The Dispatch Podcast - Donald Lame Duck | Roundtable

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Michael Warren is joined by Megan McArdle, David French, and Kevin Williamson to discuss the popularity of President Donald Trump and whether he's influential in the MAGA party. Show Notes:—Media fatigue and Miss Piggy allegations —Cracks in the MAGA coalition—Trump's foreign policy agenda—Understanding Trump's relationship with Saudi Arabia—'The most populist black tie dinner ever'—Silicon Valley politics—Crisis in learning outcomes and dismantling the Department of Education Show Notes:—New York Times: The Sierra Club Embraced Social Justice. Then It Tore Itself Apart We’re running a listener survey, which you can find at thedispatch.typeform.com/podcast. 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

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Terms apply. Welcome to the dispatch podcast, I'm Mike Warren. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss if Trump is already a lame duck. Saudi crown prince Muhammad bin Salman's visit to Washington, D.C., and the current state of education in America. I'm joined today by my dispatch. colleague Kevin Williamson, David French of the New York Times, and Megha McArdle of the Washington Post. Let's dive right in. All right. Well, the conventional wisdom took a turn this week on President Donald Trump. And I want to read you all a few headlines that demonstrates this,

CNN. Is Trump a lame duck now? MS now, which is what MSNBC is now, MS now. Lame duck Trump, Politico, Donald Trump enters his lame duck era. Look, and there are plenty of examples in these articles that these headlines are attached to. And we can start at his, at Donald Trump's, you know, approval rating, Fox News approval in the latest poll. 41% of all voters approve of the job Trump is doing. Even 86% of Republicans approved. That's, that is pretty low. for Republicans approving Donald Trump.

Basically, you have to go back to the first year of Trump's first term to find numbers that bad, but it's not just the approval numbers. People are looking at what's happened, say, with the Epstein Files vote. I mean, just a week ago, as we were recording this, Donald Trump was trying to get House Republicans not to vote to force him and the executive branch to release these Epstein Jeffrey Epstein documents. He reversed himself after basically

House Republicans told him to go pound sand. And here we are, right? Like, he is suddenly not dictating to people in his party, and to lawmakers in his party, what they can and can't do. I don't know. There's a lot of talk about Trump being a lame dog.

I think it's a little premature. We are, I mean, to def- what is a lame duck? A lame duck is a president who there are no more elections that affect him. He is not effective as a result of having nothing to hit members of his party or the other party with. I just think this seems a little premature. I'm curious what you all think. Kevin, actually, let's start with you. Is Trump a lame duck president?

it now, or is everybody just jumping on the bandwagon for some reasons we can't, we can't divine? What say you? I don't think I would call him a lame duck in that a duck is a useful and lovely bird that, as a noble kind of bird in many ways. And I don't think that that's a good way to describe Trump. In a sense, the guy sort of started as a lame duck. You know, if you look back at the one big stupid bill thing, among other things, he was communicating that he had no further legislative agenda that he really just wanted to pass this one thing and he wasn't going to be back at Congress anymore. And he was going to be essentially reactive in his relations with the rest of the government since then. And that seems to be what he's been doing. But that's kind of

been Trump from the beginning. You know, he's never been a president who's gone out and tried to work big things with Congress and have this, you know, sort of big, bold national policy agenda. He's always been a guy who has restricted himself to what he can do relatively easily on his own to executive orders and tweets and sub-tweets even and things along those lines. So if he were a lame duck, it would be hard to see that he's lame in the sense that you couldn't tell the duck was lame if it never got out of bed. Yeah, I think that's fair. I just have to finish my thought here real quick.

I'm sorry. Go ahead, Kevin. So the two big issues that Trump really seems to care about in life are immigration and trade. and he's never really tried to pass a big immigration bill. And the trade stuff that he's done in terms of, you know, permanent revisions to American trade policy, you know, some relatively minor revisions to NAFTA, which were substantial but not huge

and not really terribly controversial in a lot of ways. When Trump leaves office, presumably things will revert to status quo ante on the next day, especially if there's a Democrat who follows him up, And he will have accomplished not very much other than to introduce a great deal of chaos and short-termism and things that he can do through executive orders that will be, in many cases reversed, although some of them will be kept, I imagine. Tariffs, because we live in a dumb country, are popular with both parties. It's one of the few apparently bipartisan policies. And there may be some other dumb things he's done that will be bipartisan for that reason. But there won't be any great, you know, Trump legislative legacy.

If you look at someone like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi in that era, they were willing to do something and pay a large political price to pass a very, very bad health care bill because they wanted to do a health care bill and they thought it was important at the top of their agenda. And they actually did it. And although I think it was a bad piece of legislation, that is kind of how this stuff is supposed to work. And they get some credit for being willing to pay a political price for doing something they thought was important. Donald Trump will not walk across the room to hand some congressional Republican proposal for a piece of legislation on the two issues he teams he claims he claimed to care about more than anything else in politics. And thank goodness for it, right?

And as I've written many many times before, the only saving grace of this guy has been that he's lazy and stupid. Well, Kevin, maybe I set you up a little unfairly because I suggested that maybe we should judge whether Trump is a lame duck based on traditional measures of what constitutes a lame duck. But Trump is a different kind of president. And so maybe we should think about it differently, right? Donald Trump's presidency and his power in his presidency has been to sort of dominate the conversation, to be able to kind of move the news cycle as such as it is focused on Washington and the federal government, you know, when he says, you know, jump, the new cycle says

how high? And that's something that I don't know he's got that same kind of all-power, you know, all-power to do. I think a relevant point of comparison would be George W. Bush. Sure. And if you look at Bush, what he came into office wanting to do, his whole package got derailed by 9-11 and then Iraq. So when he's in the last part of his second term, he's got stuff he wants to get done and he can't do it.

You know, he tries Social Security reform. He tries some other things like that. He just can't get things done. The country was pretty well exhausted with him by that point. He lost a lot of political support, such political capital as he had had been spent on Iraq and war on terror stuff. So all the, you know, education, ownership society, all the reforms that he wanted to do on the domestic front, which were really his thing coming in as a governor, just never happened. There isn't something like that sitting in Trump's top drawer. As you say, he's a guy who likes to be at the top of the news cycle.

And I suspect that Americans being Americans, maybe there's attention moving on for him. We are a relatively short attention span kind of people. And as he gets older and weaker and slower, he's less entertaining than he was a couple of years ago. So there may be some of that. But I think if Trump wakes up tomorrow morning decides that he wants to be a national story of some kind or an international story of some kind, he can make it happen still. Yeah, I wonder about that because, Megan, there was a, there was a moment this week. Donald Trump was on his plane, and he was getting questions about the Epstein files, and there was a reporter asking him questions, and he didn't like it, and he said,

he said, be quiet, picky to this female reporter. Quiet, quiet, picky. It sort of blew up on social media a little bit. but I saw a tweet from somebody that really encapsulated, I think, the difference between this term and the first term, some Twitter account said, we would have talked about this, this comment, for weeks on end in 2017. There would have been a best-selling children's picture book by Samantha B called The Piggy That Wouldn't Be Quiet.

And that may be a comment on sort of the resistance to Donald Trump running out of gas, But it also suggests to me that Donald Trump doesn't have the power to kind of goad America into paying attention to him like he did. Am I wrong about that? Is he losing that power, Megan? No, I think people are exhausted. It's been 10 years. We have screamed. We have yelled.

We have debated whether he is a fascist. And I think everyone is just tired of it. I can't tell you the number of people I know who were kind of like resistance moms during the first Trump administration who were just like, I've stopped watching the news, I can't take it. And I think journalists are tired too. You know, I often get yelled at.

Like, why are you writing about this, whatever this is, instead of Donald Trump? It's usually, usually I get that when it is something that makes the left look bad. But sometimes it's just like, I wrote a column about innovations in food technology and people are like, How can you write this when Donald...

It was the year's best column about pie crusts. Thank you. Thank you. I like to pick alternative status hierarchies where I can win. However small, the victory. And, you know, the honest answer, there's a lot of answers to that

where people will ask me why, they say I'm a crypto-Trump supporter because I don't attack him enough. And part of the answer is, I've said what I've got to say. There's only so many times I can say this man is unfit to be president. He has not innovated in his unfitness all that much

since January 6th. So, like, I could repeat myself, and I guess there are a lot of people who would just like to hear me repeat myself, you know, for 52 weeks a year. But the other thing is that it's honestly exhausting. Every time you spend hours, trawling through Trump's statements,

meditating on Trump's statements, trying to craft the perfect sentence about Trump's statements. You walk away with a sort of malaise of the soul that then needs to be repaired, ideally with whiskey. And so I think a lot of reporters are less interested in doing that kind of journalism

because it's so unrewarding. Nothing happens. You say Donald Trump is unfit? Is that a problem for Trump, right? Like, does he get a lot of power from people paying attention to him and getting outraged about him? I mean, I think yes and no, because he was actually quite good at surfing the outrage. Yeah. He was good at using the outrage to rile up his base.

He was good at using the outrage to distract from stories that weren't so outrageous, but were probably worse for him politically, such as inflation and the cost of living. And that is less effective than it used to be because everyone is just lying on their backs, panting, trying to work up the energy to go to the fridge and get a Gatorade. And so I think it cuts both ways. You know, being called piggy by a man who looks like his conception involved 300 pounds of velvita and a jello mold. That's got a, that's got a stang. Oh, man. Kevin's got it even in the morning.

Even in the morning, Kevin has got it. I know, I'm impressed. I mean, yes, it is an honor to be called piggy, a special honor to be called piggy by the president of the United States rather than, you know, fascist pig 997 on Twitter. But the fact is that at this point, reporters get so much abuse and invective. Like, Piggy is probably not the worst thing that reporter was called this morning. No. You know, and so it just, it doesn't have the same juice that it used to you. And I'm in many ways glad because I think that the exhaustion both reduces the incentives to be outrageous and reduces the incentives to do what we did, what we in the mainstream media did, I think, incredibly and effectively in the first term, which is blow everything up to DefCon 11, right?

the minute, actually, how does the DefCon? It gets bigger when you get lower. DefCon 1 is the... DefCon 1. Blow your way that to DeFCon 11. DeFcon 11 is, I've got to go out and get a sandwich for lunch. Now, one of us knows this because he was in the military. The others know this because we

watched war games when we were eight years old. Okay, well, I also watched war games. I just don't remember. Maybe I didn't like, you know, watch it 900 times. like some people I could name. You should have. But, you know, I think that

the theory of that was that, you know, we couldn't normalize Trump that we needed to signal how abnormal this moment was and tell the public, you know, that this is not a normal president and he shouldn't be president and he's destroying democracy.

And it's not even that I disagree with the premise that Donald Trump is dangerous to democracy. He's incredibly corrosive to Georgia institutions. He has no respect for the Constitution. He has done things that are bad in themselves and even worse in that they set the stage for future presidents

to abuse their power. But just empirically, this did not work. All it did was convince people that we were lunatics who, you know, Donald Trump would like pet a dog and say nice doggy. And we'd be like, Donald Trump hates cats, right? And so I think it is good that the tone has shifted down, even though I think the threats remain real, because the tone itself, I think, actually made it harder or not easier to convince people when he did things that were really outrageous. David, let's go back to the original question, but I love your thoughts on what Megan just said as well, which is, is Donald Trump really a lame duck, or is this just media

conventional wisdom and something will change all of this narrative? in the next day or so? I think a lot of people are conflating the crack up in MAGA with Donald Trump being a lame duck, and I do not think those are the same things. So I think it's absolutely clear that there is a crack up in the broader coalition. The broader coalition is going at each other.

And part of this is related to one eye on, you know, the successor to Trump. I mean, he brought a bag of scorpions. I've used this analogy before. He's brought a bag of scorpions into the party. And they were never going to be, in harmony with each other over the long term. The only thing that they had in common a lot of them

was they all just put on the red hat for Trump. I mean, what do the anti-vaccine people have in common with the America First people? Now, there's a lot of overlap because of tribal affiliations. But, you know, you had a coalition of a lot of different competing interests all under Trump.

And it's very interesting to me that the only area where he really has seen a breach with the Republicans in Congress is the one area where he's, has acted like a totally normal politician. And that's in the Epstein files, where normally this guy's just brazen. Yeah, I'm going to pardon a guy who increased the value of my family's company by a billion dollars. What are you going to say about it?

Yeah, I'm going to contest an election. What are you going to say about it? I mean, he just lays it out there. Here's a memo where I'm trying to extort a political investigation from an allied country in exchange for weapons. Like, what are you going to do about it? He just puts it out there. this was the one where he's acting much more clintonian it's drip drip drip it's mislead it's evade it's bob and we it's all the stuff that the trump world hate and all of us hate about normal politicians but trump world in particular

has really gravitated to trump because he's not like that he's authentic he tells it like it is he but here he's acting he's acted just like a normal politician and he's getting a normal politician response which is very interesting. Now, how much does that radiate beyond Epstein? Absolutely remains to be seen. And I would say also that the day that we'll know he's really a lame duck in his own party is the day when we see Republicans in Congress more nervous about the broader electorate than they are about Trump's primary endorsement or not.

And we're not there yet. I just don't think we're there yet. I think he is still the captain in the party, and he has a very tight grip on it. Maybe the pinky finger has slipped a tiny bit. But I think declaring him a lame duck is premature. It is not premature to say that Maga is already tearing itself apart. But to call him a lame duck, I think that's just – we're a little early in on that. I agree with you, David.

I think a lot of this, too, I didn't really mention this, except in the general sense that it's the kerfuffle, the fight over releasing the Epstein documents, a lot of the mainstream media kind of fell in love with Marjorie Taylor Green over the last week and a half. She's been, you like can't escape her. And I think that that has contributed to the sense that, well, Marjorie Taylor Green is breaking with Donald Trump and is doing so, so publicly. Everybody expects Thomas Massey, the kind of weirdo libertarian congressman from Kentucky

to do this. But for Marjorie Taylor Green, wow, that must mean he has. no power. But I do think it suggests more about a crackup within the coalition. Yeah. And you know, and even in the, even in the Marjorie Taylor Green back and forth with Trump, what did she emphasize so much? She emphasized her long, long loyalty to Trump. Yes. And so, yeah, I do think there were, there was about a half second where when Marjorie Taylor Green said, this had this moment with, you know, on CNN, where the CNN anchor said, hey, you know, I don't want you to receive threats, but can we be real here? Your rhetoric has been

out of control. And she said, that's fair. I'm sorry. I'm trying to work on it. And I thought, okay, I want to give everybody a chance. I'm sorry or not words that come out of politicians very often. People can repent. There is a prodigal son story out there. You know, I believe in redemption and repentance and reconciliation. Oh, so let's see where this goes. And I think it was, you know, what, a day before she called Trump a traitor. And so, you know, I am, I am, I am reminded of that tweet from drill that people, you do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to ISIS. I'm not going, I'm, just to be clear, everybody, they're not the same, Marjorie Taylor

Green, but in the American political context, an almost circumstance, almost every circumstance, I'm just not going to be persuaded that you have to hand it to Marjorie Taylor Green, even if for five minutes she's opposing Trump on something, you know, like the Epstein files. But it is, it, it, you can tell that people are very, very keen to locate and notify the cracking point, the point where it, because he is going to become a lame duck, it is going to happen. And my own theory is it's just really only going to be obvious in hindsight. We're not going to know it maybe in real time. Yeah, I think there's a sort of a Schrodinger's duck situation here.

You can't identify it when it's happening. I'm mixing up my physics metaphors, but you get where I'm going with this. Before we take a break, I want to let you know about a special Thanksgiving promotion we're doing here at The Dispatch to show our appreciation to everyone out there for supporting our work and listening to our podcasts. We're making our morning newsletter, The Morning Dispatch, free for all readers this week. You can get the full edition of the Morning Dispatch for free. when you sign up at www.

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is, you know, in his role as head of state. And we had a visit this week in Washington, President Trump welcoming Saudi Arabia crown prince Muhammad bin Salman, he's the crowned. Prince of Saudi Arabia. He came to the Oval Office. He had a dinner. And, you know, there's been a lot of conversation this week, obviously with the American press, very interested and motivated to ask about, you know, the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist from several years ago. And what was this, 2018, I believe, is when everybody essentially believes that I think the CIA even sort of made that conclusion that the Saudi government was behind his pretty brutal death. A lot of focus on that asking the Crown Prince in that Oval Office meeting about it.

But I'm more interested in the question of sort of where we are in terms of Trump and the American foreign policy as it relates to the Middle East. you know, just a kind of temperature check almost. David, I'm going to stick with you on this because, you know, everybody could point to, say, the Abraham Accords, even people who were not fans of Donald Trump, and look at it and sort of agree that of the first term, that was a pretty impressive achievement and maybe even a success of Trump's foreign policy. Here we are now several years later in the second term. You know, this, again, just to clarify Abraham Accords, several agreements between the state of Israel and several Arab states, Saudi Arabia is not one of them right now, but this was seen as a sort of move towards a normalization of relations that Donald Trump could take some credit for.

I'm just curious, in light of this visit from MBS this week, how do you evaluate where our and the Trump administration's position is in the Middle East? How are we doing there? You know, I have said this for a long time. It's funny, if you take all of Trump's actions abroad, in so many ways, he's ham-handed, he tries to act like a bully. he alienates allies. He makes strategically short-sighted decisions. You know, I just was seeing yesterday that the amount of support now we're offering for you, Krain, has dropped to such a degree that it's negligible,

like just negligible. Europe is carrying the financial load entirely now. So you look around the world and you'll see, and what is this Venezuela campaign? What's going on here? How is this legal? But then you go to the Middle East, and there, I would say, going back from first term through here, by and large, you look at a record of some pretty substantial accomplishments. I mean, the killing of Soleimani, the completion of the Obama military campaign against ISIS, the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities. The UN Security Council just ratified the Trump peace plan. Now, let's not get over our skis here because you know who hasn't ratified the Trump peace plan, Hamas, right?

So, you know, if you have a peace plan and one of the combatants hasn't accepted it, you don't really have a peace plan, but you've got a lot of progress. And so I look at the Middle East is almost like this island. And maybe this is because Jared Kushner has been more involved there. But there are reasons for concern. And I'll give you two areas of concern. One is, as this Gaza situation unfolds, it is growing increasingly likely that the actual, what we're not going to have is a peace plan,

but just another version of a ceasefire with Hamas still in control of a chunk of Gaza. And with Hamas still being in control of a chunk of Gaza, the primary responsibility for that is that in Netanyahu government, after October 7th, they could have, they should have engaged in a full-on invasion slash occupation that would have driven Hamas entirely out. They did not do that.

more of an anti-terror strike and retreat-type strategy in many ways. But this current peace plan, I do worry that it leaves a place for Hamas. And if you've left a place for Hamas, all you've done is you've pressed pause on the fight in Gaza. You haven't ended the fight in Gaza. So the second cause for concern is it looks as if we're going to actually be approving the sale of dozens of F-35s to Saudi Arabia. and this is our top this is our fifth generation fighter it's not the F-22 which has an absolute export ban on it

it's the F-35 though is our it's a fifth-generation fighter it's the fighter that the Israelis used to penetrate Iranian air defenses essentially at will we're giving our best to Saudi Arabia and I'm not so sure we can trust our best with Saudi Arabia and previously there had been some discussion about hinging an F-35 sale on normalization with Israel.

So you can get your dozens of F-35s, Saudi Arabia, but you have to normalize relationships with Israel. You have to sort of enter into the Abraham Accord framework. And that, at least not yet. If it happens, I'll be the first one to be glad to see it, but that's not happened. And then the last thing is, what the heck is going on with this cutter situation? we've got a donation of an airplane followed by security guarantees what the heck so the cutter situation

is sort of out there floating very strange very weird some questions about dealings with Saudi Arabia some questions about the status of an action do we actually have peace in Gaza or is it just a pause and so those are areas of concern but it would be unfair to Trump to say well, because there are still areas of concern in the Middle East, you've failed. When had there not been areas of concern in the Middle East? It's just a constant, big area of concern. So I would say overall, in the Middle East, this has been, you know, where he has had his most consequential successes.

And I think it's just, you've got to acknowledge it. Kevin, I have a sort of armchair theory about why that is. This is not unique to me. It seems that of all the sort of world leaders and systems, the Middle East has, Donald Trump may understand the Middle East better than any other part of the world, just in the way the sort of dynastic and, you know, transactional nature of the way a lot of these regimes operate. it seems like that's kind of the way Donald Trump has operated as a businessman and how he sort of thinks of himself as a leader. To what do you attribute Trump's relative success in this region, as David just outlined? Well, I'm more modest in my estimate of a success there. I mean, the only country that really assigned the Abraham Accords that matters is the United Arab Emirates.

Right. And other than UAE, what is it like, Morocco or something? and then Sudan signed it and didn't ratify it. I can't remember the details. Forgive me for that. But certainly not Saudi Arabia. Certainly none of the other major players there that we need to have on board if you really want to normalize stuff.

I mean, it's a different world in the Middle East. I remember, you know, when the Bahrain. Bahrain, okay. Well, that matters then. The superpower, Bahrain. Exactly. I remember in the Gulf War when we were, you know, defending Kuwait, and Kuwait had this Air Force.

And the Kuwaiti Air Force had uniforms that were designed and manufactured by Georgia Armani. and that was just, that was kind of what Middle Eastern military stuff was about back then. It's changed a little bit since then. They're getting a little more armed up and a little more serious. MBS, I think Trump's relationship with MBS is probably a less a matter of him being able to understand MBS than it is a matter of MBS being able to understand him. I think the lines of empathy, if you will, run the other way. NBS is, I think, a really very difficult character to get an estimate of.

If I were a State Department flunky, I wouldn't want to be on the NBS desk because I think it's a really hard not to crack. He is obviously an autocrat and a torturer and a guy who certainly murdered one of Megan's colleagues and not the sort of, he's not a Thomas Jefferson in waiting, you know, but he might be able to be on you in writing. And what he seems to want for his country is for it to become a more normal, certainly more economically liberal, less. you know, kind of medieval sort of country. And if it's a matter of, you know, he's a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch, I don't know that we really know he's our son of a bitch. Right. We have a feeling that he might be, and we know the Iranians aren't, and that he's on the opposite side of them.

But that gets, you know, that gets to be some either very, very crude math or some very, very complicated math, depending on which way you want to go about it. I think the Biden administration made a real strategic mistake by being so, vociferously anti-Saudi and by being so cavalier about our relationship with them. I think that the Saudis are probably worth holding close, even if we are skeptical of what their true ambitions and attitudes are. And even as we have to, I think, be upfront about the fact that their internal politics is still pretty gross and that they are a badly governed repressive country

and a bad actor in their part of the world in some other ways that this certainly matter to us. And, you know, the thing about Trump, of course, that really, I find this so, not just in Trump, so shocking in so many politicians, we're just simply telling the truth in a kind of modest way about things would be so much easier than the BASA tries to.

He's asked about the Khashoggi killing. And the first thing Trump can think of us, well, you know, a lot of people didn't like that guy. He was very controversial. Well, I'm pretty controversial. I'm not sure that's going to be my standard. But, you know, a normal sort of halfway intelligent politician could have sat there and said, yeah, there are points of contention in our relationship. And we don't consider this matter resolved. And we take it very seriously, even though he was an American citizen.

He worked for an American newspaper and his children are American citizens. And I'm going to be taking this up with the crown prince and our discussions henceforth. And then actually maybe do it. Because if Trump actually were the kind of, you know, Machiavellian dealmaker, he pretends to be, you know, you could have gone into the room afterwards and said, all right, I need a scalp on this, you know, and it doesn't have to be a member of the family. It doesn't have to be a member of the royal circle. But we need to get this matter resolved if you want this stuff. And I've got some things that I need from you. And I need to see some progress toward real normalization of relations with Israel and some other things. You know, let's have a little quid for the pro quo. But Trump just doesn't seem to be able to do that. He's either, you know, all-in, super aggressive against relatively powerless parties like Ukraine, or he's obsequious and deferential when it comes to powerful parties like China. And strangely enough, with the Saudi relationship, Saudi is not a very powerful country,

I mean, certainly not compared to the United States, not in this context. You know, they're a very, very junior partner in this relationship. And much more sure than they were 25 years ago before we decided we wanted to be an energy powerhouse again. But that's Trump's way of doing things. He's either, you know, Mr. Bulley or he's Mr. Rollover and, you know, expose his belly. Megan, we were talking previously about whether Trump is a lame duck. And if you look at this dinner that Donald Trump held for MBS at the White House, you look at a lot of leaders in business and even some in culture, right?

Elon Musk was back in the fall for the first time, but you also have, you know, I think Jensen Huang from Navidia, Tim Cook and Mark Benioff from, again, a lot of tech folks. So much populism. So much populism. I mean, the most populous. Man of the people. The most populous black tie dinner ever, I think. My favorites are actually, it's Christiano Ronaldo and the FIFA president were there.

If you want to talk about corruption, by the way, FIFA is the organization that puts every other organization that might have corrupt tendencies to, you know, puts them to the side. Megan, I'm just curious, you look at this dinner, and it does seem like, you know, Donald Trump still has some power in this sense, right? I mean, these people are coming and what to be seen. He's still the president. Do you have any thoughts on this or anything else on NBS's visit? Yeah, so, look, I have lots of thoughts on NBS, but I think it is hard for those of us at the Washington Post to get any kind of journalistic distance from the question

about whether our colleagues should be dismembered with a bonzo. I'm a no on that one. I'm also a no on should the U.S. government give the folks who did that advanced fighter planes that will, by the way, very potentially have the effect of giving that technology to China. But because Riyadh has a security partnership with them. But I think on the Trump lame duck question, there's one, usually when a president comes in, they're lame ducks because they don't have any more elections, they're not going to have more coattails.

And normally, that's a kind of sad and dispiriting time. But this is a little interesting because for Trump, who does not care whatsoever about the fate of his party, except in as much as it remains a platform for glorifying dear leader, it's been the YOLO presidency, right? He never has to face the voters again. He can do whatever the hell he wants. the corruption has been more flagrant,

the outrages have been more outrageous. And I think that that, for if you are a tech baron, there's still a lot of mileage in being attached to this guy. Although I also don't want to say it's entirely cynical, right? I think that Silicon Valley's right shift

is often portrayed on the left, either as like these billionaires lost their mind, or they're just sucking up to Trump in order to get favors or to protect their businesses from his depredations, right? And, you know, so there have been some convulsions at my own paper. We withheld our endorsement of Kamala Harris. We have a new mandate to support free markets and personal liberty on our opinion pages as someone who does support free markets and personal liberty.

I am happy about that. But a lot of people have attributed this to Jeff Bezos, having bent the knee to Trump. And all I can say is, my internal experience is not that. We are under no orders whatsoever to be nice to Donald Trump. But or to avoid pointing out things. You can read our editorial on MBS, MF-35s. and I don't think you're going to see a lot of signs that we're being kind to Trump.

That said, I think, that in Silicon Valley, when I talk to those guys, they are genuinely, like, the right shift has a lot to do with, you know, they were liberal Democrats in 2015 because they thought, look, I have a lot of money. And, you know, did I earn it? Yes.

Also, there's like a fire hose of money just spewing from this product I've made. And I can afford to give a lot of that to the government. I can pay high personal taxes. I can pay, you know, decent capital gains taxes. I can pay corporate taxes. I don't need a lot of regulation on things like labor and the environment because I don't pollute the environment with my software. And my workers are highly paid.

I'm not line workers who are going to be agitating for weird work rules. or whatever. They're all, like, sleeping at the office so that they can have more time to code. And they thought that was a pretty good deal. They thought they were good for society. Democrats thought they were good for society. All good. And then something changed.

I mean, a lot of things changed, right? Their employees start revolting and demanding things. I mean, like, Google had a revolt over whether they were allowed to do business with the military on their cloud business, right? They're getting embarrassed a lot by left-wing activism,

leaking stuff to the media. Google, again, famously had to fire an engineer who suggested that maybe women were somewhat less interested in staring in a computer screen all day than men were. Which, in my experience, I worked at IT before I went in the business school,

and I wrote a column saying, like, look, there were not a lot of women who did this work, and it wasn't just that there was sexism, there was sexual harassment. But the main thing was, like, most of the women that I met did not want it as much as the men, right? They were good at their jobs. It wasn't that they weren't, but the men would be like,

I went home and built a fiber channel network in my basement this weekend. And like that level of dedication just is rarer among women because on average, lots of individual variation, women are more interested in people than they are in stuff. Can I interrupt you, Megan, real quick here. It just reminds me of my wife as a graduate, of Georgia Tech, and it reminds me of what they tell all the incoming freshman first-year girls who go to Georgia Tech where there's a huge gender imbalance at this elite engineering school.

They tell the girls that the odds are good, but the goods are odd. But the goods are odd. I think that demonstrates what you were just discussing. I went to the quantiest, which I am not personally very quantie, but I went to the Quantiest Business School, or what was the Quantiest Business School in 2000 when I attended, and that was exactly, it was 75% men. And it is actually true. It was like, there were a lot of guys there. Most of the women, like, many of the women got married to classmates. All of us had boyfriends. There was an abundance, but you had to be a certain sort of person to take advantage of

Anyway, please continue. Anyway, yes. So, you know, they didn't like that. They didn't, they suddenly realized that the deal they thought they had with, like, the kind of center left was not holding. Antitrust was huge, where Lena Kahn just goes in and on these bizarre theories, starts trying to break up big tech, block their mergers, gets rebuffed over and over and over again at the courts,

is taking court cases she can. can't win but even cases that you can't win they slow things down they you know it makes it harder to do deals it makes it harder to do your business you're diverting a lot of energy into dealing with an antitrust case instead of doing the thing the guys in silicon valley went there to do which is they love making stuff um and they didn't like it it was a genuine reaction to what i think was were genuinely bad developments on the left which is not to say that like tech never, you know, should never be regulated or never, like, that the government should never be interested in looking at stuff they're doing. All companies sometimes get a little over

their skis. But the theory at, like, at the New York Times, in the tech media and in the government was, these guys are too big. They have too much power and we need to destroy it. Not because they had evidence that, like, these guys were abusing their power, had accumulated illegally, we're doing something wrong, we're net worse for society, just literally, they're too big, I don't like it, rival power center, destroy, destroy, destroy. And that has pushed them towards Trump. And I think that, you know, you have to reckon with the fact that they genuinely do believe, in many cases, that Trump is better for America.

I think they are mistaken about this, which is why I voted for Kamala Harris. but, you know, people interpret it as they're just selling out, they're trying to get some access. I'm not in those meetings. I can't say whether that's true. But, you know, if you think that that's the whole story, you are missing most of the story. Megan's making a really important point. And that is people who had up close experience with this sort of far-left cancel culture, the height of it, the height of far-left wokenness, can't quite grasp how vicious, intolerant, smug, condescending, merciless, it all was. And so here you are living in Silicon Valley. You're living in a really blue place.

You're a pretty blue person. You know, you listen to the Mark Andreessen interview, I think, with Ross about all of this. And they were shocked and stunned by a lot of the way their own employees interacted with them. And this is not a thing that was unique to Silicon Valley. I mean, we just had this really amazing story out of the Times about what happened in the Sierra Club, how younger employees just absolutely annihilated senior. I mean, for example, they wouldn't even allow the word vibrant to be used in internal communications because that might be ableist. Or Condi Nast, where a couple weeks ago, they closed Teen Vogue because Teen Vogue,

was losing money. And Teen Vogue had turned itself into this kind of like avatar of wokeness. And so four employees go to the HR director with someone filming them and stage a confrontation and then we're surprised that they got fired. And like, you know, this is not a big part of this, right? Is that in, and I, you know, we were talking before this started about sub-tweeting and what this is for listeners who don't know. it's when you describe someone

but don't name them on Twitter so that they can't see what you're saying about them. I was sub-tweeting my fellow journalists saying, like, because all of these journalistic institutions, when social media happened, they start doing

often necessary institutional work in public on social media instead of inside the institution where it needs to happen. And while that temporarily empowered some groups of people, it also wrecked the institutions and the Silicon Valley guys who found it, remember, founded these companies.

These companies are their babies, and their employees are doing incredibly destructive things and kind of daring them to crack down. That's a really terrible place to be in. But I would also say, in response to Andreessen and others, the idea of radicalizing to Trump because you couldn't handle your employees is a problem for me, you know, And also, guys, don't pull everybody from Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth. There are other places in the world. So I feel like what they did, a lot of them siloed themselves in this elite far-left bubble,

encountered the worst of the worst of the elite far-left bubble, and then sort of said, well, that's what the left is, or that's what it all is, and then ran over into the magaverse without having any real cultural connection to it at all without having any cultural knowledge of it at all. And some of them are like, where did I land now? But some of them are still smarting from, you know, the 20 teens and content to stay with MAGA. But, you know, part of me, I was at an event where there was a discussion of younger employees. And I was that event, one of the few conservatives, there are a lot of people who were heads of

philanthropy groups and progressive NGOs and all of this and the stories they all told it was like a group therapy session and i remember asking at one point why didn't you fire people like what where was where were the terminations here and it was just it just seemed like it was so utterly contrary to the culture of these institutions that you would actually fire people for disrupting the organization rather than sort of yielding and accommodating it really is remarkable the extent to it the radicalization of a small set of America really drove a lot of the captains of American industry and technology

straight into MAGA's arms. The reason for that divide, David, is because they're not Condonast, right? You can push around the executives at Google. But I hear about these kids, we're going to march into the offices of Condonast and show these people whose boss. I was thinking, do you know who you work for?

You are not getting out of this. You're going to hit the brick. in a hurry. And there's something to be said for that stuck in the 80s mentality. I will defend it to some extent. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. At Desjardin Insurance, we put the care in taking care of business, your business to be exact. Our agents take the time to understand your company, so you get the right coverage at the right price. Whether you rent out your building, represent a condo corporation, or own a cleaning company, We make insurance easy to understand

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And has absolutely everything you could want From a vacation destination From world-class hotels, record, breaking skyscrapers and epic desert adventures to museums that showcase the future, not just the past. Choose from 14 flights per week between Canada and Dubai. Book on emirates.ca. Today. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. All right. Well, I want to move on here and talk a little bit about, we've been sort of talking about the limits of kind of liberal or progressive social policy within institutions, it's a great time to go back to school and talk about what's going on

in education. On the sort of conservative side of things or the Trump side of things, we've been hearing a lot more about efforts to dismantle, take apart the Department of Education. I think the Secretary of Education, Lyndon McMahon, had a video recently in which she, I think, correctly pointed out that education in America continued. throughout that long government shutdown, suggesting that maybe the Department of Education doesn't really have a lot to do with how actual schools are operating on a day-to-day basis. But let's talk about how they are operating, and particularly in places where progressives have

been in power over the last 10 years. And I really can't recommend enough this story from New York Magazine, The Big Fail by Andrew Rice. It's an extended feature. It's not just reporting about what's been going on in places, you know, elite, well-funded school districts in blue states. It's a reflection of his own experience in one of those communities, Montclair, New Jersey, someone with school-age children there. The story is just, I'll just give listeners a taste of what he goes through here. there are there there is a it's jarring to see what students uh are not learning that you would think

would be kind of the basic things that kids should know i'm just going to read this from the top of the new york magazine story um fourth graders were presented with a multiple choice question about a passage from the children's book the tale of despero asking why the main character a mouse decides not to eat a book this is a reading comprehension question. Nearly 30% could not pick the answer, which is that he wants to read it instead. A similar proportion of eighth graders failed to come up with the following sum. 12 plus negative 4 plus 12 plus 4. Eighth graders could not do that basic arithmetic.

By the 12th grade students were asked by the national assessment to demonstrate fundamental capacities of a thinking adult, like recognizing the point of a persuasive essay. That is concerning to me as someone who's in the space of persuasive writing. One math problem set out a scenario involving a restaurant check. This is a check with a bunch of different things that was purchased, a hamburger sandwich, etc. And the amounts that each one of them cost, test takers were asked to add the cost of these six items and calculate a 20% tip. Three quarters of the high schoolers were unable to correctly answer one or both parts. of the question. This feels like a perennial concern. The kids are not all right, that they're not

learning the things they should be in school. But it does seem, and this article does a good job of demonstrating, that something has happened in the last decade, and it puts a lot of the blame on the lack of testing, that the reaction to no child left behind and the overtesting has been lots of under-testing, particularly in these blue districts. Megan, I want to start with you. What's going on in education? Are we learning anything from these mistakes? Have we overcorrected? COVID is a whole other thing. What's happening? And is there anything we can do? I've got school-age kids. I'm very concerned about all of this from a selfish perspective. What say you? Well, you know, as someone whose readers seem to frequently fail to grasp the point of

my persuasive essays. I will now simply assume that they were enrolled that they attended Montclair public schools. Or perhaps UCSD, where I have been looking at this report that UCSD just issued on the math preparedness of their incoming freshmen, they've now got one in eight of their students requires remedial math. And I don't mean that one and eight of their students really needs to brush up a little bit on some of their more advanced algebra. Only 39% of these students who placed into their remedial math class, their lowest level remedial math class, 600 students, more than 600 students,

could round the number, 300,074, 518 to the nearest 100. Find three quarters minus one-third. 63% managed to get that right. Only 15% could expand the simple equation, you know, parentheses s plus one close parentheses squared right these are really really serious deficits deficits what happened here well you know um from reporting on personal finance one of the interesting things you learn is that a lot of people who are in deep trouble they just stop opening their bills like this does not in any way solve the problem but they're so panicked

about what they're going to see when they open the bills that they just stop and of course then the problem just gets worse. And that's kind of what America did with its race and income disparities in educational and testing performance. We were getting letters showing that something was not right. And we looked at this mountainous problem

and we just panicked. We couldn't forget how to solve it. And so we were just like, what if I just didn't have the letters telling me that there's a problem? problem. And in this case, the letters that they decided to ignore were grades. So instead of, right, instead of doing a lot of standardized testing, instead of grading kids hard using high standards to demonstrate real mastery of grade appropriate material, what teachers did was fight the test,

parents fought the tests, we had fewer tests, we paid less attention to the tests, And meanwhile, now that there is no check on what the grades mean, it's a lot easier to give a kid an A than it is to produce a kid who is doing a work. And so you had rampant grade inflation. So parents are getting these great report cards and they're like, yay!

Little Jimmy has an A in math. But that didn't show anything. The scariest thing about this report from UC San Diego is that 25% of these kids had 4.0 GPAs in math. And not only that, most of them, most of these kids had taken not just like the minimum requirements

to get into college, like algebra and geometry. Most of them had taken either pre-calculus, calculus, or statistics. They had an average GPA in math of 3.65. And so somehow there are kids sitting in a calculus class who are struggling with, like, minor algebra, often struggling with minor arithmetic. They seem to be really bad at handling negative numbers, which is also what you saw in Montclair.

And they're getting passing grades in calculus. Right. Obviously they're not taking the AP exam, or if they are, they are definitely not submitting that score at the university. But what teacher gives a kid a passing grade in calculus when they can't do third grade math? And the answer is a teacher who feels bad for the kid, a teacher who knows that this could hurt the kid's chances at college.

And by the way, the UC system, like many universities during the pandemic, got rid of the tests, got rid of the standardized test requirement for admissions, now does not look at them at all. And so there's absolutely no check on great inflation, and people responded to incentives. And I think we have to understand that the important thing is not to have a letter on a transcript. The important thing is to have learned skills. And you can't fake a signal of the ability to perform. You can do it for a little while, right?

You can do it on a minor scale. One dude can go to Harvard and not really belong there. and not do any work and get out and not be very competent. But if that is a common thing that is happening at your school, then eventually employers are going to notice. And the thing you are trying to bestow upon these children, which is the economic and social value of having a college degree, you cannot redistribute that by fiat or by messing with the signal.

You have to do the preparedness. You have to level kids up, level schools up, and demand accountability. And we stopped doing that because it was unpleasant and the problems were hard and there were a lot of political... There was powerful political interests

who were arrayed against that, most notably, obviously, the teachers' unions. But this is a wake-up call. And if there is good news, I think, that these articles are running in a place like New York Magazine, in a place like the Atlantic, that people in blue states

are saying, oh, oh, yeah, no, this is not good. Stop. We got to fix this. I think, Megan, you may be discounting the fact that perhaps Lake Wobigon has infiltrated the rest of the country, and every kid is above average in UCSD or wherever. David, I want to talk to you about the opposite case here. We've been hearing for a couple of years now about the Mississippi miracle. This is the phenomenon in which Mississippi, which has, I mean, it has become so accepted that Mississippi is one of the,

the worst public school student outcomes in the country for years, that it really does seem like a miracle that in its K-12, you know, reading, I believe it, mostly in reading, but also in math, performance has improved markedly due to Mississippi and other southern states doing the opposite of what Megan just described, actually using testing and standards to try to improve things, and that has been the case. Should we all be looking to Mississippi for the future of public education policy? You know, however much attention the Mississippi miracle has gotten, it needs more because the bottom line is that policies matter.

And I do think that, you know, I do think that we're going to be in an era of education reform for a little while that's got a lot less to do with, say, Donald Trump and the bull in the china shop and a lot more to do with the consequences of competition. And so if you have a state like California that for years it's just poured money into public education, it's poured money into public higher education. And all of a sudden it starts falling behind Mississippi, right? That has an effect. It absolutely has an effect. And it wakes a lot of people up who'd sort of ceded control of education to the far, far sort of left educational establishment in the state, similar phenomenons happening in higher education, for example.

So well before Trump, the homogenization, the sort of homogenous higher education culture was already starting to crumble. When I started at fire as president in 2004, there wasn't a big cultural difference, to be honest, in many ways, especially at the leadership level, at the faculty level, between a big SEC school and an Ivy League school. They were very similar. And, you know, Alabama, for example, was one of the worst offenders on politically correct censorship when I was president of fire in 2004, the University of Alabama. But since that time, the Chicago model of free speech and institutional neutrality has really spread. And then you've had some institutions like Vanderbilt University, for example, where I've taught this semester at Vanderbilt Law School,

a class on academic freedom. Vanderbilt is rocketing up the rankings. It is drawing, it's like a giant magnet for northeastern and western parents, especially, you know, parents of Jewish students who really can't have confidence that at Columbia, for example, that they're going to be treated well. And so I think that there's been just real competition emerge, and that competition over time isn't going to make a bigger difference than whatever sort of bull in a China shop, blunderbush, short-term, executive action-oriented attack of the Trump administration. In fact, I think that's going to be counterproductive because the universities will set themselves as sort of like the heroic resistors, like during the Red Scare.

And if they get through this and when they get through this, they're going to look back on whatever resistance they offered with enormous pride. And it's going to be an impediment to reform. But I think actually competition, competition is the thing that is going to be reforming higher education because we're already seeing it happen. And there's even actually interesting stories of building resentment against the Vanderbilt Chancellor, for example. Daniel Dermeyer.

That he's doing such a, Chancellor Diermeyer is doing such a good job positioning his institution as sort of the new model of elite education in the U.S. It's causing resentment against peer presidents. So I think there's a lot of good stuff to focus on in higher ed that's not related to the Trump administration, but is the culmination of a lot of longer trends where institutions have set themselves up to compete with the elite establishment. establishment and have done it very well. Kevin, let's talk, I think that's a great point, but I want to go back and focus on some

the problems going on in education because I see this as somebody who lives and pays taxes in a high income and a very large budget school district. There's a lot of money that is being spent in school districts, in, in, you know, in blue states, in places where, you know, that are not like Mississippi. And a lot of that money doesn't seem to be going anywhere good, anywhere toward the students and bloat in administration and administrative costs. You know, there's this is a huge issue here. Speaking, David was just talking about higher education.

It was an experience that I witnessed when I was in college of just an explosion of administrators, not actual, you know, nothing to do with what's happening actually in the classroom. There seems to be a lot of buyer's remorse, and you can see that in this New York Magazine article. What do you make of this buyer's remorse of progressives kind of coming up short and saying maybe spending money, Blithely, is not the answer to our problems? Well, I love the political background that the context comes in, first of all. So you have the President of the United States is a game show host who is in some porn films

and he appoints as Secretary of Education a figure from the world of professional wrestling. That's almost literally the plot of idiocrycy. It's amazing. Brando has what plants need. And somehow they're not the problem. That's the amazing thing. They're not actually the problem.

If you look at real dollar, you know, adjusted for inflation per capita, spending. It just about doubled from the early 1990s through about 2015. So we've been pouring a whole lot of money into schools and not getting great results out of it, particularly for non-white students, low-income students. You can do state-by-state comparisons and see that spending on education doesn't really seem to affect outcomes all that much. You can do next-door neighbor comparisons like Lower Merion versus Philadelphia, where the spending per student on education in those places is pretty, pretty similar, but you will not be surprised that the high-income

suburban schools get a lot better outcomes than the relatively low-income big city schools do. It doesn't seem like we should have such a hard time convincing our progressive friends that the basic problem here is one with which they are familiar, which is that monopolies don't work. When you have a monopoly provider that's going to get your tax dollars, irrespective of performance, you're not going to get good performance. That's just the thing. We do have some indicators of what works in terms of public education at the K-12 level. It tends to be, as far as the data show, is very teacher-centric. There are some teachers who are really good.

And you can take a third-grade teacher who's really good and put her into a fifth-grade classroom or a seventh-grade classroom. You can give her this curriculum or that curriculum from this school to that school, and you will pretty consistently see good teachers in one context or good teachers in another context. Now, we unfortunately don't have, in spite of all the good quantitative work done by Megan's friends at the University of Chicago, any way to put on paper what actually makes a good teacher do this. So you end up sort of begging the question in a sense. It has become a sort of circular argument that these teachers are good teachers because their outcomes and the outcomes are associated with good teachers.

We don't know why they're good teachers. It's probably some combination of really hard to pin down features like charisma and dedication to the job and personality traits and things like that. You can't just instill in education programs. although it's worth noting that in almost every major university in the country, back when we were still keeping track of test scores, the people coming into the College of Education would almost always reliably have the lowest overall test scores. So we put the very dumbest people into the education schools, because the worse than the communication majors. So the worst than the journalism majors are the people becoming teachers. And so these institutions don't really attract very high-flying people for lots of reasons.

I don't really think pay probably is it, given that, you know, adjusted for work hours and all that sort of stuff. It's not a terrible job for people with those kinds of credentials and backgrounds. So we don't really have – we can't extract from the data we have that is reliable a set of policies that we can generalize from. And that's really the problem. You find pockets of places that work. You'll see things in like in Mississippi where you've got a particular environment that works for a while, at least anyway. I mean, we've seen this in other places where you'll see, you know, 20 years of really good performance in a particular school district that usually has something to do with a certain cadre of administrators and teachers who were there at the same time. And as they get replaced by other people, those performance edges tend to go away.

So there's not really any way to come up with what they wanted to do when no child left behind, right? Which was like, here are our quantitative targets and here are the policies that are associated with those quantitative targets that we can use to ensure that we get better education than we do. And it's just not a fixable problem that way. You know, someone earlier was talking about Thomas Massey and used the term weirdo libertarian. It's a weirdo libertarian. I object to being classified that way, being sexually with Thomas Massey. He's a weirdo and a libertarian, Kevin. That was those were not meant to be tied together.

But the weirdo libertarian point here is a true one, which is that one of the problems is the idea that there should be a system of education. There should be lots and lots of systems of education, lots and lots of models, because we are a country of 341 million people and there's not going to be one thing that works for everybody. The current model of municipally-based monopoly publicly funded education which is never going to work.

That's never going to produce the results we want. It's something essentially from the 19th century and like the first half of the 19th century at that. It's kind of a Bismarcki and Prussian society as factory model of educating future bureaucrats and workers for this kind of, you know, systematic and rigid kind of society. And it's just not the economy we have. It's not the culture we

have. It's not the world we live in. We need lots and lots and lots of school choice and lots of different kinds of institutions and services doing lots and lots of different things for different people because people are different from one another. I can't disagree. Go ahead, Megan. Yeah, I think, I think though also, as a libertarian, I thrilled to every word, Kevin just said, I would add a couple things. And one is that, you know, over the last 10 years, I've really been thinking more about how much execution and leadership matters in government, right? The reason that we focus on putting more money into schools in doing these like broad testing and these broad rules that say, you know, you are accountable, is that that's stuff that government can do, right? And it can do

consistently. If you mail schools a check, they will have that check. And so we tend to do the wrong things because the right thing is really hard and it is getting good people in to execute. Now, agree. We should have more models, more school choice. We should not be trying to get the government to do some sort of huge one-size-fits-all thing that is going to work for four million kids. But I will also say that for the things the government does do, whether that's, you know, some schools, special ed, running a transit system here in D.C., it really matters who's running the place. And we have tried to look for policies where it doesn't matter. And that's the stuff that people mostly like about the government like Social Security and Medicare. I might want

I privatized, but the American population manifestly does not. And so you see something like D.C.'s transit agency, which has been like a three-ring goat rodeo for a very long time. And then we've got a new guy in, and he's doing kind of great. I'm taking the metro again for the first time in, like, probably a decade. And what's the difference? You know, it's not that he is magic and brilliant. I'm sure he is. I've never met him. It's that he's really focused on execution. He is willing to take personal risk and he is willing to sort of override stakeholders

and figure out how to get things done rather than doing the thing that is maximally protective of his personal career and protecting him from liability and protecting him from, you know, angry politicians, right? Most bureaucrats are in protection mode. And because the system is screwy, they can't get good things done.

We need to bring more people into government. Again, for the functions the government has to do, defense, policing, whatever it is. A really interesting regularity, the three top-performing police departments in the United States for big cities are probably Boston, L.A. and New York City. What do those three cities have in common? Bill Bratton was the police commissioner and all three of them.

Right? That leadership matters. Execution matters. And we have to figure out ways to do that part better rather than trying to like legislate micromanaged rules that say, you know, you have to do this on this day. And that's always the approach we take because that's easy to specify.

But actually, the real approach we need, we probably need to pay our civil servants more. We need to demand more from them. We need to get more accountability out of them. They should not be unfirable. But we should be trying to attract better people into the work that government does to give them more discretion

and hold them accountable when they fail. And that is not how we're set up and then we're surprised that then the schools don't work. And the progressive answer to that, unfortunately, was just no accountability at all. And that is definitely not going to improve the problem. Megan, there's a line in a T.S. Eliot,

about the mistake of trying to dream up systems so perfect that no one has to be good. And you were making me think of that systems so perfect that no one has to be competent. Yes, indeed. It never works. Well, as the temporary leader of this podcast episode, I will make a executive decision at this moment to say that whatever we were going to discuss

for not worth your time was not worth our time. Because this whole discussion has been worth our time. Megan, David, Kevin, thank you so much for your time. Listeners, thank you so much. We will talk to you next time. Do you have thoughts about the podcast? we're making of The Dispatch, now's your chance to tell us. We're running a listener survey, which you can find at the dispatch.

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