strong as he was before. But it's also premature to draw these

sweeping conclusions that I think you'd be inclined to draw if what you were doing was reading headlines every day or just reading the top line takeaways from these polls for all the reasons that you suggest here, but going to greater depth in the sweep, in particular the different methodologies. And to me, the greatest misleading indicator is the, the Trump DeSantis head to head because it's just not, that is not what's going to happen. So we're polling fiction, we're pulling fantasy. And if you want to come to certain conclusions about something that's not going to happen, you know, fair enough, but it's not a very good way to think about how our politics is likely

to play out. So having said all that, you know. It's great for DeSantis who can use it perhaps to convince other Republicans not to hop in the field. Yes. But that's about all that's good for. and some of these polls, by the way, some of them include 19 candidates,

which is actually pretty realistic probably, but others include, you know, six candidates. One of them included Don Jr. So it was Donald... With Donald Trump, yeah. Yes, Donald Trump, Don Jr., Mike Pence, you know, and Ron DeSantis. I was like, that's a weird, that's odd.

Who came up with that? Can we just digress a moment on that? Was that a media poll? And if it was, is this just to get headlines? Is this just to get people talking about this? Because what is the point of a poll like that? I would argue that it is anti-information. It detracts from our overall knowledge set.

It was actually an economist YouGov poll. So it was a media poll that included Don Jr. You know, I think a better example of they're asking for different things than you think they're asking for, but they're interesting things nevertheless. So one of the polls that got a lot of headlines, for instance, had Donald Trump way behind, you know, Iran DeSantis, for instance.

And it was like, aha, see Donald Trump losing altitude. But when you actually dug into the poll, it was asking all American adults, not Republicans and not registered voters even. But the question itself was totally fair. It said, who would you most prefer to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024? for. That's an interesting question to ask all Americans if you want to sort of see where

Donald Trump stands writ large in sort of an almost general election sense. But if the headline isn't written correctly, it's incredibly misleading if you're, you know, asking that question. I mean, I stared at this like six different ways to try to figure out what I was missing there. In some ways, that's the, that's the results of that question are the results that should interest Republican operatives more than any other question, right? Yeah. How does the American public, how do American adults, I'd be better, I guess, if it were registered voters.

Think of Donald Trump because it tells you something about the likelihood, his likelihood of being elected again. And the weaker he is there, the more I think it doesn't make sense for Republicans to nominate him. Yeah. I mean, so the whole, the Trump versus DeSantis' head-to-head poll. I think are important because they show you that Donald Trump is very beatable,

including by a real candidate who's out there. And that's important because if all you see are the head-to-head polls, you could walk away with the impression that Donald Trump is as strong as he ever was and is going to waltz into winning the Republican nomination. I think the head-to-head polls show you a different path. But as you said, Steve, they're not a path in reality. They're like a hypothetical.

But here's where I think they really do matter. and I've mentioned this before, I think it's, I think the only way past Donald Trump for the Republican Party is if there is somebody else. And what these early DeSantis' Trump head-to-head polls do

is give people something to talk about, like this. They're talking about Ron DeSantis and the people who use the head-to-heads, however silly we might think they are, can say, oh, DeSantis is stronger than Trump. And if you're a candidate, like Donald Trump, who's built his reputation on being strong, on dominating, the alpha.

And you're routinely getting smoked by this other guy. I think that's not a small thing. And the second point, and it's related, is for Republican activists, conservative movement types, who've been, you know, who've had this marriage of convenience with Donald Trump for seven plus years and haven't loved it. And there are a lot of them, right? there are a lot of people who fit that description. This gives them somewhere else to go.

So instead of being, you know, in the binary formulation that we've had to deal with for, you know, nearly eight years, if you weren't for Trump, you were for the Democrats, you were for Hillary Clinton or you were for Democrats in Congress, Nancy Pelosi, or Joe Biden, now you can be for someone. And this is the first time that people on the center right, who want to be part of the center right, who are frustrated, you know, either for policy or tribal reasons,

are frustrated with won'tness, you know, by the culture war arguments, we would like to see smaller government. They can be for Ronda Santis in a way that really hasn't been available to them for a long time. So, David, here's my question to you. There's a chicken and egg issue about why this is different than 2015.

Right. the amount of attention that Donald Trump is getting from the media and what he has to do to get that attention is so wildly different. I mean, just remember the empty podium. They would stay on that empty podium, you know, for an hour, if need be. That empty podium was enough to get network coverage. Now, the biggest amount of coverage that Donald Trump has gotten since his announcement is having dinner with Kanye West and Nick Fuentes,

you know, if you keep having to ratchet it up to more and more extreme things in order to get that attention, at some point, it does undercut your general election feasibility. On the same side, though, is it... Who is it? Is it the media making a different call? Or is it that Donald Trump has so burned out

his own, you know, machine there that, again, the things he has to do to get that attention are so extreme. I mean, he put out a thing saying he was making a major announcement today. You know, if he had just teased a major announcement during the 2016 election at any point, and really during his presidency,

all eyeballs would have then been on what's the announcement going to be. My understanding is it's going to be the announcement of a new NFT, a non-fungible token that he's rolling out. Oh, you've got to be kidding me. Right? And so... Yeah. there's a sense of collapse that is different than even the data,

and it's the sense of media attention collapse. Yeah, but also, dare I say, he's rather low energy compared to 2015. He's not leaving Mar-a-Lago, really. He hasn't done many or any real events since his announcement. He's had his dinner with Yeh and Nick Fuentes. He's had that for sure. But remember, in 2015,

he was all over the country, he was packing out arenas, he was calling into the morning shows. The morning shows were putting him on directly live on air as he would call in. He was everywhere. And, you know, yeah, he was on Twitter then, but not now. But I guarantee you, even if he wasn't on Twitter and truth existed in 2015,

people would be putting all of his truths on Twitter and talking endlessly about them much more than they do now. So I think it's a combination of, yeah, a lot of media outlets are kind of over him, or if not over him, there's definitely not paying the same level of attention. And he's not generating the same level of activity, not even close to the activity he was generating in 2015. And so I think it's the combination of those two things. And, you know, I also think to Steve's point about there, is there somebody else? Is there somebody else?

There have been people during the Trump era who have sort of raised up as, you know, Republicans who've raised up and taken on Trump and have gotten crushed, slaughtered, or when they've been seen as taking on Trump, like Pence post-January 6th, crushed, slaughtered in the polling. The thing that's different about DeSantis is he's the first person that a lot of hardcore Republicans can say, oh, look at this person, I really for him, and he's not taking on Trump, he's taking on the same enemies of mine that Trump took on. And so they get to focus their anger.

He's a vehicle for focusing their anger without also focusing it on Trump. and that's what DeSantis from a political perspective has done so deftly so far is present himself as an alternative without ever really explicitly aiming his fire on Trump or even opposing Trump explicitly yet at all. He's just done a very good job of becoming sort of the media's Republican target

instead of Trump, which has rallied an awful lot of people to his side in a way that allows them to join a Republican without opposing Trump, at least so far. Like that, by definition, that can't continue. There's going to be a confrontation if he gets in the race. But I think that's a big part of why he's risen when other Republicans haven't as an alternative.

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isn't responding to anything Donald Trump did, which is the trap that I think a lot of 2015 Republican candidates had to fall into. I'm not blaming them. Obviously, I was there. You weren't given much of an option, I'll say. But, you know, between the Martha's Vineyard moment and now this investigation into COVID-19 vaccines that he's asking for, it's different.

It does feel very different. I'm curious what you think of the politics of Ron DeSantis'. Again, I'll call it a shadow campaign because there are legal requirements if you want to actually spend money to run for president. But here's a way to spend money to not yet run for president. Yeah, so a reference that are sane listeners who are not on Twitter might find a little perplexing.

This is a giant sub-tweet of Donald Trump, right? I mean, that's what Ron DeSantis is doing here. Because Trump, if you go back and look at, Trump's handling of COVID. He was late. He spewed misinformation. He was uninterested in things he used it for political gain. I mean, it was, you know, everything Donald Trump did was, was, I think, had the effect of not helping get us past COVID.

With one major exception, and that was Operation Warp Speed. and his, I would say, reluctant embrace of the vaccine. Trump didn't, he sort of went back and forth in the early stages, and then once it was clear that the vaccine was happening, and then clearer still that the vaccine was proving effective, you saw Trump get on board. He became a sort of an unapologetic booster of the vaccine, no pun intended. And I think what DeSantis is doing here, I mean, it's a very interesting play.

I think what he's doing here is trying to set up an issue where he can criticize Trump from the right, where he can take on Trump in a way that endears him further to the Republican base. I think this could have that effect. If you look at the polling on this issue among Republicans, Republicans are the ones who are most skeptical still of the vaccine. A third of Republicans, I think I'm going off the top of my head. There's some very good morning consult polling data on vaccine skepticism, vaccine uptake. And while it's true that the percentage of Republicans who are still vaccine skeptives

has fallen from like 45% in March of 21st. 21 to 37% now. I'm guessing, I apologize, I don't have these in front of me. It's still a sizable group, and it's exactly the people who are the most likely to be Trump supporters. And I think if you're Ron DeSantis and you're making strictly a political calculation, you look at the Republican primary and the people you need to peel away from Donald Trump to win, those are the people.

So I think that is the political move here, and it's understandable and it makes some sense. Now, the thing that is going to be challenging for DeSantis, at least in a primary election, is that at one time, DeSantis too was a pretty strong booster of the vaccine. If you remember the case that he made to lift mask mandates and to let businesses resume operation, is at the core of that case was his enthusiasm for the vaccine and basically said, if you take the vaccine, you're not going to die. And if you're not going to die, we can go back to normal. That was sort of the long and short of his case.

You know, I imagine he finesses that during a Republican primary and then forgets everything that he's doing right now if he were the Republican nominee and focuses on that in a general election where he says, oh, I was always for the vaccine. Look at these things I said. So, David, I want to read you a few pieces of this request that he sent in for this grand jury. While Florida rejected vaccine mandates and passports, some Floridians made the choice to receive the COVID-19 vaccine because they believed that receiving the vaccine would prevent them from spreading COVID-19 to others. The widespread belief that the COVID-19 vaccines prevented the disease from spreading became so pervasive

that the president of the United States himself believed it to be true. He sought to impose a variety of vaccine mandates on the American people, including health care workers and members of the military, which were premised on the notion that unvaccinated people spread the virus and the best way to slow the spread of COVID-19 to prevent infection by the Delta variant or other variants is to be vaccinated. That was May 3rd, 2021 was the quote he was using, carefully picked, I'm sure, no doubt, to pick one United States president over another.

Florida's prohibition on vaccine requirements could not prevent all federal vaccine requirements, such as those for military members. Many Floridians serving in Florida and abroad were forced to submit to COVID-19 vaccination as a condition of employment. These mandates were imposed, even as evidence surfaced of increased cases of myocarditis, pericarditis in those vaccinated. obviously it goes on from there it's an interesting tactic David do you think that the headlines alone are a net plus

in the sense that he's getting the headlines the headlines aren't about Donald Trump it's calling into question vaccine mandates which at least polls lower than say you can choose to get a vaccine if you want to Yeah. You know, this is a short-term win for him in a way that matters. And now, I'm withholding judgment on long-term, but this is a short-term win for him in exactly the pattern that I talked about before, which is he has become very good at courting sort of the angriest part of the Republican base, especially online. This is a hyper-online sort of thing that you do.

because out in Normie Republican land, people are not seething about the vaccine. They're getting the vaccine. Okay. A majority of Republicans definitely got the vaccine. And so that is not a sentiment that is percolating through the United States of America about seething over the vaccine

and exchanging all kinds of information about transmissibility of the more recent variants and all of the, you know, there's different studies that surface who will say, the vaccine's risky, no, it's not risky. And you'll see a lot of this on Twitter. You don't see this percolating out in the wider world. But he's very good at feeding the very online, very angry activist, and which then triggers a media reaction against him

and say he's at no point there, Sarah, is he taking on Donald Trump? At no point, although it is a sub-tweet of it of Donald Trump, at no point is he taking on Donald Trump. But what it's doing is it's causing media people like me and Steve and others to say, what on earth are you doing here? A grand jury impaneled over a COVID vaccine that has saved millions of lives? That's what we're doing right now. And that's all the right enemies.

to look into Florida law prohibits fraudulent practices including the dissemination of false or misleading advertisements of a drug and the use of any representation or suggestion in any advertisement relating to a drug that an application of a drug is effective when it is not. The pharmaceutical industry has a notorious history of misleading the public for financial gain. There's a footnote there.

Questions have been raised regarding the veracity of the representations made by the pharmaceutical manufacturers of the COVID-19 vaccine. vaccines, particularly with respect to transmission, prevention, efficacy, and safety. An investigation is warranted to determine whether the pharmaceutical industry has engaged in fraudulent practices the people of Florida deserve to know the truth. So you think net political downside? I said net political upside in the short term.

Yeah, but we're not playing a short term game here. Or maybe define short term. Weeks. Okay. So, yeah. So we're not playing a weeks long game here. You think net political downside in the bigger picture? I think possibly, but the problem you have or the thing that's been illustrated with DeSantis

is he does a series of these net political short-term wins where he gets, he shows that he's fighting, he gets the right enemies, he has a new cycle and he moves on. By the time this thing either peters out or backfires against him, maybe he's picked five other fights that he has been on the right side of. You know, and look, we see this in the legal outcome of a lot of his previous culture war initiatives. So his social media law blocked in courts. The provision of the Stop Woke Act that applies to private corporations blocked in courts.

The provision of the Stop Woke Act that applies to public universities blocked in courts. If news reports are accurate, the Reedy Creek Improvement District that he re-yanked from Disney's about to come back in some form. And so in thing after thing after thing that he does, when you pay attention over time, doesn't actually work out. It turns out he doesn't actually win that fight, but he picks the fight and then he picks another fight

and then he picks another fight and then he picks another fight. So by the time we have the denouement of this grand jury, Sarah, we're probably 11 more fights picked down the road and we're talking about those. That's what he's been very good. good at. Now, if this grand jury turns into something weird and does something that is blows through the bounds of the law, then yeah, it might backfiring him. But he's really good on short-term win after short-term win after short-term win. And what that all adds up to is

this perception that nobody fights that God made a fighter, Sarah. That's what it adds up to. That was the two-minute campaign style video about Ron DeSantis. based on God made a farmer. And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a protector. So God made a fighter.

That was... Yeah. Odd. Yeah. Odd. To say the least. Yeah, look, I think, I mean, it's interesting.

I mean, I think this is a political risk. You can understand why he would do it. it in the context of a potential primary battle with Donald Trump. And you can see what it would make sense. If you have a grand jury, you have an investigation, let's just say you have a public debate about what people said the vaccines would do, I have no doubt that he will be able to find a lot of either public health officials or big pharma folks who overstated what the vaccine would do or could do.

In the enthusiasm, I mean, I think the vaccine, what we've seen is a miracle. I mean, this is incredible. The effectiveness of it, I think, is stunning. It's a triumph of science. And it's one of the best good news stories in science and humanity in the last century. said, you did have people who overpromised. You did have people who overstated what it was going to do, both in the political realm and in the public health realm. And I do think it was the case, and we've talked about this before, that the people who asked legitimate questions

about how the vaccine would work, about the possible side effects, about the newness of the way that it was built, were vilified. And I think vilified. And I think vilified. in an unfortunate way. There is no rule that you have to be an over-the-top vaccine enthusiast. You should be able to ask these questions. I do think there are legitimate questions. I thought there were then. I think there are now.

The political risk for DeSantis, though, is can you ask those questions? Can you point out the people who overstated this without really fully climbing into bed with the kooky anti-vaks crowd? and I think he's pretty close. I think some of the things that we heard in connection with this announcement the other day came awfully close to just the nutty anti-vaxxers and there are a bunch

and they're enthusiastic and they're voluble and they will, I think they have the potential to kind of take this over. So if this was a narrow play or if he was attempting to thread the needle, I'm not sure the, I'm not sure that it'll be as smooth as he imagines. I'm going to John McLaughlin this conversation and say you're all wrong.

Wrong. What I find fascinating about Ron DeSantis so far is that the fights he picks are policy-based. So he wants to show he's fighting on immigration. He does the Martha's Vineyard stunt. He wants to show he's fighting on Big Tuck. He has the, you know, Florida social media bill preventing viewpoint-based discrimination by social media companies. And here you have vaccine mandate people. So it's all these parts, coalitions within the larger Republican primary voting group.

And he picks those fights, as opposed to the fights Donald Trump was picking, which were almost, I can't think of one that wasn't, only rhetorical. And so in that sense, Ron DeSantis is really taking advantage of being the governor of a large, populous state. It's how he came onto the scene in the first place, really, was during COVID-19 as the governor of Florida, you know, charting a different path at every step he could from Joe Biden. Here's where I think he's in danger. Each time he's doing one of these, and maybe this is to your point, David,

in order to get that attention and just wall-to-wall media coverage of it, he has to do something at least a little bit zany. So, for instance, Greg Abbott in Texas, he was busing illegal immigrants to D.C. and New York and Chicago. And that got a lot of attention at the beginning, but then it sort of petered out. Ron DeSantis took illegal immigrants from Texas.

Yeah. and chartered a plane to Martha's Vineyard with Florida money. And that, to me, is where you run a risk long term. Because if you're surrounded by people who aren't making those safer stunts for you, Ron DeSantis, I think so far these have all worked to his benefit.

I think the vaccine won politically, only to his benefit. And that's where I disagree with you guys. but the trend is that he's going to do one of these. You don't see any potential downside? Only to his political benefit? Political, political downside? No.

No. Because in a general election, he's in or even, you know, at whatever point you want to pick, he's going to be able to say, I wanted a grand jury to look into whether these vaccine manufacturers lied when they said that it prevented transmission

or lied when they said there wasn't an increase in myocarditis from 18 to 34-year-olds when they in fact had this specific study. He's going to say, of course, I'm for the vaccine. I've taken the vaccine, yada, yada, but we deserve the full information instead of, you know, sort of the sheep information. Again, you know, I just don't see a huge political downside to that long term.

No, I mean, I think that those would be very reasonable questions. I'm just not sure that the people who he's ginning up by doing this, which are the kooky anti-vaxxers, in some cases are going to let him get away with those kinds of very specific, targeted questions. They will in the general election because they let Donald Trump get away with it. See, that's my point.

They'll let him get away with it as long as he keeps picking fights. Yeah. And that's, to Sarah's point, is if the fights get zanier and zanier, that's where he starts to have problems. But, you know, look at Martha's Vineyard. I agree with you, Sarah.

That has overall worked out in the Republican base is a win for him. Huge win. actually, not a little win, a huge win. Even though all of the reporting after it has been how much of that was a complete fraud. But like legally a fraud, you mean also. Like he's being sued for using Florida money

for people who were not in the state of Florida. Right. That a person came and lied to these immigrants, that there was, it was a nasty, dirty, awful thing that he did, but the people that he wanted to appeal to, they've already moved on to the next

thing. Oh, look at who, look at what Ronne Sanchez is doing now. The point was to raise the issue and to make the media cover this issue of how many people were crossing the border every single day. I mean, we're looking, I think, to average $14,000 a day in this coming year. I mean,

something just wild, like sort of mind-blowing numbers. So they're fine. Of course it was a stunt. they'll tell you. It was a really well-done stunt. It forced the media to cover it. And they want to nitpick about, you know, where the flights were,

where the money came from. Good on Ron DeSantis for not backing down when his lawyers told him this had legal problems. But just to your point, if we're talking about 14,000 people crossing the border every day, he used a stunt to highlight what I think many people would think is a real problem. I don't think the average person, I mean, if you look at the morning consult pulling,

vaccine is very popular. It's been very effective. I think we have a control experiment taking place right now in China. China has a crappy Vax. It's not going to work. It's not working now. And I think we're seeing them. I think at the front end of what looks to be potentially a horrible, horrible surge as China opens up. I mean, it's interesting because if you look at some of the footage out of Beijing and elsewhere, people don't even want to come out now that they're allowed to come out because they're so afraid of this thing and they know that the vaccine there hasn't worked. I do think, you know, I'm not,

I don't want to suggest that American Republican primary voters are going to look to China and conclude that because China is having trouble with the vaccine, they should be skeptical of what Ron DeSantis is doing on this grand jury. But there is this general sense and it's also, you know, reality that the vaccine has been pretty effective. It's possible that it was oversold. It's possible that people over-promised.

But it's also more or less worked. As Ron DeSantis himself made clear again and again and again again. Yeah, talk a little bit more about China. Let's use this to now move to what is happening in China, Steve. China, in reaction to all of these protests, is opening up more. But like we had talked about previously, they didn't have great choices. You keep everyone locked down forever, which isn't good, obviously,

or you open it up and what they know is that they do not have a population vaccinated nearly enough and to the extent they are vaccinated, it's not an effective vaccine. And in particular, interestingly, in China, the people who are least likely to be vaccinated are the oldest cohort in China. And so what they knew was either you keep everyone locked down or you open it up and suffer you know, a catastrophic sort of rise of the disease again, killing, who knows? Right. Yeah. Here, I mean, there's a deep irony playing out in China right now. And it is that, however ineffective and frustrating the zero COVID policies were, and however harsh the Chinese government,

was in implementing the zero COVID policies, we're now seeing very clearly why they thought they had to because they know the vaccine is not effective or not as effective as ours. And they know that they're going to see the spike, particularly among this vulnerable population. So I think you're looking at, you know, a potential catastrophe playing out in China right now.

And as I said, there's this, The BBC had a very good sort of mini documentary about this just a few days ago showing that on the one hand, people were sort of thrilled to be out from under this oppressive zero COVID policy. On the other, most people just didn't want to go out. They don't want to get it. They don't want to be subject to whatever the sort of remnant rules of zero COVID might be. It's somewhat ill-defined right now. The lifting of these policies is being applied unevenly across the country. And I think you're looking at, you know, a Chinese regime that had come under serious pressure,

not enough pressure to, I think, destabilize it as people who know a lot more about China than I have pointed out again and again and again. But serious pressure, and now, ironically, by opening up, the pressure could increase if the results are what many epidemiologists and public health officials think they will be. David? Well, you know, the Chinese government has rejected American vaccines. They have an inferior variant at, you know, Chinese vaccines. I believe they've only just now approved an MRNA vaccine, but only for limited,

very limited use. Their vaccines are based on a different, technology and inferior technology. And I really fear for what's going to happen, especially to China's older population. This is not a super young country. This is a country, you know, the one child policy, the disastrous one child policy, for example,

has led to a real demographic change in China. So this is a much older country than you might think with ineffective or less effective vaccines. less uptake on booster shots, which are much more necessary in the Chinese vaccine. And so I really fear for what's about to happen in that country. Now, it's a much different, COVID ripping through, now it's much different than COVID ripping through, say, in June of 2020.

I mean, the therapeutics are much better. We know a heck of a lot more on how to treat it. I can't even imagine how horrifying it would have been if it just completely ripped through Chinese society in mid-2020 when we didn't have a vaccine and we didn't have great therapeutics. So they're in a better situation, but it's still a deadly, dangerous situation for them. And they're reaping in many ways what they've sown

in their rejection of Western assistance and Western technology. And so I, you know, it's going to be very interesting to see how this works out for China from the standpoint of how is it going to manage this crisis both from a public health standpoint and also politically with their own people because they've just demonstrated

that they are sensitive at least to some degree to protest. And this change is a symbol of that, yeah. It's clear. I mean, the panic I think that is pervasive across the Chinese populace is evident in all kinds of ways, there's a run on ibuprofen across the country

and drugs that are used to treat the symptoms of COVID potentially, and they are having a hard time keeping in stock peaches, which are thought to be to have some sort of remedy for COVID that are selling out peaches across the country, these canned peaches. I think it's, you know, this is the kind of situation where the government has presented itself as totally in charge, all knowing, all seeing in ways that, you know, I think the Chinese populist was prepared to believe, given the sort of surveillance state of affairs over there. But the cracks in that are increasingly evident. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside.

So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at mx.ca.orgia slash Y Annex. I want to make sure we don't give too much short shrift

to the legal, the political, the cultural side of the fall of crypto under Sam Bankman-Fried. David, obviously it's getting a little. a lot of attention in sort of an Enron-esque way. Right. But it's not getting as much attention from a political side, which is interesting.

I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the largest Democratic donors out there. You know, imagine a world in which Charles Koch got arrested this week. Right. Back in the day, Charles Koch. Not really today the Cokes don't actually do a lot of Republican fundraising anymore. But, you know, back in the heyday of the Coke boogeyman, stuff. Or for that matter, you know, imagine Soros being arrested on the Democratic side. Right. Why hasn't there been more of a political fallout angle to this?

Well, I think there's a few reasons. I think, number one, even though he was a major Democratic donor, he's not somebody who's been on the scene since as long as Soros or as long as the coax. he's a, you know, this sort of comet, this like shooting star who burned out pretty quickly, obviously. So this is, he's not really a household name in political circles in the same way these guys were. The other thing is, I think because he was attached to this crypto phenomenon,

there are, there were a lot of people who, A, never understood it. Like, what even is this stuff? so they never really understood it enough to even have necessarily have an opinion on it. And then number two, because he's attached to this crypto phenomenon, it crypto never really latched on in a political, with a political salience as this is a red or a blue phenomenon.

This was much more of a sort of an online phenomenon. So his guru-ness to the extent, that he had a sort of a guru aura around him was attached to the crypto part of his life, not to the Democratic donor part of his life. That's what he was known for. And then the third, another factor is it would be one thing if he was a big Democratic donor, his fraud was uncovered, and somehow it appeared as if the Democratic Party were covering for him. Instead, he's been called to testify before Congress and a Democratic-controlled Congress and arrested and charged by the Biden, or charged by the Biden DOJ is going to have to be extradited.

So the instruments of government under a Democratic president have been turned against him. So there's no real sense, at least that we know of right now, that all of that Democratic money bought him any sort of Democratic favors, which would be a different kind of scandal. But yeah, he, what I do think, and this is, Sarah, this is a kind of. of a bigger point around him, with his implosion and the implosion of many others, quite frankly, who've sort of become gurus in this tech world and the Silicon Valley era, we've got to, we need to get over our guru fascination. We just need to get over this. Elizabeth, I just finished watching the dropout. I know I'm way late on this.

Way late. Wow. Way late. I know. I don't even know it is. Sorry. Oh, my God, Steve. So good, so good. But it's remind you how much she was sort of a, you know, she was a guru before Sam Bank Van Freed was a guru of these technologies that mainstream media didn't really understand, created a multi-billion dollar empire, and then it was all a house of cards.

There's something, we've always had this kind of cult, or for generations, we've had this kind of cult of the CEO in the United States. You know, I remember growing up, Lee Iacocca, Jack Welsh. But there's something that changed in the Silicon Valley era as sort of the cult of the CEO attached to tech created even a more magnified guru syndrome. And we need to be getting over that. I don't think we need to get over the cult of the CEO.

I think that's actually a healthy impulse in America. Oh, gosh, no. I think Steve's being sarcastic. I don't know that. You know, of all the things that we make cults of, celebrities, you know, people with sort of stature unearned, a lot of CEOs deserve cult status, not because they, you know, I separate guru, David, from admired or whatever else. Right. A guru implies that because you were good at thing A, we should listen to you about thing B. That's my beef. But we should probably listen to you about thing A if you built a multi, you know, hundred.

million billion dollar company in thing a these people were frauds though so they didn't actually build the thing um worth noting by the way that of the federal federally brought charges one of them very much includes conspiracy to violate federal campaign finance law because of straw purchases the idea is not straw purchases straw contributions the idea that he was um you know in the simplest way. I write a check for $10,000 to David. And then David writes the check to the candidate because I've already maxed out. But that's still my money going to the candidate. That's illegal. Interestingly, the SEC also alleges that he steered money from his trading firms to federal political candidates. So that's a no-no. Also, corporations cannot make direct contributions

to candidates. And that's on top of, of course, the general wire fraud. The bigger fraud questions. Steve, crypto was becoming a cultural phenomenon. Is this the end of, I mean, Congress was constantly talking about how are we going to regulate this? How are we going to create a structure that can support a new currency in the United States? Are we done with that? No, I don't think we're done with that. I mean, and it certainly isn't the first or won't be the last example of Congress struggling to keep up with new emerging technologies. I mean, you hear this a lot from folks elsewhere in PAC. You say the kinds of regulatory proposals that are being made by members of Congress are 10 years too late. They just don't get it. They're not on top of it. Let me be

transparent about this. I have basically a newspaper reader's understanding of Sam Bankman-Fried and of crypto. So let me not pass myself off as an expert here. For just a split second, by the way, when you said I want to be transparent, there was like just a moment where I was like, is Steve about to tell us that he owns like large crypto holdings? And then he needs to be transparent about that? No, I don't own any crypto holdings. That's more like it. And I don't have large holdings of any kind, you know, to be totally transparent. No.

You have large dispatch holdings. I mean, I just find it fascinating that we have the rise of Mark Zuckerberg, and that was so, I think, unique in American history, the accumulation of wealth, the sort of lack of widgets to back up that wealth. This isn't like Henry Ford can point to all these cars and say, that's where the money's coming from. Mark Zuckerberg still really can't point you to what the worth of Facebook is in any sort of widget capacity. He was so young, but it is real, at least kind of, for our purposes, it's real. And it opened the door for a bunch of other young people to use this smoke and mirrors.

You don't need to see the widgets. Don't worry about it to become billionaires. But I can't think of one. sure there are, and I'm just not thinking of them, that have been able to do what Mark Zuckerberg did in terms of name recognition plus wealth, plus building something that didn't then collapse. Obviously, Theranos and this being the top two examples, but they're not the only ones. Silicon Valley is littered with those types of... Uber. Yeah, yeah.

But in those cases, I mean, we work as an interesting. potential analog you know in the Zuckerberg case I think at the end of the day he could stand there and sort of wave his arm and say look at all these people who are on my platform and and point to that as as the thing as the as the product in some ways and you know with fairnos and with with this so far as I can tell you didn't I mean you didn't have it to the same extent it wasn't It wasn't as obvious there. And what I find fascinating in this, so I have read a little bit about Theranos.

I know more about Theranos, even though I haven't watched whatever pop culture thing you guys are going on and on about, is the number of really smart people, at least people smart by reputation, who went along with this and never asked any hard questions, never stopped and said, nah, that sounds interesting,

but now let me see it. And this is where it's so different from Enron. People were asking questions around Enron. Right. Now, they were maybe buying the answers too easily, but there were a lot of questions, and you had Arthur Anderson working overtime to help answer those questions

in a way that people would find remotely satisfying. Here, you didn't even have, they had quick books. My God. But some, yeah, and some of the other examples, I mean, they didn't have anything. You know, it would be like, they would approve huge expenditures of money or transfers to Alameda, which is this other company that he controlled over chat,

like billions of dollars over chat. Was that in the wild fraud channel or was that a different channel? Well, and you know, one thing about this, also it's all, hey, it's all shrouded in the Bitcoin phenomenon, which the way the dynamic worked for a long time is if you, were skeptical about Bitcoin, that was considered proof that you don't get it, that you don't understand. So you would say, wait a minute, as far as I can tell, the actual primary use of Bitcoin as a currency is to facilitate illegal transactions. And then otherwise, it's sort of a

speculative investment asset like tulips at a certain, or care bears or whatever, you know, like a hobbyist, enthusiast, you know, short-term craze kind of, quote-unquote, investment. And you'd get somebody online

or a bunch of people online with red laser eyes and their profile just gang tackling you, like they had understood the higher truth of Bitcoin and the blockchain and Web 3 and all of these, all of this lingo that would just be hurled at you. And I remember not long ago,

I was watching the exchange between a Bitcoin enthusiast and a skeptical journalist. And the skeptical journalist was just saying, let's, what's your use case? What, tell me, tell me, what is your use case of blockchain, of Bitcoin? And, you know, the laser, red laser eye enthusiast just struggled and struggled and struggled to come up with the real world use case of a lot of this technology. And so you're in this world. where no one understood Sam Bankman Fried's business like Alameda and what he was actually running.

And also they didn't understand cyber currency and, you know, and the whole, that whole phenomenon block chain and all of that didn't understand that either. So it gave him a lot of room to run for a long time until his house of cards collapsed. And on the pedestal, these words appear. My name is Osamandis, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty and despair.

Nothing beside remains. All right. Last quick segment, we wanted to be transparent about topics that we think about in the green room. We have a meeting the day before this podcast and we think about all the things we could talk about and we try to narrow it down. And some of them are tough calls.

And so this week, we thought we'd pull back the curtain a little. one of the things we decided not to talk about was Marjorie Taylor Green and her comments on January 6th, Steve, you thought it was a tough call, right? And explain what she said and why you thought it was a tough call. Yeah, I mean, I think this is an ongoing tough call. It's an ongoing balance of trying to make clear to people what the sort of crazy side of the Republican Party and the crazy side of our politics is doing and saying,

because the crazy side has become more and more powerful, or crazy elements, maybe is a better way to put it, have become more and more powerful over the past decade. Marjorie Taylor Green this week in a speech before New York Republicans acknowledged Steve Bannon in the audience and then said that if she and Steve Bannon had been planning January 6th, it would have been more successful. It would have worked.

And they would have come better armed. And I think there was an attempt, having watched the video a couple of times, to suggest that this was a joke. Didn't feel very joky. It felt, I'd be overstating it to say it was a threat, but it certainly didn't feel like much of a joke

and given both her words and her behavior, I think it would be foolish to treat it as one. So the question for us was like, do we talk about this? Do we make it a thing? And on the one hand, you hate to elevate her any more than she already is. And talking about it, giving it attention, playing it on cable news, gives her the attention she seeks and makes her more powerful.

On the other hand, you can't not talk about it. And in a way, it's almost irresponsible not to talk about it because people like Marjorie Taylor Green, particularly in a, if it is a Kevin McCarthy-led Republican Party in the House, are going to be very powerful. And I think we're seeing a manifestation of that power with the fact that Kevin McCarthy hasn't condemned her clearly. I mean, it should be very, very easy for anybody in public life to say,

you know what, we should not be pro-insurrection. We should not be talking about being better armed to take down the government to steal an election next time. It should be the easiest thing to say. And Kevin McCarthy hasn't said it. Now, I think that's because Kevin McCarthy is a flaccid, weak, pathetic leader. But I also think it tells us something about Marjorie Taylor Green and the strength she brings. So this was the debate we had.

And the way we solve it is a totally weasily way out where we put it in the not worthier time segment, but then spend a few minutes on it, which is, you know. contradictory. I was pretty in favor of this not being worth our time. David, where'd you fall? Yeah, I don't like nutpicking, you know, this phenomenon where you take an extremist, an extremist fringe voice, elevate them and say, see, look, this is what the right is like, or this is what the left is like.

And, you know, one of the features of right-wing media for a long time has been the unbelievable amount of attention paid to the squad, right? the Ilyan Omar, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez, as if they were running the Democratic Party. Now, early on in particular, some of that attention might have been more warranted because I don't know if you remember there was a Rolling Stone Women Shaping the Future cover story

where Nancy Pelosi poses with, at least part of the squad. And, you know, there was sort of a lot of attention paid to these folks as the new emerging voices of the Democratic Party. and that's much less true now. That's much less true. And so it's almost as if on the democratic side, the squad went from powerful to less powerful.

And Marjorie Taylor Green has sort of done a reverse process, which is talking about Marjorie Taylor Green initially seemed like nutpicking. She has had the wildest of fringe views. You know, just mentioned the phrase space lasers. and that'll give you a sort of a sense of where Marjorie Taylor Green was on some relatively recent events

and she was the person of wildest fringe views. The leadership kept her way at arm's length and then she's kind of done a reverse squad whereas the squad has receded in power in the Democratic caucus. Marjorie Taylor Green has gained more power and has gained more influence. And so now we're at a position

where it would have been easy for me to say, 18 months ago, 24 months ago, whatever. This is way too much attention being paid to this person to now how much is she channeling a meaningful, a truly meaningful part of the Republican caucus and how much is she going to play a truly meaningful role? And goodness knows, she keeps it getting invited to be a headline speaker at an awful lot of, you know,

what are now more mainstream political events, Republican political events and she's a fundraising juggernaut. So in some ways her continued rise is forcing us to pay attention to her and moving her from the nutpicking category. And she won her

Republican primary pretty easily. So she's speaking for some voters too. And we'll leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us if you enjoyed this podcast. Give us a rating wherever you're listening to it and consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You can hop in the comments section if you're a member of the dispatch.

And you can join us for Dispatch Live on Tuesday nights where we kind of do this in a more casual drinky fashion, is fair to say. But until next time, enjoy your week. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick,

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