The Dispatch Podcast - Is This The ‘70s All Over Again?

Episode Date: April 29, 2022

Most economic numbers paint a dire picture for Democrats in the upcoming midterms. Steve, Jonah, and David discuss who is exactly to blame for that. Then the trio wade into the debate over forgiving student loans. (Spoiler alert: They aren’t fans.) Will the woes in the Democratic Party produce a Ronald Reagan-type figure on the right? Plus, what is everyone’s opinion of the White House Correspondents Dinner? Show Notes:  TMD on the economy numbers  Student loan forgiveness is regressive whether measured by income, education, or wealth | Brookings Institute Kevin McCarthy recordings Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes, joined today by David French and Jonah Goldberg. We are Sarah Iskerless today as we record. So we will be a lot less smart and a lot less provocative. The first thing I want to talk about is GDP numbers and the economy. We received numbers yesterday, Thursday, that the economy is growing at a paltry 1.4% down from 6.9%. Shrank by 1.4. Shrank by 1.4. Shrank by 1.4. The inflation rate is 8.5%. This is not an economy that is likely to see a lot of Democrats get elected in 2022. Something we already knew, but I think this drives at home even more and

has Democratic strategists and Democratic elected officeholders panicking. How much blame does Joe Biden and deserve for the current state of the economy. David? Well, you know, we're talking about, I would say a moderate to, certainly not insignificant level of blame. If you're talking about inflation, you know, we were talking in the green morning beforehand that we've seen estimates that between 2% and 4% of inflation

is due to the last big burst of spending. So that last big burst of spending did make a difference. I'm never one who sort of lays the entire economy at a president's feet. There are business cycles. There are world events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine that obviously impact this. But the last thing we needed after an enormous blast of spending during the height of the pandemic was another enormous blast of spending. in the last year. And they wanted to do much more than that, a lot more than that.

And at this point, it's now, you know, essentially received conventional wisdom that this enormous amount of spending had this effect. You know, we've mentioned it before on this podcast, I believe, but, you know, there's this fascinating conversation between Ezra Klein and Larry Summers where Ezra says, you know, in many ways, we kind of got what we wanted, which was. running the economy hot, running hot with public spending. And we ended up with this inflation. And look, the inflation is big enough to where it's swallowing any growth and income so that people are feeling even if they have a job and even if they, which, you know, we have a pretty robust

employment situation, but you feel like you're losing ground because you're actually, you actually are losing ground. And then you combine this with the low growth numbers. And you've kind of got this combination of stagflation, this low growth plus high inflation, which was the hallmark of some of the worst days of the 1970s. And that's just a terrible. I mean, you don't even have to be any kind of political observer at all to note that that's just terrible for the party in power when that happens. Yeah, Jonah, I mean, look, let's be fair. it was going to be difficult to manage our way out of the pandemic, the economic crunch that

the pandemic brought to the country. So we shouldn't, you know, and it's true that economists of a wide ideological variety suggested that the economy would be stimulus, that some of the emergency programs that were launched were necessary. You heard this from Republicans in the latter stage of the Trump administration from Democrats as Biden came into office, even our libertarian friends were in favor of much more government than our libertarian friends are typically in favor of. So you have to look at it in that context. At the same time, the Biden White House was on record. Even as others, including Democrats, prominent left-leaning economists, were sounding alarming alarms about inflation. The Biden White House was downplaying and even dismissing them.

Larry Summers was one of those. Jason Furman, who ran the Counsel and Economic Advisors under President Obama, was another. I just want to read a few headlines from over the course of 2021. February, Yellen, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, downplays inflation, inflation fears amid Biden's 1.9 trillion stimulus bill. Are we in a rerun of that 70s show talking about inflation? That's from July. Biden downplays inflation fears ahead of infrastructure bill of vote. That's also from July of 2021. And you can go even further up to December, for 2021 from Bloomberg, Biden team seeks to downplay inflation data ahead of release. Pretty consistently throughout 2021, we were told by the Wyden White House that inflation

would be transitory, that it was nothing to worry about, that we really needed this spending. By any objective measure, they were just flat out wrong, weren't they? And if they were, why shouldn't he shoulder a ton of blame for this yeah so uh i think we got to pull a bunch of things apart politically this is his bed he's going to lie in it i mean i it is it is difficult to think of a president in our lifetime who just has everything break the wrong way for him on everything and some of it is he deserves overwhelming blame for Afghanistan, right?

Some of it he deserves some blame for. And this is one of these things I think part of the problem is you're absolutely right as a messaging thing he owns it, right? This is at least the inflation part of it.

I think part of what the explanation would happen here is that they basically were replaying their playbook from the Obama years, which was flood the zone with money in response to the financial crisis. People said you're going to get inflation. Republicans were wrong about their calls for their warnings of inflation.

Let's just do it again. So it's not the 70s show. It's the Obama show in a lot of ways. And the problem is that the economic circumstances are completely different in the sense that you had people locked away from, like, locked in their homes or prevented from going to bars and restaurants and vacations and doing fun things for almost two years. So the amount of pent up demand was enormous.

And you were paying people an enormous amount of money not to work. And you put those things together and you got, you know, plus the incredible supply chain problems, which are not entirely Biden's fault, obviously, not even mostly Biden's fault. but you put them all together and you think that you're not going to get on inflation, it turns out that you're wrong. I don't think, I think inflation is a real problem. I don't think the economy is in as bad shape as people are claiming it is based upon this contraction. There's a lot of misreporting about how this works.

I don't want to set, you know, Scott Linscombe's ears of flame. but like even the new york times yesterday reported that because there were too many essentially too many imports lowered our GDP which is a very maga trumpy version of economics and it's just not what any economics textbook says imports are basically neutral for for GDP and because people are bringing in stuff it actually generates economic activity The problem was that as a statistical matter, our net exports were lower because demand worldwide is lower. And it's not Joe Biden's fault that, you know, Europe is buying fewer of our widgets right now. The world is going through an energy shock and all these things.

The problem for Biden on this and a thousand other issues, and we're going to talk about student loans in a second, is that they sound, they're never in doubt, but so often in error. they were sure that there was going to be no inflation, right? They made fun of people who said there was going to be inflation. And you can't keep coming out of, you know, Jen Saki's whole mode is to make fun of people asking reasonable questions that end up reflecting administration policy six weeks later. Right. And so messaging wise, they're just, they're always wrong-footed. And at this point, it doesn't matter how much blame they get.

like on immigration stuff they're every on every issue i can think of they're caught between what their base minimally requires to show up at all on the midterms and what the median persuadable middle of the road voter would need to hear to possibly vote for a democrat in 2022 and if you please one side the other side will punish you and vice versa and And the economic stuff is just part of that broader equation. And so he deserves it on the messaging how much factually he deserves blame for every economic problem we have is a perfectly reasonable thing to debate, but I don't have a great answer for. But isn't that, I mean, if you're assigning blame, I would say that one of the main reasons to assign blame to Joe Biden.

And I agree with all of your stipulations about how much of this is just the circumstances. But he is inthrawl to the liberal base of the Democratic Party. His White House, you know, had a difficult, I think, assignment, a difficult job coming in to manage these different factions of the Democratic Party. The centrists on the one hand, with slim majorities in both the House and the Senate and the progressives who are the where the center of gravity in the Democratic Party is today. And, you know, while they, they, it was a difficult job, it was always going to be a difficult job.

They seemed to again and again and again, I think in part because of the influence of prominent White House staffers come down on the side of the progressives. And if you think back to the arguments that we were hearing from the White House, again, echoing the case that was being made by the progressives, they wanted far more orders of magnitude more spending. than they were able to get. And if you think about what the potentially catastrophic effects of three times the spending might have had on the economy and driving inflation in particular, you could make an argument that the centrist really saved him from being in a much worse position. The New York Times, speaking of the Times, reported today, quote, some economists estimate that the Democrats' $1.9 trillion

dollar American rescue plan added between two and four percentage points to the U.S. inflation rate. Imagine if they had gotten everything they wanted in the additional spending measures. Again, I'm not stipulating that this is a difficult thing. That's Joe, that's on Joe Biden, isn't it? He was pushing for more. Sure. Sure. And, you know, just to just to sort of rewind the record also with with us, we were saying for a long time, you know,

fiscal conservatism isn't invalid just because both parties seem to have abandoned it. The laws of economics still apply. And, you know, there was this image that we talked about that Noah Smith had used that I thought was just really powerful about how much money had been spent

in the Obama year, and the Trump years. I mean, just an enormous sum of money had been spent. And it was like walking down an infinite quarter with an invisible pit that you were going to fall into high inflation at some point. It was just happening. And with each step, you were taking and spending money, more money, you were taking a step closer to that pit that was somewhere out there.

And the thing that got me and gets me about the Biden administration was, again, is Jonah was saying, it's just sort of scoffing at this idea that the pit exists. And then also this kind of idea that just because the American people have politically moved on from an issue, you know, they've politically moved on from the idea of fiscal responsibility. And you're kind of sneered at the very idea that you're still, you know, to use the Jonah-ism, banging your spoon on your high chair over an issue that because the American people have moved on, well, it's just not. Oh, you know, why are you talking about this? But what we're experiencing right now, I think, should be revising a whole lot of people's.

On right and left, revising a whole lot of people's worldviews about what American politics should look like and what government programs should be looking like in the near and medium term future. this whole idea of that fiscal conservatism is just dead. And we're all fiscal liberals. And the question then is whether it's social conservative or socially liberal at the same time, you know, reality has entreated on that one, gentlemen. Yeah, I mean, perhaps not surprisingly, the progressives don't seem to be taking that message, David. What?

They don't seem to be seeing it the same way. You are, Joni, you mentioned discussion or the debate over forgiving college loans. And, you know, you've seen over the past several weeks, progressives led by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and others really pushing the idea. I mean, cancel all debt. That's the sort of Twitter hashtag. This is what Elizabeth Warren is arguing for. This is what Bernie Sanders is arguing for. Chuck Schumer has gotten behind at least a version of that.

Joe Biden has signaled that he's. that it's something he's interested in, something he's looking at, he said in a meeting with the congressional Hispanic caucus this week. Is there any merit to the idea that all college debt should be forgiven? What would the economic consequences be if he were to do that, Jonah? And is this something that you see could possibly happen? zero merit to eliminating all college debt, right? That's $1.7 trillion. That would be in effect a giveaway to a narrow slice of essentially a Democratic coalition. It would have profound moral hazard problems. And I don't think it's going to happen. I mean, Biden did say, you know,

we're not going to do $50,000 as if that was like marked him as the reasonable guy. But there is an argument, I don't agree with it, per se, but there was an argument at the beginning, Mary Beth Acres, who was named, I got to remember how to pronounce. It was a, what a book on student loans or not on student debt. She made this point at the beginning of the pandemic, which was like, look, most people who are in danger of defaulting on their student debt owe less than $5,000. and those are the people who are really on the on the edge of poverty and um and forgiving a small amount at the beginning of the pandemic might make some sense i'm not saying i agree with that but like that that's a argument that sounds in the realm of the reasonable we did something else reasonable instead as we we did a moratorium on all student debt payments essentially which

you know probably adds up to quite a bit by now because it's still going on I believe $100 million in lost payments. Yeah, according to New Mexico, $100 million or $100 billion? Sorry, $100 billion. What did I say? A million. $100 billion. Yeah.

And so, you know, that's 100 billion here, $100 billion there. You start talking about real money. And, but most people don't have student debt because most people don't go to college. And the only moral, I've had this debate, because I tweeted about this last night, I've had this argument with a bunch of people now. The only moral argument, let me put it this way. I tweeted a lot, I tweeted the other night that there's no moral case for forgiving student loan debt that isn't a thousand times or a hundred times stronger for canceling the debt for, auto loans of non-luxury vehicles for sort of middle-class people and below, right? You're talking about hardworking people who need their cars to work.

It would help some students, right? It would help some people with student debt, because all, you know, debt is debt. But it also help a lot of working class people who don't have college degrees. And the one response I got back from people was that has any credibility to it is that we encourage everybody in this country to go to college. We told them if they go to college, that it'll be worth it, and now they're saddled with all this debt. Well, first, again, most people who just have debts for undergraduate tuition are not saddled with massive debt. They have debt that is manageable.

The really massive debt loads go to people who went to graduate school. And if you went to graduate school and you acquired hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, and we're talking, by definition, college educated people, you kind of own some of your choices. And some of it has to do with the incentive structure that is set up by public school systems in this country and municipal governments and other layers of government that incentivize you to go get a graduate degree. So you come back and you come back for a higher salary. You did a cost-benefit analysis. That's a problem with the system. If you went and got a PhD in Aramaic poetry, and now you're bummed that you can't pay it off because you paid cash for your degree, that's on you.

The idea that some working classes, you know, apprentice plumber should pay off your debt makes no moral sense whatsoever. And I think the problem that the Democratic Party has gone itself. this gets into the thing with Biden being enthralled to the base is the Democratic Party is largely in terms of its influencers, not as actual voters, but its influencers, the party of higher education, broadly speaking. It's people with graduate degrees. It's people who come from college towns. It's people who take their lead on what they think from that sort of sector of the culture. And the idea that a congresswoman who has student debt should have it forgiven is so grotesque to me, right? Six-figure income, the second Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez leaves government

or Elon Omar, any of these people who are out there saying, I have student debt, and it's outrageous, they are going to make enough money in six months to pay off all of their student debts. And is there a single person in the world who went to law school? and was told, okay, here's the deal. You're going to acquire a bunch of student debt, but then you're going to become a congressperson, and you're going to be a congressperson, become famous and powerful for a while,

and then when you stop being a congressperson, you'll either become a senator or a mayor or a governor, or you'll go into the private sector and make seven figures almost overnight. So therefore, the federal government should cancel all your debt. It just makes no sense. David, can you steal, man, this for us a little bit? I mean, if you're Elizabeth Warren,

Why would you do this? Just in political terms, it would seem to alienate many of the same voters that Democrats seem to have had the most difficulty keeping white working class voters and others over the past several years. What's the rationale for doing this? Is this a sort of a play to the online left? Is this a play to the Democratic voters most likely to go out and vote in 2022 to stem their losses, or is this just an Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, ideological, I've always wanted

to do this, so I'm not making the argument. Okay, so steel manning this, I would say that what you're talking about is a combination of a philosophy and a perceived reality. And the philosophy would be that, quite frankly, college shouldn't be a financial burden. Since college is such an engine of upward mobility in this in this country that making it such a profound financial burden on people is an impediment and obstacle to that opportunity in our country and so therefore the cancellation of student debt removes the financial burden of college empowers an opportunity you know an opportunity society although that's not exactly the words they'd use that sounds more conservative but philosophically if college

is a is the engine of upward mobility. Why are we putting such severe sort of breaks, financial breaks on that upward mobility? Practically, again, you're talking about politicians taking care of their base. I mean, this is old school politics to take care of your base. And so if you're talking, you know, the combination of philosophy and practical politics, I think can in some ways make this seem compelling to them, even though I think on a macro basis, it's based in rooted in bad philosophy and bad politics. Look, if you're going to talk about granting an economic benefit, using the power of the government to grant a substantial economic benefit to a community, the community of college-educated people in this country is probably the least deprived,

most powerful, and most economically ultimately advantaged community, not just in America, but if it is in America, then it is in the world. So, you know, if you have a college degree, if you're sitting there with a college degree, even if you're struggling early on to pay your bills, you are set up in the United States of America. I mean, you're so set up that it's just an enormous, that an enormous amount of time, energy, and effort is spent trying to get more people to college because we know that set you up to do well in this country. And the other thing is, you know, this constant throwing of money, of state money at these educational institutions isn't limiting the cost of the

education. It's just shifting the cost of the education. It's shifting it to, and as Jonah said, a lot of non-college educated people who have less opportunity and mobility. And that's, so, you know, again, we can't think of this as free college. You know, what we're talking about is who's paying for a college. And who's paying for college, sure, some wealthy people have a lot of money, but it's also in a lot of people who are under inflationary pressure right now who don't have the college education. So there's no such thing as free college. And, you know, I, you look at this and you just think as a matter of sort of justice and fairness, I am completely of the view that resources of the government can and should be used. And, you know, not infinite resources, but reasonable resources

of the government can and should be used to help the least fortunate in our society and the most disadvantaged in our society. That, you know, safety nets and spending to increase opportunity in the most vulnerable communities, I'm for that. Not infinity money for that, but I'm for that as a general principle. What I'm not for is the allocation of vast resources to provide a sort of temporary economic boost to the most advantaged part of American society college graduates. strongly against it's philosophically and politically. Yeah, just to put some numbers to it, there was a study out by Adam Looney at Brookings, released in January of 2022, the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank here in

Washington. The title of the study is, student loan forgiveness is regressive, whether measured by income, education, or wealth. A couple quick bullet points. Whether measured by income or wealth, student loan borrowers, hours are better off than other Americans, and widespread loan forgiveness is regressive. Accounting correctly for both human capital and effect of subsidies in the student lending plans, almost a third of all student debt is owed by the wealthiest 20% of households, and only 8% by the bottom 20%. Across the board,

student loan forgiveness is regressive, measured by income, family, affluence, educational, payment and also well, just to underscore that point. David, one quick question, and I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I will put you on the spot. There are suggestions from Elizabeth Warren and other that President Biden could, by executive fiat, wave away. You can't cancel this debt. Are they right?

Can he do that? I don't, you know, if you're looking at the development of administrative law, in the U.S., especially at the Supreme Court of the United States, it is getting increasingly difficult for the chief executive of this country to just simply wave a magic wand and use whatever discretion that he has to essentially stop enforcing the law, because this is what forgiveness would essentially be. It would be, I'm not enforcing the payment obligation.

Think of the prosecutorial discretion on the prosecutorial discretion argument with DACA or DAPA, which is, I'm just not going to enforce this law out of an exercise of administrative discretion. The Supreme Court is looking with increasing side eye, increasing side eye at this idea that presidents can just sort of create new law and new rules by not enforcing the old law and the old rules. It feels, I mean, just not to get out my Polysy textbook from freshman year in college, but it feels like a lot of like the rescission debate with Nixon, right? Where Nixon was just refused to spend certain money that the Congress had allotted, right? And the Supreme Court was like, yeah, you can't do that. Like Congress says, you do this, you know, I'm not sure how it's philosophically any different. maybe legally it's a thousand degrees different, but refusing to collect money rather than

refusing to spend money seems like in terms of the power of the president is sort of very similar thing. We seem to be having a lot of debates that are throwback to the 1970s, right? I mean, this stagflation, inflation, price controls, something that we're talking about increasing there is increasingly discussed on the left. I am all that's really missing is bell bottoms and disco I mean come come back come back and left a few times

stagflation and aggressive Russia I mean it was Soviet Union back then you know sense of national despair and uncertainty I mean it's just you know it's I know history doesn't repeat itself but man you know what was it Twain who said it rhymes it's it's rhyming loudly Right now.

So a bunch of theocons start a weird radical magazine about composing sort of theocrity. I mean, I can do this all day. Keep going. Crime goes through the roof. You know, I mean, you know, Batman becomes a popular culture icon, although that's permanent. I'm sorry. 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.

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already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ethoos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. So if this is all true and if there are all these parallels, the obvious question is, do these circumstances produce somebody like a Ronald Reagan on the right? And I think if you look at the state of the right today, certainly the elected right, similar problems afflicts. the right that afflict the left. Yeah.

The right is increasingly being driven by a loud vocal group of the extremes. Whether you want to call them the online right, whether you want to call them the sort of super MAGA or MAGA plus, right? They are dictating a lot of what happened in the Republican Party, and I think evidence for that we saw in abundance this past week with the difficulties that Kevin McCarthy has been having. There were these recordings that the authors of this book, This Will Not Pass. Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns came out with, in effect, catching Kevin McCarthy in a bald-faced lie

about whether he was going to advise Donald Trump to resign from office after January 6th. McCarthy put out a statement and said that he had never even thought such things. he never suggested it on a phone call. The authors came forward with this audio. And clearly he had. Clearly he had been caught in a lie. This is not the first time this has happened. Kevin McCarthy happened to him.

Can I get a fact check on this just real quick? Yeah. I've been confused on this because there's so many different tapes, right? And I've also been in a fever dream for most of the last week. Is McCarthy's defense, is the is the is the is the does it net out as being um so he says the time story is completely untrue obviously it was very largely true but his fallback defense is that he didn't lie because he didn't he never asked Trump to resign he merely lied to his own conference about

saying he would ask Trump to resign. Is that it? Or, because like you hear also this spin that Chris Christie did it. I've heard McCarthy do it. That he was just running through a hypothetical. And if Trump were to be impeached, he would advise him to resign under those circumstances. Because I just can't keep it straight. Like what the... Well, there's a reason you can't keep it straight. And it's not because you've been in a fever dream all week. It's because it's an incoherent defense. I mean, What happened was he got busted line. They produced the audio.

He said he didn't say the things that he said. You know, he was busted. I think he's given versions of two different responses. One of them is the one that you describe. I was just walking through hypotheticals. I was trying to make Liz Cheney happy. You know, there's some version of that that he was just sort of thinking out loud in effect. That is not what the actual recording of the conversation suggests.

and I think it's very clear. The second version that he apparently made in this, there was a House Republican conference meeting this week was that, you know, this had been spliced and this was, you know, released in a way that was deceptive. There's no evidence to support that. But this leads directly to the question I wanted to ask both of you. So McCarthy shows up at this meeting of the House Republican conference

and by accounts from folks that we talked to in the room and reports that we've seen elsewhere gets something close to a standing ovation. What were they applauding? Any idea what they could have been applaud? I mean, he's just been busted in a big lie. He hasn't done anything worthy of applause, in my view, unless there was something big I missed.

Is it the case that he gets this. rousing ovation from not all, but apparently many members of the Republican conference just because he's now getting Donald Trump's back or because he's making an accusation that the New York Times is lying even when the tapes suggest pretty clearly or make clear that the New York Times is not lying? Well, is there any reporting that like he successfully saw it a woman in half or, you know, me like tiger disagreement like it's possible

that's what they were plotting you know I I've been trying to figure this out I think that part of it is simply that the you know one of the reasons why the house the GOP conference isn't matter at at

McCarthy is because they did the exact same thing he did yeah right they were really outraged by it at first and then they sort of they clawed it all back and they sold off, you know, their integrity one little piece at a time and they're not going to throw them under the bus for basically having the exact same position that the majority of the conference does. If I had to guess, maybe David disagrees, is that what they're applauding is that he said, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that you guys are in the majority

next year. And that's what most of them only care about anyway. And the rest is sort of screw it. Does that make sense to you, David? I mean, certainly there's that that's a plausible explanation because they're doing the same thing that at the same time. They know that he's not being honest. He didn't just make these arguments on one call with leadership on January 10th, four days after the January 6th of assault on the Capitol. This was an argument that he made repeatedly in private with the Republican conference and also in public from the House floor. So he can't

very well say, you know, I didn't mean this. I didn't, I didn't mean it when I said it. He said it a number of times and you would think that at some point that diminished credibility would have people in his own conference saying, I know he's full of it. Well, part of the psychology of Trumpism is that if you get even a vocal critic to yield, you know, think about how vocal J.D. Vance was, right? Back in that recent day. And if they yield and if they have Trump's back, you're not necessarily kicking them back off the bus. And so I think there's a part of this that is related to what Jonah said that they are, how different is McCarthy from them, right? So how different is McCarthy? And then also at the same time, they, the psychology of Trumpism is once you're,

you've yielded and you're on the bus, the only person who can throw you back off it is Trump. And it's not going to be the mainstream media. It's not going to be New York Times. So this is often seen, for example, as a hit from the mainstream media as a hit from the New York Times. And so therefore, you're going to back your guy who's being hit by the mainstream media. Unless, of course, Trump just goes and throws you over the side. And not everybody.

not everybody's on board with him. I mean, obviously we saw some, what was it, Matt Gates, shots fired. So, you know, there's still going to be some of the most hardcore MAGA folks who are going to look at him and say, no. But, you know, I think Jenna's right. Number one, he's them, he's them. Number two, once you're on the MAGA bus,

only Trump can throw you off. And number three, you rally around your guy when the New York Times comes after him. So I guess my view on this is that while it looks like there's a sort of circling of wagons, at least in the near term, with Matt Gates and Marjorie Taylor Green and some others accepted in their public statements, I think that this will have a longer term effect on Kevin McCarthy. You already had a group, a reasonably sizable group of moderate Republicans and some movement conservatives who were frustrated that McCarthy had apparently made this deal with the House Freedom Caucus where they would continue to support

him, he would elevate them, amplify their arguments, and give them, you know, a fair amount of say over how the conference acts in certain areas. I think those moderates, for those moderates, this is a frustrating thing that he keeps stepping in it. He's done it again and again and again, his public statements are often scrutinized and left to be wanting and sometimes scrutinized and found to be just completely untrue. I spoke with a Republican who was asked to defend McCarthy on these grounds this week, and he sort of reluctantly did it, but he wasn't happy about it. You know, was pretty frustrated. I suspect that there are more folks like that out there that predates this incident, but that this incident sort of adds to their

frustration. And then as you say, you have the Matt Gateses who are, you know, basically making the argument that Kevin McCarthy, as much as he's kissed Donald Trump's ring, he's never really been a pure MAGA Trump supporter. And, you know, their argument is these things he was saying to Liz Cheney on these calls, these are his true belief. and he was not out there defending Donald Trump the way that people like Matt Gates were. And I think that has some resonance on the super Trump right to the point where, you know, you have to see who might emerge from this if there is a battle for the speakership, if Republicans take the House in November.

But I would bet that there will be. I would bet that there will be. It's also interesting, I mean, very interesting to try to learn more about who may have leaked this audio. You had a pretty categorical denial from Liz Cheney that she had anything to do with leaking it. Steve Scalise also put out a statement that he didn't do it. Apparently, Elise Stefonic said something this week I saw in a New York newspaper that she was denying. Having leaked the audio, it'd be interesting to see who's doing it. somebody who's clearly interested in making Kevin McCarthy look bad.

Yeah, well, I mean, the thing is, I think Liz Cheney is believable because... Her denial or... Her denial is believable because it's not like she hasn't put her money where her mouth is on sort of where her political integrity is these days. It would be really interesting to me if it was at least Stefanic, just because it would be. We talked about this last week. We had a peppy disagreement about whether or not it deserved to be in the not-worth-your-time segment. But I'm sticking by my long-term sort of half-wishful thinking, half-prediction,

that Kevin McCarthy is either. Um, sort of like Moses not going into the promised land, either never going to be speaker or, um, is speaker for about five minutes because, uh, it, it, part of it, part of it, there are two huge variables. One is the size of the majority that Republicans win in 2022. Um, if he's got margin for error, then he doesn't need the Matt Gates is and Jim Jordans and all those people. Um, and the other variable is, uh, how capricious. impunitive does Donald Trump want to be? And neither of those things are, the size of the majority is actually going to be easier to predict than the mercurial nature of Donald Trump's personality. But I could see it very possibly being the ultimate comeuppance for McCarthy that he ultimately doesn't get to be a speaker precisely because of all of this, you know, double dealing and dishonesty.

I think you're right. I would say there's a 50-50 chance that he becomes speaker at this point. He has, the one thing he really has going for him is he's done so much fundraising for these candidates and has helped them get elected and remain in Congress in such a way that so many feel indebted to him that I think they would support him just out of that sense of loyalty or gratitude for their help. in Congress. And we've seen over the past several years that nothing is more important to many of these members of Congress than remaining members of Congress. So that's amazing that

when you, yeah, I agree. But it's amazing when you think about it, the Paul Ryan, who didn't want to be speaker, the reason why he was like thrust into the speaker role was because he was the one guy that all the Republicans thought had the sort of integrity and honesty for the job that they could at least take his, you know, trust him. And now it's sort of the reverse, which just sort of tells you something. It does. I mean, you know, one of the interesting things in just checking in with Republican members of Congress over the past week since this, since the tapes emerged, and it was clear that Kevin McCarthy was just busted in a really, really bad lie was

the extent to which, and this wasn't necessarily the people I was talking to, but them describing the response of the House Republican Conference more broadly. You know, Kevin McCarthy is a bad liar, and this demonstrates once again that he's a bad liar. But it seems to me that the frustration with many members of the conference is less that he's a liar and more that he's bad at it. And that seems to me backwards. I would be pretty frustrated that he's a liar.

But as you both pointed out, many of them have made the same kind of compromises. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca.com. All right, our final topic by popular demand, what is not worth your time.

And I'm going to float this over Jonah's very strong objections. Jonah actually asked if we could do a dispatch live on Saturday night to do sort of a mystery science theater thing on the White House Correspondence Dinner because he loved the White House correspondence dinner so much. He's frustrated that he didn't have an invitation. But I vetoed it. I said, we're not going to do that because it's really not worth our time. Why do you think it's worth our time, Jonah? I, you know, I just don't understand your obsession with sitting on a throne of lies. I despise the White House Correspondence Center.

I've been to many. Probably not as many as Steve has been to. I've been to, I don't know, five. I have to count. I don't know, four. But, you know, Steve was probably at the Fox table up front. for a long time. I was never on that at that table.

And before that, or after that weekly standards, posh table paid for by, you know, Rupert or somebody. It used to serve its purpose, right? And then it got this utterly destroyed. I'm not saying it was a great purpose,

but it was fine, you know, like I don't like self-congratulatory journalists to begin with, you know, but there are some journalists doing some amazing things right now and like Ukraine and all that. But, because I think it's largely because of the Clintons, the Clintons tried to break the blood-brain

barrier between Washington and Hollywood and was the era of George magazine, which was a garbage magazine. And it became de rigour to have celebrities show up at it. And then it just became just grotesque. And then they started feeling guilty about how they weren't edgy and transgressive enough. So they started inviting crappy. I want to say crappy, but they just started inviting comedians who, you know, is the John Stewart era who took themselves way too seriously. And the whole thing took itself way too seriously. And now I think it's a, it's a mess. So, yeah. David, do you wish you were going? Never gone. Never, don't have any desire to go. And it's not that I have any particular resentment for it.

fine. If you want to have sort of a, you know, nerd prom, isn't that what it was called for a while? That's the AI annual dinner, which is awesome. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But if you want to have a White House correspondence version of a nerd prom, I don't care. It literally matters so little to me that I have trouble sort of forming any kind of opinion about it at all. Go to the party. Don't go to the party. broadcast it. Don't broadcast it. I'm going to be catching up on Utrid's son of Utrid. So that that's where I am on it. I don't even know what that is. Last Kingdom. Last Kingdom. It's a great Netflix show that Jonah and I talked about a ton. Wow. Gosh, maybe I'll do that. Yeah, I won't. Thanks for joining us on this edition of the Dispatch podcast. If you can take the time,

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