The Dispatch Podcast - Great Men of History. Small Men of Congress. | Roundtable

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel went before Congress this week, and Sarah Isgur, Steve Hayes, Mike Warren, and David French consider whether confirmation hearings are a giant waste of time. Also, Donald Trump’s shaming of Colombia’s president made Sarah rediscover the allure of Great Men of History theory.The Agenda: —The hearings that weren’t worth your (and the nation’s) time —Gerrymandering isn’t the problem you think it is (or is it?) —Everything is broken and I didn’t break it —Trump bullies his way to foreign policy wins —The power of leadership over the human heart —Is DeepSeek our Sputnik moment? (And should we retire Sputnik comparisons?)Show Notes: —John McCormack on RFK's confirmation process —The Dispatch explainer on Trump's Colombian feud The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgar. I've got Steve Hayes, Mike Warren, and David French in the House. I'm pretty pumped about this. We have some fun topics. Yeah, there were more Senate confirmation hearings, and these were the hard ones, if you will. I wanted to talk. a little bit about gerrymandering, because I get, it's probably the number one topic that I get random emails about, if that makes sense. Like, not news of the day, just like someone emailing and being like, so, gerrymandering, that's a problem. And I want to ask these guys, where it ranks for them. A little bit on the effectiveness of Trump's foreign policy so far, looking at whether the Colombian president is on Trump's payroll. I mean, my God, I've never seen something so effective for Donald Trump. And finally, we'll do a little not worth your time on Deepseek and the Sputnik moment. All right, Steve, starting with you,

we had three major confirmations hearings in the Senate this week. Tulsi Gabbard, nominee for Director of National Intelligence, Cash Patel, nominee for FBI director, and RFK Jr., nominee for health secretary. All of them were tough in some ways, and then arguably all of them went pretty well for the nominees, which again, to me at least, is a failure of the Senate to be good at this. I agree with that. I agree with that entirely. I don't know that I would say that they all went well, more or less for the nominees. I think we have a couple nominees who could be in trouble, in part owing to the fact that these hearings may matter, but maybe not in the way that we wanted. So RFK Jr., we're recording this Friday morning because we, rather than Thursday morning, as

usual because we wanted to be able to talk about these. RFK Jr. had two hearings because there are two sort of committees of jurisdiction, more or less one Wednesday, one Thursday, and then Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence on Thursday and Cash Patel

for FBI director, also on Thursday. I would say the three, in some ways, were trying to do the same thing, even though they came at it with strikingly different approaches. They were trying to distance them from the positions and practices that made them famous and won them the approval of the

president that they want to serve. And they ran away from these things, I think, in very, very different ways. Cash Patel was sort of characteristically combative and dishonest. And he sort of tried to recast his enthusiasm for the January 6th rioters, deny his involvement in far right politics and conspiracy theories in order to win all of this. in order to win the approval of a handful or of a handful plus of Republicans in the Senate who are conceivably no votes on these nominations. Tulsi Gabbard, for DNI, was, I think, much smoother and a much better talker than Cash Patel was, but may have gotten herself in more trouble.

She was asked questions about her history as somebody who, has seemed to prioritize the intelligence assessments or the views of some of America's enemies, Russia and Syria, in particular, over the consensus views of the U.S. intelligence community. And she was asked to explain this and explain her defenses of, or sympathies at least, to Edward Snowden, who was responsible for the worst intelligence leak in U.S. history. and then RFK Jr, I don't know that he had a strategy and it's hard to sort of characterize his exchanges because he really was sort of all over the place.

If Cash Patel, you know, simply denied things, people would read quotes of things that he said before and he would just say, that's out of context. And I didn't say that. That's wrong. That's false. And Tulsi Gabbard would kind of talk her way around those things and re-explain them and recast them. And there was no rhyme or reason to what Kennedy did.

He, with his sort of gravelly voice, would lash out at some of the questioning. He would seem apologetic at other times. Sometimes it was as if he wasn't the same guy who had been for four decades an amplifier of crazy conspiracy theories on all manner of health issues, on vaccines, on things like that. But what struck me probably as much as anything was the fact that these nominees, I think Cashbertoll is likely to get through. Tulsi Gabbard is in trouble.

Senator Curtis of Utah, who replaced Mitt Romney, and is not on the Intelligence Committee, which held the hearing, but sat in the hearing room anyway because he wanted to see this up close because he had some questions, told us after the hearing that he left the hearing with more questions and deeper concerns having listened to her for the several hours that she spoke than he had when he came in. And I think there are... And that was the Gabbard hearing that was at the same time as Cash Patel's hearing. And there was some indication that he had considered voting no on Cash Patel.

So I find it interesting, he had to choose which one to sit in on. And I don't know whether that means he's already made up his mind to vote no on Patel, whether he'd already made up his mind that actually he can swallow Patel, Whether he, you know, does he think he can vote no on both? Is he only going to vote no on one? Like, what do you read into the fact that he attended the Gabbard hearing over the Patel hearing, if anything? We're focusing on Curtis, Senator Curtis,

because there's reason to believe that senators Collins, Murkowski, and McConnell will be no votes if Curtis is the fourth no vote, if that makes sense. So if Curtis votes no, the nominee fails is the short version. Potentially, right. And, you know, there are, you can overread this stuff. And look, we won't know until there's an actual vote, right? I mean, Senator Murkowski and some of her questioning seemed friendlier than I think some of us anticipated. But you also had Senator Bill Cassidy who led the hearings for RFK Jr.

And is a physician, he's a gastrointestinalogist, GI doctor. Gastroenterologist. Yes, so that too. Gastrointestinologist. I prefer that. I prefer intestinologists. He's a GI. doc.

Because there are intestines there. I mean, just to be clear. For some people. You wish that Republicans had shown more guts in some of the questioning. Sorry. Frankly, I wish Democrats had. So this was the point I was meandering to two big takeaways. So I split my time between watching the Cash Patel hearing yesterday.

I listened to a big chunk of the RFK hearing on Wednesday. I watched the Cash Patel hearings yesterday and watched most of the Tulsi Gabbard hearings yesterday. yesterday later, and a couple of things really stood out. Cash Patel said some things that it would be hard to believe that they're true. He said he didn't, for instance, know who Stu Peters was. Stu Peters is a sort of far-right Groyper type, sometime Holocaust denier, anti-Semite. He's been described by some of the lefty groups as a white nationalist or white nationalist sympathetic. And

Cash Patel has appeared on his podcast eight times. And yet when he was asked if he knew, just knew who Stu Peters was, he said no. He said, not off the top of my head, which is a weird answer to like hedge. A perjury hedge, if you will.

This is, I think, how he can probably get around being accused of saying that this was an unequivocal and clear denial. But Stu Peters, after words, not that we should necessarily take what Stu Peters says at face value, tweeted, like kind of laughing about this.

Like, really? The guy doesn't know who I am? We text each other on our personal phones. Like, of course he knows who I am. David French, never heard of him. He said several other things that I think in a previous era with a previous nominee would have drawn intense scrutiny and may well have led to him being defeated. And I think he emerges from these.

hearings because there's little appetite to challenge him among Republicans as the most likely of the three to get through. Part of that is, to your point, Sarah, due to the horrendous questioning we saw from Democrats, they just fell down on the job. Now, Republicans, Senators should have had better questions, too, for sure. Do you know, do you want to read the transcript of all the questions that Senator White House asked Cash Patel? Oh, we just. did because he didn't ask any. He just used his five minutes to talk himself. In fact, almost all of the Democrats did versions of that, although Senator White House's was literally, there was no question for Cash Patel. And at the end, when Cash Patel was like, I would like, actually, I would appreciate

the opportunity to clarify that. Senator White House said, no. So the one moment where maybe Cash Patel could hang himself, he was like, please stop, don't want to hear anything from you. Exactly. Exactly. Even Senator Klobuchar, who was credited, I think, as being the most effective, basically we're just like, did you say this? And he's like, it's out of context. Did you say this? She was the worst, in my view. She was the worst. She asked the most questions, but she was racing through her questions as if the goal were to just ask as many questions as possible. So she would ask him a question about something that he said that was, you know, this is a guy who writes for Gateway Pundit, major conspiracy site. He did raise money. for the January 6th choir. He did help produce the January 6th choir. She asked him a question about that. He would just deny it or say it was out of context. And then she would state the date that he supposedly said these things

rather than try to get him to answer the question. And in some cases, you know, on the January 6th choir issue, he has in public several times taken credit for saying the things that he said for popularizing the January 6th choir. He did it on Steve Bannon's show. He did it on Steven Nunes' podcast. And, you know, if you listened to him yesterday, he was basically like, yeah, I don't even know what you're taught.

What do you? What? The choir? Yeah. I mean, I liked those people, but I was raising money for, you know, poor kids. And she didn't press them at all. Anyway, she raced through. She got three extra minutes, but all she did was ask the questions and then basically

give a timestamp. So he was never forced to answer these things. Anyway, it was overall an ineffective, ineffective hearing because of everybody involved. David French, can we stop talking about Senate hearings? I mean, in life, are we done with these? Is the Senate so ineffective at this point that we can just call it a day? You know, I would be tempted to immediately say to you, yes, Sarah, this is absurd. It was ridiculous.

It was incompetent. Even the aggressive questioning, as Steve said, was often incompetently executed. And I thought that we were going to be able to sunset the idea that until we get a more serious political class, that we don't have to obsess over these things. But I still remember there was a hearing, not Senate, House hearing, on after October 7th, on the university's responses to anti-Semitism that actually did, like, shake up the academic world. Good reminder. So these things can still matter, which is what.

What makes the performance all the more disappointing? But can I just say, I have a degree of sympathy for the senators here because you're looking at a person who I'm sure that some of them are just gobsmacked that just quoting him isn't enough to deal with who he is. But we're in a political moment. And our former colleague, Andrew Eggers, did a piece about cash potential. podcast problem, talking about Stu Peters and other things. What's so shocking to me, and sort of like really level-setting our moment,

here's a title of one of the episodes that Peters, that Patel appeared on. This is from Andrew's piece. Vaxed mind-control zombies advocate for World War III with Russia to save Zelensky's fake democracy. Okay, so that's the title of the podcast. unhinged. But here's the problem. You've got a whole Republican base reading that title going, yup, that sounds about right. This is where we are. And so how do you respond when there is a giant segment of the body politic, which also happens to be the core base of the president, and whose views are mirrored by the president, who he nominates people who are like mini-mees of

him. That's what he's doing. He's been nominating some mini-mees in some interesting ways. And so you're a Republican senator. What do you do to a Trump mini-me when Trump is the guy who's the colossus astride your party? Now, yes, the answer should be you exercise your independent judgment like a reasonable adult, but that is not the answer that they're providing. And then for the Democrats, I think the Democrats really have lost any conception of the of how to persuade people who are outside their tent. They're just not there. And again, I can kind of understand it.

Look, they've won popular vote majorities for a generation. They were consistently the more popular of the parties. Their consistent thought was all we have to do is get our people together and we win. And now they have to actually reach outside the tent. They're proving time and time again that they're just, they cannot crawl into the mind. of even someone one millimeter to the center right who might be persuadable and reachable and use language or focus on issues that matter to them.

They're just so trained on to respond by inflaming their base that they have lost the art of persuasion in many ways in reaching anyone outside their tent. And that kind of stuff is obvious when these questions, you know, when these hearings arise. Mike, should I put this in not worth your time? question mark? No, I actually think these hearings do matter despite the bluster and the failed missed opportunities for these senators. Because by the way, I should say I really agree with

what David just said. And it would benefit, I think it would benefit organizations, companies, you know, governmental bodies to have people who are outside of the kind of group mindset to just inject, I mean, this is like not a profound point, but just to inject some differing views. I think Jonah often likes to say like if every part of the government had like one libertarian, just sitting there kind of being, you know, you know, urinating in the punch bowl and be like, hey, should we really think about this? Things would be better. And Democrats would be so much better off if they just had like, they don't even have to be a rabbit Republican. Just somebody... Go hire a Mitt Romney's old comms team. They were excellent.

Somebody like that. Just to kind of say, hey, you know, I know this isn't on your radar, but among my former people or among my people, Gateway Pundit is kind of a big thing and it's a problem and maybe we should figure out a way to artfully make this point that this person is beyond the pale. But I do think the very fact that after these hearings, we kind of don't know. I agree with you, Steve, that cash is probably, it's probably a done deal that he's going to get confirmed, but we don't know about RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. We didn't know before and we certainly don't know after what the final vote is going to be, whether it's going to matter. And I think that just proves that how they performed, how they answered questions or didn't answer questions, does

matter because we're talking about margins here. We're talking about, is it going to be three Republican senators or four? There was talk that Democrats might vote for RFK Jr. at some point. I think that might be off the table. Now, maybe not. Who knows? I haven't been doing like a whip count here. But I do think it matters. And I think it matters procedurally too. Because let's talk about Tulsi for a second. Excuse me, Tulsi Gabbard for a second. If she does not get out of the Intelligence Committee. And if Susan Collins and Todd Young vote against her with every single Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, she doesn't get out of committee.

And John Thune, the Senate Majority Leader, has very few convoluted options of putting her confirmation to a vote on the floor. That's the point in which Thune calls up, or somebody else in leadership, calls up the White House, calls up Donald Trump. and says, you've got to pull her. I think that's likely. And it's almost certain if she gets voted down by the committee. So these hearings do matter.

The fact that somebody like Todd Young came out said basically, I kind of know, I kind of know, I've heard everything I need to hear, the fact that Curtis, I mean, because it's not just that she might lose, you know, the support of the Intel Committee and not get voted out. the Intel Committee, it's that, the fact that she's going to be unable to get out of there, if that happens, will be because there are more than just Susan Collins and Todd Young opposed to her nomination. There are other Republicans like John Curtis, like others.

And so, yes, these things do matter, but can we just do them better? Can we please just, can we focus on on senators and senators' staffs thinking through these things more than just can I generate a clip that's going to run on MSNBC that's going to

I'm going to be able to point to to raise money for myself please can we get that going Sarah can you help can you help out no fix that Sarah please 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

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Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatched. save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. All right, I do want to talk about gerrymandering. I find this to be a really interesting topic because it's a term that both sides throw around. And obviously it's been a term that's been around more or less since our founding. It's this idea that congressional district lines

are drawn in a way to help one side or the other or to ensure incumbents don't face competition from the other side. And as people talk about sort of our broken politics, they're always wondering why I don't talk about gerrymandering more. And those are the sort of not news of the day emails that I get. It's like,

hey, I'm hearing you talk about Congress being broken or our primary system or we need to make it easier to amend the Constitution. But what about gerrymandering? And there was this really interesting piece in the New York Times that was out last week. We'll put it in the show notes. And it said only 8% of congressional races and 7% of state legislative races were decided by fewer than five percentage points.

As in over 90% of congressional races and state legislative races were blowouts, as in there was nothing really a campaign could have done. They used Texas as an example. In 2020, 10 of 38 congressional races were decided by 10 percentage points or less. In 2024, the number dipped down to two. of the 28. But here's the problem, and here's why at least I don't raise redistricting a lot, because, A, we now have 11 states that have some type of independent redistricting commission, and these numbers haven't gotten better, they've gotten worse, in terms of partisan,

incumpancy advantage, in terms of the partisanship of individual districts and those sort of blowout districts. So how can it be the case that we've moved away from the ability to gerrymander, and yet the problem keeps getting worse, I would argue that some evidence that gerrymandering isn't the problem and that in fact it's partisanship, negative polarization, and the biggest problem of all

that people either move to where their neighbors are like-minded or they simply meld to be like their neighbors. And David, you've literally written the book on this. So I wanted to turn to you first as sort of gerrymandering, the boogeyman keeps coming up in the New York Times, obviously, saying this is Republican gerrymanders, this is how they're controlling the House. Again, it's not that I'm for partisan gerrymandering,

actually. I don't think it's great for democracy, but I'm not sure it's in my top 10 problems. Where does it rank for you? Yeah, it's not top 10 for me either, Sarah, and it's exactly because of the thing that you mentioned, the big sort. We are self-gerrymandering in a dramatic way. So we're actually beginning to reach a point where if you want to create ideologically balanced to districts, you have to create weird districts to get them ideologically balanced. So for example, like think about, say, Illinois, the state of Illinois. You have the Chicago land, which is quite blue, and it's a hyperconcentration of blue folks. And then you've got a much redder rest of the state. well, how are you going to, Jerry, how are you going to create redistricting, say, in a state like Illinois or some of these other blue states that are blue because they're super large urban centers?

Well, you would create snaking districts that bite off a piece of the urban and combine them with the rural. And that is just as artificial as some of the weirdo districts that we see created, say, to protect specific politicians, which happens all the time. So I don't want people to misunderstand me. I don't like partisan gerrymandering. But if you think that fixing partisan gerrymandering will fix our situation, you haven't been paying attention to the big sort. And several years ago, there was a piece in the Times. And I've been trying to find it, but there's been so many things written on gerrymandering.

It's hard to find the one I'm thinking of. But essentially the argument that was made was, wait, when you can, when you account for self-jerrymandering and the way that we have clustered in these landslide counties. So now more Americans live in landslide counties, which are where one party wins, the presidential vote by 20 points or more, than really any time since we've been keeping the statistic. So when you have these landslide counties,

this piece in the time said, honestly, if you're a blue American and you want to do something about hyper-concentrated and gerrymandered congressional districts, the most effective thing you can do is move to Iowa. In other words, start to unsort the big sort. But I will tell you, you know, living in, I've had the misfortune of never living in a swing district or swing state in my life. It's all been bright blue or bright red, my whole life.

And that last thing you mentioned, Sarah, the social dynamic is so important. because as politics gets more intense, there is a form of social death that you endure if you are in that tiny minority in a self-gerrymandered world. And so you learn to either be quiet or conform, and very few people sort of have the self-confidence to sort of boldly proclaim who they are in those environments. And self-jerrymandering is, in my view, far more of an issue

than the actual gerrymandering process itself. So, Mike, out of 52 districts in California, a state that has an independent redistricting commission, five were decided by five points or fewer. So if the redistricting commissions aren't a solution, but we all don't like partisan gerrymandering, and maybe more than partisan gerrymandering, the incumbent protection gerrymandering,

which is part and parcel, right? you redistrict a district to protect the incumbent because he's part of your team but there's something even worse about that right like i might feel more comfortable if it were just republicans or democrats but it's like no this guy in particular is the one we want in office for 40 years or something like that um and i would argue that that incumbent protection racket in gerrymandering and redistricting is actually what's led a little bit to our populist moment again I don't necessarily put it in my top 10. You all know that I think campaign finance reform

had a lot more to do with it, the big sort. But this idea that these incumbents became so entrenched, so out of touch, that it led to a lot more primary challenges. Not that anyone thought you could beat them from the other side, but that you could beat them from your own side if you flanked them from the extreme. And so now we have a Congress that's even more partisan, but with the same incumbent protections,

so that these, like, increasingly left-wing or right-wing yahoos, it's even harder to primary them, and it gets harder and harder. Mike, what say you about this? That this has contributed, the failures or success, if you will, of gerrymandering has contributed to the current badness, the bad times. Right, right. There's a bit of a chicken or egg question here. And we have to acknowledge as well that there are,

are, there were good reasons for certain policy measures that have had bad external effects or bad effects down the road, for instance, the effort based on the Civil Rights Acts to include majority, minority districts in, particularly in the South and in former Jim Crow states had, you know, the valuable, the value of adding particularly black members of Congress to represent black voters, voters, members of Congress who represented their constituencies, but also contributed to the sort of incumbent production. There's actually sort of a weird alliance between, in the South, for decades, between black Democrats and white Republicans, Let's keep our districts the same and then we'll both, you know, went out in the end.

So there's a lot of questions for me about who to point the blame to. Ultimately, though, and I don't think this is just about gerrymandering, like you can expand this out to all of our political problems. It's like ultimately our problem, like we, the voters and the people are the problem. I've been thinking about this when it comes to RFK, Jr. and make America healthy again as well, where it's, you know, people are angry about how unhealthy Americans are at this point. And so they look to like blame others, blame sort of outside forces, things that are forcing them to do these things. Jerrymandering is forcing us

to get more extreme and big, you know, and big food, big ag or whatever is forcing us to eat. so that we get fat. And it's like there's probably some truth to that. But at the end of the day, like you're the one who decides to make some of the food choices that you're the fatty. That's what you want to say. You're looking right at me too, man. No. I'm looking right at me, Steve. I'm looking right at me, Steve. I'm looking right at me. So it's like not, it's not something that any politician has any incentive to say. But I'm not a politician. I'm not running for anything. So I'll say, like, we are the problem and the problems that we have in this country because we are a free country because we're a representative democracy because we're a republic. They reflect ultimately on ourselves.

And it's a shame that we don't have leaders at the moment who can sort of rise above that the petty need to sort of pander to us terrible people and sort of treat us like adults. Anyway, sorry, this is like a very, I've thought, I've been thinking a lot about this for a lot of different contexts, and that's all I can say about this gerrymandering thing. Like, the problem is, is that we only want to live with people who have our politics, who have, who share our sort of social values. And there's a good reason for that, but it has these downstream effects. And so I don't have a solution. Yeah, Mike, you raise a great point because I feel like our national belays can be summed up like this. everything is broken and I didn't break it

and so it's Tim Robinson in the hot dog costume wondering who drove the Wienermobile into the store it's like who could do this who was the one who did this it's us

so I wonder if we're not overthinking this a little bit I mean I take David's point that our self-sorting is exacerbating the problem, but I don't think it's the cause of the problem. And I think gerrymandering, partisan gerrymandering is really largely responsible for getting us to where we are. It may be the case that because of our self-sorting, partisan gerrymandering won't get us out

of the current predicament. But it seems to me pretty obvious that when you've had, you know, decorates of partisans drawing districts to make them more partisan, the voters in those places are inevitably going to be choosing from more and more partisan actors as they make their choices, whether it's in congressional races or state legislative races, making primaries more important than general elections. Am I misunderstanding? Because to me, it seems very clear that partisan gerrymandering is a huge problem, is a source of a lot of the problems that we're having today. And ending it would at least help us take steps toward a solution, even if it's not a panacea?

David, answer that question. Okay, number one, I'm going to, I do not like partisan gerrymandering, and it is exacerbating the problem. I don't think there's any question. It's exacerbating, but it's not the core. So if you look at, say, the state of Tennessee, we do have a partisan gerrymanding problem. It's about an R plus 20 state. So just generally, this is a red state.

But the legislature might be more like 70% Republican or 75% Republican. And that is amplified by there is partisan gerrymandering. They go into example, for example, we used to have a Democratic representative for Nashville, which Nashville is a blue city. And they have bitten off chunks of Nashville and given it to some of the more rural districts so that now there's no Democratic representative from Nashville. but so you're creating what that partisan gerrymandering is doing is it's creating geographic districts where you don't have those kinds of common interests right you don't

have those kinds of common um you know your district is so diverse sort of within its own frame that it's it's hard to say in some ways what community are you representing but the answer to it actually is to do a reverse gerrymander. In other words, to, okay, we're going to say, well, we want more political balance. So we're going to change this process where we created these weird districts for ideological uniformity. And we're going to create new weird districts for ideological diversity. And so, but either way, because of the big sort, you're creating weird districts. And And so the big sort places a gerrymanderer or places a districting, you know, a districting commission or a legislature in this really interesting position because if they just go with geography, if they just go with geography, the problem's going to be substantially the same. It's going to be hard to make it better.

What if we increase the size of the House of Representatives, like by a lot? Bingo. So instead of 435 members of the house, maybe it's a thousand. And so each member of the house represents something much closer to the number of people that George Washington thought they should represent. The idea isn't that you would know every single person. We're not talking about like you represent 200 people, but something closer to, you know, 200,000, I guess, so that you would have far more in common with the 200,000 neighbors that you live, live near versus the now approaching million neighbors that you live near. The New Hampshire legislature is great for this point because like literally everybody

knows somebody in the New Hampshire legislature if you live in New Hampshire because they have so many people in their house of representatives. Yeah. So I mean in New Hampshire, it's a 400 member house with a population of 1.4 million. So each member of the New Hampshire legislature represents Drumroll, 3,500 of their neighbors. Like, my high school was slightly smaller than that, but not by much. I think that's a good, that's a good model to go to. Can we get a little closer to that is what I'm saying? I do think there, yeah, there are certainly ways in which that would help to solve the problems of extreme partisanship that we're talking to.

But we, of course, ought to be mindful of unintended consequences. of a move like that, you can imagine if you have that many more people representing districts in the House of Representatives, that the problem of performative politics would get that much worse because then you're trying to stand out in a much bigger crowd. And the things that you have to do to stand out in that crowd as opposed to 435 of your colleagues might breed many, many more Marjorie Taylor Greens. And, you know, look, I mean, the cynic could say, hey, look, maybe that's because we'll have, if you're representing fewer and fewer people, the better representatives, the fact is there are many more Marjorie Taylor Greens in the country who also deserve representation. So if you have all of these people practicing this, this sort of outrage bait performative politics, that might be sort of more.

or a representation approximating what the framers had in mind, at least on a numerical basis, if not on a virtue basis. The showboater's power within Congress is diluted as well. I mean, there's a sort of a point in which like one person becomes less powerful, not just within Congress, but that platform that they're able to get. I mean, it's like, oh, what? So what? You're a member of Congress.

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Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Okay, I want to talk about Trump's foreign policy win, question mark. So last Sunday, Colombian president Gustavo Petro suspended permission for U.S. deportation flights to land in Colombia. Trump's response included several retaliatory measures, including the suspension of visa processing at the U.S. Embassy in Columbia, visa sanctions on Columbia government officials and their families and a 25% tariff on Colombian goods that would go up to 50% the next week if the Colombian president didn't reverse course. That evening, the Colombian foreign minister

not only agreed to accept deportation flights. On Monday, Colombia sent one of its own planes to transport Colombians awaiting deportations. Trump couldn't have paid someone to look more effective than he did in his first week in office, Steve. So I will start with you. Is this proof of Trump's foreign policy working the idea that you can't guess what he's going to do? And David, I'm just going to preview where I'm going for you because I want Steve to talk about sort of the micro-politics of this. And then I want you to talk about the great man theory of history making a roaring comeback when it comes to Donald Trump. So I don't think this is evidence. I don't think you can sort of draw a straight line out and say Trump seemed to prevail in this instance

and therefore this approach to the world is going to work forever thus. I think this was a unique moment with unique circumstances. We had a terrific explainer on the dispatch website, Gilgara, who explained sort of all of the different moments of this exchange and the dynamic back and forth. And part of it, of course, as is almost always the case in a situation like this, was driven by internal Colombian politics. So the president is in trouble. He's facing sort of an internal revolt or internal dissatisfaction. He thought he needed to sort of take a stand to distract from the problems at home and to appear strong. So he does this thing. And Trump just comes and knocks him over, basically. He says, nope, that's not going to work. You can't be strong. I am going to roll you here. and this is what I'm going to do. It's one of those NFL moments when the like, the, you know, running back or whatever

thinks maybe he can take out that defensive lineman and just, like, the defensive lineman doesn't even notice really and the running back just falls over. Yes. It's, that is exactly what it was like. I mean, it was really, it was really this moment. So Trump, I mean, there was no downs. There was little risk for Trump to threaten what he was threatening.

The dispute was more or less over how these Colombian migrants were going to be delivered back to Colombia, whether it was going to be commercial charters, whether it was going to be military planes. And the president of Columbia wanted to ensure, he said, that these returning migrants would be treated with dignity. And he didn't think that military, our military flights would do that.

And Trump basically said, like, well, tear off the whole thing. And, you know, I think he prevailed. It was the Colombian president gave up, a long and sort of rambling statement, sort of challenging Trump, taking him on, making threats. And Trump said, okay, here are these massive,

we're going to tariff, you know, 25%, 50%, and we're coming after you and there's nothing you can do about it. And in effect, what happened is the Columbia president sort of back down. And even there was a moment at which Caroline Levitt, the new White House press secretary tweeted something about this being a huge win for Trump and the Colombian president retweeted her tweet saying this was a huge win for President Trump. So I think in this moment it was a win for Trump. The question is, of course, it's one thing to do this to Colombia.

It's another thing to try to do this to China or to Europe or to Mexico or to Canada, places that have much more leverage than Columbia does. And I think, you know, we're in this moment. Trump is going to make clear what he wants to do on some of these tariffs coming up this weekend. February 1st was the deadline. It's tariff Saturday. Yeah. And I think, you know, you have a business community in this country sort of bracing.

They don't know what's coming. There have been hints. There have been declarations. There have been, there's been grandstanding. they don't know what's coming. They're certainly nervous about it in a variety of different sectors. So it could be the case that if Trump does the things

he seems to be signaling that he's doing that he'll get blowback not only from the would be countries that would be tariffs, but internally in the United States and important groups to his political success here at home and important members of his own.

party. All right. So, David, big picture here. And this is a rough generalization. But generally speaking, conservatives are more likely to buy into a great man theory of history, this idea that history is shaped by the individuals who make decisions. And the left believes in sort of historical trends and some inevitability to movements and reactions and counter reactions.

and that people are often products of that inevitability. Boy, I feel like Donald Trump is going to be the picture next to Great Man Theory of History in 50 years. And this example being one of them, another president would not have done this. Well, okay. I am somebody who has over time become more drawn towards the Great Man Theory of History. I used to kind of scorn it. but the more that I see the power of leadership over cultures and the power of leadership over the human heart,

the more I think of the Great Man Theory of History as having a lot more validity. I don't go all in on it, but it's generally, I think, has quite a bit of validity. This stuff that we're talking about is a footnote to a footnote to a footnote to history. I mean, my gosh, that Columbia suspended deportation flights under Biden and then resume them. You know, this is something that a lot of stuff like this

sort of happens in the background of American political life because whether or not Columbia temporarily resumes deportation flights is not a significant national moment. It is a hiccup in a relationship that is almost always ironed out relatively quickly. And so this is not significant at all. What is significant is that Trump is very,

very adept at using his bully pulpit to make things that make him look good that are insignificant be magnified as if he's won this tremendous victory. And by unpausing a pause, which by the way, the Biden administration did with little fanfare months before. So, but when Trump does it, he's the colossus astride the world. But then when he does something like strong arm Israel, into a ceasefire agreement that may end up actually leaving Hamas and power in the Gaza Strip

and defeating one of Israel's key war aims, which, by the way, will be a hundred times more consequential on the world stage over time than whether or not a few military deportation flights were delayed going into Colombia. Where are we hearing about this?

And this is again where the Democrats have real problems because the Democrats are so torn to pieces internally over Israel and Gaza, that they're unable to jump on the fact that, well, and also the fact that, you know, Trump was actually coming in behind a Biden ceasefire initiative and sort of reinforcing the Biden administration ceasefire initiative. This would be an opportunity for Democrats to break with Biden, which they need to do. This would be an opportunity to highlight Trump's weakness, which they need to do.

but we're talking about Colombia and bullying Canada and Denmark and Mexico because that's what Trump wants to talk about and that's what he can command the stage to talk about but from a geopolitical standpoint this idea that the most powerful country in the world can bully its close neighbors

is about the oldest story in the Western Hemisphere that you can imagine like has no one heard of the Monroe Doctrine has no one heard of all of the ways in which we have, for good and ill, intervened all up and down Central America. This is a very, very old story that because we have a historical memory that is measured in nanoseconds and are sort of captivated by paying attention to everything Trump says, we've taken something

that's a hiccup and a footnote and turned it into some giant geopolitical win, which is absurd. in my view. Mike, David, didn't really feel strongly, so I'm curious if you wanted to weigh in and have more of their thing in. Yeah, I know. I know. Stop, stop staying in the, you know, staying off the sidelines on this one, David. Look, I don't know. I mean, what is the guiding principle here with Donald Trump's foreign policy? It's strength. It's basically like chest beating and use the kind of size and power and, you know, hegemony of the United States to just kind of get what he wants in kind of every situation. I just don't see what the, what is going to be, like if we could describe what the Trump

doctrine is or what the Trump approach is, it's kind of fuzzy and it's kind of situation. So I'm, I just, I find myself unimpressed. I also find myself unimpressed by, by beating our chests about Columbia. I mean, it's, it just seems like small ball here. What are we, what are we talking about? Also, I keep hearing that, you know, the great value or the great strength of Donald Trump on foreign policy is people don't know what he's going to do next. Look, this makes me a bad, would make me a bad conservative in our current,

in our current times, but to me, the strength of the United States when it comes to foreign policy is the stability that we offer, not the instability, not the threat that nobody knows what we're going to do. In fact, where we get our power is that countries always kind of know where we stand and we stand pretty big and stand pretty tall, despite what some of the, you know, Maga right like to say about how things have been going, despite all of our failures and struggles on the foreign policy stage, that seems to be where our strength is. And Donald Trump doesn't demonstrate to me at all.

This will be a surprise that he understands that or has any respect for that. He thinks it all kind of flows through him in a way that sometimes works for him and sometimes doesn't. I think there's a trade-off, though. I mean, you know, when you... I take your point. I think what we've represented to the world,

particularly in the post-World War II rules-based international order is stability. And I think that's responsible for so much of our strengths. And were I choosing the way that we would operate, that would be the way that we would operate with the world. But I do think that there is an advantage to, sometimes, to this unpredictability. And if you talk to diplomats from the Middle East, the Gulf region in particular and they will say

we want to be with the strong guy and if Donald Trump is sort of running around and beating his chest and saying he's going to do these things we don't have the luxury of having the seriously versus literally debate we have to take him literally and we have to take him seriously and therefore we're going to do what we can to be on his side

and I think you've seen that to a certain extent with the behavior that we've seen from the Saudis, from UAE, from others in the region with respect to Israel, if you go back to the Abraham Accords and decision-making on Iran. I mean, certainly a lot of the Gulf Arab states are emboldened now on Iran because Trump is there and he's saying, hey, we're going to do this and, you know, we've got to beat our chests. Wait. Are they that emboldened on Iran because of Trump or because what Israel has done to Hezbollah Hamas,

the collapse of the Assad regime, and the decimation of Iran's. I would say one's a lot more important than the other. Yeah, but I mean, so I take the point. But if you're talking to these diplomats, even in the early stages of the U.S. election, I'd say many of them wanted Trump to win because they thought they could line up behind Trump. I mean, if you saw what you saw from the Biden administration,

which was preemptive capitulation on Iran, overt accommodation, enabling Ron to receive billions of dollars in frozen cash and assets, versus Trump assassinating Qasem Soleimani, who was responsible for spreading death and destruction and chaos throughout the region, there was no question. I mean, I can't do this diplomat by diplomat, but certainly the ones that I was talking to, and hearing from in the region,

there was very little ambiguity about who they wanted and in part why. I mean, there are also, of course, there are also complicated issues. I think they thought that the economics would be better. Maybe some of them thought that they could create personal incentives for Donald Trump to make to make decisions that they wanted to make.

I do not want to be guilty of sort of monocausal fallacy here. But I think that there is some, there is some upside to the unpredictable. predictability thesis that we're discussing. And while it's not the way that I would run things, it's also not the case that there aren't benefits from it. All right. Last up, before we head off into the sunset of January,

a month that I could not be more enthusiastic to say goodbye to, a little not worth your time here. On Monday morning last week, Chinese AI company Deepseek released a groundbreaking, AI model that caused a panic in the U.S. stock market. Navidia, the chip-making behemoth, stock went down 17%. The NASDA closed Monday, down 3%. Both have rebounded since then.

But many have described Deep Seek's launch as a Sputnik moment. And I mean, I guess I'm sort of curious whether you guys think this is a Sputnik moment, whether AI is the next moon race. But also, more importantly, what is a Sputnik moment? moment. Did Sputnik turn out to actually be important now that, you know, were many years on? David, I'm going to start with you because obviously you were there when Sputnik launched. I was present at the moment. Yeah, absolutely. 50 years old at the time. Look, you know, when you look back at the Sputnik moment, I do think the Sputnik moment was, in hindsight, very, very important

for the Cold War. And the Cold War, where we ultimately were victorious, one of the reasons why we were victorious ultimately in the Cold War was we had an immense, an immense national initiative to ramp up American technology, ramp up American capabilities to the point where we began to, over time, build this extraordinary economic

and qualitative military advantage over the Soviet Union, that it just could not. David, for those of us who are a lot younger, can you just explain what the Sputnik moment was? So the Sputnik moment was the Soviets shocked the world by putting a satellite, a little very primitive satellite, into orbit before the United States. And this was taking place at a time

when the United States was investing a lot of money, time, energy into its rocket and missile development, And we were seeing in the States this just spectacular series of failures, rockets blowing up on launching pads. If you remember the old movie The Right Stuff based on the Tom Wolfe book, there's this montage of like exploding Atlas rockets and that we were struggling. And then Sputnik happens. It's a giant shock.

I would like to recommend, by the way, the movie October Sky, which is an incredible movie. I even showed it to Nate, who's only four, and he is into it. And it is about John, sorry, it is about Homer Hickham, yeah, who's going to become one of the guys to rise to the Sputnik moment, but it actually does show the Sputnik moment in the movie as well, and sort of America's response as they are sitting in one of the earliest times where there's like a shared television moment stunned, as they see the Russians launch that.

Absolutely stunned. Spurs on our side a tremendous. burst of energy and activity, and it really was the state of the space programs between the Soviet Union and the United States really was almost symbolic of the emerging vast divide between the two systems, because by the end of the Soviet Union, we're sending up space shuttles on a very regular basis, and they are in a state of economic and technological collapse. And so to say Sputnik moment in many ways is the starters pistol. It's not a the end. It's not the finish line. It's a starter's pistol. And from that standpoint,

right, we win. Right. From that standpoint, when I hear people say Sputnik moment, my moment, my thought is game on, not game over, if that makes sense. Oh, that's such a good way to put it. I feel like you're a coach in the locker room. When I hear that, I hear game on, not game over. Let's go, boys. Steve, our Sputnik moments a thing? Is that term something we should put to bed? I think that's, I think David's description is, is a good one. I believe I saw Mark Andreessen tweet that this was founder of Netscape, big venture capitalist, tweet that this was our Sputnik moment on AI moments after the, the deep seat was revealed in all its glory.

Look, I, I don't think it would be fair to say that, that there was kind of, kind of complacency in our race to building and perfecting AI before this moment. You know, I think if you look at the investments that we're making in AI, if you look at the certainly the private sector growth in AI tech, you know, over the past many years, it was clearly we were taking it seriously. But this provided sort of a kick in the ass, I think. in some ways because people were surprised by what Deep Seek was able to do. And I think in the days since the revelation, we've seen some of the flaws.

We've seen some of the limits. Maybe it doesn't look quite as good or ominous a development as it had in those first earliest moments. But I think if people take it to be what David says, game on rather than game over. I guess the right response. You know, I've got, my grandfather was a NASA engineer. So whenever we would watch these, my dad would always be pointing out, oh, yeah, that, that was, you know, the VAB and all these things. Where was he based?

Patrick, Cape Canaveral. Not Houston, sad for him, not to be at the Johnson Space Center. No, but he was there. when they launched. Blah, blah, blah. We in Houston don't really care about the launches so much. Okay.

Let's take this fight offline. Like, I have an investment in. I don't know. Like, I don't know. I am very, I remain skeptical about AI, mostly because I don't understand it.

And I hold on to my ignorance as a shield against people who say, this is a really big deal. I mean, on the one hand, I kind of have to believe people who understand this stuff when they say it's a big deal. But I have yet to really kind of grok what it all means and how it will change a whole bunch of aspects of our lives. And why, I mean, I kind of understand why this particular Chinese development was an innovation on what we're already doing. but in a way that the space program was a kind of a tangible thing.

It was about, yeah, getting to space, getting to the moon eventually and sort of exploration and also developing, you know, the kind of weapons programs that might help if the Cold War became hot. I just, I'm waiting to learn and understand. And maybe people, you guys will inform me why I'm an ignoramus about this. I just want to see some proof that this has those kind of implications for the future that the space race and the sort of competing space programs had. Also, like, will there be, you know, kind of side innovations like baby formula and tang the way that the space program, you know, what else? like cordless vacuums, I think, came. Oh, the freeze-dried little yogurt puffs that my baby eats are definitely from

astronaut, you know, ice cream and whatnot. Oh, yeah. I mean, all of the, you know, I think like tennis shoes are basically like come from some development. Like, once you show me the raft of, of cool innovations like that that come from AI, then then I'll buy it. So I'm sorry if that's, I don't want to end this on a Luddite kind of perspective, but that's where I come from.

too late I wanted to see this was a quiz actually just to see if Steve and David and I think I know the answer to this so listeners like take your bets now between Steve and David which one of them knows

what the term to grok means who's buzzing in first here I mean I've seen it around To grok I've gotten this really wrong I thought David would be all over it and I am just...

Yeah, that's from Stranger in a Strange Land. It's not... Oh, I didn't know the... Anymology, but it's on Twitter. It's like there's a GROC thing, right? Yeah, that's... It's all, like, everything, like all of these tech bros, they take stuff from the literature they like,

but they don't even really understand it. They don't even grok it in a way. No, GROC is just like a... Are you saying GROC or take rock? No. To GROC. G-R-O-K. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. I know what that is. is. I thought you said take rock. I was like, what is take rock? Well, Grock. Yeah, I know what Grock is. Yeah. I can use it in a sentence. I feel like I've only really heard people actually use it not ironically or whatever, but only in Silicon Valley. Like my, you're right, Mike, my Silicon Valley friends all use it like it's a totally normal, huge part of their vocabulary. Well, like Robert Heinleyn was basically like a kind of a crazy right winger and all of this stuff. It was, it's like, it's a thing.

It's a thing. It's a thing. I like, it's a very useful word, actually. It's, you know, understanding things at a very kind of deep and in total, almost, you know, 360 degree perspective. There's very little like rock, I think then. That's about it. It makes two of us. I don't know.

I'd take rock. I was so confused. I was so confused. One of the thing I can say is I grok the Lord of the Rings, man. Like, absolutely. We know, David. We know. Are we doing this dick measuring?

Because I got to say, like, at least according to Hollywood, like, I've got the biggest dick you can get. Oh, my God. Okay, well, why wasn't that being recorded? Oh, it was. It was.