The Dispatch Podcast - Fox News Will Not Change

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

The Dominion lawsuit denouement leaves (almost) everyone feeling shortchanged. Two ex Fox News pundits and licensed attorney debate whether Fox can dig itself out of this hole. Plus: -A march to default -The DeSantis' EQ issue -Trump's coming in hot with endorsements -QR codes portend the robot takeover To get High Steaks and more election punditry, become a Dispatch member and click here: https://members.thedispatch.com/account/feeds Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgar. That's Jonah Goldberg. That other one is Steve Hayes. And we've got a great lineup today. We're going to start talking about the debt ceiling. Are we stumbling toward default? And then we'll talk about the Fox News versus Dominion settlement with two guys who used to work at Fox News. Lastly, do a little bit on Desantis versus Trump. Is it too late for Ron DeSantis? Or is that getting overhyped as well? And lastly, a little not. Not worth your time on QR codes. Let's dive right in. Steve, Speaker McCarthy has put out his proposal for how to increase the debt ceiling, attach it to spending cuts. Nothing particularly surprising in there. but several poison pills of the Biden administration in no way is going to accept at this point. You also still have defectors from the right within his caucus,

all the things that we expected at this point. It seems to me that the markets are underappreciating the likelihood of at least a technical default at this point. So that last point is the most important point, and I'll get to it. If you look at what McCarthy put out, I think it's encouraging that McCarthy put out anything. It's, I would say, notable that he has fewer sort of immediate departures among Republicans than we might have anticipated. You've had people from sort of the McCarthy skeptical right House Freedom Caucus wing of the party saying that they're on board. You've had most moderates, almost all House Republican moderates saying that they're on board. You've had some surprising voices in the U.S. Senate among Republicans saying that they're on board.

So we see over the past few days as they've gone from doing virtually nothing on the debt ceiling to actually coming up with a plan, presenting it in a speech, presenting it as legislation, and now scheduling a vote for it, potentially next week, a unified Republican Party on this, which we really haven't seen. And if Republicans hope to extract any concessions at all from the Biden administration, they need to be unified. You know, in the big picture in terms of our fiscal outlook as a country and the kinds of, specific proposals that Republicans are making, these are things that are not going to alter the trajectory of U.S. national debt. There are some tightening of spending proposals on domestic discretionary spending. There are reports that this will not, that this will exempt defense spending, which I think is a good thing.

And then a number of other sort of poison pills, as you put it. there's no chance this is ever going to be legislation. What it is is a sort of an opening negotiating position for Republicans when they talk to the White House. The White House, unfortunately, is still saying that they will not negotiate. You had White House Chief of Staff, Jeffrey Zinz, Zines. Zines.

Tell NPR this morning, Zines. Tell NPR this morning that he... Nope, that's not how rhyming works or means. I said, kinda. Kinda is a very capacious term that lets you off the hook for lots of literalism. We just did like an hour on advisory opinions on what the word otherwise means.

So if you'd like to spend some more time on what words could mean, capacious or otherwise. Well, I rhyme all the time. Oh, no. I'm a poet. No, don't, don't. And I didn't know it.

Don't, God. Anyway, Jeffrey Zeyance told NPR this morning that the White House won't negotiate on this, that really we should decouple the debt ceiling negotiations from broader spending conversations because the two aren't really linked. I think that's an irresponsible

position. I think Republicans, Republicans have control of the House. Joe Biden needs the House to be on board with this. He should be open to some negotiation and certainly efforts by Republicans in the first two years

of the Biden administration to negotiate some spending restraint have been ignored. So I think we're now at the point where we're going to start getting this. Final point real quickly, Joan is rolling his eyes. I need to get to your final point,

which I think is a good one. It is entirely possible that we stumble into default. I think we have seen in the conversation taking place in and around Washington, Democrats and Republicans like this assumption that this couldn't happen because this can't happen. We never can actually default because everybody understands that it would be potentially catastrophic if we did. So we'll go right to the precipice. There will be a last-minute deal

and we won't default. I still think that's by far the most likely outcome here. But it's not a guarantee. When you look at the narrow margins Republicans have in the House and you look at people like Representative Matt Gates who went asked about a potential default or what what would happen in that instance, he just, he said, the government will spend less money. Well, it's more complicated than that. So I do think it's possible in a worrisome way that we could sort of stumble into a default. Jonah, what of that would you like to roll your eyes at first?

So first of all, just to be clear, I wasn't rolling my eyes at the length of Steve's comments. It was just, it looks like I'm rolling my eyes because Steve blinded me with Zion. so bad better than I'm a poet I don't know it or whatever the hell that was just the fifth grade teacher who sang blinded me with science can you name the person who sang blinded me with science Thomas was it Tom's Dolby nice very good I don't know what's showing more your dad your dad humor or your age it's really hard to say you too yeah I'm much better with music that has a music video ascribed to it because I watched a lot more music videos

then listen to music. So where was I? Yeah, so look, I think, like, I mean, Steve and I were both at this off-the-record thing where we listened to a guy who is with considerable knowledge of the inner workings of Congress. And the thing that's stuck with me at this Chatham House Rules briefing that we got was this point that...

there are lots of people who think it'll all work out, but when you ask them, including all over Wall Street, but then when you ask them how it will all work out, they all have a different theory. And some of it is just like real underpants known logic about, you know, step one, we'll get serious. Step two, question mark, question mark, question mark,

step three, we raise the debt ceiling. And no one really has a good theory about what the question marks are. And when you have, when you have lots of smart people, people looking at the same problem and they all come to the same conclusion, but for different reasons, that's probably a good sign that there's more, you know, hope being the father of the thought than actual reason going on. So I definitely think we could have a shutdown because why wouldn't

we? I mean, we've had this situation. I mean, not even counting the decently, time and time again, our institutions have screwed up because the incentive. Structures are such that individual players benefit when the system on the whole loses. So why would we think that would be any different for this part of it? And, you know, Matt Gates, who I think people know I do not hold in the highest esteem, but this is a high-minded podcast, so I will save my more acerbic aspersions for another time. But he is correct that if the government shuts down the government, if we default on our debts, the government will spend.

less money. It is also true that if you have a fatal heart attack, you will spend less money. I mean, the idea that's simply because, anyway, it's not a serious position, so I don't need to take any more seriously than that. But I think Steve is right that there's no way Kevin McCarthy can be a plausible negotiator about getting even symbolic concessions, which is all I think McCarthy needs. He just needs to say that he used. his power and Republicans stood their ground. And guess what? Now every Tuesday, Republicans get free tacos. That would be enough. But he has to get some sort of negotiation. He has to get some sort of concession out of Biden to seem like he's just not a paper tiger. And that means a lot of

Republicans are going to have to actually agree to vote for something that is very risky for them to vote for because who wants to vote for something that seems like it um furthered the brinksmanship on a debt ceiling fight that never passed anyway so you're on the record democrats can now attack you for playing games on the debt ceiling without having gotten anything for it um and so you know i just thank our lucky star is that we have such a legislative mastermind is Kevin McCarthy in charge of all this, so it'll probably all work out.

Steve, I want to go a little bit big picture here, because to some extent this can feel like any number of other political topics in our sphere right now. To me, it like most reminds me of the confirmation war, sort of

a who started it, individual incentives, they did this to us first. I mean, I hear a lot, you know, Barack Obama refused to vote to increase the debt ceiling back when he was a member of the Senate. Right. How did it get here? Is this the same as all these other fights?

Is Jonah right about the individual incentives just now being so divorced from the incentives for the country, et cetera, when you're thinking about running for office, that being flanked from the right or from the left is just so powerful that it's overcoming everything else in our politics right now? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I really think that's true. certainly if we've learned anything over the past eight years,

it's that politicians put politics and their own standing before anything else. And you would like to think that in a situation such as this one, where we could be potentially facing actual default, they would say, yeah, it might not matter as much whether the Democrats come out of this smelling a little better than the Republicans. We really ought not play games. But both sides are playing games. I think Joe Biden's playing a game by refusing from the outset,

any negotiations whatsoever with the Republican-controlled House and Kevin McCarthy's playing games because I think that's what Kevin McCarthy does and it's what his conference wants him to. I mean, it can't help that Barack Obama, Barack Obama votes no on increasing the death ceiling and then becomes president. I understand those are not causally connected in every sense,

but clearly it's not so politically damaging as to prevent someone. You know, they say every senator wakes up and sees a president in the mirror. like not a great foundation to lay. No, and other Democrats too. Obama certainly wasn't alone on that. And again, if you flip it and you look at what Republicans did during the Trump years, Republicans voted without fight without any problem to increase the debt ceiling under Donald Trump.

Look, I mean, I think you have to take into account Joe Biden's record on spending. I think it matters here. I mean, the argument is Republicans shouldn't do this. this is an irresponsible hostage taking. You can't, you know, you can't engage in negotiations over something in the serious. And I'm pretty sympathetic to those arguments as far as they go. The problem is Joe Biden has shown no willingness to work with Republicans on spending restraint whatsoever. If you look at the amount of Biden's spending in his first two plus years, you're talking about an extraordinary amount of newly approved spending, the Center for a

responsible federal budget, put Biden spending in September of 2022 at $4.8 trillion of new borrowing. Donald Trump at this point in his profligate, irresponsible, reckless term in office had spent a mere $2.5 trillion above what was expected. So look, I mean, there's no reason that Republicans should take Jeffrey Zines seriously when he says, look, just pass a clean debt limit hike and then we'll sit down and talk to you about restraining spending in a presidential election year. Like, that's preposterous on its face. So I don't blame Republicans for wanting to impose some level of spending restraint. The problem is, you know, the margin for error here is very small. And Republicans look like hypocrites because they didn't

care about spending for the past four years. I mean, you could argue for a lot longer than that, but certainly the past four years under Donald Trump. Jonah, what happens to the markets when they start realizing that they're thinking like rational people and that's not how Congress works? Like, are we going to get the downsides of a default before we even have the technical default? And then do we end up in a panic situation once that sort of starts trickling in? Well, you know, I hate to say this way, and I don't mean to sound like a super villain,

but I certainly hope so because the only way if Congress and the White House can't get their acts together that they can be shaken off their myopia is if we get a sufficiently strong warning from financial markets that if you continue down this path, you're going to be drinking puddle water. and post-date canned goods. And I think that's sort of the pattern that we've seen, you know, in the 2008 financial crisis, you know, there was, they didn't pass the first votes on TARP failed. And then the markets, the tremors got worse.

And they're like, all right, screw this. This is all funding games until you see your 401K, 4.0K disappear. So I think if we start, seeing massive double-digit, you know, declines in the stock market two days in a row. My guess is all bets are off and they pass something pretty quickly. That's not a feel-good story, right? I mean, that is a very sort of banana-republicy way to handle your finances.

And, you know, there's a lot of, there's a very serious push, which I still think is unlikely to happen. to, but Saudi Arabia, China, and these other countries are trying really, really hard to figure out a way to make the dollar not to reserve currency anymore, which we benefit from enormously. Coming close to defaulting on your debts is a great way to help the people who want to make the dollar, not the reserve currency anymore.

And even if we end up not defaulting, just raising the risk premium on America is, it's just stupid. right and just really really stupid and which is why it's probably something that we're going to be heading towards not long ago i saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind the truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious that kind

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vary. Rates may vary. Halloween is on Disney Plus. Hello. So you can feel a little fear. What's this? Or a little more fear. I see dad be more. Or a lot of fear.

Mom. Or you can get completely terrified. Choose wisely with Halloween on Disney Plus. All right, let's move on to Fox News versus Dominion. Disclaimer, as always, even though this case is over, as far as most other people are concerned. My husband was an attorney for Fox News in this matter, and you two work there.

So take all of that. in for what you want, listeners. Steve, anything surprise you? Well, I mean, I think the fact that they struck a last-minute deal was a little bit surprising. I mean, I think it certainly was surprising to the reporters who had gathered up in Wilmington, Delaware for the trial. Axios sent out a note, you know, at 11 a.m., the three, four hours before the settlement

saying, you know, there will be no settlement in Fox story. And it was accurate at the time, actually, as reported since then. The parties had basically decided that they weren't going to be able to come together. It's curious, I think, that Fox would agree to a settlement at this point, rather than agreeing to a settlement before the disclosure of all of those incredibly discrediting and embarrassing emails and text messages among people. primarily it's prime time hosts and senior executives, which were not in effect, not basically,

but literally revealing that Fox was knowingly feeding its audience falsehoods, lies again and again and again and again. And making extended arguments in those texts and emails about why that's bad for business. There was a note that sort of went overlooked, and I just read about it with, in the past few days back in November, mid-November of 2020, that Fox had had redacted from the original disclosures in which Sean Hannity was complaining about a drop in his ratings

from a Tuesday to a Wednesday, very frustrated that his ratings had dropped. And in proposing a solution, he wrote to his colleagues, we need to own the Dominion story because then ratings would rebound. and go up. Just an incredible series of disclosures throughout the trial, and that all happened because of Fox's position from the outset that they were not going to settle. Now, talking to some people familiar with Fox's reasoning on this,

lawyers involved in the case, their view was that Fox thought it could end up with a jury where they had to get one or two loyal Fox News viewers on the jury, and it could scuttle the attempts of Dominion to win a large settlement. I think as we got closer to that and as Fox took stock of the damage that had already been done to its reputation, in the pretrial proceedings, the prospect of Rupert Murdoch, who was likely to have been called early in the trial, and Suzanne Scott, Fox's CEO, and Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Laura Anger,

testifying under oath, under oath in a position where they presumably had to tell the truth was just too much. So they decided to take the money and run. Give the money and run. Sorry, they did not take the money. This won't be the end of Fox's legal problems or Dominion's legal potential victories. Dominion still has its cases against Newsmax in OAN that are actually going to be before the same judge, which is interesting because we can assume

that all of those rulings that the judge made about various reporting privileges and stuff aren't going to be any different for a different news organization. Second, Fox still has its lawsuit with Smartmatic, which is actually in federal court over in New York, and Fox now, because of this lawsuit, has sort of baby lawsuits,

A, shareholder lawsuits related to it, and B, the lawsuits from Abby Grossberg, the producer who says that she was pressure to lie, destroy evidence, et cetera. So those will continue a pace as well. This just isn't the end of this. But Jonah, I guess, and you're welcome to comment on anything Steve said, obviously, and you will and ignore me. But I was, I truly, I laughed out loud last night when I saw some of the reporting from the New York Times about how this could be viewed as an assault on a free

press and that this was all part of an effort by right-wing actors to undermine the New York Times versus Sullivan actual malice standard. And that in fact, Elizabeth Locke with the law firm Clara Locke, who is representing Dominion, wants to overturn. She's a defamation lawyer, so of course she wants to overturn New York Times versus Sullivan. But the implication was this was all kind of a conspiracy to help to boost Republican candidates, which is why they sued Fox News? The idea that this whole time it's been Fox News is awful, they deserve everything coming to them. And then the second the case settles, it's like, now we want all of our press protections back and all these things that Fox News argued that we were cheering for them to lose on, like

neutral reporting privilege, fair reporting privilege, which by the way are different, even though they sound identical. Now we would like those things for ourselves. I mean, come on. It's funny. You're talking about, like, we're talking about the report, how this came to a surprise to all those reporters in Wilmington. You know, I think whether you were in Wilmington or not,

they're just an enormous number of people who, you know, are responding to this like a, you know, like a dog whose food bowl has been moved. and they just like wait a second I had plans this was like there were conversations we were going to have and debates we're going to have for weeks on end and we're going to have TV panels about this and now it's just gone

and so there's this scramble to come up I mean this is a very bad hot take moment I think I mean I didn't see this New York Times piece but it sounds like a perfect example of a bad hot take moment you also had people coming out saying that this was

actually a big win for Fox, which I can stare at from any angle and it still just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You can make a case that it was a minimization of a loss in some ways, but like if they were going to settle. It would have been three months ago. I don't see how it is today. Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, like, if this is where they were going to get, and this is the problem I have, like, I always thought they were going to settle for a long time and and you, Sarah, were one of the people who disabused me of that. And then when you got all this discovery,

it seemed like, okay, they're not going to settle. I mean, why go through all this if you're going to settle anyway? And then they settle, right? And so, you know, one of the things that Steve didn't mention was the Bloomberg story that suggests pretty thinly sourced from what I could tell that these Grossberg tapes,

the Fox, the Tucker producer who's suing, the idea of them being played in open court terrified them at the last minute maybe there's some truth to that maybe there's not I'm kind of skeptical about it but clearly they were just they got cold feet and they were like

the the battle space did not look what they thought like what they thought it was going to look like for a very long time and they decided they were going to cut their losses and so I always I think this is the worst of all possible worlds for Fox and for everybody, really, because first of all, there's less Schadenfreude than everybody thought they were entitled to. But there's also the fact that Fox thinks it doesn't have to change very much. And

the way Fox has responded to this own story has been pretty pathetic. I liked that a media reporter for Fox Digital wrote up this thing. 235 words. Does not mention the number. That was his entire story, his entire story. Well, you don't want to make it longer than the Gettysburg address. Well, his previous story, the story before that on the queue of stories that he's written

was a story about how Bill Maher warns Democrats that the example, this is like all in the headline, Bill Maher warns Democrats that the example of Bill Clinton proves that sex scandals don't work so they shouldn't go after Trump. And the article was three times as long about that than... this other thing. Anyway, my only point is is that Fox very clearly is just moving on

and pretending that this didn't happen the the, the, that this article I was talking about by the Fox Digital reporter referred to this as,

says that the this referred to reporting stemming from the post 2020 presidential election. There was

no such thing as a post-2020 presidential election, right? It's just one of these euphemisms that the average Fox viewer who needs to be respected will just, their eyes will glaze over and go past and not actually focus on the fact that what they're doing there is actually continuing

to mislead people about the nature of what this was all about. And so I just don't think they're going to learn from their lessons. And there's an enormous, meanwhile it's making a lot of liberal media or mainstream media even more sanctimonious which is going to cause everybody to sort of harden their positions even further and so the only real winners as far as I can tell one is

because it's not me you know who was very inconvenienced by being subpoenaed by Dominion and didn't get the the Schadenfreude that I wanted the only real winners of this are Dominion and I mean I think that's about it and don't forget the lawyers Everyone else can... The lawyers for the minion.

And the lawyers. Well, the lawyers always win. I mean, you know, those little fish that follow around the Great White Shark, they get to eat even when the Great White Shark dies. So, like, they're always winners. But, um, anyway. The brisket will be dining on lobster for weeks. So, Sarah, what did you as a legal person?

I know that the, right before it came on, I saw that the latest A.O. dropped. and I haven't had a chance to listen to it. Should we tell people what a. A.O. is. Probably. A.O. is a podcast and this podcast called Advisory Opinions, part of the Dispatch Media editorial offering. And we recommend it. It's up and coming. So a few things. One, I was surprised at the timing of the settlement. Now, this is when most civil lawsuits settle.

You know, the pressure's on and you're about to go in a trial. and you've picked the jury and you've realized whatever your thoughts were on how the jury selection was going to go, they didn't go your way and it brings both sides to the table who don't actually want to go through with it. You know, like a duel type thing. I assume most duels got settled right before you drew the pistols.

Nevertheless, for this one where so much of it had been done publicly and in the media, yeah, it didn't make a ton of sense except there had been this filing over the weekend basically in which Dominion had lowered their damages asked, you know, everyone was reporting 1.6 billion, they lowered it substantially

because their damages model was always crazy. It was, you know, everyone enjoyed reporting on, frankly, the sort of juicy details that were coming out in discovery. Second to that, then maybe some of the legal stuff on actual malice and defamation, but nobody really wanted to get into the weeds of the damages model.

How much was Dominion actually damaged? You have to show that your business lost money and they didn't really have a good model to show that they lost any money. They're doing just fine. They sell voting machines. So I assumed then we heard about the settlement that in fact what would come out

was something to the effect that like, wow, they weren't as confident as their damages model. And so Fox was able to find a number and yada yada. That's just not what the result was. The number was incredibly high, much higher than I expected it to be backing up everything you just said, Jonah, except for the reason why now, and here's my theory. It does have to do with the Abby Grossberg lawsuits, the ones that were filed by that producer for Tucker Carlson, but not for the reasons that everyone thinks, not because it was going to embarrass them. They've already lived through the embarrassment. Clearly, embarrassment is not going to be the biggest motivator, but the only way Fox was going to to win this, was at the Supreme Court to litigate New York Times versus Sullivan, what actual malice means, whether reporters have this fair reporting privilege, a neutral reporting privilege, which to like do the very high level version of that, if something's newsworthy, do reporters

get to report it, even if the person who they have on is lying and they know they're lying? And that's never really been fully litigated to the Supreme Court. That was their vehicle. The problem with the Grossberg lawsuits is it. potentially made it a very complicated case and made it a far less clean vehicle to get that into federal court because remember right now it's in state court and to get that up to the Supreme Court

at the point that Fox didn't think they could get to the Supreme Court anymore, they had lost already. And so the threat of that, I think, probably was quite motivating and explains the timing a little bit better because it was relatively late in the game here. Can you give me like one or two more minutes

about, like, why it made it harder to get to the Supreme Court? Because if Fox was destroying evidence and or these discovery abuses, lying, et cetera, there could be sort of independent reasons for a jury to find the way that they were going to, separate from just an actual malice, fair reporting, neutral reporting privilege thing that makes it a legal question to go up to the courts.

There could be then fact questions. And if it's a fact question, that's a jury, not the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court doesn't second-guess factual findings by the jury. Sarah, how much did it matter that over the last couple weeks as we moved towards trial, the judge made very clear that he was growing exasperated with Fox's, you know, not only having misled. I mean, he found that Fox, that the claims about false statements were, were true, that Fox had indeed broadcast false statements, which I think was a significant moment.

But beyond that, we had this dispute over Fox's failure to include the fact, and I think actually denial of the fact when it was asked of them that Rupert Murdoch was executive chairman. I don't have the exact title in front of Fox News. An officer of Fox News, not. just Fox Corp, which puts him in a much tighter decision-making loop among Fox News executives then was previously understood. And Fox failed to disclose this. And the judge was really upset

about that. So Dominion said they failed to disclose it. Fox said they didn't. It had been in their SEC filings. In fact, Dominion had asked Rupert about it during his deposition. So a lot of that was resolved well before the settlement. The judge, the Fox lawyers wrote sort of a, sorry if there was a misunderstanding letter to the judge, the judge had fully accepted that. So that had sort of already been taken off the table, at least the... But the judge was angry about it. I mean, he really pushed them. I don't think the judge thought it was a nothing burger. Did he, did he sort of back down after it was explained? But my point is he did by the end. Yeah, yeah. Once it was explained that it had been in the SEC filings this whole time, Dominion's argument

looked much less credible, frankly. Because their argument was that it had resulted in them not getting things during discovery from Rupert Murdoch. But if they then asked about it at the deposition, then clearly they did know about it. It didn't prejudice them in any particular way. I'm not, I don't know a ton about that. I just know that in the end, the judge was like,

got it, sounds good, moving forward. But there's two ways to think about it when a judge hates you. And I don't dispute the overall characterization, that the judge really, really did not like the Fox side and like in the summary judgment denial of summary judgment opinion that everyone looked at, that was really bad for Fox News. But there's two ways to look at that. One is this is bad for us, duh.

But the other way to look at it is this is so bad for us and the judge clearly hates our side so much that he's making legal errors, which is going to make this easier on appeal, actually. And so, you know, in the summary judgment thing, there was, again, the neutral reporting privilege, the fair reporting privilege

where the judge said basically those don't exist and or they don't apply. And, and this is maybe a little bit more into the weeds than people want, but the defamatory statements, there's a question about this. Is it each individual statement itself or is it the entire segment that was broadcast?

Which one do you look at for the purpose of deciding actual malice and defamation? up to this point, everyone had thought it was the individual statements themselves. Like, that sentence, that was a lie taken by itself and who said that sentence. But that's not what the judge found. He put them into segments, if you remember, at the end of that summary judgment filing. And so things like that, I think actually should have made them more likely to want to continue because they were getting all these nice nuggets along the way, legally speaking.

But you still have to have the venue to then get to the... the appeal, get to the Supreme Court, show the legal errors, because if there are factual errors, they would end you up in the same place, then the legal errors didn't matter. Right. Yeah. We're going to have another conversation about this on May 1st with me and Jonah and Chris Steyerwald, which will be broader and look at sort of cable news generally, but we'll go deeper on a lot of these questions because I think there are some really important questions. And to me, the sort of most interesting question with the understanding that we still have this Smartmatic lawsuit looming for Fox News, first reaction to one lawyer involved who I emailed

after the settlement. I said, so what does this mean for Smartmatic? And it says Smartmatic is going to get a lot of money. I don't think it's a done deal, but certainly doesn't hurt Smartmatic's case. I think that for me, the sort of big takeaway here is that there's no indication from any of this. All of the things that have transpired over the past couple years, over the past several months in the public eye, give any suggestion that Fox News is going to change what it does. And, you know, just last night you had Tucker Carlson a hosting interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who provided false statistics about deaths, killed in action deaths in the Ukraine-Russia war. Now, it's not defamatory, but it's not true. Tucker Carlson made similar claims before. He'd been corrected. Everybody's acknowledged that this came sort of from a source of Russian propaganda. this is just going to continue. And I think that's the sort of the discouraging thing about the whole outcome.

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And focusing on Ron DeSantis a little bit here, Ron DeSantis hasn't had a great week in terms of punditry at least. He comes up. to D.C. for all these meetings. That's covered as kind of a bust. In the meantime, Trump rolls out various endorsements from the Florida delegation in DeSantis's backyard, of course, and you have

some of those congressmen explaining why they didn't endorse DeSantis. You know, the one guy's like, I've tried calling him a ton. He never called me back. He never wanted to meet. He never returned my calls. I got hit by a tree. I ended up, you know, in a critical condition in the hospital. hospital. He never called. He never visited, et cetera. And then when he's thinking of running for

president, I get a call from his political guy that he wants to meet. No, like, that's not the way politics works. Trump was the first one to call me when I got hit by the tree. So I endorsed Donald Trump. Set aside some of the specifics of that or whether you think that's even justified. It goes to sort of the political instincts, I guess, of Ron DeSantis and his team. You've got the donors then, anonymous stories about donors griping, what the F is he doing, particularly around the six-week abortion ban, and other just political failings. And then you've got the Donald Trump problem that he has,

which is not being able to really land any of the punches against Donald Trump, while Donald Trump's team is having a pretty effective time roughing up Ron DeSantis. So is this the end of Ron DeSantis according to the pundit class? Or is this overblown? We're just not in it yet. Ron DeSantis hasn't even announced

back up, everyone. We're not there. Jonah? Yeah, so first just correct the record and I don't want you getting sued by the trees. The tree did not hit that congressman. You said it twice that this guy got hit by a tree. He got hit by the ground.

when he fell. Yes, that's right. The ground cruelly came rushing up at him when he fell out of a tree. Sorry, gravity is to blame for this. You're right, not tree's fault. I mean, with that there were more ants, but we do not live in Middle Earth.

So that said, look, I think I was the first or near first to do a serious column about how DeSantis could end up being the Scott Walker, of this cycle. And I still think that that's a real possibility.

I also think it's a real possibility that he's not. And I think that like there is this tendency in the news cycle for particularly people like us who pay way too much attention to the daily, never,

nay, hourly, nay, minutely, which I don't think is a word, but I've declared it one, unspooling of the news cycle to invest great importance in stuff that no one's going to remember a month from now, never mind two years from now. I mean, like every candidate who won a primary or won the primaries had really bad stumbles after they announced. DeSantis hasn't even announced yet.

So that said, I think it's absolutely true that DeSantis. has had a bad week. This was badly planned. I think it's an example that Sarah could probably speak to much more expertly than I can about how a lot of mistakes in politics stem from stuff that you didn't do three months earlier or three years earlier. And it seems like, oh, they screwed up this week. No, actually, the screw up was like the strontium 90 they took two years ago when he didn't call this guy who fell out of a tree and now the

consequences of it are manifesting themselves now. So I think that all this stuff about DeSantis's bad interpersonal skills, his low emotional, his low EQ, there are going to be a lot of these stories that the consequences of the way he operated in the past

are going to manifest themselves as a delayed response. And people say, oh, he had a bad week. No, it's just like this is the nature of the beast. But You learn from mistakes. So it's entirely possible that DeSantis recovers entirely from this. Trump's lead over DeSantis and some polls has shrunk. Trump's lead over DeSantis and other polls is gained.

Polls are pretty meaningless right now. And so if you're in the business of making straight line predictions about the future from the current moment you're in, you're going to look wrong a lot over the next six months to a year because they're going to be good days and bad days for everybody. And so you have to have a theory of the race that extends beyond the current news cycle. Steve, what about the Disney stuff, though?

I mean, DeSantis now just seems in this dog fight with Disney every day new headlines of now DeSantis saying that maybe he's joking, maybe he's not, I get it. Like he's going to send more inspectors to inspect the rides. Or he's going to open up a state prison next door. The joke being to, like, have fewer people visit Disney, one of the biggest employers in his state. What is this? You're just going to make a point about this real quick.

It just occurred to me. This is like stuff with Disney is his is like Chris Christie announcing before closing the George Washington Bridge. You know what I might do? I might close the George Washington Bridge. You know, it's really weird. All right, that was worth the interrupt. Anyway, I'm sorry, Steve. No, look, I think this makes DeSantis look very small and petty,

even for people who might have agreed with the sort of like, he's a fighter, let's take on Disney. You know, I don't like woke Disney. I don't want to go take my kids to the park and be confronted with all this PC stuff or have this stuff thrown in my face. I'm sympathetic to Miranda Sanchez. Now it just seems like it was something that he did,

consistent with a lot of the other things he did back at the time, which was pick a fight, stoke a fight, engage in a fight, make his point and then move on quickly. But he hadn't been able to move on quickly, and now this is just dragging out and escalating. And Disney's made pretty clear that they're not going to take this rolling over. And it's like a distraction. This is a guy who said he wanted to run,

who it was reported, wanted to announce his bid for the presidency after he finished a very successful. legislative session with Republican legislature in Florida, you know, at the end of the spring heading into summer, he was going to be able to tout this successful legislative session, use it as momentum to launch his presidential bid and then really take on Donald Trump. I think Jonah's point about not making straight-line projections about our presidential politics is probably the best piece of advice for anybody venturing even an idle thought about 24. And if you look back at all of the straight line projections that have been made over the past

decade about the direction of our politics, virtually all of them were wrong. So you would think that that might cause a little bit of humility in people who, you know, analyze politics for a living, including doing stupid things like make bets about who's going to be the Republican and Democratic now nominees for president. We're really, really stupid and potentially very costly. I think there's no question that DeSantis has had a bad run here. I was on a panel last week with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press Now. And Chuck said, you know, is it time for Ron DeSantis to reboot his campaign? And his campaign hasn't even started.

And I will admit, I thought that was maybe a premature judgment. Chuck and I talked about it. It turns out Chuck was more right than I imagined at the time. We've seen, if you go back and look at what Donald Trump tried to do, do in the period after the 22 midterms when he was largely, and I think mostly correctly, blamed for Republican losses for being backward, looking for endorsing bad candidates. And Republicans were pretty down on Donald Trump. You thought, okay, maybe January 6th didn't get Republicans to bail on Donald Trump, but a third consecutive cycle of losing

might get Republicans, if for only self-interest reasons, to bail on Donald Trump. And he went out and sought endorsements from Republicans in Congress in anticipation of his announcement shortly after the 2022 midterm elections. And he largely came up dry. I think he had eight or 10 or 12 people who were willing to endorse him. And I think we talked about it on this podcast. I took that as a sign of real weakness. People were not willing to endorse Donald Trump, even though he was putting the arm to them at a time when he really needed them. it suggested to me that Republicans didn't fear Donald Trump the way that they had when he was president of the United States.

Well, he now has dozens of sitting elected Republicans in the House and Senate who have endorsed his bid for presidency, and he got a number more just this past week. So if there were any question about Republicans being afraid to align themselves with Donald Trump, given his obvious and demonstrable history of recent losing, they've gotten over it. at least a good number of them have. And I think that's a real problem for Ron DeSantis. So, Jonah, what should Ron DeSantis do? Or what should these other candidates do? I mean, we have Asa Hutchison in the race, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley. Notably, we haven't talked about any of them on this podcast yet.

Is it just that nobody's figured out how to deal with Donald Trump yet? Again? Yes. It's exactly that. It's that people don't know how to deal. with Donald Trump because while all of them can't stand Donald Trump to one extent or another, they need Donald Trump's voters. I don't have a solution to this problem. I know that I would like as a cleanser of the party, someone to take Trump on head on and actually speak honestly about

them. I don't know that that's very good politics. I've been saying that for a very long time around here, but I'd like someone to strap on a suicide vest. I think for Ronda Santos, one of the things he could do, which would be smart, is to put Twitter away. One really gets the sense that not only is he surrounding himself with people who are very online, but that he himself is very online

and thinks that like he can really get a sense of where the electorate is by following some of the worst people on Twitter. And that's all criminology in my part. You hear things like that, but I have no evidence that that's the case except by the sort of actions that he takes. And I think that would explain some of this Disney stuff that he thinks he can't seem to have been like the one to back down on as as or as as as as former secretary of state Pompeo put it in a book. He wrote, never give an inch, which he subsequently then dropped out of the race, which he never joined in the first place. there's this idea that

letting the other side get the last word on anything is a sign of weakness which is a very very online understanding of life and so I think like he should think about going back

he needs to communicate to the electorate that he's a general election winner instead of a Ted Cruz 2.0 and that means taking positions that the subtext of which remind people that this guy could actually win in a general election not come in a really robust second in the primaries.

And he seems to be following the robust second in the primary strategy rather than communicating that he's the grown-up who can actually deliver more things in part because he can actually get elected. And maybe he's just the wrong personality type for that. I don't know. But that's the way George W. Bush campaigned for the primary

and, you know, in 99 was he's the guy who's going to win the actual election. That's the way, you know, Ronald Reagan campaign and there are a lot of people who think the world has changed and maybe the world has changed. But you're not going to get, there are a lot of people out there who want to back a winner in 2024

and DeSantis is increasingly looking like he doesn't think that way, which is weird because he definitely thought that way when you got elected governor the first time. So, but Steve, this is always the conundrum, right? You win the primary and in doing so lose the general, or you focus too much on the general and you lose the primary. And so all this advice of like, well, DeSanta should stay off right-wing, you know, Twitter

or quit focusing so much on right-wing media. Yeah, but you got to win the primary first. And things have changed since 1999 in terms of how you win a Republican primary. Who's in a Republican primary? electorate, Donald Trump has totally transformed that. And so is it just the case now that in order to win the primary, you're giving up the general right off the bat? I mean, I think this is the conundrum for Republicans, whether it's Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or anybody. It's a different party today. And the things that appeal to the Republican primary

electorate in many ways don't appeal to a general electorate. I think that's the challenges, This is particularly a challenge if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee, but I think it's going to be a challenge for almost anyone who would be the Republican nominee at the time. I mean, Ron DeSantis made a calculation. His campaign appears to have made a calculation that he wasn't going to play ball with the mainstream media, that really he wasn't going to engage. And you've seen him go about trying to win over the sort of right-wing influencer, or online personality primary

and appeal some of those folks away from Donald Trump. Now, there's a case to be made for doing that. And, Sarah, you just made it. But there are real downsides to that, I think. If you look at what's happened in the reporting about Ronda Saitisthus over the past few weeks, there has been this sort of growing narrative

that he's struggling, that he's having a hard time. And while, as I noted earlier, earlier, I think it's true. I think the narrative in this case is true. I think he's struggling. I think it's fair for mainstream outlets to report on that and to provide details as they can. Part of the problem, though, is if you decide you're going to freeze out the mainstream media on this, that when you want to make, when you want to push back on that narrative and you want to say, no, no, here are the ways that we're succeeding or here are the things that we think we're doing, you all are jumping to conclusions. You don't have the relationships and

the credibility to make that case with the mainstream media. The second problem is, I think he risks really hurting his credibility if he continues to, with a broader electorate, if he continues to focus on winning over sort of right-wing internet influencer types. This past week, he gave an interview to Benny Johnson, who has a show, I think it's called the Benny Report, popular online. Johnson was given access to Ronda Santos. The video shows him in a van, doing an interview with Ronda Santis. Then they go to what looks like a convenience store. And he asks Ronda Santis about Bud Light, which has come under criticism from some conservatives

for pushing Dylan Mulvaney as this influencer, a trans influencer. And Ronda said he hates Bud Light and he prefers Guinness and it was a thing. It was a viral internet moment that will appeal to probably cultural war conservatives. And I thought, look, on substance, I thought some of Ron DeSantis's arguments there made some sense. I mean, there's a sort of a common sense element to someone he was saying. But in the middle of the interview, as he's talking to Benny Johnson, he says, are we going to be a society based on truth or are we going to be a society based on deceit? And he's referring in there to, you know, claims that men should be allowed to participate in women's sports. But he's saying this to Benny Johnson, who is, you know, I wouldn't really call him a journalist.

He's a right-wing personality, sort of a provocateur, who was fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism, who was demoted a few years later from IJR. what used to be a conservative, mainstream conservative outlet, sort of viral conservative outlet for publishing a fake story about Barack Obama. If you're going to make a stand on the need for truth in conservative world, you don't do it with Benny Johnson. And while, you know, maybe that doesn't hurt him among a broader conservative electorate who don't know who Benny Johnson is and maybe it buys him some credibility among sort of the online right

who like and follow Benny Johnson, certainly among the journalist crowd as he's turning down interviews from mainstream outlets and giving interviews to this guy who's twice gotten himself in trouble for not being an honest journalist, it's going to cause problems for him in the long term. Speaking of problems in the long term,

we've got another high stakes coming out for those of you who are not members of the dispatch. This is a little private podcast that Steve and I do about our bet over who the Republican and Democratic nominees in 2024 will be this week. Jonah Goldberg joins us to talk about why he thinks Biden

won't be the nominee, and I shut him down entirely. But should we bring Jonah into the bet? I don't know. But join us if you want to become a member and listen to our little, I don't know, our little high stakes bet going on. I think it's time for not worth your time,

question mark. And this one's about QR codes when you sit down at a restaurant and they don't hand you a menu anymore because hashtag COVID or something. And instead, there's a QR code on the table. At some restaurants, it's just that's how you look at the menu. But in others, it's also how you can order or pay your bill for or against. Jonah, very curious where the curmudgeon of the group stands. Jim Meg's

former editor-in-chief of popular mechanics and the tech columnist for commentary posted a cartoon this morning on Twitter which shows a bunch of robots whipping humans as the humans carry giant cinder blocks on their backs and the caption is to think this all began with letting

auto-complete finish our sentences. I kind of feel the same way about the QR code stuff. I don't like it. I think it is one of these examples of adding effort in the name of efficiency that actually is efficient for, it's supply-side efficient, right?

The restaurant doesn't need to make menus. The host or hostess doesn't need to strain themselves carrying those heavy, heavy pieces of paper. But it makes the dining experience less enjoyable. And I'll just say as a parent of a kid who grew up with devices, which I regret to one extent or another, sending the signal that you start the meal. You have to start the meal by taking out your phone is bad culturally.

It's bad psychologically. It sets the wrong tone. You know, the rule should be that when you sit at the table, you put away your phone. Not you take it out because you have to eat. And so I don't like it. I don't think it's the end of the world, but I don't like it. I think it's the end of the world for the reason you just said. I hate taking out my phone at the beginning of a meal.

And then we're looking at our phones and you don't know whether someone's looking at their phone to look at email, looking at their phone because they're looking at the menu. I hate the QR codes. Steve, how do you feel? They're fine. It's not a big deal. Who cares? like restaurants that offer people to look at menus in a variety of different ways.

But there's not a variety of different ways. There's only the QR code and I have to look at it on my phone and it's tiny. Are there actually restaurants that don't have paper menus anymore? Yes. Are there? Yes. I haven't been to one. For sure.

I haven't been to one. I think if they're if they're forcing you to do the QR codes on your phone, it's, it's not good because people don't want to be on their phones. as you both have said in rather emphatic ways. And maybe people don't have phones. I mean, it is possible that some people are not bringing phones to the restaurant. So I think it's good to give people options. But I don't care if a restaurant has a paper menu, it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

They also have a QR code. Sometimes you sit down on a table and the host or hostess doesn't bring a menu and you want to get going. We want to look at the wine list to see if they serve good Spanish wine without huge markups. No problem with you. Yeah, so I think that's just wrong. So, first of all, they shouldn't, if you object,

you object to also showing, you object to giving people the option of using a QR code. So like, let's take your best case scenario where it's an option, you can have one or the other, you're brought to the table without the menu, and then you're sat, you sit there and you have to wait, it's adding a step, it's adding an inefficiency.

You're to ask the host or the major deed, or whatever, to come and bring you a menu. You have to get their attention again to bring you a menu. They roll your eyes at you. So now you've just added this extra step. It's, you know, remember there's this whole nudge thing about economics, Cass Sunstein and some other people, about encouraging people? The whole idea that they're adding an awkward social interaction and a delay in the dining process

for you to get the thing that was once normal for you to get when you walk in the restaurant is a way to wean you off of using paper menus over time. and I just think it's wrong. Look, Steve, it's outrageous. But there's not, that that doesn't necessarily happen. It's not the case that because a QR code is available, the host or hostess automatically doesn't give you the menus and then you're in this really tense, awkward interaction.

It's like, no, most places they walk you in, they give you a menu, there's a QR code on the table, you have the option of reading the menu that you've been given or pulling one up on your phone. I just, it's, it's not thrown alive. I hate the whole thing. Who cares? Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. This is one of those things.

No, this is emblematic of another thing in this weird moment in America where people feel like they have to have really, really strong views about which you don't have to have strong views. You're wrong about that too. Of course I am. And with that, thank you so much for joining us this week.

That's Jonah. The other one, Steve. I'm the female voice, Sarah, and we will talk. to you next week. It's like clambering aboard the Titanic. Let me on.

I know that country club's on fire, but I just got to be part of it. All right, let's do this thing.