The Dispatch Podcast - Mr. Trump in the Middle East | Roundtable

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

Michael Warren is joined by Jonah Goldberg and Grayson Logue to discuss the ongoing trade war with China and Trump’s newest aviation toy. The Agenda:—Scott Bessent or Peter Navarro?—What to make of the 90-day pause with China—Golden calf foreign policy—Trump meets with Qatar but skips Israel—Leaving America because of fascism? The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—⁠click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit TELUS.com. Total Security to learn more. Conditions apply. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Mike Warren. I'm joined by Jonah Goldberg and first timer on the dispatch podcast, deputy editor of the morning dispatch,

Grayson Logue. We're going to be talking today about Donald Trump's big trip to the Middle East. We'll talk about his executive order that claims to be lowering drug prices here in the United States. And a little not worth your time? Yale professors leaving the... the United States, going off to Canada in protest. Do we really need to care about this? A pause on tariffs, a pause on tariffs announced last weekend, bringing almost all of the

tariffs, but importantly, not. not all of the tariffs that we have levied on China and that China has levied on us. The 90-day pause period began this week. This is a deal. The Trump administration is trumpeting it as a deal, the beginning of something that can sort of reset our trade relationship with China. This is a big deal, but I wonder, Jonah, I'd like to. to start with you. How big of a deal is this particular announcement? Obviously, this pause

had markets rallying when it was announced, I guess the morning after it was announced, the financial markets basically erased all of the losses since Liberation Day, and I'm using scare quotes here, Liberation Day, that we saw on the markets. So the markets loved it. People in Washington seem to love it. Hey, it's great. These tariffs, he's holding back, but it's a 90-day pause. Do we think that pause is going to be permanent? Did we gain anything from this negotiation with retaliatory tariffs and now they're off? What do you make of the medium and long-term effects, not just the short-term effects of this

China trade deal? Yeah, so it's, look, I mean, it's very tempting to dive into the things that are most annoying about all of this rather than the things that are most important. Having been told by a lot of MAGA people a month and a half ago that the stock market needed to come down. America was at a casino. It's a wild ride. We need to get back to basics and who cares about the markets. Wall Street isn't Main Street. All of those talking points, which we've heard from the left and sort of the Buchananite right for 40 years or whatever. Plus all the defenses of Trump, that this is part of some grand plan,

now that the stock market is going back up, they're like, yay, what a genius this guy is, right? The plan all along. Yeah, so, like, I reject all of that garbage. I think it's all nonsense, all that. What I think is actually the most important thing and going forward,

actually wasn't necessarily this move, which I agree with you, doesn't get us to April 1, right? It doesn't get us to pre-liberation Day, levels. And that is still going to have consequences. But I think that is one's most significant is where Trump has basically said, Scott percent is running trade policy. Like, he's basically capitulated. Anybody who thinks that this was like some grand plan and four-dimensional chest and all that kind of stuff, they're what social scientists call wrong. He basically just capitulated.

And he hasn't completely capitulated and he hasn't rhetorically capitulated. But on the policy, they've basically abandoned all of the stuff that Vance was saying. They're doing it piecemeal. I still think it was a huge broken window fallacy from soup to nuts. But the announcement that percent is basically going to be driving the car on this, I think is a big deal. It means that Peter Navarro, who we don't see very much anymore, is not bending Trump's ear the way he was.

and we're not hearing Lutnik out there very much either. And that's, I think, markets like that as much as they like the actual number on this tariff stuff. Right. The Wall Street Journal, their markets columnist, basically said exactly what you just said, Jonah. It looks like Treasury Secretary Scott Besant is now in control of trade policy. Put simply, the grownups are in the room. And the grownups do not, on trade policy, do not include Peter Navarro, who is Trump's, you know, trade, you know, trade Rasputin, his tariff Rasputin,

whispering in his ear saying, you must keep doing this. The magic of the tariffs will work. Grayson, I'm, I tend to agree with that analysis. My question is, yes, Bessent, the Treasury Secretary is in charge right now. But as far as I can tell, he's not the president. Donald Trump is the president. And what we know about Donald Trump is Donald Trump likes tariffs, qua tariffs. He thinks that they are good in, they are a good in and of themselves.

He clearly was spooked. Donald Trump was spooked by what happened to the bond markets. That's where some of the initial pause in the tariffs came from, as if we can believe, reporting, and I think we can. Trump has said as much. And he seems to have been kind of spooked by the fear that, that the phrase that Scott Besson kept using was decoupling, the decoupling of trade between the U.S. and China.

The real world seems to have spooked Donald Trump in the moment. Why should we have any confidence that things get kind of back on track and Donald Trump gets bored that tariffs aren't back on the menu at some point in the near future? Or is this the beginning of the end for kind of massive tariffs? No, I think you're right. I don't think tariffs are ever going to come off the menu for Donald Trump. They're arguably maybe the only thing that he's been consistently about for decades and decades. Like he's been making the same argument about tariffs for a better part of 40, 50 years. But I think you raise a good point about how the question is how durable is this easing and the markets and this disruption when there's still this nascent uncertainty about how long Bessett being the adult in the room can actually last. And I think that's an open question, and that's going to be baked into the cost that we've already seen from all of this disruption. So I don't think we're ever going to be in a situation in the current Trump administration where we're not having some level of tariffs or some level

of discussion of tariffs with China. The question is, to your point, has Trump been spooked enough to totally sideline the Navarro Vance School of we need to have tariffs that are so high to totally reorient the U.S. economy and have people back working. In fact, and $2.2 instead of $20. There will still be severe economic costs, like China's a huge trading partner if we keep it at a baseline of 30 percent, a level of tariffs above what it was previously. But that's potentially not the type of economic impact that could have the scary outcomes like we were seeing with the bond market. And I think that's the range that will probably be in for the foreseeable future. But again, it's Donald Trump. Things could change. It's very hard

to have a stable position at a senior level, senior level in his orbit for extended periods of time. Right. And look, we're talking about China, huge trading partner, huge economic power. There are tariffs on a whole bunch of other countries all around the world that we trade with, maybe not at the scale that we trade with China, but those don't seem to be disappearing, although we keep hearing this claim that there are deals. The deals are happening. Their deals are everywhere, even though even this China deal seems to sort of, it sort of kind of sprang from out of nowhere doesn't seem to be. And it's really a memorandum of understanding, right? And correct.

Same thing with the UK deal, which is pretty kind of flimsy, not a, you know, doesn't, even if the memorandum of understanding is implemented, it doesn't really amount to very much. It is like, again, they're saving face. They're not doing some grand new thing here. And there's also just like, if you're a CEO thinking about reshoring, you know, auto plants or pharmaceutical companies and all that kind of stuff, 90 days is just not a very long window for making plans. And so all of this adhocry eventually is going to come due. And, you know, and we're not getting into it, thank you.

God, but the GOP budget thing looks like it's going to add, I don't know, three and a half trillion dollars to the debt, which could create a bond market scare that people might attribute to the trade stuff, but the reality is the way, it's real connections to the trade stuff will just simply be, oh, so on the budgeting side, this is not a serious country either, and that's a problem. This is breathing room. like to a trade agreement in any traditional understanding of the word takes months and years. That's what we had with all of like past previous large trade agreements of the United States has done this. It takes so much time.

So to Jonah's point, these are memos. This is just a pause to allow them to actually begin to think about what could we actually do that isn't this giant kind of willingly tariff regime. And that's going to take much longer than 90 days if it's actually trying to do something akin to traditional trade agreements. I'm also confused a little bit because I thought that Donald Trump was a China hawk. And this memorandum of understanding, don't call it a deal deal, as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be really anything that we have gained or seem to be gaining in terms of the actual concerns that we have from China, whether it's intellectual property theft. Obviously, there are military and national security related issues, problems. I'm not expecting a trade deal to solve all of those things, but at this point, and

I'd love to know what either of you think about this, there doesn't seem to be a lot of movement in the relationship or where we're bringing something to bear to actually kind of change Chinese behavior in any real way, except kind of on these, in a limited way by implementing this still 10% tariff and I guess some of the steel tariffs and things. I keep thinking in all of these trade efforts, what is it that we actually gained where we are better off as a country than before it happened? The deal here seems to be we've gotten to a place where we're better off than we were before we implemented the tariffs on

on China or say on the UK we're better off than we were five weeks ago under the regime that we have implemented ourselves is there anything that we can that we've actually gained on on this front either on a diplomatic front things like again IP theft or has Donald Trump not really care about any of that stuff. What he cares about is an abyss that will look back into you if you try to

figure that out. So we'll put that aside. But if the question is, are we better off on any front since Liberation Day? Right. Is there any actual tangible gains since Liberation Day? And you can even keep it to China, but or in general. Yeah, with China, I haven't seen anything that says we are. I could make the case that there are. I, I, I could make the case that there I know some China Hawks and national security types who would make the case that while this whole thing was ill-advised and ill-planned, even from the pro-protectionism standpoint, right? Because the way you actually do protectionism is you ease into it like an old man getting into a bath and you don't do it all at once because you get scalded, right?

And you do it incrementally so there's a long time horizon so people can plan around it, right? You do it through Congress, so there's political buy-in, all that kind of stuff. Put that aside. So even among the people who were protectionist or not protectionist, but who are China Hawks, there is a widespread argument that Trump shouldn't have backed down because one of the things, and if you think this is sort of Orientalism or whatever, but like going back to the days of requiring people to kow, which is to bow seven times prostrate for forgiveness, China respects strength and consistency.

and if they think that you're going to blink, they think that you're going to swerve, that is more damaging to the competition between us than the economic stuff. Now, as I should be clear, China caved a little bit too here, right? I mean, this was hurting their economy. I just don't know if there's anything tangible.

I haven't seen anything about the IP stuff, which is really the only legitimate, not the only legitimate, but one of the only truly legitimate trade issues that we have a right to be, hard asses on. And that's, look, and that's ultimately, that's the frustrating thing about all of this is we, Trump went around in the China shop, smashing everything, and then everyone celebrates what a genius he is when he successfully glues back on some handles to some teapots.

He created this mess. I don't, I don't know that there are many wins in it in any, I mean, when you have the theory that all trade deficits are the equivalent of theft, any policy that works on that assumption is not going to lead to a lot of gains. There is some reshoring stuff. There's some press release stuff that people can point to, but, like, I don't know of anything tangible. And I believe, I mean, to kind of spin the globe over to the UK, last year, I mean, the U.S. had a trade surplus with the U.K., you know, so it doesn't even, I mean, we're celebrating this agreement with the U.K., an ally,

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use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I'm going to keep spinning the globe here and move on because we have a lot to talk about in the Middle East. Where Donald Trump has been, week traveled to multiple stops in the Middle East. And a lot, it feels to me like a lot of things happened. Things were said and meetings happened. Plains were exchanged. So, but I actually want to start at the beginning of the president's trip.

He was in Riyadh, visiting, of course, Saudi Arabia and gave this big speech. And, as with many Trump speeches, it can be difficult to listen to the first, like, 15, 20 minutes of a Trump speech, no matter where he is or what topic. Because he goes over kind of the same things about how he's winning. He won an incredible victory in the election. And you do start to wonder, like, does anybody in Saudi Arabia care about that every state? Yeah, exactly. Every state got redder, whatever. Beyond that, I want to move beyond that because I think there's a good window into Trump's view of international relations in, certainly in the Middle East and maybe beyond. He spent a lot of time in the speech once he got through that initial part talking about how wonderful and terrific the Arab states have done and built. up their cities, their great big cities, and he mentions them, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Muscat. You know, he's impressed. This is a New York guy who built Trump Tower. He's impressed by all the

tall buildings and all the sort of a seeming economic boom going on in these little emirates, different emirates and kingdoms and things. And it's crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionalists or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadhya and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders neocons or liberal non-profits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region

themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives, developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies in your own way. It's really incredible what you've done. there, Jonah, that the Arabs have made Arabia great again, all on their own, and he's just there. The United States is just there, what, to pat them on the back and do business with them, right? There seems to be a real kind of speaking of the transactional way in which Donald Trump views international relations. You guys did this. Now let's see if we can do business together. do you take anything from any of that that I just said or anything from his Riyadh speech that

helps you understand Donald Trump better? Or is this just the Donald Trump that we've always known? He's a transactional guy. He prefers strength. He prefers economic development and he wants a piece of it. Yeah. So there are a lot of people think this is the most important foreign policy speech Trump has ever given. It signals what his foreign policy is going to be in the second term. Some people think it's aimed for a domestic American audience, right? It's about it's, it's shots fired at the neocons, you know, which he, name checks, all that stuff. I think I'm going to write about this tomorrow, but the, first of all, just the whole, I'll back up. I think the whole spectacle of this trip, this is really bad analogy.

Unseemly? Well, I was going to say it's like a Canadian porn, incredibly depraved, but oddly polite. Um, and, uh, and so I, I, uh, I thought the whole thing was kind of gross. And so on the speech, what I find remarkable about this, well, first of all, as a matter of form, like, I get tapping into the fact that it is, it is just a, it is the mainstream view on the right, never mind in America, that war on terror, rack war, these were mistakes or misguided or went wrong and all that kind of stuff. And those are, there are defensible arguments in all of that.

The idea that Saudi Arabia did all of this on its own is so staggeringly idiotic. Like, but for a handshake deal between FDR, the king of Saudi Arabia. And B.S.'s his grandfather, I believe. Yeah. But for a handshake deal with FDR, you know, 80, 90 years ago, Saudi Arabia would have, you know, let's put it this way, just be a very different country. right now. They, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states generally, they have been living under the protective cover of the United States of America for a very, very, very long time. And the, and what I find

so remarkable about this is that we don't have a NATO with the Middle East, right? We don't have that kind of treaty organization. We just straight up protect these countries. In exchange for, like, stable oil markets, I'm not saying we don't get anything out of it. It is in the national security interest, you know, from a whole bunch of angles. But when you listen to Trump talk about our democratic allies in NATO, it's just endless BS about them ripping us off, about how they're taking advantage of us, they're exploiting us, they're living on, we're subsidizing their welfare states. Some of those claims are, you know, subsidizing welfare state, there's merit to that argument. But when Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Qatar and UAE and these countries get to build up their economies while we protect them from Iran, from Iraq, presumably even from Russia, you know, back in the day,

the idea that somehow they did it all on their own through self-sufficiency is such a self-owning piece of nonsense that Um, it's, and I get the audience likes to hear it. And I get that the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the signal that is being sent, most people aren't thinking about those issues. They're thinking about, okay, we're no longer going to care about the internal political operations of these countries. So if you want to, like, violate human rights domestically, as long as your check's clear, everything's going to be fine. I get the argument. We can argue about it, but like, um, it's just it's factually not true. But it's so interesting you mention the contrast between how the administration, the president, the vice president in particular speak about the NATO countries because something that Trump said just a few seconds later after what I finished reading, it's the first thing I thought of when I heard this. You achieved a modern miracle, the Arabian way. That's a good way. Today, the Gulf nations have shown. this entire region, a path towards safe and orderly societies with improving quality of life,

flourishing economic growth, expanding personal freedoms, and increasing responsibilities on the world stage. I mean, to be fair, you have to acknowledge that there have been in targeted ways, particularly in Saudi Arabia, some expanded personal freedoms for certain people in certain compartments. You know, women can drive now. You know, that's a, that's a big step forward, I suppose. But the contrast with the way that the administration speaks about liberal democracies in Western Europe, which, to take your point, like there's all kinds of specific policy ways and even sort of mindsets in Europe that don't, that, that sound backward or whatever to the American ear, at the same time, there are also these, these. allies in kind of a small l liberal democracy it's not exactly what i think of when i think of the

arab states and so this flattery of the arab states yeah again the the audience loves to hear it aren't we so great um but it i can't imagine i it's it was jarring to hear it even though it's maybe what we've come to expect i would love to hear some a reporter asked trump what he thinks of Qatar's immigration policy, because Qatar has got about, I don't know, two and a half, just shy of three million people, and nine out of ten of them are migrant workers. Yeah, like the actual citizenship of Qatar is like 350,000, something like that. Everyone else is, I don't want to say they're all slave laborers, but some are slave laborers. They are certainly second-class citizens, and, like, the Qataris aren't making Katari Great, Katara Great Again, by working in factories

themselves. It's a, it's a problem. Well, and you talk to anybody, Grayson, maybe you have thoughts on this. You talk to anybody who's been to, say, Dubai or Abu Dhabi. There's, it's sort of a potential, right. It's a Potempt in Vegas or any kind of, you go there as a Westerner. it looks extremely cosmopolitan because there are people from all over the world going to these places. And there are sort of, you know, restaurants and bars and things.

And it's not, you get the, you get the sense and you talk to people who actually know what's going on. I mean, they're not for your average UAE citizen. I mean, any thoughts on sort of the way Donald Trump looks at the Middle East and this relationship before we, before we move on to other spots in this region. To your point about the contrast with how they speak about Europe and Western global democracies in Europe versus the Gulf states, I think places like Saudi Arabia are closer to Donald Trump's ideal country and ideal way of how leaders operate than how they operate in Europe.

And that whole view of these cities that he loves that are towering and gleaming and they're going to get some more towers from the Trump organization in the next couple of years, which we can talk about kind of the personal enrichment aspect of this trip but that just appeals to to Donald Trump more like personally like miserly he likes the way that these countries are set up he likes the level or lack there of of rule of law he likes that the the imperial court fanfare and the thousand camels and Arabian stallions greeting him on when he when he's on the the tarmac like this is all stuff that that he loves and I think that that is just so so clear and the way that this

speech was structured. One thing I think this isn't anything surprising, but you talk about, does this reveal anything about Trump's mind or foreign policy, the nature of this speech? I think it just highlights how severely diminished the hawkish or traditional internationalist Republican voices in the administration. If you go back to the first administration, you had more of a, I mean, Walter Russell, we would call this Jacksonian Trump foreign policy influenced by people like John Bolton taking harsh steps against Iran. And all of the major vectors of those policy points in the region appeared to be far more relaxed, far more on the dovish wing of the spectrum in Trump, too. And that kind of gets at the issue that we're seeing between the United States and Israel at the

current moment, which we can talk about next. Yeah, no, I'm actually more, I mean, he raised a lot of different things that I want to talk about. Maybe we should reel it in just a little bit and go back to the personal enrichment element of this story, which raises the story of this jet that the government of gutter is gifting to the United States, but that will be conveyed to Donald Trump's presidential libraries. It's sort of, it's shocking in how this news story has kind of, yes, there has been reaction from Capitol Hill from newspapers, but the sort of galling kind of transactionalism

of this gift in the way in which Donald Trump says, of course I'm going to take it up in a way that there seems to be more of a shrug than I would have expected had you told me this was going to happen, at least here domestically. Is there anything that's going to come of this in like saying our domestic politics is there going to be an actual is Congress going to do anything

about this the seeming violation or potential violation of the Monuments Clause of the Constitution or is it because it's all happening out in the open

and Donald Trump's saying yeah of course I'm going to take this jet and no I'm not going to use it for personal use or it's just going to happen and we'll move on to the next outrage. No, I mean I'm surprised

you're surprised by the lack of surprise, right? I'm a knave. What can I say? No, no, no. I mean it this way. If I heard you read, you said that you were surprised by the lack of kerfuffle about it or that kind of thing. And I kind of am surprised by the amount of backlash to it. You know, it got Ben Shapiro and a bunch of Republican senators

to say, this isn't such a great idea. even Ted Cruz is troubled by it. I mean, think of all the things Donald Trump has done that have not gotten any criticism or pushback. I have friends on the right who are like livid at the idea of the president of the United States, just having a plane from another country and forget the national security issues,

forget that it's Qatar, right? They had a very interesting conversation about this on the editor's podcast over at National Review. And my friend Rich Lowry is just like, This is just, it's just, we shouldn't have anybody's, gosh, darn plane. We're Americans, right, and all this kind of stuff. And I get that, but that's not what bothers me about this. Like, if we had a, you know, for whatever reason we needed to buy an airbus, okay, you know, if, if the Brits had some kind of plane, I wouldn't give a rat's ass, right?

To me, it's, I wouldn't care very much. Sure. Most heads of state don't fly on planes made by their domestic aviation industry. We do because we have one, right? And there aren't a lot of aviation company, you know, aren't a lot of jet making businesses in the world, which is why even China buys a lot of Boeing and air buses. What's gross about it is that this is a really questionable regime in the Middle East

using the manners and customs of the court to curry favor with the head of the United States. and I think the reason why it strikes the court is partly, you know, there are some people, we should say that one of the things that ties these, all this stuff together is there are a bunch of people who think, like, any day now comes the great screwing of Israel by the Trump administration. I'm not saying that's right. I have criticisms on all sides, but that's a background for some of this stuff. It's like, geez, what more of like a signal that this is coming than actually accepting what is, in fact, a bribe from Qatar. And the people who say, well, you know, it would be a gift to the government and then it would go to his library and all that kind of stuff.

There's not a single person who pays attention to Donald Trump or politics who thinks for a moment that when Trump, when or if Trump leaves office, he won't keep the plane and use it all the time as his private toy. And yeah, sure, maybe after his death, it will go to, you know, the fabulous museum or library or whatever, you know, talk about. about a post-literate society, but I think it's, it has to do with the nature of Qatar and the nature of Donald Trump that makes this problematic in a, and it makes it icky. And the rest of it is sort of, to me, second order. Some of the reaction to it feels like the reaction to the, Mike's old enough to remember, Grayson was still in the womb, the, the,

the Dubai Ports deal. Yes. kerfuffle. There were reasons to be for the Dubai port steel. There are reasons to be against the Dubai port steel. But most of the arguments were about, ew, dirty foreigners owning an American port. And there's a version of that going on here in some ways. Well, then maybe I should recalibrate what I'm surprised about, because I'm surprised that there's not been more discussed at what you're discussed by Jonah, about just how kind of scozy. and medieval, this sort of, this gift feels. But that actually, but you raise the issue, the issue of Israel, I mean, Donald Trump is not

visiting, probably by the time this podcast poster, people are listening to it, Donald Trump will have returned from the Middle East. We'll be on his way back from the Middle East. Without having visited Israel, I think there is a lot of, there are a lot of good reasons. It goes beyond speculation that a sort of abandonment or a, you know, some kind of throwing Israel under the bus from the Trump administration is imminent. Grayson, what, I mean, what should we make of this trip without a visit to Israel? What is the nature of the relationship now, particularly after years of kind of liberals and a of B.B. Netanyahu saying, you know, oh, Netanyahu and Donald Trump, what's really

the problem is there are two sides of the same coin. They're too close. What do we make of the state of the relationship right now in May 2025? I mean, we've seen a pretty serious divergence in short order on all of most of the big issues that Israel cares about in the region on Iran and the way that a potential deal is shaping up on what just happened in the last couple of days with Syria, not only lifting U.S. sanctions on Syria, but the president actually meeting with this guy, which under normal circumstances would be a huge deal. I remember, like, just a few months ago or last year, it was a question of whether or not, like, low-level state department people should talk with this new Syrian regime, whether or not we should have an outpost there.

First meeting between an American and Syrian head of state in decades, right? I mean, it's, it's a huge deal. And again, it's just been kind of. kind of throw it on the pile of things that happen on this trip. Go ahead. Yeah, and to relate to what we were talking about before, like, I think that is the, the sleazyest element of the, like, personalist grift on display in this Gulf trip. Like, we don't have confirmed details of any type of, like, exact quid, pro quo between what the Saudis said they give to Trump on any business deals

and Assyrian sanctions being dropped, but at least the appearance of that, that's kind of the landscape of this trip. That's, I think, the most disturbing part. In terms of the relationship between the United States and Israel, I'm curious as to how much of this, there's a personal element here between Bibi, Nanyahu, and Trump, like they've had the rift going all the way back to 2020

and the stolen election claims and B.B. congratulating Biden on his victory. Like, it's been soured, at least at that level, for years. So I don't know how much of this is, like, well-thought-out policy differences versus there's some personal dynamics going on. So I'm curious to follow the reporting on that front as this continues to develop. Before we move on, Iran, Donald Trump said that Iran has sort of agreed to a new nuclear deal.

Does anybody have any thoughts on how real this is? What difference is there are between this and the, what, you know, the JCPOA, the sort of official term for the Iran nuclear deal under the Obama administration? that Donald Trump scuttled in his first term, where is this right now? I'm a little confused about how serious to take this, even though conversations were ongoing and appear to have wrapped up over the weekend. What do we make? Well, I think one important distinction between the Obama-era nuclear deal and the current situation is how much weaker Iran is in the region after everything that's happened since October 7th. So just from a negotiating perspective,

if they want time. Aram wants time to try and rethink its regional military strategy, to rebuild its proxies, to kind of lick its wounds. And obviously Israel doesn't want that, so it gets to the conflict between Trump wanting to say he has a deal done and Israel wanting to actually survive sustainably in the region and not kind of get back to closer to square one before they've made all of these really significant military gains against Iran. So that's one situational difference. I think a lot of it is still unclear, even the question of whether or not you can have any level of nuclear enrichment. Like, that's a huge, huge question. And there's some reporting for Maxios about senators like Tom Cotton trying to really push heavily back against the Trump

administration, giving that ball away to the Iranians in this process. So it's still very much live today, but it seems like we are going to have some concessions and the Trump and his team are pushing towards concessions that are certainly not what the hawkish a strong maximum pressure position against Iran was previously. And to your previous point, Grayson, this is, to say, to call it even the twilight of the Hawks is, it's probably, we're probably long past that point within the Republican Party, certain the Trump administration. Well, let's keep tabs on that.

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Seeing past the horizon, investing beyond the bench. mark because your money can't grow if it doesn't move learn more at dynamic dot ca slash active let's move on actually to talk about another trump executive order an action that he took that he announced was sort of the biggest deal uh believe on on truth social you know sort of the one of the most important things he would ever do this executive order to lower drug prices. Who knew that it was so easy to lower drug prices that all the president had to do was sign a piece of paper and it would happen. So, Grayson, you've written about this, you've written an explainer on this executive order. Tell me, how is it going to make drugs in America much cheaper

just like that with a signing of a piece? The way that some of the president and some of the senior officials were talking about. This was funny to me. I mean, presidents always say that their orders, they frame them expansively. Like, this is the most historic thing. But to try and claim that this is the most historic, this is the biggest order in the history of the country on drug pricing formulas. Like, how long has that stuff even been around? Like, it hasn't, like, George Washington wasn't dealing with, like, pharmacy rebates. But this is more certainly concept of a plan than actual policy plan, which is Donald Trump's style when it comes to health care issues more broadly. This specifically is an attempt at reviving

something he tried in his first administration, but in a different way, apparently at a much broader level and with even less legal footing for it. So in the first Trump administration, they did a pilot program of something called Most Favored Nation drug pricing. It's also called International Reference Pricing. And the basic idea here is we are going to set prices or at least price caps on U.S. drugs that are matched to the cheaper rates that other wealthy countries are able to get, especially in Europe. So that's kind of the most favored nation price among that cadre of nations. They tried in the first administration through like a Medicare pilot program. It came into some legal challenges, questionable rulemaking authority.

And then the Biden administration kind of abandoned that that program as it was still live in terms of the court challenge. This is not going to reduce drug prices by 80 to 90% almost immediately, as Trump said. This is not even really a rulemaking. This is basically the start of something that could lead to rulemaking that may have some amount of legal authority to partially affect drug prices and some of the public programs and certainly almost certainly not in the private market whatsoever, just because there isn't really the legal authority currently on the books for the executive

branch to do that without Congress. So let's just put that, put that there. But there is some curious things to discuss here about. But and should we, and we should note, I mean, yes, there's no legal authority to affect the private market, but between Medicare and Medicaid, the government is really involved in not just the healthcare market, but particularly the prescription drug market. So this can have an effect, regardless if it gets to that point which, as you lay out much farther down the road than Trump is proclaiming, correct? Yeah, and to be clear, they're not going about this.

They're not trying to, oh, here's how we can actually impact Medicare drug prices, which is more like what they tried to do in the first go route. This is, to be clear, like, essentially a press release saying, we will have these cheaper rates. And it was unclear in the executive order whether or not that they just met Medicare and Medicaid and public programs, or if they also met the private market. RFK went on Fox business on Monday and said, no, we mean the private market

too. So that's, it's just the HHS secretary setting a price cap for the private market. There isn't really the power to do this. Now, the way that they're trying to approach it is basically trying to pressure drug companies into voluntarily agreeing to do this, which I don't right. We'll see if that can be an effective strategy, but that's how they're trying to get around the fact that they don't actually have the legal authority to just fiat set a price cap or a price certainly in the private market. Why are drug prices more expensive in the United States than in, say, Europe? It's government, right? Government in Europe, the governments in Europe set prices and do these kind of price controls. Trump is just looking there and saying, hey, we should do

that too. Basically, yeah, I mean, drug pricing is incredibly complicated, but by the virtue of having either nationalized health care system or a single payer system governments, because they are the one controlling all the money spent on drugs, have significant negotiating leverage, and then in some cases just straight up legal authority to set the prices themselves. And so the president is basically, he's trying to get around the traditional argument against doing anything like this in the United States, which is we'll have less drugs, we'll have less innovation. If you have less revenue going to pharmaceutical manufacturers, then we're going to have less new drugs, less life-saving therapies coming out. He's trying to get around that argument

by saying, well, actually, we're just going to keep the pie of money the same. The Europeans are going to pay more than what they're doing right now, and the drug companies are going to drop their prices in the United States by the exact same amount. So revenues will stay the same. Innovation will stay the same, but we'll just have to pay closer to what Europeans are paying for prices, which is kind of a magic scenario that I'd have no idea how we would actually get to that perfect utilization. Yeah, I was reading the economist. They have a one of the things that some drug companies are thinking about doing is ostensibly selling to European governments at a lower rate and then giving a backdoor rebate so that the published price is in line with the thing

and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but like it gets super complicated and who knows if that's actually going to happen. Well, as you said, it was basically press release and this kind of, like I didn't answer on the Iran question because my general rules to wait for do you have to tell me what to think about Iran? But I think the tie-through on so many of these things is that so many of these executive orders are essentially press releases. And it's a very difficult thing. We talk about this in editorial meetings, you know, like, how seriously do we take the executive order if the executive order is a press release that has very little follow-through in it? And what follow-through there may be is almost surely going to get dragged through the courts

and ultimately rejected. And none of this means, that's not true of all those executive orders because there's some executive orders that undo previous executive orders that, you know, or, you know, or that are about the actual operating of the federal government that have impacts.

I'm not saying all executive orders are meaningless. But a lot of these, you know, like, a lot of these are sort of Michael Scott in the office. I declare bankruptcy, right? I mean, he's just saying, we're going to make drug prices lower, you know, details to follow. And similarly, like, he made a statement about, you know, we've, the, the Houthis have stood

down, and that wasn't true. And I don't trust anything he says about Iran until it's like, I mean, forget Steve, until, like, we actually see the reality unfold. And so on this stuff, there is a legitimate complaint about how the fact that the rest of the world are free riders on our innovation, our R&D, that produces. these drugs. This is a very old argument. I've often thought that one place to fix this is in the trade area. So I'm not utterly dismissive of this stuff. But it's also worth pointing out my friend Tevi-Troy makes this point that, you know, Europeans, because of

this arrangement, get fewer drugs later than Americans do. It is not like Europeans automatically get all the good path-breaking treatments and cures and all that. right away, because of their system, the pharmaceutical companies consider them sort of a, you know, they're an ancillary market. They have major domestic price controls, so that means that some drugs just don't get sold and right quantities and all that kind of stuff. And price controls generally stifle, you know, supply. And so, like, Europe doesn't get as good medicine as the United States does.

The way people talk about this, well, they just get our drugs cheaper. It's not entirely true. Again, I'm not saying that the status quo is great, but I'm basically with Tyler Cowan. I mean, the idea, when you add this stuff to the utter monkey wrenching of NIH, FDA, you know, CDC, places that all could have used some reform, the bullying of all these research universities, the signal that America is sending is that we are just not taking basic scientific research seriously. or the other end of the pipeline from basic research is like highly specialized drug treatments, we're just not taking scientific innovation and science seriously right now.

And I think this is gonna have monumental consequences they're gonna play out over decades. Yeah, no, I mean, it feels like we could have an entirely separate discussion about the priorities when it comes to healthcare and medicine and medical research from this administration and how it really is a warping of what has been a success story after success story after success story. But it does, to bring it back to executive orders, just real quick before we move on,

there was some set that was shared earlier this week. Now, Donald Trump has signed something like the lowest number of bills from Congress in his first, in this first period, something like five bills have come from Congress. It's another in our continuing series about Congress is not doing its constitutional job and duties. And so we are left with executive orders, most of which or many of which amounts of nothing more than unenforceable press releases. But let's move on and ask, is this worth our time? Is it worth your time or not worth your time? I'm going to bring up this project from the New York Times opinion section.

It's a video. You can go watch it if you really want to. I guess that's the question. Is it even worth our time to watch this video? But I watched it. It is several professors from Yale University, Marcy Shore, Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley, who say they are leaving the United States.

They are experts all. They've done research in authoritarianism, in fascism. that they are all leaving the United States. They're going to the University of Toronto. And they're doing this as an act of protest. They're saying there's a democratic emergency in the United States under Donald Trump. This is what Marcy Shore said.

We're like people on the Titanic saying our ship can't sink. And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can't sink. So they're abandoning ship. They're going to Canada. In one hand, this is like the same thing that we hear pretty much any time a Republican president is elected or begins their term. People of means, usually of some kind of celebrity or have some kind of people know who they are. I think of it a lot of times in terms of Hollywood folks say, we're leaving the United States.

We've got to get out of here. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they come back quickly after. don't know. Why should we can't? There's so much talk about these Yale professors leaving and the reason that they're leaving, you know, that they understand fascism and authoritarianism better than anybody. And so they're seeing what nobody else can see. I have a longstanding view that we pay way too much attention to elite colleges in the sort of general discourse that because so many people in journalism and punditry come from those elite colleges that we spend a lot more time than we

should talking about what happens in those colleges because that's our milieu whether or not we actually went to Yale. It's a world we understand. I don't think this is worth our time. I don't think it's worth, frankly, the New York Times time to give attention to these folks. Am I wrong, Jonah, that I start with you, am I wrong to think that this is not worth our time? I think it's probably not worth our time. I've not watched the video. No, look, Timothy Snyder wrote some serious books, but he seems to have kind of like, given that I get accused of Trump's derangement syndrome every four and a half minutes,

I don't in turn like to throw it around out there. But I think he's gotten a little over his skis on and a little emotional on some of this stuff and it's affecting his seriousness. The way I look at it is, okay, so if they're right, if they're right, what does that say about them leaving? If they're wrong but sincere, what does it say about them leaving?

And personally, I think neither are good things. um like if you actually think that your country has is under the if the if the curtain of fascism is descending on america you should fight it you should call it out you should say something you should do something um you shouldn't run to canada and particularly if they're right you know what is first on america's list Canada so they're running to the to the new state they're going to pack up again and head to greenland and then we're coming for them there. So like, I mean, look, I don't mean to make light of it. There are a lot of things Trump is doing I don't like. I don't like that he creates this kind of state of anxiety out there. I do think he's a threat to like the rule of law and liberal democracy and all sorts of meaningful ways. But this is, they're not the canaries in the coal mine that they're painting themselves. Why do we, why do we obsess then? What is, okay, not to ask you to get into the heads, Jonah or Grayson, of like the New York Times opinion, editor. and the decision makers, but we put so much emphasis and import on people who, I mean,

it's not to diminish what they do, but they're just, they are just three people. They are just three people who happen to sort of have an academic interest in this part of history or politics or whatever. Why devote, you know, this august, you know, the New York Times opinion section, three people who are leaving the country. What do you think, Grace? Well, to put a wet blanket on that even further, I put my reporter hat on a little bit and read some more details on these folks. And it's not a, this isn't clear to me a purist act of protest.

So Timothy Snyder, who's actually married to Marcy Shore, so two of those three, like, they're married. They're both going to work in the University of Toronto. That's an important detail. That's an important detail. I did not know that, yeah. And this is a couple of them. Exactly. So this was broken, I believe, in March by Yale Daily News. So New York Times is kind of late to the story. They had to take the time to make this produced video, I guess. But this is what Snyder said back then. The opportunity came at a time when my spouse and I had to address some difficult family matters. And he says that he's not leaving the country because of Trump or anything that's happened, but he's doing it kind of to support his spouse and that they've been being solicited by the University of Toronto for years with offers to go there. So

I think you should consider though that is a little bit separately from Jason Stanley. He said that he's decided after he saw what the Trump administration's done over the first few months. So I'm not sure. I was just surprised that the Times chose to frame this as like these are elite

scholars of fascism and they're making this decision to leave when at least with one of them he's explicitly saying I'm not leaving because of what's going on. And then the other one, it seems enmeshed in their potential personal issue. But regardless of that, if the goal was to sound the alarm for the public, which is what Jason Stanley says, like, I'm doing this to let people know that this is an emergency and they need to wake up, if that was the goal, which I don't think is actually very achievable for Yale professor, but regardless, it would be so much more persuasive if any one of these people was actually targeted in any way by the administration since they took power, or if they were silenced by Yale because they're afraid of, of having funding cut to my understanding, none of that has happened.

This has affected none of their like jobs or their ability to write about fascism whatsoever. So that kind of takes the wind out of the sales, in my view, of this even as an act of protest. Yeah, there's a, there's not Valerie Plame, who had a legitimate gripe, even though it was way blown out. But what was her husband's name, that horrible guy? Joe Wilson. I mean, there's a personality type that, you know, we talk about it with kids and Instagram stuff, you know, main character syndrome. But it's a real thing with academic types and government types, too, who they just, they want to be in a more dramatic narrative.

I remember this is like 30 plus years ago reading a Martin Perrette's diarist in the New Republic about a literary conference in Paris where the issue of, I believe, it was Mumia Abu Jamal came up. Right. Uh, for listeners who don't know, Mumia Boojibu Jbal was a cop killer in Philadelphia, um, like really guilty, um, but turned into like this dashboard saint and this resistance figure of the,

you know, incarcerated state and all this kind of stuff and convicted cop killer murderer. I don't know. I think he's still alive. I'm not sure. Um, but anyway, I just remember this scene that Peretz describes where this writer I had never heard of very grandiosely stands up.

stands up in this lecture hall after hearing this presentation about Mumia and takes out a pen and snaps it in half and says, I swear, I shall not write again until Mumia is free. And I've always wanted to go find that essay, find out what the guy's name was, and find out if you ever wrote anything again, you know, but like there are people who love the big gesture. And that's what I see in this, you know. And you've never, you've never heard of him since because he's... Well, I haven't heard of him before or after, yeah, you know, but anyway. All right.

Well, I just, I think we have given, even in this discussion, more time than was needed and necessary. And before we go, a big day this week in the big birthright citizenship case, oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court, our friends and colleagues in the dispatch legal expanded universe at Scotus blog. Lots of coverage over there at SCOTUS blog and, of course, on advisory opinions, the team there joined to discuss the case. For more on that, subscribe to advisory opinions wherever you get your podcast. You know,