The Dispatch Podcast - It Was Always Going to End This Way

Episode Date: December 2, 2020

During an interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday, Attorney General Bill Barr said that “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” In what seems to be a clever attempt to appease the president, Barr also said during the interview that he had appointed John Durham as special counsel to investigate the Russia-Trump probe in October. Will news of Durham’s appointment appease Republicans? Is there a legal defect in the Durham appointment? Sarah and the guys give us the breakdown. On today’s episode, our podcast hosts also analyze Trump’s election litigation madness, the ethics of COVID-19 vaccine prioritization, and last week’s killing of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Show Notes: -Attorney General Bill Barr’s interview with the Associated Press. -“As Trump Rages, Voters in a Key County Move On: ‘I’m Not Sweating It’ ” by Elaina Plott in the New York Times. -Statement from Sen. Ted Cruz urging SCOTUS to hear the Pennsylvania election challenge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgird, joined as always by Steve Hayes, David French, and Jonah Goldberg. Today, we are talking about the Department of Justice announcements coming out from Bill Barr yesterday, no election fraud, and a special counsel to boot. And then we'll talk about the cases, the election litigation, still being pursued by Donald Trump and his campaign. A little on coronavirus updates, the vaccine as it rolls out, and who, who's getting it first? And finally, an assassination in Iran, what it means for foreign policy heading into the Biden administration. Let's dive in. So first up, yesterday, breaking news out of the Department of Justice, the Associated Press reporting, that Bill Barr, in an interview, said that to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election. And then just a few moments later, we, Bill Barr announced that in October before the election, he had appointed the U.S. Attorney in Connecticut, Durham, as special counsel to look into the Russia investigation instead of just

sort of an internal DOJ investigation. And then this morning, we have Catherine Harage of CBS reporting from a DOJ spokesperson. Some media outlets have incorrectly reported that the department has concluded its investigation of election fraud and announced an affirmative finding of no fraud in the election. That is not what the Associated Press reported, nor with the Attorney General stated. The department will continue to receive and vigorously pursue all specific incredible allegations of fraud as expeditiously as possible. David, I'm sure we're going to spend a little bit of legal time on this tomorrow on advisory opinions, but politically, what say you? Well, okay, can I violate the question and just dip my toes? Just dip my toes in the legal water. Okay,

well, let me back up a little bit and say, look, in principle, I want the investigation of the of the beginnings of the Russian investigation to be completed. This is something that I think it's in the public interest to have a complete picture, a complete picture of everything that occurred that we can know from start to finish of this entire sorry affair. So I've said this for years now.

I want to investigate the investigation. I wanted the investigation to be completed. I want to know it all. But we got a little problem here, Sarah. We got a little problem. And I'm going to read from the Code of Federal Regulations, which is always a crowd pleaser. And especially 28 CFR, Section 600.3A, which is, yeah, that's a great. Everyone knows that one.

That's a great part. I mean, literally nobody's listening anymore. That is it. No, no, no. We know from advisory opinions. See how early I got that plug in, Sarah? Really early. That was good.

We know from advisory opinions. This is exactly the time when the audience is at the edge of its seat. Here's what the regulation says. The special counsel shall be selected from outside the United States government. Durham is not outside the United States government. He's a U.S. attorney. So there's a legal defect in the appointment right there. And so if you are a incoming Biden administration and you just want to want this thing to be over,

it seems to me that you've got a legal defect in the appointment right from the outset. So, yeah, in principle, I want this thing to be investigated. I want sort of the complete picture and I want accountability for any individuals who committed unlawful acts. At the same time, I also want it to be done lawfully. And so we've got an issue. As far as the politics of his declaration regarding fraud, I mean, all he was saying was what's plainly obvious to everybody who's not at this point completely in the tank for Trump, which is, there's no evidence out there. And sort of the cleanup statement is meaningless.

The cleanup statement is essentially, if you bring us evidence, we'll look at it. But there's just no evidence out there. And he got just massacred on the MAGA right for pointing out what's plainly obvious to everybody outside of the MAGA right, that we just haven't seen anything that comes close to upsetting the election. And at some point, somebody's going to have to, this is going to, somebody's going to have to start breaking it to these folks, or maybe never, but somebody needs to break it to these folks that there's nothing that's going to overturn these results. Jonah, DOJ seemed to be, had a plan here.

They were going to announce, on the one hand, there's no fraud in the election. But on the other hand, we appointed a special counsel as a way of sort of appeasing a whole lot of people and or angering a whole lot of people. do you think that will be successful? Do you think it's appropriate? If you were correcting your interpretation,

and I had to defer to you on all things, DOJ, so I'm going to assume your interpretation is right and that one or the other was the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, I don't think it works. I mean, whether it's appropriate or not, I don't, I honestly don't know. I guess if it is,

If it is truly the case that the intent of doing the simultaneous announcement was this sort of clever play to please both parties, I don't think that's appropriate. But regardless, it clearly hasn't worked that way. You don't see a whole bunch of people on the MAGA right or President Trump saying, well, he did, you know, make Durham a special counsel. So he must be telling us the truth when he says that the lizard people didn't steal the election. you know, not the lizard people you're thinking of either. And so I don't, I don't know. I want to disagree a little bit with David on this. I think it would be smart if there's truly, if there's, if there's very little

there there, let Durham stay in. Let Durham finish his thing. And it only becomes a real problem for the Biden administration if they have reason to believe that major appointees to the Biden administration, We're involved in the FISA warrant stuff. And I think the only person that I'm aware of, you guys have probably following this closer to me, that gets crosswise with this in any real way,

would be Sally Yates. And she hasn't actually been named anything yet. She's just on a short list for AG. As for the fraud stuff, I agree entirely with David that, you know, he is just basically saying what everybody already understands. And I saw people leap on the heritage thing

as if this was some major new qualifier or twist in the story when not only is David right that you're supposed to say we're always open to new evidence, but you also got the electoral college certification, vote stuff barreling down on the calendar.

And the idea that somehow hold on, there's going to be another shooter drop that reveals something, you know, this massive lizard people thing. I just think it's very, very unlikely. And so it's, the clock is running out on this regardless, even if Bill Barr is open to new evidence, which there's not going to be any of.

Steve, on the one hand, it says that, as David read, that the special counsel has to be appointed from outside the government, Barr in his memo cited specific statutes that would allow him to go around that rule. so at least it's, you know, in dispute on that front. But what appointing the special counsel does is it means that the special counsel can be fired only by the attorney general and for specific reasons, such as misconduct, dereliction of duty, conflict of interest, the reason for firing him must be in writing.

Is the Biden attorney general, we don't know who that will be yet, but will Joe Biden as president bless an attorney general doing anything but letting this person finish their work, as in, you know, is Barr going to be successful in his plan here? Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. It seems to me, just from a practical standpoint, if you're going to have a fight about it, you'd rather have the former fight rather than the latter fight, which is to say a fight about process than potentially a fight about substance,

which would be what is required under the guidelines that you just mentioned. You know, what David suggested as an argument for a way out from under or to prevent this special counsel from continuing before it even gets to the point where the AG, the new Biden AG would have to undertake dismissing isn't a theoretical point. I saw Ben Witt as a prominent left-leaning legal scholar making almost exactly that point yesterday. So you can imagine that that's where this might head. I think I'm with David entirely on my eagerness to see this, a full investigation, a serious investigation. I do think there are some remaining questions beyond the ones that Jonah mentioned about Sally Yates and the FISA warrants.

I do think there are, we should have more clarity on what Susan Rice was up to. She wrote this famous C.Y.A. memo about meetings that Joe Biden was involved in as it relates to what the Obama administration, top officials knew about these efforts to monitor Trump administration officials. You know, you don't have to sort of buy into the hardcore mega world conspiracies about this to have real substantive questions about it. I do have those questions. I like to see them addressed. You know, it's probably too facile an observation to say that, you know, if Joe Biden decides to get in front of this and derail it, that that suggests something nefarious actually did happen. They're probably good process reasons that they would want to to stop this, but that'll be unfortunate, I think, if it does happen that way. so here's here's my quick thought on this uh both durham and uh muller were both appointed not under the special council regulations because the special council regulations only apply to criminal

investigations uh they both had things that were outside of the special council regulations now of course muller the department sort of voluntarily kept itself under the special council commitment, if you will. That doesn't mean that the next attorney general will have to, but I do wonder because of that whether, in fact, Barr is in some ways helping his successor. The Durham report, we have no reason to believe they're going to find any wrongdoing. So assume for a second the opposite. Assume that they're not going to find wrongdoing and that they also are not going to finish in time. And so no matter what Durham was going to finish under the Biden administration, and if he announced then that there was no wrongdoing, people would assume that he had been

interfered with, that his investigation had been cut short. In some ways, this will lend his conclusion credibility similar to the idea behind appointing Mueller. Regardless of whether the department could have handled the investigation itself at that point, having Mueller on the outside was helpful in lending it credibility to both sides. And so in that sense, because this will span the next administration, I think that the next attorney general letting Durham wrap up, which I assume will actually happen pretty quickly under the next attorney general, I don't think this is going to drag on too much longer. Having that quasi-independence that Barr's appointment gives him could be good politically

for the country, or at least better than it could. could have been otherwise. As far as the timing, no question in my mind. Bar had a point, had sent, you know, signed this memo on October 19th. He hadn't told the White House, he hadn't told Congress. And then in a letter to Congress yesterday, he decides to send this on the same day that they announce the no fraud. I agree with you. I'm not sure which is the chicken and which is the egg here. But it was a clever plan to do both on the same day. but the idea that you were ever going to appease both sides, no, you were just going to anger both sides on the same day.

So that's what I think happened. The only thing I'd add to that is that, I gave up trying to like defend Barr on the merits a long time ago, not so much because I think the hardcore case from the left against him is all that persuasive. Just because he has showed so little interest in the, the obligation to appear above board? He may actually be above board. My point is that that appearance of conflict, that appearance of politicalization, he really couldn't give to Fs about it. And

that makes it very difficult to defend him because he doesn't seem to uphold a level of public trust about it. That said, the fact is, you know, Trump really, really, really, really wanted some Comey-like replay in 2020. where Barr was either going to do something about Hunter Biden or do something about, you know, the FISA stuff or whatever and drop some bombshell in a replay of 2016 because Trump had so much 2016 on the brain, the fact that Barr did this in secret,

not even telling Trump about it, I think if you're a bar defender, you know, that's actually a good talking point on your side because the rules of DOJ, again, as you guys know better at me and the FBI, is you don't announce. these kinds of things close to an election, and he refused to be, to play the Comey role that Trump wanted him to play. What that says about the underlying investigation, all that, I just don't know. I'm with you guys. I just want to, I want to know what he found out. And if you found out

something really damning, I'll say it's damning. And if you found out something that's not really damning, I'll say it's not damning, and that will, you know, annoy all the usual people. per the Mueller investigation, the regulations say that they must submit a report to the Attorney General. It does not say that that report has to be released publicly. And there was a lot of discussion over whether the Mueller report would be released publicly or rather there was not an assumption the whole time that it would be released publicly. Yeah. The one thing I would just add is unless Durham ends this thing with a just avalanche of indictments of senior Obama officials, there is going to be a large section of Maga World that thinks that he'll have been of sellout.

There is a unfalsifiable theory in that world that is that the entire Russia investigation was nothing but a entrapment operation cooked up at the absolute highest levels of government for which multiple people at the highest levels of government must be indicted or justice has not been done. So I want to see the investigation complete, but unless it ends up, with something, this sort of maximal sweeping, you know, this wave of indictments that I don't think anyone sees coming. Just get ready for a massive attack on Durham to come from the right. I think that's going to happen anyway. I will just say, I hope he files a report. I hope he writes a public report and shares with us as much as he possibly can without getting into, you know,

anything that would be sensitive or classified. I think it's important. As I say, there are serious, I think, substantive, non-conspiracy questions that we still don't know about the origins of the investigation in some respects how it was conducted. And it's important to have those questions answered. And let's take a quick pause to hear from our sponsor Keeps. Take it away, Steve. Hey, guys, for those of you who have seen me on Fox News or know what I look like, you know that losing my hair is not a big concern for me. But I have lots of friends who started losing their hair as early as their 20s and 30s, and it's panic time when that happens.

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had been scheduled to go to the White House, in effect saying all of this conspiracy stuff, all of these claims of widespread voter fraud that are being sort of bandied about in public right now, we haven't seen real evidence that they exist. And David and Joan are right. Of course, he's just saying what we already know, what's obvious to anybody who's paying attention to the reality of the situation is. The problem, I think, and the reason this is important, is that you have lots and lots of people who are not paying attention to the reality of the situation

and for whom having somebody like Bill Barr weigh in with an authoritative statement like that. I mean, it was pretty categorical, unqualified. Now, he may have qualified it a little bit later, but it was a pretty strong statement. And I think what it does, in particular, is it may help steal the spine of some Republicans on Capitol Hill who have thus far been far too deferential. to the, you know, the president has a right to his process arguments without following that with an affirmative statement that, no, the election has not, in fact, been stolen. But this, this conversation that we've been having as a country has really happened for the last month on two separate tracks. Most people have moved on. They understand Joe Biden is going to be

president. He's putting together a cabinet. The transition is happening more or less. And most elected Republicans are privately settling into this reality. Most of them actually understood it, again, at least in the privacy of their own homes a long time ago. But the president's followers, and we've seen this in poll after poll after poll with the stipulation that polls are not necessarily going to be accurate, but I think you have a trend in these polls suggesting widespread belief among Republicans that the election was stolen or fraudulent. or highly problematic, the president is egging this on. And he's creating this alternative reality based, I think, on a series of, you know,

thus far baseless claims and conspiracies. And what's been interesting for me to watch is the shift in how these claims are being made. Early on, what you saw was people latch on Trump supporters and the president in his legal team, latch on to specific incidents of irregularities and attach nefarious motives to them. And then those would be investigated or reported and explained, and they would kind of back away from them. Now, I think we've moved into this area where the president's top champions, Rudy Giuliani, this attorney Lynn Wood, Sidney Powell, who was for a time part of the Trump legal team and is now operating sort of an adjacent parallel effort in support of the

president are making these just sweeping claims that, you know, most people would understand are crazy. I mean, Lynn Wood yesterday tweeted that China bought Dominion in October, bought Dominion voting systems, which has been the subject of a lot of these conspiracy theories are at the center of it in October. China did not buy Dominion in October. That just didn't happen. You've had Sidney Powell suggest a conspiracy that involves the Republican Secretary of State in Georgia, the Republican governor in Georgia, former associates of Hugo Chavez, top Democrats across the country, local Republican officials, the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ. These are things that are nowhere in evidence. It's not true, but the more that they're pursuing this, the more

they appear to be flailing. And in fairness, they are getting help from the partisan Trumpy media, including Fox News and Newsmax and OAN, the Federalists, people are giving oxygen to these kinds of conspiracies, Maria Bart Romo, allowing the president to come on and peddle his BS for an hour, virtually unchallenged. Sean Hannity is giving a platform to people like Sidney Powell or just peddling things that aren't true. Lou Dobbs muttering into his sleeves, the kind of crazy stuff we was once confined to UFO clubs. But we have finally seen some resistance here.

We've seen Bill Barr speak out and make his statement, which is important. You had Gabriel Sterling, a senior election official in Georgia, gave a three-minute stem winder, calling for Republicans to find their voices and denounce this stuff. And I guess my question to the group. You've got to be kidding me. I'm sorry, that was a very long preamination. I mean, I was timing that, Steve. What in the world? I mean, I had a lot to say.

Remember how we were supposed to be asking questions to the group? As I said, my question to the group, where do we go from here? What price freedom? No, I mean that. What, like, what is next here? I mean, what, like, what is next here? continue to just have these things, these conversations in sort of on parallel tracks or does something like Barr stepping in and making his comment penetrate that? And does it, does it trigger a kind of response or finally getting leading national Republicans to speak out? Jonah, we only have about 30 seconds left in a segment.

I think in some ways the best. case scenario is the McCarthy period. And what I mean by that is, and I've written a little bit about this lately, but in the McCarthy era, there were very serious anti-communists, who were very serious people who made very serious allegations that should have been followed up very seriously. And there were a hothead idiots who were talking about, you know, sort of in the Dr. Strange Love sense, the commies stealing our bodily, our precious bodily fluids. And for a brief moment, the Wahoos were winning, you know, under Joseph McCarthy, who sort of like with the election fraud people, you know, McCarthy's claims would often change over the course of the day. Like the number of communists, he said, working in the government on his list in his hand, the number on the list would change from one speech to another, depending on his mood.

and the same thing with the allegations that you get about the election fraud stuff the the um they just make up the craziest things and like and they do it in a very mccarthyistic way where they say you know if you read that lynn wood to read about china buying dominion it's a lot of these guys do this where they say it has been reported that and if that is true um I'm sorry, somehow my Siri just turned on. They say if it is reported that, or if it is true, and then they just proceed as if it is true. And then it gets recycled in the Twitter sphere as true.

And that's a lot of how the sort of commie, the crazy anti-communism stuff spread in the early 50s. And what happened was it never really went away. It just had a half-life. And more and more serious people just quietly stopped taking their cues from McCarthy until he kind of became a joke. And I think that is sort of the best case scenario with Trump. Even now, we're seeing people kind of peel off, not get involved. You know, Ron DeSantis was all in on the fraud stuff for a week. And then all of a sudden he remembered he had, you know,

he had a pot of tea on the stove that he had to take care of. And I think we're going to see more more and more of that kind of thing until you just get the Joe DeGenevas and a few others who are, their whole business model is invested in being in this 24-7. The one last point I'll make, since we're talking about, says I brought up Joe McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin, is the senator from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, who there is something in the water in Wisconsin. I'm sorry, Steve. that you go back and forth

from being this incredibly serious, polite state that takes politics really seriously and professionally and then loses its frickin minds once every generation or so. And, you know, Ron Johnson basically saying Bill Barr needs to come out and present to us the evidence he didn't find. You know, it's like he has to herd

all the unicorns and bring him to Washington. That said, I actually think it would be very good for the country to respond to people like Ron Johnson and say, okay, I'm coming. You give me all the stuff that you think is a serious allegation, and I'll tell you how we investigated it and how it turned out there's nothing to it. I think that would be very good for the country, very good for Barr to do, but I don't think it's in anybody's interests except the countries for them to do it. Well, also add into that, the Ted Cruz press release from yesterday, where

he was calling on the Supreme Court to take the Pennsylvania case about whether the Trump campaign can amend their initial complaint, which is all that's being appealed at this point. There's nothing else they can add to that appeal. I thought it was an interesting 2024 move, which I think is in the background of a lot of this stuff, as you said. The DOJ announcement, I think, does give Republicans some cover to move on, but then you've still got Republicans with an eye on 2024

who don't want voters to come back and say, you abandoned the president, you said there was no fraud. And what we saw is some folks willing to throw Bill Barr under the bus, although notably not the president, by the way, is that there won't be something other than President Trump agreeing that there's no fraud that will really be sufficient for that minority of people. And so Ted Cruz calling on the Supreme Court to take this, I thought was a little cute because on the one hand,

he's not saying there's fraud, he's not saying that the Supreme Court should rule in Trump's favor. He's actually just saying that they should take the case so that I think later on he can sort of have it both ways. Yeah. Which is, um, Ted Cruz would you do something like that? No. I think it's going to be a problem for the 2024 folks who think that they're channeling Trumpism with stuff like that because they're not. And Donald Trump all but said yesterday at the White House that he was running again in 2024. I'm paraphrasing here, but he said, you know, we'll see whether we're here again next year, but if not, I'll see you here in four years. I mean, that was like the Ted cruziest thing, because he knows full well that Justice Roberts isn't sitting there saying, what court filings

did we get in today, clerks? And oh, by the way, can you print out tweets from senators regarding our docket? No, I mean, that's a classic, hey, I'm going to pretend to do something without really doing anything, sort of very online move here. But look, I mean, all of this was, this was always going to end in a combination of depravity and stupidity. It just was. Like so many things that Jonah's involved in. And, you know, the truth. If you didn't have the stupidity, the devil's. depravity would be truly dangerous, but I'm still not convinced that at some level

depravity isn't going to end up being dangerous anyway. I mean, I think what we have here, what I'm really concerned about is the effect of the depravity on the people who are hearing it. So, you know, we know the rudies of the world are pretty far gone by now. We know the folks who are going on TV, calling for martial law, tweeting out for martial law, or saying that, you know, heads of internet security, former heads of internet security should be put against a wall and shot. We know they're pretty darn far gone. And these words should be self-discrediting. It should be humiliating to them to say them in public. And I feel like we've kind of got in the GOP a sort of a broad range of reactions here. One is a group of people in the GOP are saying,

he lost. Okay, he lost. It's it. Another group of people in the GOP are saying, the election was stolen, what's the score of the Auburn Alabama game? In other words, like, they kind of have this election was stolen feeling, but they got a lot of underlying cynicism and mistrust anyway, and truth be told, other things are more important to them. But then you've got this group where this is their life. I mean, this is their life. I mean, they are desperate, they are dedicated, they are sad,

they are furious, they are angry. I know someone in my own circle, extended circle, who's trying to get tickets to Trump's 2021 inaugural right now and trying very hard to get tickets that supposedly exist to Trump's 2021 inaugural. And here's what I worry about. You know, the right is not really the home of the mass of thousands of people,

some of whom start breaking off to loot, you know, some of whom break off to loot, you know, sports stores or whatever, athletic stores. It's the home of the people who plot and at the very far edges of violence who plot and plan and kill.

That's like what on the far right. And that's what I'm starting to get really worried about. The atmosphere of threats is getting downright scary. The relentlessness, the avalanche of these threats are getting downright scary. We have had a foiled plot against a Michigan governor that was making, you know, that was making strides towards, there were overt acts to try to accomplish that conspiracy. And that's one thing I'm really worried about right now, to be

honest. I feel like we will look there, we could reach a point where something terrible happens and we look back and we say, oh, it was so obvious this was going to happen. the level of intensity and emotion and fury amongst some of this core. And that is what I think is getting scary to me. David, there was a funny, not funny, there's a New York Times story. The headline is, as Trump rages, voters in a key county move on, colon, I'm not sweating it. And basically, Eliana Plot went to Bucks County and interviewed some folks. But the end, the kicker on the story, it just made me think of what you're talking about.

It's Daniel Compain, 65, a Cuban-American who fled Castro. He had a big Trump flag outside his window of his apartment near Main Street. He said that he would not accept the results of the election until the electoral college officially voted in mid-December. He has questions about whether Dominion voting machines had deleted ballots for Mr. Trump. When asked why he had decided to take his Trump flag down, Mr. Compihan responded as if the answer were self-evident, quote, well the election is over he said yeah and that's a lot of people but there's also a group of people that are not that at all yeah i think it's i think it's both i mean i i i think david your your point about you know the the friend who's trying to secure tickets to the 2021 inauguration i'm not convinced

that that's a that's a real minority and in conversations that i've had with with top republicans around the country, including elected Republicans, they're getting questions, like serious questions from sane constituents, friends, even sort of non-activist types about, you know, that are obviously following on the detailed conspiracies that have been laid before them, both on the internet and on, you know, from Lou Dobbs and from the president. And I worry about that. I mean, how do you, how do you sort of deprogram that from people who are, you know, in many cases, well-meaning people? These are people who didn't sort of sign up to go down deep rabbit holes of conspiracy thinking,

but have for reasons that are certainly understandable to me, long developed a skepticism of what they've gotten from the mainstream media. and unfortunately have come to trust what they're getting from the president. So the president tells them this, and they believe it. And then they hear it reinforced on Sean Hannity's show and elsewhere. And, you know, we've seen this growing. I've told the story here before about, you know, a speech I gave five, six years ago and had a couple senior bank executives come up and ask me about the Facebook post about how many people the Clinton's had killed.

This is not a new thing. But I worry that the more deeply entrenched it gets, the more difficult it is to move on from it. I think, though, that y'all are underestimating the amount that Trump is hurting his own legacy with his voters. Yes, not the folks on Twitter. But when you talk to a lot of Trump voters, they, on the one hand, perhaps,

have some questions about the election. they don't totally discount all of it, sure. But they think the way that Trump is behaving is undermining his own legacy, even if they agree with him. So much so that it is, I think, affecting their desire to vote for him in 2024. So to the extent that he thinks

this is all a setup to running in 2024, I actually think for the first time he is losing some of his base who see how everyone else is seeing him and think, well, look. He had his chance. Why would he win in 2024? If he didn't win this time, if it was rigged, he didn't prevent it from being rigged when he was President of the United States and had the FBI and the Department of Justice. So if it's rigged, he can't prevent it. And if it's

not rigged, he's coming off like a loon and the Rudy Giuliani press conference was embarrassing. And many of them are worried about his legacy as supporters of him. I mean, if this was the thing that got them to finally see that Donald Trump was a conspiracy theorists? I mean, where have they been for the past five years, right? I mean, and, you know, David mentioned Ted Cruz earlier. Remember, after Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump claimed it was because of fraud. He was out there tweeting about this repeatedly. He's been making these kinds of claims forever. I do think, I do think this is different. He's the President of United States, and he's tweeting daily about this. And as one Trump voter told me, it's embarrassing me as a Trump voter.

Like his behavior reflects on me and that this is just different. It's very different than the Iowa caucus. And even I think it's different than the Iowa caucuses, sort of a one-off like, oh, it was rigged. It was stolen from me. And then he goes on to win a bunch of things and it's sort of forgotten. This isn't that. I mean, it's different in certainly in magnitude because of the office he holds. But, I mean, he made the case about the Iowa caucuses for days on end.

He made the case about Ted Cruz's father being involved in the Kennedy assassination for days on. I mean, he's he's been doing this. conspiracy stuff pretty consistently for five years. Look, I'm, I'm happy if this is the thing that gets people to recognize that, you know, the president's been making these kinds of outlandish arguments and amplifying really bad conspiracies for years, great. I think that's a healthy development. I hope you're right. I suspect you are. I mean, I've talked to some of the same kinds of, you know, increasingly disaffected Trump voters. My point is a simple one. There is a there's there's another group who um you know would have been you know prominent business men and

women who are sort of marginally interested in politics and good citizens community leaders who have kind of taken this on as a cause and thrown themselves into it and that's sort of a a counter trend that has me concerned yeah the only i'd add to that is is in some ways it's it's almost a little irrelevant about what the average voter starts to think about him now that we're in this phase and all of that, for Trump to continue the schick that he's doing, he has to say anybody who disagrees with him is in on it. And so he is shedding once loyal allies by the day.

I mean, Brian Kemp, he really thinks Brian Kemp is going to really go out there and stump for Trump the way he once did, given that he's just been accused of being in on Hugo Chavez's, scheme to steal the election. And I predict that we're going to see them turning on the Federalist Society more and more because these Federal Society judges are basically deep state men Ks who will not, you know, go along with Trump's BS. And, you know, I think Mitch McConnell doesn't want to go through this hell again. You know, he's Roy Sharder and Joe Oz, too.

And he's like, I've seen this before and got to. is my witness, I'm not going through it again. And I just think that as a matter of the politics, he's not going to have Fox on his side if he continues demonizing Fox. He is shedding his natural constituency as he's slowly, you know, as he's, you know, eating his own political capital to sustain this psychological narrative. And I, so I think it sets him up poorly for 2024. The problem is you still have this problem of if he can get a plurality of,

voters in a primary, that makes him a very formidable candidate. And that's, that's, that's, that's still a real problem. Yeah, I don't disagree with your basic takeaway there. I would just say for, for governor camp as a specific example, you know, when he certified the, the results, he said in effect, I'm certifying the results because this is what happened in Georgia. This is the thing, which is a, which is a big, you know, contradicted what the president's been claiming pretty consistently. And then he ended basically with a, uh, a pronouncement that he stands by the president, that he's a Trump fan.

I mean, there, as long as people, as long as there's a perception that Donald Trump has this, you know, this sway over the Republican base, I think you'll, you'll continue to see people,

um, defer to him in that way. And with that, uh, Jonah, take it away. Um, going in a different stylistic mode and previous setup,

I'll just get, cut to the chase and ask a question very quickly. No, I, I was on special report last night, and one of the topics was the COVID stuff and the decision by the CDC, not quite a decision yet, but while we're recording this, they may formalize it, but the guidance to the CDC from this outside board was that the first people to get the vaccines should be the medical professionals, doctors, nurses, EMTs, frontline medical workers in every sense. And I don't think there's anybody in America

who's to be taken seriously has a profound disagreement with that part of it. And then the second part was people in long-term care assisted living areas and are institutions. And I think that's probably the right call too. But it just sort of bothered me that I didn't say this last night,

so I'm kind of venting my assistance. sprituscalier, it seems to me that we should have a very serious priority for somehow Siri thinks, every time as I say the word serious, I'm calling for her, that once you do those, once you do that triage, at the very top of the list should probably be teachers and school administrators so that the teachers unions no longer have this uh and and compel them to take it as well make it mandatory as part of their employment um uh no longer have this excuse about their personal safety so we can get the schools back open because if you want to get the economy back open you got to get kids back in schools if you want to get the psychology of the country back in shape um uh you need

to sort of liberate parents from the the hell of having kids running around the house and doing Zoom classes and all the rest. And not that I don't love my own daughter, but I just sort of curious, where do you guys think the politics of COVID go now that we can definitely see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's still pretty far down the other end of the tunnel and it's going to be a bad winter. I think we can all agree that Trump's prediction that after the election we wouldn't hear about COVID anymore turned out not to be true. But where do you guys see the politics of all this playing out in the near term and into

2021? I'll start with you, Sarah. I'm actually very concerned, not about the order in which we do this. I think there's going to be some skirmishes and people trying to score some points over the order. I am worried, fast forward to April, let's say, when many people, have had an opportunity to get the virus or the people, I think, who will be at the, I don't know, the top of our economy. And you'll have increasing inequality, which you've had

already because of this pandemic, where folks at the bottom of the economy are getting the most hurt. They're the ones losing their jobs, and they're the ones whose kids then are going to school. And it's just, it's compounding itself over and over again. And access to the vaccine, I'm worried will be the same, except that when the folks at the top of the economy have all gotten the vaccine, they're going to be done caring. Because now, you know, well, if you don't have the vaccine, you can get on this plane or you can not get on this plane, but, you know, die at your own will type thing. Because there's going to be this assumption that everyone's had the same opportunity to get the vaccine because it's quote unquote been available when we know that

that's not the same for the exact reason. When both people have lost their jobs and their, you know, kids have been out of school and they are struggling to get very, basic things done in their life. Or they live in a rural part of the country where the economy is collapsing before coronavirus and then extra collapse now. And we're expecting them to be able to figure out where the vaccine is being distributed and get there, whether they have health insurance or not, to find a way to get it. And then there's going to be no more protection for them. And so I think you could even see a little bump, perhaps, in people getting coronavirus. But the media will have moved on because they'll all have the vaccine and the folks running the

economy will have all moved on because they'll have the vaccine. It'll sort of be like, well, why don't you have the vaccine? It's a good point. David, thoughts? Yeah, I think Sarah raises a really good point about the practical reality of this vaccine distribution. I mean, you're going to have millions of upper middle class helicopter parents helicoptering over their local pharmacies. ready to immediately pounce when that vaccine is available. And then you're going to also have a call to essentially say, okay, let's reopen as much as possible with proof of vaccination. And so, you know, you're going to have,

you need to have a vaccine to go to school. You need to have a vaccine to teach in school. You need to have a vaccine. What kind of other element, you need to have a vaccine to go back into the office. You need to have a vaccine to do A, B, C, D, and E. while it's still not quite universally available. I mean, I think that's one tension that you're going to see and you're going to end up with this sort of class-based difference

where those people who are sort of helicoptering for advantage and have the ability to sort of helicopter for advantage as opposed to hanging on by their fingernails in life are going to do it and they're going to attain an advantage here. I think it's almost inevitable that we'll see that. But the thing that I'm really worried about, Look, we got a lot of time between now and when the virus is going to be, I mean, the vaccine's going to be available in any real major numbers to impact sort of that herd immunity calculation. And the carnage between now and then may be just staggering.

I mean, I'm looking at the world am meters from yesterday, 182,000 new cases yesterday, 2,614 deaths yesterday. Now, some of that is distorted but from hangover from the holiday weekend, but that's, I think, the fourth worst day and the whole pandemic going back to when hospitals were overwhelmed in the Northeast. And we haven't even started winter really yet. And there's an enormous amount of fatigue surrounding people's pandemic restrictions, an enormous amount of resentment that keeps building around vaccine, I mean, around virus hypocrisy. you know so we had what um the day after gavin newsome had his french laundry jaunt we now find out that the san francisco mayor had london breed had her own french laundry jod at what at what point it's it almost seems like we need to keep a list of the major politicians who haven't been hypocrites uh so far in the course of this pandemic that raises one quick question

i'm sorry to interrupt it steve does this affect our planned french laundry retreat for Christmas. Jonah, that was a Jonah only thing for premium members. Oh, well, that's a bummer. But so we're still going to do. I still get to go. You're in. You're on.

You can go with health care lobbyists like Gavin News like Gavin Newsom did. I'm sorry to interrupt, David. I think there's a, I think there's a really valid point there on the, the, the likely socioeconomic effects of the distribution of the vaccine. And we know that it would be exacerbating, as Sarah said, not just the ravages of the virus itself, but also what we've seen in the early, you know, the early sort of secondary and tertiary effects,

both as it relates to unemployment and also schooling. The Washington Post had a story this past week about, the effects of low-income children and the remote schooling and what it's done to their performance in school relative to what it's done for middle and upper-class income kids. And it was a heartbreaking read. The NIH just had a study that said that there was an enormous amount of child abuse that they wouldn't have missed had not been for the fact that kids weren't reporting to schools. I mean, like bad child abuse.

I mean, there's bad things going on by doing all of this. Anyway, go on it. But, you know, it's not just poor school performance. Just bad stuff is going on. Well, so my question then to kind of throw this back at Sarah, who raised it, is there a policy way of addressing this? I mean, we've seen primarily coming from the left, people floating ideas or plans to vaccinate those who have been disproportionately affected. by this. In some cases, they've made this a race argument. Is there a case for prioritizing how the vaccine is distributed not only on a vulnerability scale, but is there a policy

case for doing it on a socioeconomic basis? I have a different idea that won't happen. we're talking about a stimulus, let's say it's $1,500 per person. We should tie the stimulus to the vaccine. Yeah. Pay people to get it. Pay people to get the vaccine. And that's the way that you'll be able to affect in this sort of downstream way, the vaccine being accessible,

and then providing that incentive to get people to, take the effort to go find it. And I don't know of another better way to do that because the distribution alone, you should have make sure that we have distribution centers in all sorts of places. We should do that regardless. And I think we will do that regardless. But I don't think that will necessarily fix the underlying problem. And I'm not saying my $1,500 being tied to the vaccine will fix it entirely. But I think it will help a lot. And I just don't see anyone really talking about doing it. And I don't understand why. I'm not sure that that's that crazy. I've seen, I've seen that floated in several different places. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's part of the eventual

solution here. I mean, one way to think about it is the helicopter parents that David is talking about. They may want to get the vaccine and they may be willing to pay $1,500. They're probably less likely to be willing to wait in the line down DMV style for $1,500. And so you're kind of flipping the incentive structure in a certain way. I think it makes a lot of sense. Not only does that makes sense, Sarah, but I have formally tweeted my endorsement of the idea days ago. What? Yes. Sorry I missed it.

Yes, my formal tweeted endorsement makes it, what, 40% more likely to happen now? Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, just based on how court cases have been coming out after we've talked about them and advisory opinions, I mean, at least 40%. Yeah, at least, at the very least. And let's take a break to hear from Gabby Insurance. You know you're probably overpaying on car and home insurance? Sure, you'd love to save money, but is spending hours on your own shopping for a lower rate to maybe save a few bucks worth it?

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That's gabbi.com slash dispatch. Gabby.com slash dispatch. All right. Steve, last topic. I'm sorry, David. David, last topic to you. What am I a potted plant? Okay, so let's go to foreign policy

and the assassination of the Iranian nuclear scientist, which in a, you know, in a more normal news cycle would be something that we would be talking about quite a bit. And I want to start with Steve. And here's my question. So it appears the available evidence indicates that it was likely an Israeli ambush that took out the Iranian, one of Iran's top nuclear scientists, Mosin Fakrida. Henceforth, the Iranian scientist. The Iranian scientist.

And so I think this is, it's a perilous. Anytime you're, you know, when Soleimani was killed, it's a perilous moment. When anytime you engage in that kind of aggressive action, especially on Iranian soil, it's an escalation. It's a perilous moment. But here's the interesting question to me, just from a standpoint of geopolitics, and strategy, and assuming it was the Israelis, did they pick the perfect time to take a gamble here? Because as we've talked about in the morning dispatch, didn't they put the Iranian regime in a box? Because if they launch any kind of escalation or retaliatory attack, doesn't that

mean it make it less likely that they're going to have a fresh start with the Biden administration? But at the same time, if they don't launch a retaliation and within a reasonable time period of time, doesn't that put them in trouble with their own hawks? It seems as if Israel picked exactly the right time to deal this blow on Iranian soil and may, I don't know, time will tell, may get away with it, so to speak. Steve, what do you think? Yeah, I think you're right. I'm sort of obsessed with this story and I've tried to think about it from every single geopolitical

angle because there are dozens and dozens. I would just add to the way that you set up the question, the idea that they could be certain that they would not be condemned by the Trump administration for doing what they did at this particular time, which would not have been a guarantee, I would suggest, if this had happened post-January 20, where the Biden administration, I think, would have been under tremendous international pressure, particularly from Europe and also some domestic political pressure to have condemned something like this. Yeah, I do think it puts the Iranians in the box. I think it puts the Biden administration in its own box, having heard the president and his advisors

declare repeatedly that they're interested in going back to the Iran deal, the JCPOA, or a version of it, the Iranians have made very clear in their response to this attack that, A, they're furious about it, as you would expect them to be, and B, they hold both the Israelis and the United States partially responsible for it, which I think makes diplomacy with Iran thornier proposition for the Biden administration than they may have anticipated six months ago. I don't think that's the primary reason for doing this. I mean, you've had some suggestions from folks sympathetic to the Biden administration that the reason the Israelis did this right now was to tie their hands and not allow them to go back to the Iran nuclear deal. I don't think

that's the primary motivation here. It was very clear that the Israelis have been watching this scientist for a long time. It's also, clear, just as a brief digression, when you look at what the Israelis have been able to do not just to Iran and its interests in the region, but in Iran, whether it's stealing documents that detail the nuclear program at a level we've never seen before or these kinds of targeted assassinations. The Israelis have absolutely extraordinary intelligence on Iran. I think that's not a surprise as a general proposition, but even for people who have studied

what the Israelis knew or had a sense of what the Israelis knew, I think even they're surprised at just how much they know and what they're capable of doing. I think it would be fascinated to watch this play out. I definitely think it makes the Biden administration's attempts at reviving diplomacy there more difficult. And if there's a reaction, I think it will make it harder for the Biden administration to go back to the Obama administration position of decoupling nuclear talks, nuclear diplomacy from the nature of the regime itself.

So if Iran strikes out in an asymmetrical way or conducts terrorist attacks, what it strikes Israel, what have you, it'll make it that much more difficult for the Biden administration to pretend that we can have sort of serious conversations. with the Iranians about their nuclear program, treating them as a would-be, you know, member of the civilized nations of the world if they are at the same time conducting mass terrorist attacks or otherwise attacking Israeli interests.

So Jonah, a fair historian writing a history of Trump administration foreign policy, does he or she put his approach to Iran in the W column or the L column? Unfortunately, it's an apocryphal story, I think, and it didn't actually happen. But according to legend, Chow Enlai, the former Chinese premier, was asked what he thought about how history should judge the French Revolution. And he said, according to the story, it's too early to tell. And this was in 1973.

So, I mean, I think, you know, so much of it depends on how events play out. but I personally think it goes down as the way to bet is that it goes down as a win you know I've been saying this for a very long time presidents get credit for the good things that happen in foreign policy on their watch

and they get blame for the bad things and it's not necessarily fair to suspend those rules just because Donald Trump seems to be stumbling into a lot of good fortune and but the underlying currents going on in the Middle East, it seems to me, were very propitious for him. And that's one of the great ironies

is that you don't get the success that Donald Trump had, as had with Iran and with Saudi Arabia and with Israel, if you didn't have the incredible blunders of the Obama administration. If you didn't have the Iran deal, you don't have the Emirates. You don't have Saudi Arabia thinking, holy crap, we've lost the United States as a reliable partner in the region and at least Israel is in the neighborhood and there are interests align when it comes to Iran and we don't want them to be a hegemon. And so it's one of these great examples of how if you don't have a crazy screw up in one administration, you don't give, you don't set up the next administration for a huge win. And, but that said, I think it's a win. I know, I think, you know, look, I'm pro

Israel, obviously, and, um, uh, mostly for the humus. But, uh, I think that, uh, it's, it's, it, the only problem I have is that I think fair historians are also going to look at a lot of shady Jared Kushner deals in commerce stuff. And it's going to throw a lot of this in a bad light because it's not like the Saudis care at all about good ethical business practices and ethical political practices. And if you can get good policies out of the United States of America by granting, I don't know, hotel contracts or whatever, you're going to do that. So it could look sorted, but at the 30,000 foot level, it looks like a win to me. So Sarah, yeah, I was going to say any comment on the substance and also the politics of this. It seems like we're going to come into a

new administration where the immediate power of the administration is going to be most evident in foreign policy. But I can't remember the last time I had a foreign policy discussion with anybody outside of sort of the dispatch crew. It has really receded from public attention. Which I think voters are welcoming of. That is fine with them. And yes, I don't think that this has particularly penetrated very far into the electorate to the extent that it has, Iran bad, is real good, this is a pretty simple case. No one is, you know, crying over an Iranian assassination

at this point, even if it has implications, even if there's some things that maybe weren't ideal about it, it's the wrong country to feel sympathy for in this country. And, you know, I think that President Trump will, his presidency will go down in history with two bright spots. One is Operation Warp Speed. I think that the vaccine situation looks very good right now, and I think he'll get a lot of credit for that.

And the second is his Middle East policy. I think he will get a lot of credit for that. And so to the extent this maybe even adds to it, maybe it does, that Israel is unleashed if you will, to play a larger role over there because they are less isolated. Okay, last question to you guys. And normally we do a lighter question.

This one isn't as light, but I'm just curious. Some people are feeling that because the vaccine is sort of around the corner, that they're getting fast and loose with their social distancing. And other people feel exactly the opposite. The vaccine's right around the corner. So I'm going to lock it down.

I can make it to the finish line now. I see it. And so I'm going to be extra careful because I don't want to be sort of the last coronavirus getter. David, which are you? Well, we're in this kind of a special circumstance because my oldest daughter is about to have a baby

and about to spend some serious time in the NICU. So we are in about as close to absolute lockdown as you can be. So we're being, and we've always been on the more cautious side, masking, social distancing, no reason not to mask in social distancing. And your son already had it? My son had it at University of Tennessee, along with what feels like half the population of the University of Tennessee. I know that's an exaggeration, but yeah, so he's had it. He'll be back home after exams full of antibodies. So y'all aren't going to restaurants, y'all are cooking every

night. Right. And we were very sparing in when we would go into a restaurant even before Camille came home, we would eat outside, which there's abundant places to eat outside. So we would go to restaurants, but we'd eat outside. And I have gone to movie theater. I saw Tenet opening weekend. We've talked about that on advisory opinions. I still don't understand it, but I still loved it. But yeah, Yeah, we've been on the cautious side, mainly because there was absolutely no compelling reason for us not to be on the cautious side. And now there's a super compelling reason for us to be cautious. And so the vaccine isn't affecting you one way or the other. No, it's not. And if it affects it all, it's sort of like, okay, it would be ludicrous on the stretch run to lower your guard.

Like, you can't guarantee you're not going to get it. These things aren't certain. But it feels kind of ludicrous in the stretch run to sort of say, well, now, after eight months, I'm going to lower my guard and get hammered by this thing, when you can just, you know, endure a bit longer, perhaps, and get the vaccine. Steve, is it affecting y'all's behavior? I wouldn't say the vaccine per se, but just seeing the incidents and the surge, where we live in Maryland, pretty significant, you know, anecdotally people we know who have who've gotten it who've been effective pretty serious uptick in that so we've been careful pretty

careful from the beginning we've allowed the kids to participate in their activities um some of them outdoors some of them indoor we haven't pulled back on that our kids are still in virtual school but they're doing some of their you know extracurricular sports and hockey and dance and whatnot um we've talked about pulling them from that. But I think at this point, the studies on the transmission in schools and among younger folks are pretty definitive. So I'd say we're responding more to what we see around us on a day-to-day basis than the prospect of a vaccine in a few months. But I'm eager to get it. I mean, we are sort of unanimous in our enthusiasm to get it right away, no questions or qualms.

Jonah I agree with you there's a certain David knows this stuff better and I do but you know there was that stuff about how like the most dangerous time in Vietnam was like

two weeks before you went home because you got too careful or too uncareful whatever and there does have that little bit of that feeling I guess I'm a little more on the more careful side we actually pressed the envelope a little bit this summer we did a lot

of traveling. We did a lot of fun stuff, all sort of in the moving the Goldberg family unit intact from one place to another, not like we didn't go to a lot of concerts or anything. But I told Steve the story already. I'm less careful about myself, but my mom, who's in a lot of risk groups, I think if you say COVID three times in front of her, she could die from it. We wanted to see her for Thanksgiving, and so we were going to drive up as a family unit, but to do it responsibly, we all got rapid, very expensive COVID tests. And so we get the tests. They tickled my frontal lobe with the Q-tip for like the third time, and we wait 24 hours, and on Wednesday we get noticed that my wife and I don't have it, and my daughter's test comes back, quote, inconclusive. and my wife talks to the tech, the tech says, well, we're going to, we always rerun the

inconclusives, and, but the problem is they always come back negative. And I was like, so why did you just tell us, I mean, it would come back positive. I'm sorry, they come back positive. And it's like, oh, great. So we decided to get another test, wait 24 hours, we blew up our chance to drive up for Thanksgiving itself. Turns out the tech lied. They don't rerun the inconclusive ones. The second test came in, she was negative. And so after dropping almost $1,000 on COVID tests, my daughter and I drove up just the two of us to spend time with my mom the day after Thanksgiving. And I think that sort of captures where we come down about this stuff is that on a day-to-day basis, we're a little more loosey-goosey, but when it really matters, or when there's, when judgment and prudence

comes in, we go the extra effort to be careful. And, uh, Which all I, all of this is preface to the fact that I am sure I'm going to get it the day the vaccine comes out. Yeah, I mean, I were, the vaccine is changing our behavior. If we knew that there wasn't going to be a vaccine for another year, we were planning on taking some more chances and risks in January. but now that we know that we won't get the vaccine by January, but we'll be getting it shortly thereafter, yeah, it's changing our calculus on some stuff, on travel, on seeing people still.

We've been to five restaurants total during the entirety of the pandemic, two outside and three inside the very, very small social distance. places. So we've been, I guess, more cautious than I thought we'd been compared to you guys, which I'm surprised about because I didn't think I was being, I didn't feel like I was being in, you know, in the higher level cautious group. And now I feel like I am. Who knew? Who knew? All right. Well, we hope all of you have a very healthy week this week and can maybe lay off the news and enjoy a novel, enjoy some Netflix, whatever.

it might be. David, I really loved your review of Hillbilly Elegy in your newsletter. And so I think I may watch that this week. I watched it last night. I agree with David. It was great. Yeah, I liked it a lot. That was great. It's powerful. It was really powerful. Yeah. I'm just catching up on the Mandalorian, so I'll get to West Virginia sometime soon. They're pretty different, I think. Pretty pretty different. Tatooine in West Virginia. We'll see you guys again next week. You know, With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex presale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime.

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