The Dispatch Podcast - Justice Department Turns Up the Heat

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

This week saw the Justice Department disclose new evidence that the former president and his legal team likely sought to conceal classified documents from investigators. Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and Declan are here to discuss. Plus: Alaska says no to Sarah Palin, and how should we view Mikhail Gorbachev’s legacy?   Show Notes: -TMD: Trump Team Likely Sought to Conceal Classified Documents From Investigators, DOJ Says -The Sweep: How Will Abortion Play in the Midterms? -G-File: Grading Gorby on a Curve Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and the morning dispatch newsletter editor, Declan Garvey. Plenty to discuss today. We will start with Mara Lago and the latest on the Department of Justice's investigation into former president Donald Trump. And as we get into the swing of the midterm elections, it's almost Labor Day, and that means rubbers hitting the road across the country as Democrats are starting to breathe a sigh of relief, I think. And lastly, with the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, we're going to have Jonah just reflect on the last 70 years of his life or so.

Jonah's life. I didn't even take the bait on rubbers meet the road. And you're giving me this crap. I get no credit for anything around here. Rubbers meet the road. What are you, we're talking about, like, outside of the... There's four tires, Jodda. Four.

They all have rubber. Do I need to explain to you collective nouns versus singular nouns? And like, and how that sounds like something people are at their window outside of the Mustang ranch? Let's dive right in. We're going to... Let's dive right in. We're going to start with the latest in Mar-a-Lago. We are awaiting a ruling from that...

Florida district judge about whether she will appoint a special master, the Department of Justice, making several arguments. One, that the special master at this point is moot because the investigative team has actually already reviewed all the materials after the justice filter team already removed what they believe to be potentially attorney-client classified material. They then reject entirely the idea that executive privilege can be asserted against another part of the executive branch. And, of course, the real kicker arguing that none of these documents actually belong to Donald Trump. They belong to the government, the American people, the National Archives. And therefore, he doesn't have standing to argue about what should happen to the documents or getting them back or who should review them.

An example I used on the flagship podcast is that if I, you know, park my car in Steve's garage and the police come and get it, it doesn't actually matter whether Steve stole my car. He doesn't get my car back from the police. And that's a little bit of what DOJ's argument is. The Trump team responding late last night, basically saying fruit of the poisonous tree, which doesn't make any sense in the context. That's about something totally different. Nevertheless, the judge had said she was interested in appointing the special master,

and I think we'll find out later today after we record this. But setting all of that, not aside, ingesting. all of that, Steve? I'm curious if you think this will continue to be a top news topic, which has really moved the focus onto Donald Trump from Joe Biden in the last few weeks. Is this going to continue? Our Republicans are going to prevail on Donald Trump to chill a little? And rumors abound that Donald Trump has considered postponing his presidential announcement until this cools down with Republicans telling him that the last thing they need is to constantly be talking about Donald Trump

under FBI investigation. Yeah, so I'm skeptical of those rumors. I don't think that Donald Trump is suddenly listening to Republicans complaining to him about their electoral prospects. And I frankly don't believe that there are too many Republicans who have the courage to go to Donald Trump and say, hey, man, pipe down. They haven't done it in the past.

There's no reason to believe that they're going to do it now. I mean, this is really quite the spectacle. You know, when the story first broke, when the raid happened, you had Republicans leaping out to defend Donald Trump in a manner that we're all accustomed to, not only defending him as the victim of an unprecedented raid, but in many cases going much further, suggesting that this was obvious evidence of the politicization of the Department of Justice, that in fact the FBI may well have been planted. documents. You heard that from Rand Paul and others, even Marco Rubio was within 24 hours excoriating the DOJ and the FBI for overreach. And they were saying all of this at a time when we didn't really know what had happened. There was some reason for Republicans to be defensive about the way that the FBI treated Donald Trump. If you go back and look, as Sarah, you've pointed out before, at the treatment of Donald Trump in the context of,

of the Russian investigation, context of crossfire hurricane. You had people in effect making up stuff in support of FISA warrants to get him. You have very politicized statements that were later made public by FBI officials. So there are reasons for Republicans to be concerned that the FBI might be taking a sort of political partisan position on Donald Trump. That's not what they were saying in this case. They weren't saying there's all this precedent we should withhold judgment until we know exactly what happened. They were claiming to know exactly what happened. And what they said was, this is totally unfair. This is the former president being victim of an overzealous FBI. And by the way, they may have planted evidence. Well, now we've gotten over the past several

weeks as the Trump team has attempted, I guess, to mount a defense. It's hard to know exactly what they're doing, to be honest, because if they're attempting to mount a defense, I can't remember a more incompetent defense in recent history. But if that's what they're doing, we have, as a result of their efforts, learned more and more about what the FBI is doing. And it turns out, actually, the things that the FBI was saying at the beginning of this, to explain their actions, are true. And in some cases, you could argue that they may have, in fact, been understated. As you say, Sarah, the president kept these documents he wasn't entitled to keep. And as, as Clon pointed out in yesterday's morning dispatch, as we've talked about here before, anyone other than a former president who

did this would be in jail, would have lost the job would be in jail. So there are these double standards. I do think, you know, this is yet again, for people who aren't in the sort of hyper-partisan polarized on one team or another in this environment, you take a step back and you look at this and you say, wow, it sure seems to me like all of the Republicans who were really worried about Hillary Clinton, the same people who were on the floor of the convention in Cleveland in 2016 chanting, lock her up because of her mishandling or deliberate concealing documents that could have put national security in danger, are eager to defend or excuse Donald Trump. And the very same Democrats who defended or excused Hillary Clinton back in 2016 are the ones who are

suddenly very concerned about the risks to national security by the mishandling of classified material by senior government officials. It's a crappy moment. I think Donald Trump is in trouble. Sarah, I would like to, if I can, ask you, have you ever seen more incompetent lawyering? And I mean, that is a serious question. I mean, I don't mean that. I mean, there's a humorous element to it because it has been, you know, the legal equivalent of Keystone cops. But I just, this is just amazing. The stuff that they say in defense of them gets him in more trouble, gets themselves in trouble. They're clueless.

So you have a few problems compounding themselves. So take your question very seriously, which is Donald Trump had the reputation for not paying his lawyers. And so that already caused a lot of high-end legal teams to think twice about taking him on as a client. Then you have the people who did take him on as a client acting like buffoons and So then there was sort of a reputational cost to lawyering for Donald Trump. But perhaps we've moved into a new phase of this, which is A, the lawyers themselves are in some legal jeopardy here, particularly Christina Bob, who signed the declaration that she had done personally due diligence to look in the boxes in the storage room at Mar-a-Lago and determine there were no classified documents or documents with classified markings on them, something we know to be false. Now, you know, you can always miss something. The question is, is it unreasonable at this point to think that she did due diligence?

Like, if you open the box and there's a folder that says top secret, you didn't do due diligence. So I think she is in some legal jeopardy over that. So that's a problem is that the lawyers have their own legal problems. And this is a little bit of an Elon Musk situation where the lawyers put forward arguments and then their client sits on truth social or on some other media outlet and undermines their legal arguments. You know, most recently the whole he declassified it. You'll notice they have not made that argument in a single legal filing. Their client keeps saying that he declassified all these, but they haven't put that forward in any official court document, which is interesting. Also, you know,

he said yesterday on truth social that the you know one of the documents was found in a carton not helpful dude let your lawyers do this and so you know in the same way that i'll get this like little stat a little bit wrong but you know Elon Musk hasn't had a general counsel for more than six months or something that's a little bit of the problem here you couldn't attract the top tier legal talent in the first place. Then it became embarrassing. Then the lawyers got themselves in trouble because they weren't maybe qualified to be doing this. And then their client cuts their legs out from under him, probably because he doesn't trust his lawyers and doesn't think they're the top tier people to begin with. And so the vicious cycle begins. It's a real problem.

Now, let's also, though, add into this, the idea that like they need a special master, that's never going to do any good for Donald Trump. So we're fighting over something so tangential. It's like a tangent to the tangents tangent. The special master is a court-appointed lawyer, basically, who would oversee reviewing the documents in question to determine which documents the Department of Justice investigators should be able to look at. As they said, the Department of Justice says they've already looked at all the documents. They already filtered them. The team's already looked at them, so it's really, really moot. And then again, the other part that they asked for was to get the documents back, that's simply not going to happen and would still be unrelated to

whether Donald Trump violated any of those statutes in terms of the actual substance on mishandling of classified information or national security information and obstruction, unrelated to those two things. And remember, we're dealing with a different judge than the judge who actually signed the warrant and is overseeing the merits of the case. But, Sarah, just point of information. My understanding is that the Trump lawyers arguing for the special master thing, the new wrinkle that they're arguing about is that they want the special master to consider issues of executive privilege,

which seems ridiculous on its face to me because it's the executive branch asking for this stuff back and executive privilege resides in the office of the presidency it is not like Donald Trump couldn't have invoked prima nocta when he was president

but he really can't now because he's not president right okay so there's three reasons why he's okay thanks thanks for that there's three reasons why the executive privilege argument doesn't work one

let's even say Donald Trump was still president the executive asserting executive privilege against his own executive branch doesn't work. That's not a thing. Executive privilege is asserted against a different branch, the judiciary or Congress. All right. So that's one. Two, there is sort of longstanding Nixon-esque precedent that a criminal investigation most of the time overcomes executive privilege.

Like any privilege, right? It's not absolute. Things can become more important. It's a balancing test, and criminal investigations have been held by the courts to be more important than executive privilege.

C.EG. Clinton, by the way, as well. Three, of course, is the problem that he doesn't own the documents. They're not his. By virtue of saying that he's asserting executive privilege, he's saying that these were work documents. Therefore, they don't belong to him.

Therefore, he can't assert executive privilege over work documents. because those were all supposed to be given to the National Archives when he left. So those are three little reasons why that argument is legally unmeritorious to me. Declan, what are your thoughts? Correct me if I'm wrong, Sarah, but my understanding is that... She'll correct you if you're right. Also true.

My understanding is that by appealing or filing this motion appealing for a special master, Trump and his legal team, in a sense, opened themselves up to what we saw in the DOJ filing this week. The DOJ wasn't going to be able to publicly release a lot of the information that they did that we saw way too late on Tuesday night for morning newsletter editors who were about to go to bed. I think it came out at 11.40 p.m. Let's be clear. Just a fact check here, there's no chance you were about to go to bed at 1145. That's like 7 p.m. That would have been the earliest time in the, yeah, in the past three years. Also, let me tell you how lawyers work, Declan.

When it's a midnight filing deadline, 1140 is early. It's about 18 minutes early. Okay. Well, that filing, which we saw Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, kind of contained a ton of information that wasn't public in the affidavit, was either redacted or not be able to be included. You know, we got more information about the potential intent behind the inability or the refusal to turn over documents in accordance with a subpoena earlier this year. We saw this picture that has kind of, you know, is honestly one that we'll probably see in history books of all of this classified and top secret information sprawled across the floor at Mara Lago.

And I don't think any of this would have been able to, you know, we'd probably find it out eventually, but not now if the Trump legal team hadn't filed this special master request. And so where's, oh, go ahead, Sarah. Oh, no, I just, I think there were three really important things that we learned from the filing that you're right. We would not have learned for a while, at least, in the course of the merits part of this investigation. A, the line that said that the lawyers and F.P. B.I agents reviewing that, that many of them had to get additional security clearances to read the documents that were being kept in drawers in Donald Trump's office and not in the storage room. But maybe the, and the picture, I think the picture is number two. I mean, pictures worth a thousand words, I would argue like maybe 10,000 this time. And the pushback, by the way, from GOP Judiciary Committee Twitter account that said, oh, that Time magazine covers a real national security threat, that Twitter account needs to be shut down. You are not helping your team.

Is a Democrat running that Twitter account? Time. And again, these people have to delete these tweets because they're either wrong, stupid, the opposite of what they think they mean. Anyway, but the biggest thing that we learned was why they had to get a search warrant, that they did try the subpoena route, that the Trump team told them they had complied with the subpoena, let them into the storage room to see that the box. were there, wouldn't let them look in the boxes, and that's where they said, fine, we don't need to look in the boxes if you'll sign this declaration saying that you've looked in the boxes, you've done due diligence, and there's no classified material. Of course, Christina Bob, Trump's

attorney, did sign that declaration. They then, and this is the part we still don't know, they then get a source that says, nope, that's just simply not true. There's tons of classified material that is both in the storage room and not in the storage room, again, something they denied in that declaration. All of that being laid out as to why the search warrant was needed and they couldn't just continue along the subpoena route. We had sort of presumed that, assumed it, but to have them lay it out, it really, again, it's every time Donald Trump is out there making an argument or that Republicans kind of get ahead of themselves making an argument to defend them, he is opening up the department is saying like, well, nope, this is why we had to do it. And showing

exactly the declaration that the Trump team signed, which is, again, to actually prosecute someone for that, you have to show kind of a willfulness that they knew that they were lying. But regardless, it is factually untrue. Whether she committed a crime in signing it or not, it is certainly not accurate anymore. So, declining to wait even further to ever be asked a question 20 minutes into this podcast. I just want to chime in on one thing. You mentioned the House GOP Twitter feed House GOP

Judiciary Committee Twitter feed there is this thing that defending Trump makes people stupid and it is it is so stunning to me

like so Donald Trump says you know first of all these photo you know he thinks a big defense is that when it's a big gotcha that this picture

of the stuff on the floor he thinks is an attempt to make it seem like he just left all those classified material on the floor, right? And so he posted this thing, let me clarify, that's not what it was. They were in cartons. Well, yeah, it's an evidence photo.

Like, if you, I mean, I tweeted about this earlier, but like, if you ever see the police when they do one of these seizures or the FBI does it on these seizures and they get like 50 kilos of cocaine and 40 AK-47s, when they show up for the raid, it's not all neatly set up on the table like that. right they put it on the table for a photograph and that's what that thing was was a photograph of the evidence that they found and i saw that the word staged was trending this morning on twitter and like dinesh de suza and a bunch of gop usual suspects are all saying Trump called out the deep state on the staged photo, right?

And it makes you feel stupid to have to engage in this stuff. But my favorite thing about that, I'm sorry, that truth, post, which is post-truth, was where Trump said, look at all that stuff on the floor. It didn't happen, but they shouldn't be taking a picture or something to that effect. but good thing I declassified all of it. Now, as you pointed out, Trump's lawyers have not actually claimed any such claim in court, but he talks about declassification like Michael Scott in the office talking about bankruptcy. Like, it's a thing you declare.

If the idea is that somehow, because he, like, he seems to imply all the time that if a president declassifies something, that means the information that has been declassified no longer is problematic if it revealed to the world, right? Like, it's a magic spell. Like, under normal circumstances, we wouldn't want the Russians to know the code to this safe or, like, the location of this submarine. But the second I declassify it,

it is like, I've said apricadabra, and now the Russians won't care anymore. And there are a bunch of people, I see this all over the place where people talk about, Trump declassified it, so it doesn't matter what's in it because it's not secret anymore. The reason it was secret is it was supposed to be secret. And it just, there's this continuous feeling of taking crazy pills having to engage in some of this stuff. I'm done.

I do think that the DOJ photo that they put into the filing that they're then saying was stage, when I saw that that was trending and that people were saying like, aha, the photo was stage. I was like, ah, it's a real failure of imagination on DOJ's part. never occurred to them. I assure you that anyone didn't know that they do that. As you just said, like with drug raids, with anything, I mean, I have staged photos exactly like that when I was at the Department of Justice because they're not, like, it's not staged if everyone knows that you put the stuff where you put it for the photo. If we all get together as dispatchers for a group photo and then someone says, that's fake.

Those guys don't work like that. I've been to their office. They're at different desks. They do a lot of stuff remote. That's not how the dispatch works. That doesn't make the staged photo wrong in any way. It makes you a crazy person. I'm sorry.

It was just driving me crazy. You missed the best part of the Trump truth from this photo disputing it is that he was made very clear to say that the pictures were, quote, released photographically, which I can't think of another way that pictures could be released other than photographically. Have you heard the new photo? It smells terrific. This is, we've talked about all sorts of different self-inflicted wounds here by the Trump

legal team, but I think that this is one of the most damaging things they could do and probably why we saw reports in recent days that Trump is considering delaying. his presidential announcement is that by making all of this public, making all of it very clear, he's essentially, you know, not entirely not for the clown caucus, Jim Jordan, House GOP, judiciary wing of the party, but you're seeing less and less defense of this from the majority, not the majority, reasonable Republicans, you know, kind of people who were reflexively willing to defend him and kind of take his side and give him the benefit of the doubt aren't doing that publicly anymore. And in fact, you're seeing some people who, you know, have been fairly Trump aligned

over the past couple years. I saw Rod Dreyer and the American Conservative came out with a piece saying, like, you know, this is actually really bad. You know, we cared about this with Hillary Clinton. We should care about it with Trump. And if we re-nominate this guy, we'll deserve to lose. and it will be terrible for the country. Roy Blunt, you know, not the most Trumpy guy in the Senate, but was on Sunday shows this weekend saying, you know, why didn't he return this information? Why was it still in his possession?

Steve Ducey, the host of Fox and Friends, which is, you know, I'm sure Trump saw it when he was watching it, said yesterday, like, Mr. President, what are you doing having this information still? You know, why wouldn't you turn it over? And so, you know, it's giving. a permission structure, not that there weren't a million and one already, for Republicans who don't want him to be the nominee in 2024 to either stay silent instead of continuing to defend him

or, you know, come out and talk about reasons why he might not want to be the nominee. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain, on top of everything else, is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions.

You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same-day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly. up to $3 million in coverage, with a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of families 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 ethos.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. I think that's a great segue into the midterm elections. So, you know, if we sort of take this in quarters of the year? The first quarter of this year was all about how large the Republican wave would be. Joe Biden's approval numbers were continuing to go down every time they were sampled.

New districts were coming on to the competitive map that were previously thought to be safe Democratic districts. Fast forward to the summer and several things start to move at once. You have the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade. You have gas prices, level off and start to drop and you have inflation at least no longer increasing month over month and Joe Biden's approval numbers no longer decreasing they sort of go up maybe they're leveling off however you want to phrase it and the result is a lot of now of those same districts moving back into the safe Democrat category polling showing many of these Republican candidates that made it through their primary struggling and a money problem

on the Republican side. Something that we don't talk about a lot here because it's kind of in the weeds. But donors, either, like Peter Thiel, saying that, nope, my job was just to help these guys through the primary. I'm out for the general, which is a weird thing to say.

Because again, as I've said repeatedly, the effect of Trump or a new Republican party won't be measured in the primaries. It'll be measured by who you can actually get into office, who can win over general election voters. All right. So as we start the first,

fall, what's going to happen now, Steve? Which of those two quarters is going to be more representative of the final run into the midterm elections here? I mean, I think there are, I agree with your, your framing. I think there are basically three main questions. Trump, abortion, and the economy. And when I say the economy, I mean inflation primarily. And when I say inflation, I mean gas prices. more than I mean anything else. I'm so glad you said that, by the way, because I think exactly that. It's gas prices.

It's the thing people do every week. Gas prices, I think, are the most obvious thing to voters when they think about how they're spending their money. I mean, as you say, they do it every week, or in my case, eight times a week because you have inefficient cars. And four kids. And lots of children.

And lots of kids and tons of driving. But what we've seen over the past two months is a precipitous drop in gas prices. National average, I believe, is now about 379, according to Patrick DeHan at GasBuddy, who monitors this on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour basis. That matters when people try to figure out how much money they have to spend and they're spending $2 less per gallon over the last three months, they noticed that. They're predicted to fall more in the coming weeks. DeHan says that he thinks they'll fall another 35 to 65 cents per gallon and that you'll start to see a growing number of states with average prices below $3. So really

getting back to where we were a year ago. And that will shape how people, even if you're paying more per pound of ground beef at the grocery store, that will shape how people feel about this. And of course, there are the secondary and tertiary effects of lower gas prices on everything else, right? Everything else that's delivered by vehicles that need gas. So there is some relief. There are some signs that there could be complications. We don't know about hurricanes. There are factors that we can't predict. But right now, if you're Joe Biden and the Democrats, that's trending in the right direction. On abortion, there's a new Wall Street Journal pull out this morning, Thursday morning, making the case, I think now pretty well accepted,

that Post Dobbs world is settling in favor of people who are pro-choice, in favor of Democrats on that issue. And that that's that we've seen movement, particularly among white suburban women voters, back to Democrats because of that issue. And you're also seeing, I believe in the Wall Street Journal poll, the greatest number of people who said that they were going to vote because of one issue in particular was because of abortion. So you have those two things, I think, conspiring against Republicans and making their case against Joe Biden more difficult. I also think Republicans come in with a difficult time making a case against Joe Biden. What are they going to attack him on spending? I mean, Donald Trump spent $7.8 trillion in four years. Some of that was because of the pandemic. Some of it could be justified. But Republicans weren't terribly concerned about spending in size and scope of government issues under Donald Trump. If they're suddenly concerned about it now, I don't think voters are going to listen to them. They also haven't exercised their policy argument muscles very much anymore. It's basically all culture war all the time. So Republicans have a difficult time making policy arguments, I think, that stick. And policy argument,

like it or not are likely to be the ones I think that people are debating to a certain extent going into these elections. And then the final question, of course, is Trump himself. And for all the reasons we spent the first 20 minutes talking about this podcast, he's likely to remain front and center. He doesn't want to go away. It serves Donald Trump's interest to be in the spotlight. He just loves it on sort of a visceral level. And even if Republicans wish that he weren't, they're not going to put out there. The final quick point, if you look at what's happened over the past 24 hours among Senate Republicans, there has exploded on to the public discussion, this debate between Mitch McConnell, leader of Senate Republicans, and Rick Scott, who's running the Senate

Republicans re-election arm. Rick Scott has an op-ed out in the Washington Examiner this morning where he just fully takes on, without naming Mitch McConnell, bashes Mitch McConnell for even dating to question that Republican candidates recruited who won primaries and are struggling now in general election candidates might be bad candidates. Mitch McConnell has alluded to this. There's a big sort of quiet fight about it. Well, that quiet fight got very loud overnight. And Rick Scott is going after Mitch McConnell.

He wrote this op-ed in the Washington Examiner where he says, you know, Washington versus Republicans in the state are Washington versus voters. And it's a whole pose where Rick Scott, the former governor of Florida, is saying, look, we can't listen to these D.C. insiders and Republicans who are questioning our candidates, we have to listen to the wisdom of the voters. There's a sort of triple irony there because I would be willing to bet that the people who drafted that op-ed for Rick Scott are exactly the kind of Washington consultants that he's bashing in this op-ed. Anyway, I think the ground has certainly shifted for Republicans.

It doesn't mean that it can't shift back. The overall ground is still favorable for Republican House candidates. But it's going to be a much more competitive election than we would have guessed. Jonah, I want to provide the slight counter argument to what Steve said, which is, you know, these narratives take hold and they always are bigger than the reality, like the nut of what it actually is. So yes, there are some Republican candidates who are not as strong as maybe some other candidates would have been, maybe. But it's sort of being blown up. And I think Republicans have, you know, been making the case that, like, this looks like people are just trying to demoralize Republicans. So stop just

repeating this idea that Republicans aren't doing well when, in fact, the polls haven't shifted that much in terms of Joe Biden's approval numbers going up. Joe Biden's approval numbers were going down post-November, at least, because of Democrats saying they didn't approve of him. they were always going to come back, as they always do, as both sides, by the way, always do come the fall. People sort of retreat to their initial partisan positions, and they play around in the off year by lodging their disapproval. But they were never going to vote for the Republican. And in fact, now for the same reason, Joe Biden's approval number went down starting, you know, last year among Democrats, particularly among young Democrats. Yep, you're seeing it go back up.

Not among independents or Republicans. among Democrats. And so that's not actually particularly meaningful to the outcome of the midterm elections, and that it's a whole lot of pundits trying to sound useful when, in fact, not much has changed. Maybe the red wave was overestimated in February. It's being underestimated now, but the fundamentals, frankly, are going to come down to gas prices. Yeah. So, there's a lot there. let me take the gas prices thing since you and Steve are on the same page. I think it has less to do with the fact that gas prices are lower than it has to do with the fact that they've stopped rising.

And what I mean by that is that when they're rising, you always have this fear, you know, that feeling that you get when you're walking in dark and you miss a step and you don't know where you're going to land and you have that sort of pity your stomach kind of like panic. You know, you also get it when you would hear, you know, you know, George W. Bush sometimes try to finish a sentence. You just didn't know if he was going to stick the landing kind of thing. But my point is that when you don't know where the bottom is,

where you don't know where this thing is going to end, you kind of feel like society is out of control. And the sense of unease that was caused by prices continuing to go up had less to do, it didn't just have to do with the expense of it. It had to do with the fear of what's next month going to be like. can I handle that? And so the second you start seeing it trend down even a little, because gas prices are still high,

you change the vibe. And I think that that, it's the vibe shift, the phrase I hate using, that I think is what's really going on here. Because I think you're right. Eventually the races are all going to tighten and all that. But there was a really, really hubristic vibe at the beginning of the year where if you said

you thought there was going to be a red wave, you know, someone would come in and say, red wave, red tsunami, you know, and that was sort of silly, but it seemed more accurate at the time because you had the historical trends on your back, on your side, only three midterms, you know, starting in 1934 where the president didn't lose major seats. And given that the Republicans did actually did well in the House in 2020, it kind of, and there was all these anecdotal things. It kind of felt like

there was good reason to believe there was going to be if not a red tsunami, then a real red wave. I think that there is some merit to the vibe shift, though. And I think what it is, and I've been meaning to test this theory out on you when I had you on the flagship podcast the other day.

We have a lot of flagship podcasts. By the way, this is the flagship podcast. It's called the dispatch podcast. The other day, I mentioned this last week on this podcast, this perfectly fine podcast. And I said, so I have this theory that part of the reason why Trump is hurting Republicans and part of the reason why Dobbs is hurting Republicans isn't because of any, like,

isn't necessarily because of the issue of abortion or even the issue of Trump's classified documents. it's that the normal structural advantage for parties out of power is that they're out of power and so any discontent with the status quo they can sign up for it and endorse and you don't like high gas prices neither do we will fix it

don't like this neither do we will fix it don't blame us we're out of power and that being out of power thing lets you be all things to all people the problem since Dobbs is that it sure as hell feels like Republicans are driving a lot of important public policy out there. You have state legislatures who are in the driver's seat about, you know, unpopular, ill-thought-out approaches to

abortion in terms of, you know, no exceptions. And I know there actually are exceptions for the health of the mother and the Democrats in the media are being dishonest about that. But regardless, you get these horror stories that come from Republicans having these restrictions and it feels, and it's from a Republican-controlled Supreme Court, Republican governors, Republican state legislatures, and not just that on that, on things like immigration, too, with Abbott's sending, you know,

illegal immigrants to New York and elsewhere. It just feels like they have a much bigger hand in policymaking than the out-party normally does. And then Trump comes along, and we're having arguments about his executive privilege. We're having arguments where people are saying you have to respect the president, and you have arguments about, like, what is, you know,

about, you know, is ridiculous posting on social media and what it means and everyone's having to declare loyalty. And it's reminding a whole bunch of people what it was like when Trump was president. And you marry that to the climate of all these policy things that feel like it. And all of a sudden, midterm elections are supposed to be a referendum on the president. And all of a sudden, it feels like a choice. And that is a really important vibe shift. and it really is dangerous for these subpar senatorial candidates because senatorial candidates are much more referendum on the president than House candidates are anyway.

Just like in the run-up to 2016, you go back and look at that polling when the media was focused on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump was doing well. When the media was mostly focused on Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton was doing well. And what happened in the very last few days, it focused on Hillary Clinton. He pulls ahead by just a hair. Declan, the Democrats increased their landmash representation by something like 104% last night. There is a Democratic House member in Alaska. Will you explain how this happened in a very red state?

It is a very red state, and it's a state that hasn't had a Democratic representative in the House, and I think 49 years. Most of that is because Don Young, the former representative, represented Alaska for 49 years. For 49 years, yeah. But, yes, a Democrat, Mary Peltola, defeated Sarah Palin and Nick Begich. Begich. Begich.

Begich, the third, last night in a special election to fill the remainder of Don Young's term after he passed away earlier this year. And this is significant one because it's a continuing trend of Democrats outperforming. expectations in special elections leading up to the midterms, but two, because this was an election that was run by ranked choice voting in Alaska. This is the first cycle that they're using it, and coincidentally, it's the first cycle that they've elected a Democrat in half a century. So just for listeners' awareness, the way ranked choice voting works is there was a initial round of balloting a couple weeks ago, I think early August. You will eliminate the person who got the least support among the first round of balloting, give their votes to the first and second place

candidates, and then you kind of repeat the process over again. When they finally finished tabulating that, the Democrat came ahead, got over 50% of the vote, and she is elected for the next four months. They'll do this again in November. It's kind of sparked a debate about ranked choice voting in general, whether other states should adopt it. And, you know, Sarah, I know you had some people on the dispatch podcast a couple months ago talking about this exactly. But it's really a question about what kind of candidates we want to elect, what kind of candidates we want to incentivize to run for office. And Republicans have been increasingly frustrated by it in the aftermath of this election saying, you know, it's unfair to Palin. It's unfair to people who, you know,

got additional support, it also is the only way to incentivize people to run for, to receive majority support across partisan lines and get people to run for more than just their base. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on whether or not this is something more states should experiment moving forward. It will so dramatically change the game theory behind running a campaign that it's a little hard to say. exactly what all the consequences will be. You're right that certainly you want to appeal to the most number of voters, which is not necessarily the case right now. But as we saw in Alaska, their primary system was supposed to include the top four finishers. What happened was that

fourth person dropped out. That totally changed the dynamic, which then allowed basically what we see here, which was already weird. Now, I think that people are over. overreading the results of rank choice, the effect of rank choice voting on this election. Ranked choice voting in New York and San Francisco in Maine, we actually haven't seen a huge change in who wins. We've seen some change in how they behave once they're in office, for instance, and we've seen a little bit of change maybe on who runs in the first place. But the outcomes haven't been sort of quote unquote distorted like we saw here. So the question is, why would rank choice voting all of a sudden distort the outcomes in Alaska when it hasn't in any of the other

jurisdictions that have tried it. And my argument is, ah, but it didn't. You have something else going on here, which is that Sarah Palin was a unusually polarizing and weak candidate, and that Alaska is a weird state. Don't forget that Lisa Murkowski lost the Republican primary, ran as a write-in candidate with the last name of a Murkowski that you had to spell correctly, and won as a write-in back in 2010. So Alaska's already been a, like, yes, they're a red state, but they're a weird state, they're an independent voting state. And so I think there is just a very good chance that this would have turned out the same way, as of course we saw in the first round votes where the Democrat actually was ahead to begin with, which is what allowed her to then win in the

ranked choice voting. So I think this is not the conversation to have about ranked choice voting. because I think it makes people think that, ah, Democrats win in ranked choice voting when, in fact, she almost certainly would have won regardless. Yeah, it's a good, I mean, Tom Cotton's response, I thought, was a harbinger of what's to come. He was like, look, it's a rigged scam thing that, you know, forces, you know, that get to get a Democrat elected, more people voted for Republicans than voted for a Democrat, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, put aside the fact that the spirit or thrust of that complaint works against the electoral college, too, and works against Donald Trump's presidency. Put that aside.

What's interesting to me, as you guys know, I'm sort of obsessed with this, is that both our political parties operate as if we live in a parliamentary system and we don't. And Cotton's complaint makes some sense if you believe people vote primarily for parties, not for candidates. And, but the simple fact is, is that Sarah Palin, I mean, I know this pretty well, I have a lot of, put in a lot of time in Alaska. And full disclosure, my wife wrote one of Sarah Palin's books. And for disclosure, David French's wife wrote two of Sarah Palin's books. So there's that, small world. But she's a very polarizing figure in Alaska among Republicans and Democrats alike. And so the second, you know, if I know Begich ran as a Republican,

he comes from a famously Democratic family in Alaska. But the people who voted for Begich didn't, were not going to vote for Sarah Palin, which is why they voted for Baguage. And they didn't basically, and a lot of them basically just stayed home rather than vote for a Democrat. Why that means that Sarah Palin, who spent 20 years or 15 years polarizing

the electorate of Alaska, is a victim here, is something of a mystery to me. You know, the whole point of rank choice voting, which I'm almost sold on, is that you, it filters out. the fringe intense candidates in favor of the most acceptable candidates.

And why that is an inherently illegitimate or problematic way to do things, no one's been able to convince me yet. The problem is the people who benefit from the current system are not going to criticize the current system because it's what elected them. And so, you know, I think that's going to be the biggest problem in, you know, rank choice voting has been adopted in Alaska and in Maine. And that's it. You know, I think there's pushes to have it expand and experiments.

And I think we should obviously start with this on a, you know, a state-based level rather than a federal thing and see how it plays out. But the people who are benefiting from this, the people who have the power to make these changes, unless you put it on a ballot referendum, are not going to do so because they've benefited from the system that has been put in place to elevate the fringest and the, you know, the people who are able to appeal to part of the. in bases most easily. And so I think it will be a real uphill climb to get this adopted. And you'll see that, you kind of see that already with the knee-jerk response from people like cotton, from people in the past 24 hours saying, you know, people like me and people like Sarah Palin can't get elected in this system. So we shouldn't adopt it. But that doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do for the country for these states across the country. 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-sail tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race turns and conditions apply learn more at mx.c.com.com. All right Steve I want to wrap with the death of mikhail Gorbachev and um what exactly that has meant to the world sorry how do you say it no you just said no no you said you wanted to rap

with the death of Mikhail Gorbachev and I like a like a hip-hop thing you know Steve give her a beat I'm making fun of my pronunciation I took Russian in college that was the worst dad joke Jonah I expect so much more from you so much that's a Steve level joke frankly

all right that's that's below the belt pretty clever yeah pretty clever Steve, what did Gorbachev make a difference? And will he make a difference moving forward? Yeah, I think he certainly made a difference and people will debate, you know, exactly what his effect on history has been. I think it's pretty clear that he had an effect on history. I mean, he tried, he certainly is a complicated person who played a complicated role.

the Soviet Union was not going to win the Cold War because its leadership in the persons like Gorbachev were sitting atop a system that wasn't going to work. And Gorbachev tried to incrementally make that system work by assuming that it was compatible with things that it wasn't compatible with. then I think therefore accelerated the decline. It's interesting to read the revisionist histories who treat him as a visionary who sort of from the beginning drove to this point. That is not what he did, in fact. You know, he fought this for quite a while,

and I think gave in only at the point where it became obvious that he didn't have many other choices around him. But Jonah wrote a G-file about it yesterday, I'm sure even if I didn't tee him up to talk about the G file he wrote yesterday, he would have taken the occasion to talk about the G file he wrote yesterday. Maybe we could just have a reading. Yeah. Jonah, dramatic reading? I don't know how dramatic it would need to be because the prose speaks for itself. But no, look, I'm with George Will. I thought George Will's column on Gorbachev was among the best George Will columns I've read in a long time.

And that's saying something. Gorbachev was beloved by Western intellectuals and Western media because there was this baked-in thing in the sort of in the 80s and 90s of the Strobe Talbot types, or should say late 70s, 80s, that, you know, sort of that was set the tone by Jimmy Carter's famous phrase that he had no inordinate fear of communism. There was this sophisticated, elite opinion that caring too much about communism, caring too much about the Soviet Union's expansionism meant you were kind of like an error to McCarthy or you belonged in Dr. Strange Love or whatever.

And Gorbachev, because to his credit, wanted the Soviet Union to be a more normal country, people read into that, made it into much more of a war shock test than it actually was. Gorbachev did not want to see the end of the Soviet Union. He wanted to see the Soviet Union become more modernized, more effective. Basically, he was much more like Deng Xiaoping or Xi Jinping. He was just really incompetent at it. And he failed at modernizing the Soviet Union because he got the sequence of how you would do something like that wrong. And he loosened up political stuff too much.

He deserves credit for not sending the Red Army in to crush countries that wanted to be free of the Soviet yoke. But I cannot get my head around. And I did a lot of poking around in Nexus, Lexus yesterday. I heard, what's his name? The editor of the New Yorker, you know, who wrote, who's written a lot of great books about it. David Remnick.

You know, he said, you know, Gorbachev liberated Eastern Europe. You know, look. No. No. He refused to smash Eastern Europe with Iraq when it broke free. That is a morally different thing. And it's not morally insignificant because previous Soviet leaders would have crushed Eastern Europe with Iraq. So he gets benefit for that.

But he doesn't get to be called a liberator. His intentions were different. And so I just found the whole thing very, very frustrating because I was a born and raised series anti-communist. And it reminds me, this is probably Jaws Crowdhammers, Stephen mine's old friend, probably his best column was where Bill Clinton had said, you know, with the Cold War over, you know, I'm so nostalgic because we used to be unified in this country about this kind of thing, about foreign policy. We had this thing that we all agreed on. And Charles pointed out, are you high?

like people have been fighting about the Cold War and fighting and rollback versus containment and detente and missiles in Europe and all the rest for 60 years and there are people had very strong views about it and then there are a bunch of people on the left who just wanted to sort of take credit for having been in on anti-communism all along

and this is sort of the reverse of that which is sort of like even Gorbachev was in on it and like this that's why he gets credit because we don't want to give credit to Ronald Reagan, who was a pain in the ass about this stuff. And so I find the whole thing, there's an enormous amount of retconning and revisionism that just drives me crazy.

Well, there was a big debate on what wasn't worth our time this week. And while certainly the question about whether international law exists is a more important topic, a more fruitful topic. Frankly, the flagship podcast covered it extensively this week and Jonah and I covered it less extensively

on the remnant. So instead, I'm going to ask about Leonardo DiCaprio, who it's definitely not worth your time and you should turn off this podcast at this point. But nevertheless,

I am curious, Declan, for your slightly younger friends, if they announced that they were dating a 45 to 50 year old man, cool, not cool in the current era.

I'm just upset that I aged out of Leonardo's age range this summer. I turned 27, and I'm no longer eligible. So you didn't cut off this summer. You're way outside. So creepy or not creepy? It's obviously creepy. I mean, I don't know. I get that it's cool to fly around on a private jet and go to these fancy parties and whatnot,

and I can't say that I'd say no to it, but it's for sure creepy. Jonah, one of your friends comes to you and says, guess what? I have a 22-year-old model as my new girlfriend. similar to the last girlfriend who was also a 20-year-old model and he's never dated someone above the age of 25. Creepy or good for him? Creepy, but I can, I have friends who would definitely high-five each other over it.

And I'm of the, like, the date, like, I mean, dating is different. than not dating, you know, and marriage and all these kinds of things. And I guess one of the things that kind of, I think it gives up the ghost on this is that he has never dated age appropriate, right? It would be one thing if, oh, he found this special someone who is really mature for her age, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he dates categories, not individuals, and that's creepy. and this whole conversation is incredibly fraught with peril.

It's just awkward. There's a difference between dating and not dating. Yes, that was the best framing. There's a difference between dating and not dating and marriage. Brilliant. I mean, I'm not going to argue with that. No, no, I have a question for you. No, I have a different question for you.

But I have a same question for you, but a version of that. You can ask me the question for me. so would it be creepy sarah i mean you're not as old as say jona my god no let's say let's say even for somewhat of your tender young age female came to you and was dating a 24 year old dude just graduated from college nice young job total there's a sex in the city episode about this in fact there's a whole sex in the city season about this really I think sex in the cities was about this. I'm sorry I missed it.

Yeah. Yeah, so as Jonah said, there's a difference to be dating and not dating. Look, my girlfriend tells me that she has like an eight-pack 22-year-old frat star that she's, you know, having a great time with after a rough couple years in her life, high-fives all over the place. Sounds super fun. You know, if it's like a pattern and he doesn't. doesn't know what Nirvana is, or he's wearing the shirt ironically, probably not a whole lot

to talk about overrun. He probably thinks it's Nirvana, actually. There's kind of an informal rule here that if you divide your age by two and add seven years, that is the threshold. I was going to ask if he would allow his children to do the divide by two plus seven rule. Well, right now, it would hope not. Essentially. No.

Definitely not. I think he ends up the same age. That's right. That's how the math works. But it does get kind of fun when you're Leonardo DiCaprio's age. And in fact, he should be not dating anyone below the age of 30, according to that rule. And I'd say, if Leonardo DiCaprio is 47 years old was dating a 30-year-old right now, I don't think anyone would blink on that. sure. I dated, I think my largest age range was 15 years, age difference. And as you said, Jonah,

there's a difference between dating and not dating. And I thought that was just fine. Was this when you were 30 and he was 15? That's not good math. Oh, I guess that's the 15 years, not the French rule. Yeah, clearly I was, I was dating older. See, when Strom Thurman followed this rule, he only dated women who were 60. I think Leonardo DiCaprio is getting a bunch of crap for this. I think he should get to do what he wants and that why are we focusing on him when far

weirder, grosser, creepier guys have been doing this for approximately 10,000 years. You could just stop and say, why are we focusing on him? Yeah. Like, we don't need another clause. Caleb, how much time have we spent on this not worth your time? I think we're at six, seven minutes, seven minutes. Yeah, I'm ending with Leonardo DiCaprio, his dating life, not worth your time. Thank you for joining us through, again, what I told you to turn off seven minutes ago.

So I think I provided the warning on that. I think the rest of the podcast was pretty good, as David French would say. And if you did enjoy it, but for the last seven and a half minutes now, go ahead and give us a rating. It helps other people find our podcast. And if you want to leave us a comment, you can become a member of the dispatch and hop in that comment section and let Declan know everything he did wrong. We appreciate you and we'll talk to you next week. Welcome to the dispatch podcast.

I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Jona Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and Dispatch Morning Editor. What the fuck? What did you do? Gold. That's gold. That's staying in. All of you. It's all of you.

It's not all of you's. You know, this is the whole rubber versus rubbers thing. Anyway, unless you're in Wisconsin. True. Look, maybe the phrase about rubbers hitting the road is about throwing condoms out the window as you pedal to your girlfriend's house or something. something. I don't know. That was my point about what happens outside the Mustang Ranch. So off the rails. Five minutes in. I mean, we haven't started.

Adom's coming back to scold us. Seriously, who knew David was the adult? This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, SquareSpace. brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style.

It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.