The Dispatch Podcast - Mar-a-Lago Documents Investigation Explained

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

The rapid developments in the Justice Department’s investigation of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago may be hard to follow, but not to worry, Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and Declan are here to clarify and discuss. Plus: a look at the long-term impact of COVID-19, and the internal battles as both parties look to the midterms.   Show Notes: -TMD: How Sarah Palin Lost Alaska’s House Special Election -The Dispatch: Trump Is Hurting the GOP’s Midterm Prospects Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and Declan Garvey, our editor for the Morning Dispatch, filling in for David French, who is somewhere in the wilds of Alaska, we're told. This week, we will talk about Special Master. The latest COVID news, as we look back and as we look forward. And what is the strategy of Republicans and Democrats within their own parties? Is it Republicans in disarray now? Let's dive right in. Steve, you want to start with a special master?

I want to start with a special master, but I don't want to start with answers or my thoughts. I want to start with questions for you. I think it would be very useful to give people a sense of what exactly is going on here. So if we start with the understanding that Donald Trump took some documents when he left the White House, kept them at Mar-a-Lago, the Justice Department and NARA, which is the, I don't know what NARA stands for, National Archives. I know it's the archives, but National Art. I don't know what N-A-R-A actually.

I spent a lot of times at presidential libraries. Records administration. Thank you. They've wanted these documents. There was a long fight between apparently the Justice Department and NARA on one side and Donald Trump and his lawyers and advisors on the other about what happens with these documents. That led to this raid. I think the Justice Department would like you to not call it a raid on August 8th and the ensuing. battles, legal battles, what's being fought about? What are they fighting about? Why can't Donald

Trump just take these documents? They're his. Right. So that gets to whether they're his. If you back up to the Presidential Records Act, in short, it's going to say that all work-related documents belong to the U.S. government, not to the individual person of the president. And so when you leave the White House, you have to leave behind all your work documents. And Donald Trump didn't do that. He took many boxes of work documents with him to Mar-a-Lago, some of which we now know were classified, but that's sort of beside the point to the conversation we're going to have today. So the National Archives is asking for all those documents back, not because they're classified, but because they belong under the Presidential Records Act, therefore the keeper of

those government documents is the National Archives. Fast forward, by the way, later on in your post-presidency and you open your Presidential Library, you work with the National Archives to determine what of those documents go to your Presidential Library, for instance. So the Obama Library has requested, I don't know, something like 30 million documents at the National Archives has already moved to a National Archives facility in Chicago is my understanding. Certainly the Bush administration, Bush Library in Dallas has tons of government documents. They're not though owned by George W. Bush. They're owned by the National Archives and us as taxpayers, right? So that's kind of what this entire argument is about. Now, during that process where NARA, the National

Archives, is talking to the Trump folks about all of these documents that they need back, They find out that there are classified documents in some of those boxes or whatever. National Archives is like, hey, you need to like give all this back. Trump people are like, no, this goes back and forth. At some point, they tell the FBI, hey, we think there's classified documents, not just presidential records problems. And then the Department of Justice gets involved. They go down to Marilago and say, we have a subpoena.

you need to give us all the documents. And they say, we have. Remember, we sent those 15 boxes a few months ago, all the documents that belong under the Presidential Records Act, that would include classified documents. You already have them all. And they said, really? You're sure about that?

Yes. Okay. And they're like, come look in this room where we keep all the non-presidential Record Act documents, but you can't open any boxes. The Trump people, by the way, say they did open boxes. the Department of Justice people say they didn't. They come out of that room and say,

all right, are you willing to sign a declaration to that effect, saying that you have looked through the boxes and you attest, lawyer, that there's no presidential records, no classified documents, no documents with classified markings, et cetera, et cetera. The lawyer signs that. Later, the Department of Justice finds out through a source that they believe that there are still Presidential Records Act documents, including classified documents.

the subpoena at that point doesn't do you any more good because they already tried the subpoena route at the point that they're telling you there's no more documents, you've got to go in and get them yourself so they go to a federal magistrate judge in Florida to get the search for it. That's what happens on August 8th.

Now... Can I stop you before we get to the post-August 8th era? Why couldn't the Justice Department have just said upon learning from this source, or maybe sources, that they had, that the Trump folks, Trump lawyer had not, in fact, turned over all of these NARA documents, all of these classified documents. Why couldn't they have gone back and given them another chance? I mean, this is what you're hearing from. People are sympathetic to Donald Trump.

It's like, this is just unprecedented. You didn't need to go in with a big team of investigators and just grab all this stuff. We're reasonable people. Come back to us. Just ask us. so here's where you can follow through the subpoena line of trying to get documents so they went down with the subpoena which says give me the documents but it still has to be done by the other side by the Trump side you don't get to grab the documents if that it's like it's a it's a nuanced point here but um you show them the subpoena and say now give me that thing at the point that they don't give you the thing you can go to the judge and say they defied the subpoena. the judge could then follow up and, you know, do like a fourth with order or something and say,

no, really, give them the documents. If they refuse to do it then, you could, the judge could hold them in contempt. I mean, you've all watched movies. So like in theory, the judge could throw someone in jail for not complying with a subpoena. The problem here is that they said they did comply with the subpoena. And so it's a little bit different than simply thumbing your nose at the subpoena. Sometimes you'll see people say, I refuse to comply with that subpoena. Not for long, but they can. But here they said they had. So continuing to pursue the subpoena, you kind of end up in a cul-de-sac. At least that's the Department of Justice's argument. Could they have gone to the judge and said, we have this evidence that they actually didn't comply with the subpoena and so they're

lying to you? Yes, but I think you still would have ended up in the same place of them saying, we've given you all the documents. And you're also running up against a clock on the back end, which is that they were reading news stories that Donald Trump was about to announce for president and imagine sort of all of this flim flamming around on the subpoena track, if you will, and then in the end they're still going to have to get a search warrant and execute it, but now it's November 1st,

you know, five days before the midterms or whatever. Not great, Bob. Right, and it had become pretty clear. I mean, they had actual real evidence that the Trump team had not complied with the subpoena. I mean, these documents still did exist. And now we know that beyond debate, right? I mean, this is not disputable.

Those documents remained there. They had not complied with the subpoena. They had not turned these documents over. And not only were there still documents there in violation, you know, not in line with the subpoena, but that declaration that the lawyer signed also attested to the fact that all documents were in this storage room. That also they had evidence was not true that, in fact, document. were being kept elsewhere in Mar-a-Lago without security.

The storage room had a lock with a single key. I mean, it feels very like Al Gore and the lock secure social security lockbox. Only me and Tipper know where the key is. So they had evidence that that wasn't true either. Right. That's the significance of the passports, right? Or one of the significant, like he had passports. He uses his passports.

It's in a desk drawer and they found classified stuff or government papers, whatever, in the drawer next to his passports, which suggests that not only did he know he had them, but they had them poorly secured and not secured in the way that they claim they were secured. Exactly. So that gets us to August 8th. What happens on August 8th? That's the raid. What's a better word for it?

Execution of a search warrant. I also think it's relevant that the FBI agents, by the way, did not wear their windbreakers. You know, normally anytime you're seeing any FBI activity, they have the blue windbreakers with the bright yellow FBI written on it. That didn't happen here, which you can sort of warm muggy day in South Florida. Definitely not. Redundant. No, they definitely did not want the media attention. And so they didn't wear their windbreakers, you know, 30 FBI guys. Anyway, that day, the next day or whatever, Donald Trump and his team start talking about how they want like a special, like they don't, this is a bad raid. You can't do this. The whole.

criminal investigation is politicized, it should go away. They're not really legal arguments, but, you know, we all remember they were very upset about what happened. But it's not until two weeks later that they do anything legally. And they file a civil action with a different judge, a district court judge, which is above a magistrate judge, in the same though Florida courthouse writ large, the same Florida district. And that civil action is little bizarre because they basically are like tell them to cancel the criminal investigation and that judge is like um i think i'm i'm assuming what you mean here is and she like tries to interpret it and ask them some questions like can you tell me why i have jurisdiction

why do i get to hear this case instead of the judge that was signing off on the warrant and doing all this other stuff so they come back and that's where it turns into this special master ask A special master is someone appointed by the judge, a neutral non-government person who in this case would need security clearance, who goes through all the documents that have been seized. It takes, so it takes the Trump people 14 days to file their civil action. It takes the judge nine days to actually rule that there will be a special master. In that three-plus weeks intervening period, the Department of Justice sets up a filter team, which also reviewed all the documents for privilege, attorney-client privilege, information, and purely personal stuff, like the passports, for instance.

That's how the passports get returned so quickly. Because it takes three-plus weeks, they've gone through it all. And the investigative team, then, you know, once they're through documents and they're like, okay, that is not attorney-client privilege, it is not of a purely personal nation. or pass it to the investigative team. Those people already then reviewed a ton of this stuff, which would make the special master kind of moot in a lot of ways. And it makes this whole thing very messy now moving forward

because the judge appointed a special master to review for attorney-client privilege, what the filter team already did, executive privilege, which we're going to have to talk more about that in a minute, because that's a hot mess. and said that the Department of Justice investigative team could no longer continue with their investigation if it involves any of those documents. Like they can't touch those documents anymore.

But that the OD and I, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Intelligence. That they could still review the documents for security risk classification purposes, nobody knows how that will work in real life because the security risk part of it, you can't just glean from looking at the documents. You actually need DOJ to tell you stuff like where they found them, who had access. So there's a lot of stuff we don't know about what her order actually means in practice. She didn't clarify it. And so now the Department of Justice

has two paths that are not mutually exclusive. One, get clarification from the judge. What does executive privilege mean in this case? What does it mean to now have this wall up at DOJ, but let OD and I continue? And or they can appeal her order for the whole thing up to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is a pretty conservative court at this point covering Florida, Georgia, Alabama, that region of the country. That would take time. Yeah, there's a New York Times story this morning, I want to ask a little bit more about the special master, but just to pick up on that final point there, the New York Times story this morning suggesting that while the appointment of a special master and the judge's ruling in this case, is it likely to completely

derail the Justice Department's investigation efforts here? It could present a significant delay in how this all unfolds. Do you think that's an accurate representation of the sort of the stakes as we see them right now, number one and number two, how does one become a special master? Because that's a pretty great title. Supreme Allied commander of the 11,000 documents. You start as a special Padawan, and then you train up to become a special master. Jonah, when we launched this thing, tried to get the title emperor of the dispatch, and we turned

him down. But special masters, that's pretty good. So we're about to find out how you become a special master. normally both sides in a civil litigation matter like this will turn in their list to the judge. There will be some overlap. There will be no overlap, right? Yeah, the judge will discuss with both sides and they'll pick a special master. In this case, I expect there to be zero names in common, in part because the Trump team doesn't

actually have much incentive for this to happen, right? The whole point is to throw up roadblocks and to say it's an unfair process. If you're getting fairer process, more process than anyone ever would get in a similar situation, Well, that's not going to work into your narrative. So their next big thing is going to be this special master is biased. So they're not going to turn in names that could actually work. The special master is going to need a security clearance. Therefore, they're going to need government experience at some point.

They're going to need a law degree. And they're going to need credibility. You know, the name that I've thrown out is like a mickey case. So it sounds like you can be the special. Yeah. After this podcast. Take off all of these things. Yeah, that's true.

Just to, there are investigators in this case at the Department of Justice who did not have a high enough security clearance to review the documents that were seized here. So how high of a security clearance are we talking that this person would need? You know, same as those investigators were then cleared for higher clearances because they were put on this case. A special master could have a similar process. I think, you know, there was one line in the Justice Department. Opposition to the special master filing, you know, this is a top secret special compartmentalized investigation at this point because of the level of security of some of these documents. Top secret is actually the highest level of security clearance.

The SCI part, the special compartmentalized information, you have to get read into any SCI programs. And so I think what they met was the attorneys had not been read into these specific programs involved, you know, in the classification markings on some of these documents, there's almost no doubt that any potential special master will not have been read into these programs because presumably the person has not been in government recently. Again, think about like a Mike Mukasey who was a federal judge, attorney general during the Bush administration at the end, like that's someone who could be a special master. Of course, if I'm Mike Mukasey, it's a big no thank you from me, but we'll see.

Well, do you think the Department of Justice? I mean, he's been very friendly to Donald Trump. I mean, do you think the Department of Justice would be interested in? They're going to have an interesting choice about who they put on their list because they do have an incentive. If they put reasonable people on their list, the judge might pick someone off that list. Right, right. So where does this stand as of today? And what do you think we're looking at right now?

I mean, is this likely to continue to play out for? weeks or months? You asked about the significant delay part, and I think it just depends what you mean by significant. Is any delay significant? Yeah, when you're talking about an investigation into the former president, I think it is. Former Attorney General Bill Barr said, this is a rain delay, but it's not going to change the outcome. I sort of think the rain delay metaphor is probably a little better for people to understand. Because if the, you know, it'll take some time to get us to pick a special master get that person up in the security

clearances that they need to but we're talking a week or two not months okay second uh on the 11,000 documents that sounds like a lot that's nothing for a lawyer you're talking about millions of documents that lawyers go through for doc review and any even small civil litigation matter so 11,000 documents i mean it only took the department of justice filter team three weeks. Now, that's more people than potentially the special master sitting by themselves in a room might have. But A, the special master might also have a team if they're at a law firm potentially, or at least one or two people brought on with them. It's just not going to take that long to go through 11,000 documents. So a month. Now, if you appeal it and the 11th

circuit rules against you, and then you appeal it to the Supreme Court, in the meantime, there's a stay on the special master. Fine. That could add a couple months. But I don't think we're talking, you know, December here. What happens if the special master and their team reviews these documents, it determines that there were some things that were missed by the filter team, or they have a different interpretation of executive privilege than, you know, I think a lot of people have coming into this case, is that the Department of Justice investigators have already seen a lot of that material? Are they now not allowed to work on the investigation anymore? Are they not allowed to use

that information in the investigation? What happens if we start to see the actual, what could happen from a special master here? Great question, Declan, because we have no idea, because it's not in the order. If it were just the normal course of things, it would be kind of squishy. Like, is it harmless error? For instance, we know the filter team missed two documents that got to the investigative team. The investigator in question saw the document said, ooh, I think this might be privileged handed it back to the filter team. The filter team was like, oh, you're right, it is privileged and took it back. That investigator, we don't know whether they were taken off the case, but imagine a situation in which it's Donald Trump talking to his lawyer about

whether he should find a new dentist. It wouldn't really matter that the investigator had seen that because it's irrelevant to the current investigation. So it would be harmless error in that sense. I don't think you'd move an investigator off or seeing something that's privileged, but irrelevant. Now, if it's relevant, even if it's one document, you probably move them off and there's all sorts of in-betweens. How relevant? Could it even be tangentially relevant? Does it give you some insight? All of that. But as you mentioned, the executive privilege thing is the big problem. I don't expect the special master to find any significant number of additionally privileged documents, maybe a handful, but actually 11,000 just isn't that many

pieces of paper, as I've said. But the executive privilege review that the judge has added to the special master's list is wild because who judges this? Executive privilege is asserted by the executive. This person isn't even in the executive branch as the special master. Then we have all sorts of other problems. Does a former president have any executive privilege? Hasn't been decided. Justice Kavanaugh, on a recent case, certainly hinted that he thought that there was some of the amount of executive privilege continued on from a former president? Who gets to assert that executive privilege? Can the former president assert executive privilege? There's some very good arguments that the answer is no, because the privilege actually belongs to the executive branch,

not, for instance, in the attorney-client privilege way, to you, the person, and it follows you, or doctor-patient, or spousal privilege. All of those belong to a person. If executive privilege belongs to the branch, we probably shouldn't be calling an executive privilege. We should be calling it a separation of powers canon of executive privilege or something like that, you know, sort of a legal framework that we think about of the executive branch vis-a-vis Congress or the judicial branch, in which case it's a very weak privilege, certainly a former president, while their papers may still have some executive privilege attached to them that could be asserted by the current president, they have no ability to assert anything.

I'm raising all this because the judge gave no guidance to the future special master on what she meant by executive privilege, whose executive privilege, can the current president waive that executive privilege to this special master, all questions we don't have the answer to, and that the special master is in no way going to be in a position to answer themselves. You mentioned earlier that the judge herself, you know, Trump got a more favorable ruling. here than pretty much anybody else would in this situation. A lot has been made in recent days that

the judge that he went to for this and his legal team went to for this was a Trump appointee very late in his term. She, I think she was actually confirmed after the November election in 2020. You know, that's raising all sorts of questions about, you know, impartiality, things like that. Do you think those questions are legitimate? Why did this end up here in the first place rather than Bruce Reinhart, the federal magistrate judge who was involved in the search warrant. While I don't think any other random criminal defendant who had a search warrant executed at their house would just get a special master,

this isn't bonkers either. It's not that unusual to have a special master in, you know, large-scale, corporate level type criminal investigations. you know special masters happen they're unusual but they're not like unheard of filing the separate civil matter is legal it's a possibility but again like then should every criminal defendant be able to like get a second judge to look at their stuff and this gets to like these very weird legal questions of her jurisdiction and you know why a special master here she sort of says look he's a former president we're just going to bend over

backwards to give as much process as possible, there's an argument for that. And I think imputing bad motives to it as a mistake, in part because I don't like questioning people's motives. I think you can come up with perfectly fine motives, which is there's a lot of people questioning this investigation. So let's have someone outside. Do the same thing that the filter team did. I don't expect them to find anything else. But if that's what will give people confidence in this process, why would we not do that? It'll take two weeks. Hold on. But in terms of the precedent it sets, it's a little weird because normally to have a special master or this kind of separate civil movement, you would need to show gross

negligence of someone's constitutional rights, that they didn't have a warrant in the first place, for instance, and stormed into someone's attorney's office and grabbed a bunch of papers. That's where special masters are most often used is, again, these sort of corporate general council's offices or a law firm, things like that, where like, yep, you need someone outside because almost all the documents are going to be privileged, attorney client privileged. And so the government sort of being the fox in their own hen house for all of the documents is just a little too much. That's not the case here. We expect very, very few of these documents. I think the filter team found 500 out of the 11,000 that they moved away from the large bunch.

so we should probably get onto the rank punditry soon but um when you were on that the big league podcast that i do i had asked you this thing but i couldn't remember the examples um of things that trump says in public but doesn't argue in court right and and now it's sort of like it's all over the place um the you know, Trump keeps saying it's the, he declassified all these documents. I personally think that is one of the great examples of if his excuse were true, it would be worse than what he's accused of, but that's the different matter. Yeah, he's never argued in court that he declassified any documents,

and he's never argued in court that these are covered by executive privilege. So why? Why would this judge throw, I mean, it'd be one thing if the judge, in a nod, at bending over backwards for the appearance of fairness and all that, which I think is a little overdone here, but whatever, took up Trump's lawyer's arguments and said, all right, you raise this interesting issue of executive privilege, but they didn't raise it. So, like, she might as well have said, you, this is a, you know, we might also have to consider papal infallibility here.

I mean, it's just not one of the things that was entered into the record or the discussion in the courtroom. Why would she yank it out of thin air and say executive privilege? I thought you weren't supposed to, like, follow what people say on TV in the courtroom. You were supposed to follow what your own lawyers say in the courtroom. Okay, this gets a little nuance because they asked for the special master to review for both attorney-client privilege and executive privilege. But technically, Donald Trump has never asserted executive privilege, which, unlike a whole

bunch of other stuff, actually is Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy. You have to say, I assert executive privilege. When you're president, the question of what you do after your president, as I said, not settled law. There's a whole bunch of people online, by the way, who are just like, this is all settled law. That's very annoying. Executive privilege is a very new in terms of our whole legal framework, very new thing. Yes, you can go back to like George Washington and find some times where he was like

conversations with the president should be kept in the president's office. That's exactly what George Washington's voice sounds like. In terms of the actual legal framework for executive privilege, of course, we're talking Nixon era. And the Nixon cases are not apropos here. This is an intra-executive fight of a former president potentially saying that he wants to assert executive privilege. And a current president trying to waive it very just different all around um so it's not settled and uh i'm still just trying to process this claim of yours that there are people who are wrong on the internet i know it's wild and the department of justice here did something not great they never raised it with that with judge reinhart the the search warrant judge they never said like hey for this filter team

you know we're not going to filter for executive privilege we think that's something that this certainly could be raised here, and here's all the reasons that we don't think we need to filter for it. And Judge Reinhart never asked. So in the sense that it's not settled law, it probably should have been raised at some point and thought through. But saying that a special master is going to think through something, again, not their job, that they have no capability to do this. This is a legal judicial question, not for like the random outside person who's about to be appointed. 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

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here. If you're Donald Trump in an odd way, this is great politically, right? You've been sort of irrelevant for a long time. People haven't been talking about you. You've been losing steam. Your numbers of support Republicans have been dropping, not precipitously, but steadily. And this happens. And immediately within 24 hours, you have virtually every Republican elected official rush to your defense, declare that Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, is politicized this process, politicized the Justice Department. You have otherwise erstwhile responsible Republican elected officials making totally outrageous, unsupported claims that the FBI was there planting evidence.

There's a big rally to Donald effect here in those first few days. Now, that's definitely quieted down as we've learned more about what the FBI was seeking, about the long process that led to the execution of the search warrant, the non-raid raid. And you don't have Republicans talking about it as much anymore. We had talked on this podcast several times before that. raid about Joe Biden's attempts to elevate Donald Trump, to put him at the center of the political debate in this country. And you remember, he gave these speeches and he sent these tweets trying to raise Trump's profile so that the coming midterm elections would be less a referendum

on Joe Biden, who still has negative favorable ratings, countries on the wrong track, people are nervous about the economy, and much more a battle between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, who has more negative ratings than Joe Biden does. If you're a Republican running for office this November in a state that's competitive or in a district that's competitive, Declan, do you, what do you do with this? How do you talk about this? Do you ignore this? Do you want to stand up for Donald Trump with the hope that Donald Trump will weigh in on

your race and maybe help you raise? money, raise your profile, make an argument? Or are Republicans really at this point not wanting to talk about this at all? I think Republicans are very glad that this happened after the primaries, for the most part, that they don't have to really race each other to see who can defend Trump the hardest on this stuff. Because we're in general election season now. It's after Labor Day. You know, we're seeing it. Republicans kind of and Democrats pivoting on all sorts of issues that they took during the primary to now appeal to, you know, the 5% of centrist, independent voters that they need to actually win the election in these

close races. And so if, you know, talking to people who are working on these races, to people who are on these campaigns, we talked to David Cottrell about this on Dispatch Live earlier this week, you know, Republicans are not thrilled behind the scenes that this is the, you know, back in the news that they're giving Democrats kind of this mallet to hit them over the head with again, you know, that they can't be just running on crime guns, or sorry, crime inflation, the economy, gas prices that they, you know, voters are now asking about this and it's coming up. It's also kind of an underreported story allowed Trump to really vacuum up small dollar fundraising that was going to some of these campaigns that are at a

disadvantage dollars-wise against their democratic opponents. And now all of their supporters are giving money to Trump again to help him defend against the unjust and raid, not a raid, whatever you want to call it. And so it's a bad issue set for them. It's forcing them to talk about things that they don't want to talk about and diverting from this message. And it's also just structurally taking up, you know, attention that could be focused on the economy and crime and also money that could be used reminding voters about the economy and crime. Yeah, Jonah, I mean, there's been a lot written and reported and we'll get into it in greater detail in a little bit, but a lot written and reported about Republicans' difficulty

fundraising these days. I mean, what Declan described is exactly right. And it reflects the shift that we've seen, you know, really over the past decade, in the importance of small dollar donations, grassroots donations, you know, contributions of $5 or $40 to candidates and political parties and outside groups, as opposed to those parties and candidates relying on these, you know, several thousand dollar bigger donations. That's hurt Republicans. I mean, Donald Trump has been raising a ton of money on this. If you're on his direct mail list, you are getting emails about this constantly about him being attacked by the DOJ. I've gotten 17 since this podcast started. I don't know, I'm assuming. I mean, that would not be an exact. People think you're probably just making that

up. That would not be an exaggeration or barely an exaggeration. I mean, these things are coming all the time from all these different committees. How much does that matter, Jonah? I mean, they're not, I think these candidates are having a hard time. We're reading about the National Republican senatorial committee, having trouble raising money. How much does that matter? I think it matters a lot, but maybe not as much as, I mean, the cliche is about how money drives everything in politics, I think are wrong. I think money is necessary, but not sufficient.

And lots of people have won winning campaigns, not spending a lot of money. Donald Trump did not spend a lot of money to win in 2016, and Bark is he got so much free media, and in part because he ran against Hillary Clinton, which is always a smart thing to do. And, but it's really kind of, you know, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at some of the in-house squabbling that you see these days. You have Rick Scott, who runs the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. I think I got that right.

And he thought, you know, he went into this season. thinking, I'm going to be king, right? You know, it was like, it's a midterm, history's on my side, you know, forget goofballs. Serious people were talking about how it wasn't going to be a red wave. It was going to be a red tsunami. And he decides, and he spends a bunch of money upping his own profile. He weirdly unloads this weird plan to basically sunset Medicare and Medicaid or something

and then raise taxes on every single American. and I get what he's getting at there. And I might even agree with it as a policy thing, but politically it was really ham-fisted. And he stood by while Trump handpicked a bunch of senatorial candidates. And now the climate has changed. There's a vibe shift, right? Climate change and vibe shift?

Indeed. Well, like, I mean, this is going to be the next, what was it, game change, then it was double down of those books, those ridiculous books? Yeah. Yeah. Next one is we vibe shift. And then,

uh, it's actually a really, really good idea. Um, anyway, so my only point is, is, you now have this situation

where everyone is bickering. Uh, Mitch McConnell is doing everything he can to telegraph how Pist he is, um, in the way that only someone as stoic as him can. And, um,

um, and, um, and you have people like Peter T, who basically created Blake Masters in some lab somewhere, the candidate for Senate in Arizona, now refusing to give money to his own creation. And Trump, who's scarfing up all of this money,

isn't spending, doesn't seem to appear to be spending a dime on anybody. Even the least surprising thing. It's not surprising at all. He goes it for himself and he keeps it for himself. But you can imagine how pissed off and bitter, like, Republican, you know, campaign officials are off the record and away from cameras at this incredibly sorry state of affairs. All Mitch McConnell wanted to do, and I know people think I'm too easy on Mitch McConnell, and I got my disagreements with Mitch McConnell. All he wanted

to do was like get a bunch of, like, sane Republicans elected so he could be majority leader longer than anybody else. And then he was probably just going to retire. And he's like Jerry McGuire begging Cuba Gooding Jr., help me help you, right? Like he's just, please don't pick these goofballs and of course it's all goofball it's goofballs sort of all the way down and now he's having to bail out

JD Vance you know Peter Cheel is saying you pay you pay Mitch McConnell for Blake Masters I'm not going to pay Peter Teal just so people understand the context here is this tech executive who funded a bunch of America who's very close to Donald Trump

supported Donald Trump funded trying to kill James Bond several times he's kind of like a bond villain kind of guy sorry it's a movie reference in the middle of my point i'm just not going to get it at all now we're going to get slapped with a defamation lawsuit but he's but he funded a lot of these uh or several of these uh sort of america first trumpy primary challenges on the republican side in the senate and they prevailed and uh the expectation was that he would continue to fund them. But the defense from Peter Thiel's world is, no, he likes to fund early stage companies and early stage candidates. And once he gets them going, sort of hands off

and then they've got to go on their own. Sarah, is, how much does this, how much is internal Republican squabbling likely to affect what we see happen in November? Hugely, if it keeps the focus on Republicans. Right? If the focus is on Republicans, what they want to do, who their candidates are even, that's just shown time and again that it's bad for whoever that party is that the focus is on, just like it's been bad for the Biden administration for the last year and a half when the focus has been on them. And it's been on gas prices, school closures, crime, any frustrations and failures with the Biden administration. And we were seeing it, of course, not just among Republicans, not approving of the Biden administration. That was sort of baked in from the inauguration. but that Democrats were abandoning the Biden administration. I mean, the numbers among young Democratic voters was kind of wild there in, like, May, June. We were seeing like single digit approval numbers from the under 25 crowd. Now that the focus is on Republicans and sort of that daily vibe, as Jonah referred to it,

yeah, it's really helping Democrats. If the focus goes back to Dems and disarray, as it had been for some time, with the progressives fighting with the moderates and the popularism fight within the Democratic Party that they should pursue popular policies instead of far-left messaging that actually nobody liked like Latin X or defund the police. When that was the vibe, it hurt Democrats. I think that it's just very funny to see how Mitch McConnell seems to know this. but can't stop Rick Scott from continuing to poke him. I mean, this goes back, by the way, to Rick Scott putting out his 10-point Senate plan. If they took back the majority, it included everyone paying taxes. That, of course, would have raised taxes on, you know, millions of Americans who don't pay any taxes.

And so then it was billed as Republicans want to raise taxes. Mitch McConnell then comes out and slaps Rick Scott across the face, metaphorically, but only kind of, and said, I'll be in charge when Republicans. Republicans take back the Senate. Rick Scott has nothing to do with anything. And so ignore everything he says. I don't think Rick Scott liked that very much. And so then when Mitch McConnell says candidate quality matter, Rick Scott jumped on it and was like, see, Mitch McConnell, bad dude, not supporting our candidates, dogging them every chance he gets. When, you know, Rick Scott has spent all the money that the National Republican Senatorial Committee has at this point, of course,

they'll raise more, but the burn rate going into Labor Day was crazy high when, in fact, Labor Day is when you'd sort of want to start spending in the big way. Now, there's plenty of strategy arguments for spending early or spending consistently. And so, okay, fine. But at this point, Mitch McConnell has the pot of money. Peter Thiel's not putting in money. Donald Trump's not putting in money. And the NRSC doesn't have money to put in. So it's just, it's It's hilarious because Mitch McConnell didn't want the Republican infighting. Mitch McConnell didn't want these candidates. And now Mitch McConnell is going to be the one who's going to get blamed and who has to

fund it. Super fun. It's, you know, back in the day, you'd have to pay for your own execution. That's what this is. So, Sarah, I'm going to hand this back over to you to host us on the way out. But one of the issues that Republicans are not spending as much time talking about, which had given Republicans great energy in the off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey for the governor's race was handling of COVID. And what was perceived to have been democratic overreach on so these COVID policies and restrictions and the kind of invigoration, reinvigoration of parents. as a constituency, shifting from, you know, in some cases shifting from Democrats,

suburban parents who were frustrated with Donald Trump voted for Joe Biden in 2020 to Republicans as these restrictions continued. Is that, have Republicans lost that group? Is COVID overreach still a potent argument for Republicans? Or do we feel like we're beyond? on that. Good question, Jonah. That's fair. I was the one who said we haven't talked about COVID in a long time, so that's what Sarah's

doing right there. Pete behind the curtain. Yeah, look, I think it's kind of fascinating. I mean, one way to think about it is that, you know, it's sort of like Biden's student loan thing.

The people who are motivated in a positive way by that thing are really matter for Biden's coalition and the people who are pissed off by it are already pissed off at them so it doesn't really are already priced in and what's interesting to me is that we've now learned

pretty decisively that we did a lot of things badly with COVID things that were under policies that were understandable and defensible and and and plausible early on became baked in and took on their own sort of cult thing specifically keeping schools closed for as long as we did and we were basically the only advanced western democracy that did it anything like that i think Singapore which is a i think we can all agree is a slightly different culture and a different sort of political organization. We basically went our own way on this, all at the behest of teachers' unions. And if you had told me, I shouldn't say all the best teachers unions, but I think they were

the prime mover of it. They drove the policy. Yeah, I mean, there was polling to suggest that, you know, African Americans and Hispanics who were a big part of the Democratic Coalition weren't as gung-ho for reopening schools as I think they should have been, but we should just put a pin in that for the moment. But if you had told me six months or eight months ago that there would be this decisive conclusion from people who studied this stuff, that we had a generational catastrophe in terms of learning loss and social development for kids across the board, particularly low-income kids. And no one really is disputing

that finding now. And the Democratic administration would say, say it was all the Republicans doing, and we tried like hell to get the schools open, which is basically what the White House spokeswoman said, I would have thought that would be a five alarm fire political controversy, how dare you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think, and this is something that we talked about a bunch in the early days of the pandemic, if you read the John Barry book about the great influenza pandemic of 100 years ago, when the thing ended just no one wanted to talk about it

everyone was sort of ashamed about how they behaved everyone was sort of emotionally and psychologically spent on the topic and so yeah there are a handful but there's a small segment of the GOP right that still wants to make COVID the be all and end all

of everything but they're already priced into the GOP coalition and for the most part other than the infuriating retconning of the American public by saying that the Democrats tried to keep the schools open and the Republicans who tried to close them, which is factually untrue. I mean, like Donald Trump was vilified. Lord knows I'm not a, I don't praise Donald Trump around here, but he was right and they were wrong. What? He was like they want to, Trump wanted to open the schools. And he was called the Grim Reaper

and a murderer and a threat to public health for saying we got to open the schools. And I just find it sort of fascinating how it's just it's one hand clapping almost in terms of its political salians given that this was probably in terms of affecting actual everyday Americans a bigger deal and more disruptive than any war of the last 50 years or any other economic dislocation of the last 50 years and all of a sudden it just feels like it's something that only people with chips on their shoulder about various issues really want to talk about fight about. Just to put some data on what Jonah just touched on there, the National Center for Education Statistics put out its annual assessment of educational progress last week, and they found

that almost two decades of progress were erased over the past two years, these random scores that they use. The reading test score for nine-year-old students dropped five points from 2020 to 2022. In math, it was seven points. And those rates were almost twice as high for African-American students and for poorer students, as Jonah mentioned. And it's not just that it's childhood diabetes, type type two diabetes has spiked almost 80% over the course of the pandemic. There's all these social and emotional disabilities or dysfunction that we're starting to see kind of the repercussions of. And it's really interesting, Jonah, your point that we just don't want to talk about it for the most part. I mean, you see that a little bit this week with the fact that

we finally are getting these long promised updated COVID booster shots. It was a one-day story. Probably, you know, 10 to 15 to 20 percent of the country are going to go get them. The Biden administration is not even pushing that hard anymore. I mean, they put out statements saying, like these are safe and good and you should go get them. But they're not going to, there's not going to be mandates. They're not going to make the same arguments that they did eight months ago, a year ago, that people need to do this. And it's just kind of, you know, it's faded into what we always hoped at the beginning

of the pandemic would be, okay, it's just, we've learned to live with it. We're here now. But I understand why people are frustrated that we're not having a more real accounting of what it was the past two years. And I would just say there's sort of a built-in irony here that we're not learning that the virus itself, the disease itself, was any less serious than we thought at the time that people were making these decisions. I mean, there are actually some pretty interesting medical studies that suggest that the long-term implications of having caught COVID are even more serious for people who survive than we would have imagined at the time. And I think that what people failed to realize or failed to realize quickly enough was the differences between the age-related differences between people who got COVID when they were older and the threats to health that that presented and what's happened with young people, not that young people are immune to COVID or don't have long-term complications. Some young people do and are dealing with them still.

but there was very little public debate about the cost benefit calculations in shuddering schools. And the people, I do think it's the case that the people who tried to make the argument that schools should be open, that kids should go back, that we should take a more aggressive take for those reasons, for mental health reasons, for educational reasons, you know, we're sort of dismissed by that the so-called experts. Including, by the way, the people who were against masks in school, which have, you know, when schools weren't mandating what type of masks kids need to wear and they were wearing cloth masks that were disgusting, that also has a cost benefit.

You know, I'm teaching this semester and I had class outside yesterday because when I can't see the student's mouths, you forget how much you lip read to understand what people are saying. And they can't see me. I can't read their facial expressions. And then imagine doing that with a second grader when they're still trying to pick up the nuances of the language, grammar. You know, a lot of letters sound the same

at the end of words, for instance. And if you're dropping them, it's behind them. Phonics is just so huge. Right? Yeah, yeah. It is. It's a huge problem. And, you know, on my drive today,

I saw kids waiting for the bus wearing masks. And I thought, boy, but the tradeoff here. A, Steve, you're right in that the initial COVID-variable, that was in the United States is as deadly as we thought it was at the time. But, A, we have new variants now, some of which are not as deadly. B, we have a vaccine that prevents people from dying from COVID. And this is a little bit bleak.

We killed off a lot of the people who are most susceptible to COVID. You know, like that's tragic. But at this point, the cost-benefit analysis has shifted a lot. The problem is it shifted a year ago. And that was the problem. It's in my mind. Not what happened in April, but what happened in April of 2021. And, you know, no, it doesn't seem to be a big political issue right now. But I think you've still got a lot of parents struggling with what's happened. The question is, will all these other political things overtake it so that when they're at the ballot box, you know, they're thinking about abortion or crime or gas prices or the crazy. you know, election stuff, Donald Trump, Mar-a-Lago, who knows? Will, you know, the, you never know what would have happened otherwise. Maybe my kid wouldn't have been a strong reader. Maybe they always would have been mispronouncing their Fs.

They don't know what could have been if their kid had been in school, hadn't been wearing a mask at sort of those tender years. I don't know. I find the whole thing really tragic. Can we pause for a second to, to acknowledge the point that Jonah made about the public discussion of this lately? I mean, it is truly outrageous that the White House press secretary, whose job it is to speak to such things would make the claim that Democrats were the

ones trying to get kids back in school and Republicans are really to blame you. I mean, it is so counter to the truth and the world we actually lived in. What was the explanation? Because of the American Rescue Plan? Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, because Democrats were for vaccines and the American Rescue Plan and Republicans were against it. And so that, if you follow the train of logic, Democrats were trying to do the things that would allow us to open schools sooner. But that's totally beside the point of what was actually happening.

Also, I mean, just to be, I mean, this vexes me. The teachers union said, we need all of this money and we all need to be vaccinated and then we can open the schools. and then they all got vaccinated and they got all that money and they said nope still not opening and and i don't think i think most of the money that was allocated for schools in the american rescue plan has not been spent there's there's all these stories about billions of dollars that these states have uh that they don't know what to do with you know what i'm sure was not helpful in inflation over the past year and a half but it's not like all of that money was vitally important to to get kids back school. We've been trying to get actual better reporting on this that we can do a piece at the dispatch

on it. But just anecdotally, I've heard stories, credible stories about school districts knowing that they have this extra money and doing everything they can to get it out the door. So now's the time teachers, if you want more furniture, now's the time to go get it because the money's going to go away. And we want to keep the spending levels as high as they are so that we can continue to do this. There's one of the local school districts around Washington, D.C., is giving students two Chromebooks each so that they can have one at home and one in the school. Chromebooks are not, you know, are not MacBooks, but they're not cheap either. They're not free unless you're at that school.

lots of additional spending. Okay, but that's a huge burden to have to expect an eight-year-old to carry a laptop in the backpack. Considering the like scoliosis caused by the books I was carrying in my backpack, my God. Oh, there we go. Walking backwards through the snow uphill.

Okay, but I think you're such a geyser, Sarah. I think that when we talk about politics and punditry, people stay so focused on what happened, you know, last week, last month, and to some extent in the last election, But like the furthest our memories really go back is about two years, when in fact, almost everything that's happening in our current political moment has more to do with the 2008 financial crash than it does with anything that happened in 2020. And I think when we talk about COVID and schools and learning loss, there is just going to be

a cohort of Americans that in 15 years are going to be heading into the job market, you know, our top research universities, trying to get to Mars, just curing cancer, whatever that is, that's when we're going to see the real political effect of this, except people are going to instead, you know, miss the forest for the trees. And I hope that... And you assume we still have a republic at that time. I would say I appreciate the optimism. Yeah, fair enough.

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It's time for not worth your time, except it has sort of like this whole podcast been hijacked, but not by Steve. Jonah has a not worth your time that he is. It's so not worth our time. Jonah wouldn't share it with us in advance. It's a surprise not worth our time. Yeah, we don't have the compartment.

This is why we give him his own little podcast so we can do stuff like this. Why is he doing it on the flagship? So it's truly not worth anyone's time. But it's been vexing me for a while now. And I keep meaning to ambush Steve and ask him about this. And I keep forgetting because it seems like a weird thing. And so it's kind of festered like the, the Princess and the Pea kind of thing.

It just like, I don't know, three months ago, Steve and I were out to dinner with, I think we can disclose this, Klon Kitchen and Chris Starwell, who had just only recently joined the dispatch, the dispatch. And we were having a good time,

talking about this, that, and the other thing. And then at some point, I said that when I'm writing my column, I write it in double space. and Steve's reaction was like I wear footy pajamas

and have a teddy bear when I write my column and he laughed and laughed and was like looking around for everyone else to join in the ridicule

and the mockery the whole restaurant I wanted the whole restaurant to be laughing at you and so at the time it felt like such a weird thing to make fun of me about

that I figured I must be missing something. I must not get it, and I don't want to reveal that I don't get it. So I'll just stay quiet and let Steve make fun of me. That's how Jonah usually reacts to these things. Stay quiet. Three months later, I still don't understand what the big deal is. It's easier on my eyes. You know, I do double space.

So, first of all, I want to find out, does anyone, before Steve explains, Do either of you understand why this is like the kind of thing that you would gather in the schoolyard and point at me and go, ha, ha, because I just don't see it? I got to say, in a million, billion years, I would never write in double space. Thank you. Okay. It reminds me, it reminds me of what I would have to do for term papers in college, and I don't love being reminded of that. I will say, though, that whatever, however it is that you write your, do your work, generally speaking, I have to have, it has to be exactly the same every time or else my brain doesn't realize like, oh, it's time to do work. It has to be size 11, Georgia font, and, you know, 1.25 spacing in Google Docs. Otherwise, I cannot do TMD. And unfortunately, Esther has had to adapt her, her process to that as well as, as she's come on the team.

team here because otherwise I will not be able to convince my brain. See, that's a little serial killer to me. If it's double space for you. I thought you're going to finish by saying, and I must have a wayward hitchhiker in a crate next to my desk. Please don't bring that up on the podcast. My hitchhiker. But that being said, while I think it's insane to write in double space, I don't know that like, I particularly care that you do or think that it makes you, you know, a lesser man. I don't. It means a lot coming from you.

Thank you. Yeah. I feel like everything now has to be put in terms of masculinity. So I don't know that it's emasculating that you write in double space. Okay. I'm troubled that you think this is like a question for debate about whether it is or isn't emasculating that I write in double space. And again, and I, do you put two spaces after a period?

I'll be clear, because, like, I've been conscious about this now for three months. I often don't write in double space. I do sometimes, sometimes, like, when I'm, I do a first draft, I'll realize, oh, my gosh, I do work that whole thing in single space, and then I'll double space it so I can read through it and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, like, I, and, and, and, like, I, and, and, like, I, it, like, six different font sizes, because I've cut and paste and, like, and, like, font sizes and fonts. True. This is all true. Yeah. All true. Seeing the raw copy.

Well, Jonah, I wasn't going to bring this up. I didn't want to publicly humiliate you further. But since you sandbag me here, I mean, you just raised this. There was no warning that you were going to come back at me this ferocious. Hey, look, everyone's basically gone to your back on this. So don't get all like your Donald Trump. I'm the victim here. There's another thing that you do that I felt actually after that and after we got, you know,

Chris and Klan laughing along at you with me and even some people at adjoining tables. I believe the waitress was laughing at you as we were having this conversation. I felt guilty enough that I didn't want to push it. So I didn't even bring up the second thing. And the second thing is you still indent like it's 1977. Wow. But nobody in Dents anymore. Like I can just picture you hitting the tab.

like nobody in dense what are you denting your paragraphs for because that's the right and proper way to do it I have never I don't think I've ever agreed with Steve over Jonah like I'm having trouble thinking of a time where it's been so clear cut it hurts me Jonah

like it wounds me inside you know I'm team Jonah but here I am do you guys even know anybody who had dense other than for me I do a lot of different paragraphs like I have then like a giant paragraph space So, like, that's what allows me to see the next thought.

When I first learned how to write an expository essay in, like, third grade. So this is, like, in 2010, 2015? Yeah. I was in third grade in 2003, thank you very much. And then I had to indent. Never understood why, but I don't think I have sense. I mean, so, like, you're too young. I'm not sure about Sarah.

But, Steve, you had to have grown up learning how to type on a typewriter, right? For sure, yes. Yeah. Typing class. You did Sarah, did you? I did learn how to type on a typewriter, but it was already being phased out. So it was like you learned it just in case computers failed, I guess?

I don't know. Why 2K? Yeah. But, you know, remember, I'm like learning to the computers. We do not have home computers when I am in elementary school. Uh-huh. So at that point, you were just learning to write by hand still because you were in elementary school.

But like at home, my dad was teaching me to type with a typewriter. until we got a computer see my mom who actually worked in like various like including white house typing pools um in the early six season late 50s and all that typing was going on in my house my dad was a journalist who grew up on typewriters and um we had typewriters from the earliest age growing up my mom could while smoking a cigarette and not looking at the page type pristinely about 110 words a minute. It was really on a typewriter. On a typewriter. Yeah, that's hard. On the IBM

Selectric, not on like necessarily the old manual. Click, click, click. Yeah. And so I don't know. Using the little whiteout strips, that was my like favorite thing to do and you would mess up and you'd have to actually use the strip of whiteout itself. Whiteout was awesome, but we were still having to use white out even when you typed in a computer for some reason.

I don't remember why. I guess because like. On the screen. You know, you'd print it. you printed it and then needed to change something and it was just like one letter, it would be so hard to reprint it again and it would take forever. Yeah. And I had the ones with the holes on the side where the printer would, yeah. So I think that's why we were still using white.

Why didn't your school just buy you two Chromebooks? That's fair question. At the risk of making this not worth your time now more than 10 minutes long, do you, for the three of you, those of you who have kids and those of you who will presumably someday have kids, do you think it's important for your kids to take typing class? Because for me, it's probably, you know, one of the, the greatest, I'm pretty fast. I can type fast. When I write, I don't write that much anymore, but when I resume writing, I can, I can type pretty fast and it's very helpful.

I pushed my kids to take typing because I think it could be a useful skill. But it seems to me that they're probably going to be speaking into something rather than doing much typing in the future. Am I wrong about that? I don't think that's the reason why you shouldn't send your kids a diving class. I think the kids grow up with keyboards. Like the cordy keyboard is part of their lives and ways that you had to like force on kids our generation. And like even when I was in high school or early college, they were starting to make video games

to teach kids how to type, which were basically like space invaders, and the letters would drop down. And so, like, you would eventually learn to look at the screen and not at the keyboard to hit the buttons. And I think that they're now growing up with phones and all that, I think that, like, the transition to being able to type on a Cordy keyboard,

cordy being Q-W-E-R-T-Y, the first five letters on the left side of the keyboard, there's a big libertarian argument about whether that was a market innovation or an impediment to efficiency. So, yeah, I hope that we're not all speaking into things because I think too much written word is as if it's spoken anyway, and I know I'm hypocritical on this in terms of how I write.

I also couldn't write by talking out loud. It's like I think through my literal physical writing, but I think learning to type quickly and without looking is really important. I would not take a class on that. They have just computer programs. That's how I did it. It was like a little, you know, the little flashing yellow, green. Type to learn. Yeah. Blinker on our, you know, I wanted to call it a QE2. The Apple. The one plus side to taking a typing class is that my mom and dad met each other in a summer school typing class at the, my mom went to the public school, my dad went to the private school, but typing. was combined over the summer, and that is where they first met. So, you know, you could. I didn't play video games, and I make fun of people who play video games as a general rule. But David's ears are burning.

Yes. The way I learned how to type was both by taking a class at Longfellow Junior High School in Wauitos, Wisconsin, but also there was a game. I forget the name of the game, but it was effectively Space Invaders, but with letters. so the letters would drop down and you'd have to hit the right letters in order to kill them, to blow them up. Good.

And with that, it's very much been not worth your time unless you were born in you know, 19792 to 1982. Declan, thanks for hanging out. Happy to apply. You're like one of these kids just sitting outside

the 7-Eleven while we talk. And one last thing before we go. Legendary producer Caleb has been with us since the beginning, since the first podcast of the flagship, the flagship and the other flagship podcast. And today is his last podcast with us. He has been an amazing partner and friend to me and all of us and we're going to miss him terribly. And what's funny about this is that he's listening and still editing this podcast right now. So basically I can say whatever I want about him and he has to put it into the podcast. Thank you, Caleb. Legendary producer,

Caleb. We'll miss you terribly. If you enjoyed this podcast, give us a rating wherever you're watching this podcast. It helps other people find the podcast and become a member to leave us a comment or to chit chat with fellow members. It's a good time in the comment section. It is one of the least gross places on the internet. Thank you for joining us and we will talk to you next week. You know what I'm going to be. 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, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place.

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