The Dispatch Podcast - No Such Thing as Rock Bottom

Episode Date: January 8, 2021

Was Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol by Trump rally-goers inevitable? Should President Trump be impeached? Where does the Republican Party go from here? Our staff members have been warning about the dangers of Trumpism long before The Dispatch was launched in October 2019. But as David says, “never has vindication felt so miserable.” After all, as he points out, “the vindication was while the republic was under direct attack.” On today’s episode, Sarah and the guys break down the series of events that led to yesterday’s violence. Andrew and Audrey join the show to discuss their on-the-ground reporting at the Capitol on Wednesday, where they spent all day interviewing rally attendees. Show Notes: -“The Storming of the Capitol” by Andrew Egger and Audrey Fahlberg in The Dispatch. -“Impeach Donald Trump, Remove Him, and Bar Him From Holding Office Ever Again” by The Dispatch staff. -“We in the ‘shallow state’ thought we could help. Instead, we obscured the reality of a Trump presidency.” by Sarah Isgur in the Washington Post. -“A Day at the Million MAGA March” by Audrey Fahlberg in The Dispatch. -“If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully,” by Mick Mulvaney in the Wall Street Journal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the Dispatch podcast and happy New Year to all of you. We're going to do things a little differently today because there's only one thing we want to talk about. We've brought on two of our writers to help us today. Audrey Falberg and Andrew Eger were there at the March this week that turned violent, that sacked the capital. And so we want to also hear from them what they saw firsthand, their impressions of what was going on, how it could have been stopped. As always, I am joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French, who will have plenty of their own thoughts on what has happened this week. Let's dive right in. The Dispatch published its first editorial this morning. Steve, can you talk to us a little bit about that process and what we said as an organization?

Yeah. We've had a policy from the very beginning that we didn't want to do a lot of editorials. We weren't going to do anything like a daily editorial. We thought we'd weigh in when sort of events warrant. And we decided that the events of the Capitol and looking back over what's happened in the past few weeks, certainly warranted an institutional voice from us. So we wrote an editorial, drafted an editorial. David did a lot of the heavy lifting. Jonah added a bunch. You had thoughts.

It was really a group project. And the main argument we made was that Donald Trump has to be impeached, removed, and barred from holding office ever again. And I think we can spend more time, perhaps late. later in the podcast going through all the details of why that's the case, but I think if you look at what happened yesterday at the Capitol, you look at the president's role in inciting those riots. You look at the fact that he was unapologetic about what had happened. There's reporting in the New York Times and elsewhere that he was pleased by the violence and the

disturbances that he saw. You look at the fact that he was cut out of the military chain of command when there were requests to use the Washington National Guard. And you look at his ability to navigate the country through the next two weeks. And there are real questions about his ability to do that. Beyond that, we think it's important for purposes of civic hygiene as the editorial states that there's a message sent here. You can't do the things that Donald Trump has done. You can't behave in the irresponsible way that Donald Trump has behaved and remain in office. He's taken the country through nine weeks of hell based on his fantasies about winning an election because he's a narcissist who can't stand losing. It's forever to stand on the Republican

party that they've allowed him to do this for as long as they've allowed him to do this. But ultimately the responsibility rests on Donald Trump and he shouldn't be president any longer. Jonah, what was your biggest takeaway as you closed out the night last night? Well, and so just so people know, if I start speaking in tongues, I was in Hawaii and doing this all from five hours behind on the time zone stuff. And it was all very, very, very weird. some of the things that were particularly weird were like you can't use Wi-Fi over the Pacific so like to land and like literally want to know

whether or not like the capital is burning when the plane lands is a very strange feeling because right before takeoff in Hawaii it was just as dark as the sun was going down in DC and everyone was worried about you know martial law curfew what's going to happen you know, with the protests this summer when it got dark is when it always got violent.

And just to like be in, you know, in a communication as dark territory for a while was a very weird thing to do. I got to say, you know, I'm just, I was, it's so strange. And this is something that we talked briefly about including the editorial, and I just, I don't think it made sense to put in.

But the escalation of how quick yesterday went from bad to horrible and how long ago the bad scenes. You know, I'll just give you an example. Last night at LAX, I'm listening to, you know, David and mine's former colleagues at National Review, the editors podcast. And they clearly recorded it very early in the morning on what was yesterday, whatever, Wednesday. And so their entire conference, at least the first half, I haven't finished it, but the first half hour is all about the Georgia election. And, Rich Lowry begins the podcast saying, well, the worst has happened. And then halfway into the conversation, Jim Garrity is saying, well, I think Trump's behavior

in Georgia was clearly the worst thing he did for the Republican Party as president. I mean, I suppose something worse could happen later today. And I kind of wondering, like, how do they feel when they finish recording the podcast and see Trump talking to the masses about, you know, basically inciting a riot. And if you just think back about how terrible it was what he was saying about Mike Pence in those remarks, and then how small and trivial his remarks about Mike Pence seem compared to people getting shot in the Capitol and dudes with Viking helmets taking

over the Senate chamber. And it's one of these boiling frog aspects on sort of speed about the whole Trump presidency. It's like compressed into one day our ability. to rationalize and say, well, this is really bad, but it can't get worse than this. And the thing he did 10 minutes ago wasn't that bad compared to this. And you make allowances for it. To see it all compressed with just two weeks left in his presidency was really a kind of a weird, surreal thing.

And David, you were on record pretty early yesterday calling for the renewed impeachment of the president. Already today, one congressman has called to invoke the 25th Amendment. which would involve a majority of the cabinet and the vice president attesting that the president can no longer discharge his duties in office. Where's that headed? Well, I mean, I think the impeachment, unless Congress comes back into session, unless I'm wrong, they have adjourned and adjourned for some time. So it looks like in spite of the fact that there has been a call from impeachment that has cascaded from across the political spectrum,

that at present it doesn't look like impeachment is a viable option. There are continually hearing reports that there are discussions of the 25th Amendment ongoing. But, you know, look, why would we say this? Why would we argue this?

Why would I argue it so emphatically, so early? And, you know, it really tracks with what we said in the editorial. I mean, I think there's three purposes here. There's, it is, it's, it's, it's, punitive because what Trump has done deserves punishment. It deserves punishment. He stoked and incited an insurrectionary attack on the U.S. Capitol. Like the president of the United States did that. That's stunning. That's stunning. That right there. I don't care if he has six hours

to go in his term. It merits some sort of punitive action. Then the second thing is, is it's protective for the next 14 days or 13 days because he still is clothed with the power and the authority of the office of the President of the United States. He still can do real harm. I mean, we're still in a fog of war about the reporting surrounding what occurred yesterday. But if the reporting is true

that he sort of held back on deploying necessary forces to restore order on the Capitol or help hinder that or delay that in any way, shape, or form. that demonstrates he's a it's not just his misdeeds are not just in the past he's a current clear and present danger and then the third thing is look i mean there's a lot of indications that he might run in 24 and we should not have any illusions right now that the spell that he has cast over the gop has was broken yesterday there are people yes who have done things like

flood my inbox with messages saying okay i i get what you're you you're saying now. I get what you're saying now. But that's just, those are anecdotes. And the plural of anecdote is not data. And so there's no real indication that the spell that he holds over the GOP has been broken, or at least that he couldn't continue to commandeer a plurality of GOP primary voters now and in the future. But this man is a menace to the American Republic. So yes, I think this, if there's ever an event that merited impeachment, it is this event. And potentially the 25th Amendment. I mean, he and his continual embrace of crazy conspiracy theories,

look, I'm not a psychiatrist, I'm not a psychologist, I'm not going to try to diagnose the guy from a distance, but he believes things constantly that are flat out provably and advances things that are constantly flat out, provably, not true, and not true to an extent and not true to an scale that their falsehood is obvious to, anyone who rationally looks at the issue. But I'll tell you what, guys,

when I think about what happened yesterday and compare it with what I see emerging online as a narrative of this is what you get when you don't suppress the Black Lives Matter riots or what did you expect or people flooding Twitter with images from the Kavanaugh protests, the hold here is deep. This was not some sort of tiny, tiny, tiny number of bad people sitting on top of a good movement.

No, that's not what happened. These people are a symptom of a diseased movement. And the fact that not everybody who watches Tucker got out of their chair and stormed the Capitol does not move that mean that this movement isn't diseased. It is diseased. and it has to be cut out. There has to be a punitive action taken against what occurred yesterday and what might occur in a prophylactic against what might occur tomorrow or the next day

or on January 20th and beyond. On Christmas Eve, I published an op-ed with The Washington Post, reflecting back a little bit on my time working in the Trump administration. I was the director of public affairs at the Department of, of justice during the Mueller investigation from, you know, roughly February 2017 to November of 2018 when I was removed from my position. And what I was writing about, first of all, I tried to give the readers sort of a glimpse of what it was like to be there and be attacked by the White House daily to be, you know, they tried to fire me four times. And sort of the

anecdotes to capture that. But the point of writing it was none of that. And it wasn't to, you know, pull the curtain back about Donald Trump and like all of these, you know, things I had seen about him. Not that at all. It was rather to talk about the political appointees who went into this administration for the right reasons, who went in because, you know, they thought that Donald Trump was a pretty flawed guy, but that we want good people serving in government. We want a functional bureaucracy. These aren't like the deep state folks

who are trying to thwart the president, but I called them the shallow state, the ones who owed no loyalty to Donald Trump whatsoever, and we're fulfilling their duty to uphold the Constitution. And how we're supposed to think about that? And on the one hand, without political appointees like that, these shallow staters, I'm going to call them. We don't have the Mueller investigation. We don't have

the indictments of Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, Steve Bannon, two Republican congressmen. That doesn't happen with Attorney General Stephen Miller, for instance. You know, the Bill Barr was the Attorney General who came out and said there was no massive voter fraud. Bill Barr was the one who kept quiet. investigation into Hunter Biden, there were at least half a dozen senior political appointees in the Department of Justice who knew about that investigation. And nobody heard about it before the election. That's important. Those things mattered for four years. But the conclusion that I came to was that that wasn't nearly as important as what those people, including myself, did,

which is that we lent credibility and kept a government sort of propped up that his who Donald Trump was as president. Because as long as there was a Mueller investigation, as long as there were indictments of Republican congressmen who'd broken the law, people could think that it was simply rhetoric. It was simply his Twitter feed, but that actually his administration was getting good things done because Donald Trump was president. And because of that, at least in part, I felt like we obscured the Trump presidency and it led to 75 million people voting to reelect Donald Trump. And yesterday to me was exactly the consequence of that

where a whole bunch of folks have stood by because they think they're doing important work. They're not doing what Donald Trump says. They're undermining what Donald Trump says to some extent And so, anyway, my big takeaway from yesterday was that, first of all, I think the Republican Party ended yesterday. I think that there have to be two parties moving forward because I don't understand how someone like Mitt Romney or Ben Sasse can continue to associate with the same party as Josh Hawley, for instance, or Ted Cruz. And second of all, that the political appointees within the Trump administration who are there because they feel a sense of duty, they need to resign now. The end is here of lending your name and your credibility to the Trump administration.

Before we continue along those lines, though, I want to back up to how the day started. And we have Andrew and Audrey with us who were there when the protests sort of got going on the mall. And Andrew, I'm going to start with you. How did this start? Was this inevitable or simply foreseeable? So I think that's exactly the right way to ask the question is with those two things as the polls. Because when we got down there, pretty early in the morning, we met on the mall. And early on, there were similarities and there were differences between other conservative marches like the March for Life that I've covered on the mall before. It was, you know, there was all the sort of like positive energy of just getting a whole bunch of people together who all think the same things, you know, people that just makes people sort of cheerful to do that.

But the underlying sense of just anger and frustration, the potential energy of that, the static electricity to the air was there from the very beginning. One of the first guys that I talked to down at the rally was a guy who had come up from Louisville. He was a retired small business owner and a farmer, and he had been, he said, really involved in Tea Party politics. And he had come up for marches a decade ago. And he just said, I just asked him, you know, what's the difference between now and then in terms of like what the feeling of the crowd is? and he was like, it's just angrier now. I mean, that was just, that was, that was what he said. And he, you know, seemed like a, like a perfectly pleasant person.

And the lady he'd come up with seemed like a perfectly pleasant person when we were just talking, you know, conversationally like that. But these people believed that an election had been brazenly stolen out from under them. And that's the kind of thing when you believe it that makes even seemingly pleasant and reasonable people individually, willing to take up, you know, pitchforks and, you know, given the correct kind of push, which I think is what we saw happen, willing to participate in something particularly crazy. So I don't want to, you know, jump too far ahead.

But even from the get-go, even among the sort of very ordinary rank-and-file protesters that we talked to there, there was really this sense of, of, like I said, maybe static electricity, potential energy for something like this to happen. Audrey, was this a small group of people who then moved from where you were to the capital? Or was this everyone? So I actually arrived there around 9 a.m., as Andrew mentioned, we met up around that time. We decided to part ways shortly after that. Andrew went over to the capital.

I stayed in the president's park near the Washington. Monument to listen to the speakers. I actually left around 12 p.m. So I didn't see the storming of the Capitol. I came back from 3 to 5 p.m. because I figured that most of the interviews that I had gotten earlier in the day would have to be tossed out. So I didn't actually see that part. But I mean, I think Andrew really hit the nail on the head. I think none of this should have come as a surprise to any of us. The energy I saw yesterday, even in the morning, I mean, people were obviously very peaceful at the beginning, but the energy I saw was very similar to the energy at the Millian Maga March, where people were relatively peaceful, but people were so, so angry. I mean, you get

there and you ask similar questions to everyone. You know, what brings you out today? What are your thoughts in the November election? Everyone says, oh, the proof's out there. I can't go into detail. It'll take way, way too long. But, you know, the election was stolen from us. Oh, of course, the Georgia runoffs were robbed from us. And we're hoping Mike Pence does the right. right thing. But I think that another thing that really struck me yesterday in the morning and throughout the day was the camaraderie I saw. I mean, most people obviously weren't from the Northern Virginia or even the Maryland area. I spoke to people from Minnesota, South Carolina. People had trekked hundreds or even thousands of miles across the country to come

to this rally. But, you know, everyone there became friends with everyone around them super quickly, you know, at one point there was this woman handing out, uh, mints to her fellow patriots around her. And one guy jokes, is that pure COVID? You know, I'll take one. And people were cheering, singing, God bless America. I heard a lot of hang the traitors chance. I think one of my favorite interviews from the morning section was when I, so Eric Trump spoke probably around 10 a.m. And it was actually his birthday yesterday. And this one guy screams,

it's my birthday too. And I spoke to him after that and he was just so honored to share a birthday with the president's son. But I mean, it was truly a wild experience. I mean, I'm sure Andrew will have more to say about the actual storming of the Capitol. It was really wild seeing the aftermath of that for me.

Yeah, if I can speak to that specific question, Sarah, because I think it's a really salient point. In a sense, there were two crowds, and in a sense, there was one crowd. Because from the get-go, it was clear that there were two types of people there who had wildly different intentions going into the day. You had people, a lot of people who I talked to, who had just come out, just, I mean,

they basically said, you know, Trump told us to be here, and we want to show our support for Trump, so we're here. You know, we don't really know what's going. on with all of this election fraud stuff. I actually had a couple people tell me, like, I mean, it was kind of, and it was sad, sad to talk to these people. I mean, they just sort of looked kind of despairing and said, we don't know. We don't know what's going on. There's no, these facts are not knowable. We don't know whether it's true that the election was stolen or whether that's misinformation. There's so much misinformation out there, and it's just not accessible to us,

but we know that we love the president and he wanted us to be here, so we're here and we're going to support him. And there were people out there who were who were like that. And then there were people there at the same time, you know, even even from very early on who were extremely plainly up to no good. I mean, I talked to people who were, were describing themselves as militia recruiters who were handing out flyers saying, we're going to, you know, we're going to get a militia together here and, and we're going to be combatants. You know, that that was the language that was used. There was a group of proud boys who I, actually, as I was coming back from the capital, because like Audrey said, while the rally was going down at the other end of the mall, at the ellipse

in front of the White House, that was where almost everybody was. And I had broken off to go see whether anybody was yet down at the Capitol. And as I was coming back toward the rally that was happening on the ellipse, there were several militia groups walking the other way that I crossed paths with, sort of in this bizarre kind a faux, drill march sort of way. And I was like, okay, that's weird. And that was even prior to when Trump spoke. And so I think a really important point about all of this is that those were the kind of people who were down at the Capitol first. And then what you saw when the Trump, when Trump's speech was ending and, you know, people were getting a little restless out in the cold and he was

just sort of going into, you know, his same sort of cornucopia of grievances that he does in most of his rally speeches. People were sort of like, okay, we've heard this before. The crowd starts moving down at that point from the ellipse toward the Capitol and you get more and more and more people, a bigger and bigger crowd of people making that walk. And the people who are already down there, who are these militia people and essentially people who came for the purpose, for the deliberate purpose of starting this mayhem, they had already begun to push through, you know, the police lines and things like that,

which started off very small. But then as more and more people, you know, show up, they essentially started working like air traffic controllers, just telling, you know, just like yelling through megaphones, you know, like, come on up here. Like this is where this is, Trump had told these people to march down, right? I mean, they're, he's like, go to the Capitol. We're all going to the Capitol.

but then there was there was no other direction given from anybody i mean they're getting down there and nobody is calling any shots except for these militia types who are who are saying you know like this is what we're doing you know patriots onto the lawn patriots push forward um they they can't hold us back you know this is the people's house they they can't stop us and then the the wildest thing to watch was that what was seeing that this this group this crowd that had initially been these two distinct groups of people, where if you talk to a proud boy in the morning and some random maga-grandma in the morning, these are people who are exuding completely different energy, who are clearly there for completely different reasons, who are going to give you

completely different answers about what they're doing there today, seeing those two groups then merge, because this is what's happening, this is what the Patriots are doing, this is what we're here to say, and what we're here to do, Trump wants, I mean, Trump's saying we're not going to stand for this, and we're not going to stand for this. And without that merging, without, without, you know, this increasing number of just kind of regular people who had regular MAGA people who had shown up without a thought of, you know, storming the Capitol building. But without their participation, this thing doesn't go forward because there just aren't

the numbers there without, without this overwhelming sort of sense of force that is, that is, that was led and provoked by these, these, you know, militia types, but was not carried out solely by these militia types. Andrew, could the president have stopped them? At what point, I guess, is the question. I mean, I think, I think if, uh, he couldn't have riled them up in the first place, right? I mean, that's, that prevention might have done it, you know. I mean, so, so he didn't, he didn't, uh, stop them.

I mean, once he, once he, once they were. there once the, once the institutional, like, once the inertia was there, once there's people storming into the Capitol, I don't think, you know, Trump showing up with a loudspeaker on the lawn necessarily changes anything at that point, right? But, but there were, I mean, there are a lot of earlier off ramps. Yeah, it's a hard question to answer without, without saying at what point? If the question is, does this happen if Trump doesn't invite people to come to the rally in the first place? I think, yeah, probably not. Does it, does it not? happen if Trump is more restrained with his speech on the on the lawn. I don't know I don't know

the answer to that. I mean he he he he did say in his speech at one point there was one thing he said where we're going to march down peacefully and patriotically. And so you know you could make the argument that like if people had listened to him there you know this this wouldn't have happened but at the same time that's such a thin veneer of of restraint on top of this just a mountain of grievance and and and and and and and and and specifically saying you know we're not going to take this we came here today because we're not going to take this you know and we're not going to we're simply not going to allow it to happen and well there aren't really things you can do uh to prevent it from happening other than the thing they tried and he's also been telling his

followers he's pointed to violence as a solution to their problems repeatedly in the past so So it's no question that he incited this and that they would listen to him and whatever. You know, I think if you want to use the MAGA formulation, they didn't need to take him literally. They needed to take him seriously. And seriously, what he was saying was pointing people to do the kinds of things that we ended up seeing unfold. And again, it's been reported by numerous outlets that the people who were with the president as the storming of the Capitol began. And said the president was pleased by this. This was the outcome he wanted.

It's unbelievably irresponsible. I will set aside my rant because I'm very interested in going a little deeper with you on one question in particular. First of all, if people listening to this haven't taken the time to read the piece from Andrew and Audrey, I can't recommend it highly enough. I want to thank you both for going down there and putting yourselves in the middle of all this and doing this fantastic reporting. But one of the things that really struck me from your piece was the number of people that you interviewed who were perfectly willing to give you their names and tell you that they were trying to start a revolution and that they were happy with this and that the next time there would be more violence. Did that surprise you when you were asking people those questions? Absolutely not. So that was Christopher Alberts.

It was this man that I interviewed from Maryland. It was right to the left of the Capitol. It was shortly after I had arrived at about 3 p.m. You know, I arrived and I could not believe my eyes. People were climbing the scaffolding. There were the entire terrace was chock full of people. There were tear gas canisters going off left and right, you know, MAGA rally attendees going, it's okay, sweetie, you're going to be totally fine.

I'm thinking of myself, I'm not with you guys. But, you know, with that guy, for example, who said that he wanted to start a revolution, one thing that was just so striking to me was that he and so many other people who talked to me and were perfectly willing to give me their name and, you know, where they were traveling from, just had this unbelievable victim narrative, even though they were the ones who were trespassing and breaking into the Capitol. They genuinely were so confused as to why police officers were firing rubber bullets and why they were getting batonned in the leg or whatnot. I mean, it was just, it was truly astonishing.

This might be kind of a silly metaphor, but all I kept thinking of today in hindsight was that scene from the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie where the pirates are storming that island and there's just utter chaos and there are bombs going off everywhere. My younger sister actually attended the rally with me. She didn't want me to go alone. And she didn't tell me this until this morning, but she was carrying pepper spray in her pocket. And at one point, it fell out. and she was surrounded by like four huge MAGA rally attendees who were saying, you know,

who are you? Who are you with? And eventually they left her alone when she kind of coward and said, I'm looking for my sister. But I mean, it was truly terrifying. Well, thank you guys for your reporting. And again, encourage everyone to go read it. We appreciate you joining us today. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss. And it was a stark reminder of how quick, quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind

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It's May vary. Joan, I want to talk to you a little bit more about where things go from here. Last night, Congress came back into session at 8 p.m. after they had re-secured the Capitol. And several senators peeled off from the objections. But seven did not. Josh Hawley continued, Ted Cruz continued, and many, many on the House side continued. Where does that leave us? I think we now know that it is unavoidable that there is going to be, and I'm using this entirely figuratively. but that the Republican Civil War has arrived.

And as you were suggesting earlier, it's very difficult for people who think that this was an absolute hate crime against the Constitution, civic norms, and democracy, and people who think it was freaking awesome, very difficult for them to be in the same party, right? I mean, it's one thing to be, even for repealing Section 230 or not repealing Section 230,

It's another thing to think, wow, that was cool when the dudes with the Viking helmets smashed into the nation's capital and talked about launching a revolution. If you're on that side of an argument, it's very difficult to sort of like work compromise. And I think the fact that I honestly think that Ted Cruz and Holly are misreading their political futures on this one. they they clearly subscribe to the view that basically the primaries are going to remain the fiefdoms of Breitbart and places like that, maybe the Federalist and that kind of thing, and that winning over significant slices of the more unhinged sort of opinion side of Fox and the really unhinged places like OAN and Newsmax is the way to get a nomination. And my hunches is that if you had told them, if you could tell them, give him a crystal ball and say, here's how George is going to play out because of the stupidity, right, where you basically, where Trump basically gave Democrats a wedge issue to divide Republicans over and said, and then Trump is going to do this thing, which is going to get aroused calls for him to be

impeached and removed again. My guess is they would have played this differently. You certainly wouldn't have seen the picture of Josh Hawley with his, you know, raised Mussolini fist to the mob that 20 minutes later was breaking into the Capitol. But at the same time, I just think, you know, there are too many people who are sunk into their positions. There are too many people who, and this is something I want to write about. If I have to hear one more preening Jack Wad talk about how they just want to have their voices heard, well, what the hell are these people talking about. I mean, we have three television networks that are about listening to their voices. We have a president of the United States that's about listening to their voices. We have the

pre-primary shuffling of the Republican Party all about listening to their voices. We have people going on and on and on on about how we have to, you know, contest the election and urinate from a great height on the Constitution because we have to listen to their voices. What voices aren't being freaking heard. And I have a feeling that there's going to be more of a backlash about this, particularly as Trump loses power over the Senate, particularly his bitterness over the Senate going Democratic, sinks in. And already we see, you know, look, Matt Gates, it's funny, he tweeted like a month ago, this is Donald Trump's party. We're not going back to what it was before. Well, it's understandable that someone who is so invested, an incandescent as

would very much like it if the business model didn't change back to something that was more establishmentitarianism, establisheditarian, than it was under Trump. And we're going to see that divide. And there are going to be people who are going to be the sort of Yahoo crowd, you know, the I'm not a witch, I'm you crowd. And the, and with Trump losing his power, the establishment guys are going to, and the serious people like Sass and Romney are going to step up a bit, and the wars are coming, you know, and it's hard to predict how they're exactly going to play out, but I think they're coming. David, yesterday, there was something that struck me watching this all unfold on TV as

these protesters turn to rioters, turned to insurrectionists, whatever term that you want to use, our flag, the American flag, has 50. stars on it representing each of the states. It has the stripes representing the 13 colonies. The entire flag is a metaphor for union. It's all stitched together on the same flag. And yesterday, what I saw was a different flag that a lot of these people were carrying as they stormed and sacked the Capitol. They were carrying a flag that said Trump. It was a single person that they were carrying the banner of not the banner of union

and you think back to history and you're my you know my buddy on all of this stuff the Confederacy never took the capital they never got close no um more of the Confederacy also didn't want to federalize elections

and abrogate state rights I mean that was the Confederate flags out there too and I just couldn't believe that as like you know anyway yeah yeah um And there is a picture today that's very poignant taken by Frank Thorpe at NBC, and it's from Statuary Hall, and it's Zachary Taylor's bust, and it has blood smeared on it from yesterday. And there's just so much symbolism in what happened yesterday,

and the side-by-side of the inauguration four years ago of Donald Trump and the bunting, and then four years later, the smoke, clearing and the Trump flags instead of union. And I'll just, I'll finish with this and turn over to you. Chuck Grassley's chief of staff tweeted as he left the building at, you know, three or four a.m. last night. And he said, leaving the capital tonight, the star spangled banner yet waves. Hmm. Yeah. That's powerful and appropriate to say, but I will say to me, and I'm glad you brought up the flags, we're on the same wavelength, the single most infuriating and telling moment to me as I was watching this unfold and I did not see as you're

watching it unfold you did not see some of the the violence that was occurring inside the walls which was you know exponentially worse than what somebody did with the flag but as a symbolic moment what was so infuriating was when we saw some of the protesters trying to remove the American flag and replace it with the Trump flag. And I thought, this is exactly, this is exactly symbolic of how toxic this movement is. Because what it does is it rests on two assertions. One is that America is over, that Joe Biden will destroy America, that the squad will destroy America, that America is teetering on the brink of destruction. That's assertion number one. And then assertion number two is only Donald Trump can save us, that it is only under the banner of Donald Trump that we can restore and protect our republic.

And if you think I'm exaggerating about that, if you think I'm exaggerating about that, I'd urge you to go and listen. And maybe you can put it in the show notes, my debate that I had with Eric Metaxus, who has been for years a mainstream Christian voice, a guy who headlined the National Prayer Breakfast for crying out loud during the Obama. administration, who expressed exactly those sentiments. He said in the debate, I was debating at John Brown University in Northwest Arkansas Christian School. He said, if Joe Biden, now this is talking about Joe Biden, if Joe Biden wins, we cannot have a debate like this ever again. What? What? Are you kidding me? Is the federal government going to storm in and shut down debates at Christian universities. And then he said Donald Trump is a great man. And I'll end with this. There was a lot of Christian nationalism out there. A lot of Christian

nationalism. I saw people erecting a giant crucifix, people running around with signs that said Jesus saves. One of the protesters who breached into the Senate chamber was walking around waving the Christian flag, which is this sort of Christian nationalist symbol that flies in many places, especially across the South. There was a lot of Christian nationalism. And I'm going to say this, we warned you, we warned you, that this was dangerous fanaticism, and it was leading nowhere good. And I was a pessimist, and I didn't foresee this. I didn't foresee it getting this bad. So David raises a question I want to ask everybody, including Sarah. because she gets to hide in the moderator role.

How much I told you so's are appropriate in all of this? Because, I have to admit, the one upbeat feeling I've had in the last 48 hours is that Trump is determined to leave office in a way that completely vindicates people like, well, me. and David and you know and Steve and you know and just like it in the in the you know I've been saying for four years character is destiny this will end in tears he's a bad person unfit for the job and we're hardly alone right um but as a as a political matter forget good manners but as a political manner matter if if it just becomes a see if I told you so from the remnant of people who stood athwart all this,

does that make it harder to fix things? Because people hate being told, I told you so, and they will redouble their commitments if they feel like they're going to be called a fool for admitting they were wrong. And there are very few people like Andy McCarthy who really have the mensch-like decency to say, hey, I called this one wrong.

So what is the right road to take on all of this? Because I got to tell you, there's some. I told you so, is I would love to purl about. I am still in a place of deep sadness. When I talked to friends yesterday, I talked to one federal prosecutor who works here in D.C. And she was crying. You know, there's a family whose daughter was showing. shot yesterday in the Capitol.

There's, and I, Jonah, to be clear, I understand you're making a political, I told you so point. Right. I stipulated that manners are a different thing.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And so I don't, you know, I'm not trying to be holier than now on this, but, um,

yeah, I feel like this is so much bigger and deeper than that. Saying that character is destiny is, true, but to say that we would be, that other countries would be watching this and wondering, wondering if we were going to retake our capital, wondering if the United States was going to continue. We're far past what I think was an accurate prediction of how bad things could get. Yesterday was, you know, there's a lot of norms that have been broken over the last four years, many of which there was a lot of hand-wringing and, oh, my,'s over that I thought were

pretty silly. You know, they were, they were norms. They shouldn't have been broken maybe, but to say that this was somehow, you know, turning the tide of America, yesterday was really different. It was just different. It will be in every history book. I was at the, Capitol in June of 2004 when the Kentucky governor's plane breached the no-fly zone during Reagan's funeral. And we didn't know it was the Kentucky governor at the time. Instead, they just came over the loudspeakers and said, evacuate the building, plain incoming, plane incoming, run. And I was with the congressman's seven-year-old daughter at the time, and we had to get downstairs, and I just grabbed her, and we ran. And it was, it was terrifying. It was so

soon after 9-11, after the anthrax, and after everything else. And it's, you know, it's been 20 years since 9-11. But as you're watching that yesterday, I felt deeply that sense of those people in the building, sheltering in place, not knowing how that would turn out. You know, one congresswoman saying that she was hearing gunshots outside of her office, this to me was far beyond the political consequences of what will happen over the next two weeks or even the next four years. Or even the next four years, we are having a fundamental reckoning over the direction of this country because there are millions of people who do not want to continue in union. And that's not, and I told you so, it's far worse. Yeah, I think those are very good points and it's important. But I think

Jonah raises a valid question. And to me, it's not about tutting and sort of throwing things back in the face of people who, you know, who every time we raised a question or wrote something critical of Donald Trump would would pounce. And I don't think that's how Jonah's thinking of it. You can correct me if I'm wrong. It's less about a tit for tat. And to me, it's more about accountability. um you had just i want to be clear about this i was it's a shameful thing that i had a sense i was trying to be clear about this it's it's a somewhat shameful thing to have feelings of schadenfreude when you see your enemies or your opponents or whatever you want to call them being exposed as wrong and you being exposed as right that's not the important issue and that's

the thing i was trying to say i was trying to keep in check but i think it highlights as steve was about to explain you know there's a political question here about like Like in the aftermath of the Civil War, you know, is the, is it reconciliation through forgiveness or is it, you know, truth and, you know, truth commissioning? I mean, like, and do you, or who should be a pariah and who shouldn't be a pariah? And I think these are like important questions that we're going to need to sort of figure out. Yeah, and look, I mean, we've, we've seen a lot of people. I mean, Annie McCarthy certainly is the best example, as Joan mentioned earlier. We've seen other people who have said, boy, this is different. This feels different

to me. Now, I personally don't think this is a different Donald Trump. I don't buy that argument that this is suddenly somehow a different person than we saw a year ago or two years ago or five years ago. I mean, the things he was doing as a candidate, I think, told us how he would act in situations like this. What's changed is the environment around him and the destructiveness of his acts. But I do think that for people who have come to that recognition late, I don't want to be in the business of questioning why they did or what they're saying now. The fact that they're saying these things now is welcome. And I think will be an important first step sort of getting beyond a lot of this. The thing that I've wrestled with, I'll be sort of candid. I've wrestled

with it in terms of my own writing, in terms of the kind of pieces that we should do. At the dispatch, you know, we don't, one of the things we did when we launched was we didn't want to be sort of bogged down by the internecine conservative media wars and all of the kind of crap that obsesses people in Washington, but is really boring for most people outside of Washington, honestly. That said, you know, you have center-right media outlets who actively encouraged all of the stuff that we saw culminate in violence yesterday, who have, you know, amplified the president's lies, you know, both in the past nine weeks about the election being stolen, including, you know, linking to and covering favorably people like Sid and. Powell and Lynn Wood, who are just nut job conspiracy theorists peddling dangerous lies. You know, you have people who have been doing this for a long time. And I do think it's important to call them out. I do think it's important that, that, you know, that they are made to answer for some of the bullshit that they tried to put over on. Can I ask a

their readers and on the country. Can I ask a harder question? Because I think, sure, that's on the easier side. The harder question for me is, like, what about a Mick Mulvaney? Mick Mulvaney resigned this morning. He's the former chief of staff to Donald Trump, who then Donald Trump appointed to a diplomatic position in Ireland, and he resigned today. We've had some other resignations.

He wrote a famous op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, assuring everybody that Donald Trump, if he loses, would leave gracefully and graciously, you know. So just, it's worth point out. So right. So Mick Mulvaney is now resigned and said he can't stand by for this. Is that, you know, Steve, are you going to welcome him back into the fold? Or is that someone who led directly to the violence of yesterday? Where does that sort of, to form me, a much harder, grayer area fall in?

Yeah, look, I think he has difficult questions to answer. he will be asked those difficult questions. I'm glad that he resigned. I think it says something that he resigned. I think it's a cue to people who, you know, may have taken the fact that Mick Mulvaney was willing to work for Donald Trump and endorse Donald Trump, serve as his chief of staff, that this is all too much. And if we're talking about getting beyond the kind of insanity that we've seen, I will take every single one of those, because I think it's an important message to send to the people who have been taken in by Donald Trump. Yeah, but there's a problem there, which I think Sarah was being delicate about.

Remember Stu Stevens during the Romney campaign? He had that famous line where he said, you run to the right during the primaries, and then you can be an etch-a-sketch, and you just shake it, and everything's forgotten. It was a bad line. He got a lot of grief for it. It kind of stuck to Romney. I didn't mean to trigger any of Sarah's PTSD on this, but there is something grating about the idea of people who were aiding and abetting in all sorts of norm-breaking badness at the 11th hour, 13 days, until Trump is no longer president, all of a sudden saying, you know, this far and no farther, and resigning on principle. trying to get Hazanas for it. And, you know, it's, I've actually been, I've probably written this

a half dozen times about how there will come a point. And I was, I was wrong up until like a week ago, or 48 hours ago, that I was always waiting for the Harriet Myers moment for this presidency where there was this, you know, there's a reason why we have the phrase, the straw that breaks the camel's back. It's because a straw by itself will not break a camel's back. It's the last little bit with all the other baggage already on there that causes the back to break. And like I was waiting for a long time for Donald Trump to have his Harriet Myers moment we're saying this far and no farther, we're done with this. And the fact that it had to get to the point were again, dudes in Viking helmets and face paint

were ransacking the nation's capital at his request. And to have people doing this, you know, like McMillvania, you're right, better that he's doing than he's not. And he doesn't have the problem that Sarah was talking about, about people, you know, who have, you know, had to do with transition things and whatnot, you know, at this last minute. But like, it is not a get out of jail free card in terms of the stuff that he has contributed to until this moment. Can I use a, can I use like a religious analysis? for a minute. Okay. So, you know, in church, often when a pastor finishes speaking, he gets an altar call. Okay. And the altar call asks people to come forward and repent of their sins. And so people do. They will come forward. Sometimes we've done awful things for a really long time.

And what you don't do in that church is smack them on the head on the way down saying you should have done this six years ago. Like great, wonderful. Thank you. This is fantastic. But then what you don't do is immediately after they pray with the pastor or pray with, you know, church leaders is get up and say, okay, here you go, now teach Sunday school. Or, you know, here's the pulpit. Get in the pulpit. You don't do that because there has to be a process of discovering whether this person, which were thankful that they have said no to this evil thing, there has to be a process where you understand whether they're worthy of trust. And so I think right now you are in a process that we're in the phase of saying anyone who says no to this evil that occurred yesterday

into what is presently occurring in this movement anyone who says no to this even if you should have said no in 2015 even if it's January 7th 2021 if you say no to it welcome yeah welcome now that does not mean that if and it's a big if the right side prevails in these internecine fights over the next few years that we then say, well, you know, now go lead us. That's not the same thing. But right now, I think the stage is you say, welcome. And look, I get it. Like, you know, I think one thing that awful lot of people don't realize is it's not just that folks disagreed with us here over the last five years. And we've had some high-minded battle of ideas about Trumpism. and we're now vindicated in this intellectual combat,

what has occurred over the last five to six years has been in a direct attempt to completely assassinate the characters of basically everyone on this podcast because of our opposition to Trump. Heck, there are publications that have Jonah Goldberg and David French tags that they have written so many articles directly attacking us, attempting to destroy, not just to beat us in an intellectual fight,

but to destroy our reputations, to end our careers in some instances. And so, yeah, when you see what happens here, and I put it this way, I was talking to my family, I said, never has vindication felt so miserable. Because, yeah, this was a moment of vindication, but the vindication was while the republic

was under direct attack. That doesn't feel triumphant. That doesn't feel exultant. It feels tragic. It feels horrible. And that's where we are right now. And I totally get the temptation to turn around and sort of like give everyone on that other side the double bird and say, yeah, I was completely right. But this is a moment that so transcends this, it is a moment where I think we have to open our arms wide and say, I don't care if you've been, if you had the MAGA hat on until four seconds ago.

When you take off that hat, it's welcome. Yeah, and Sarah, just to go to your, I mean, if people haven't read your piece in the Washington Post, I would encourage them to look it up and try to find it, or we can put it in the show notes. I mean, you know, your piece raises a lot of these really difficult and thorny questions. And we've talked before on this podcast. We've all had private conversations with people who chose to go into the Trump administration and work in the Trump administration. And some of them did it for, you know, reasons of naked ambition and power lust. Others did it, I think, for more noble reasons because they thought they might be able to play a role in restraining the president or curbing his worst impulses or what have you.

Some of that latter group, I think, managed to do that more successfully than others, managed to make those attempts and come out of it without having had to sell their soul. Others did not. Others just sold their soul and sold their soul willingly, I think. But, you know, some of what we've seen over the past four years, particularly from these senior officials, you know, it's hard sometimes to understand exactly what the motives are. I mean, suppose for a second that Mick Mulvaney wrote his much lamented and mocked Wall Street Journal op-ed because he'd worked alongside Don. Donald Trump for two years and he knows that Donald Trump takes his cues nowhere more than he does from the media and that a prominent piece instructing Donald Trump or suggesting that Donald Trump will do the right thing is a far more effective way to communicate with the president than to sit across the table from him and wag his finger. it's entirely possible that what Mick Mulvaney was trying to do was in some ways noble was saying I'm going to put myself out and take the risk that this is not going to happen I mean I think betting people when I read that op ed I was not taking the Mick Mulvaney bet I did not think the president would would concede graciously and you know go on to to his next life I think it's entirely possible that what Mick Mulvaney was trying to do there was communicate to the president and the people around him, what the right thing was and doing so in a way that the president would understand and perhaps respond to. It doesn't mean that, you know, if that's what he was doing, that we shouldn't ask these hard questions about McMovaney

and his decision to go into the administration. I think we should, and maybe we'll try to get him on a dispatch podcast to ask him those questions. I suspect he'd probably join us. But I do think it's worth, I think David's point was, was a very good one. At this point, I think the most important thing is sort of, you know, excising the poison and this gets us there or helps get us there. I want to give you each then a real life example. I've talked to senior Pentagon political appointee officials who have, to a person, said that they believe that they have stopped the president from entering into wars during the last four years, and therefore they do not regret going in. They do think they stopped real, real tangible harm. With that as a backdrop, Robert O'Brien is

a national security advisor, and there have been reports that he is considering resigning. Would you suggest that Robert O'Brien resign, understanding that then there's 15 days of Donald Trump as president without Robert O'Brien as the national security advisor, Steve? Yeah, I think that is, that is, I mean, it's, you're right to push us on that particular because it's not a hypothetical. I guess my, my instinct is that in that case, no, Robert O'Brien should say exactly where he is. You know, we had the departure of a deputy national security advisor yesterday afternoon, and Matt Pottinger is one of the most respected national security officials in the country, I think widely admired by both Republicans and Democrats, an expert

on a number of different subjects with a specialty in Asia. When he talks, people listen and listen carefully, and he left. He had enough. He's been there, I think, the entire administration, he's responsible behind the scenes for quietly making a number of moves that never would get him public credit, but I think helped shape the administration's approach to some of the most important national security issues, and he's gone. I, when I saw that he had left, I saw the reports late last night that he had resigned,

I had very mixed feelings exactly the way that you're laying them out because I thought, well, good for him. And this is an important signal. I mean, Matt Pottinger is not a well-known person, so it doesn't have the power of a signal of somebody like a Mick Mulvaney or a Jim Mattis when he resigned. But I liked that people were saying, everything I saw today makes this too much. On the other hand, you know, I think that we're, I think that we as a country are in real potential danger right now. I think people aren't paying careful enough attention to the risks right now. I mean, we have two weeks with a man who is demonstrated. I mean, I think he's demonstrated over five years, but he's very clearly, I think a disputably demonstrated that he's not mentally stable right now.

You're hearing this from his top advisors and people who have liked him. admired him that he's not mentally stable. Yesterday, as I mentioned earlier, when it came time to call up the D.C. National Guard, it was Mike Pence who handled those responsibilities. The U.S. military is working around the president of the United States, the commander-in-chief, right now. That's a scary situation. And you can bet that our enemies are paying attention to this. I would like Robert O'Brien to be in the room. I'm very skeptical that even if he's in the room, that he'll be able to influence the president,

if some, you know, if there's a provocation from North Korea, for instance. But maybe, but maybe he could. I mean, the fact right now that this is kind of all we're hanging on to. We hope that these people might end up in the room, should there be some urgent crisis is, again, I think why the president has to be impeached and removed, or you have to have the cabinet officials invoke the 25th Amendment. Jonah or David, do you all agree? Does Robert O'Brien need to stay?

I think, so I think he probably should stay. He should also probably give some telegraphs to the general public about why he is staying. He doesn't have to say, I'm here because, you know, Donald Trump has lost his gourd and is, you know, running around with a sword or anything like that, he can just simply say, it can be fairly coded, sort of like the defense secretary's letter was, where, you know, it was not. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf put out a statement today that was not coded, but also not gratuitous. He said, I'm staying in place because we need to bring these people to justice. I condemn, you know, in the strongest terms, what's happened and the president needs to come out and condemn it as well. The president in the last

hour then withdrew Chad Wolf's nomination to be confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security, but that I think is exactly what you're talking about. Come out. Can I just jump in on a factual matter there? There's been additional reporting from Caitlin Collins at CNN that this withdrawal of the Wolf nomination had been previously scheduled, so it might not be a reflection of this news development, but, you know, certainly it raises those questions. The fact that we have to even worry about that, makes the point. This raises the point I wanted to make about the Pence circumvent, you know, going around, doing an end run around the chain of command around the commander in chief.

Again, not to do what I told you something. I've been writing for a long time about how when sort of classic game theory, if one side starts breaking the rules, whereas we like to say it and sort of, of, you know, puffy think tank talk, violating democratic norms. It creates a whole new permission structure for the other participants in the game to violate democratic norms, not necessarily for bad reasons, but for, because if you see that one side's cheating or, again, breaking the rules, you think the only way to punish them is by breaking the rules too, or the only way to constrain them is by breaking the rules too.

So like early in the Trump administration, you had people outrageously by normal standards leaking private conversations between Trump and a foreign leader. And the argument was that you would hear the rationalization for it was the people need to know this because this guy is violating norms. So they violated norms in response to let the people know. It's a bad place to be in when the vice presidents of the United States feels it necessary to usurp the prerogatives of the commander in chief in order to put down an insurrection in the nation's capital. And in a think-tanky kind of, like on-paper kind of way, it's kind of outrageous that Pence did that.

And you could come up with a thousand scenarios in sort of seminars and role-playing things where the vice president who did that would be the villain, the one who usurped, you know, with the Joint Chiefs of the staff, did an N-run around the commander-in-chief. But in this case, it was the right thing to do. And it just caused a mind the whole, you know,

the center does not hold problem, where all of the players in the game, and I hate calling a game or in the system, they no longer can do it the proper way because the guy at the center, the hamster at the center, you know, on the hamster wheel, the center of this giant Rube Goldberg machine

of the federal government isn't playing by the rules. And it makes it impossible for the other players to play by the rules as well. And it's a dangerous place to be. You know, our friend Eric Erickson makes an important point about exactly this discussion that we're having. And he sort of falls on the side of people staying in their positions until the end of the administration, at least as long as Donald Trump is president. Some of what we're

seeing now is Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is alone. It did have an effect that John Kelly was his chief of staff, that Jim Mattis was his secretary of defense. He was reigned in by some of these people. They were able to talk him out of acting on his many worst instincts. And while I don't think Donald Trump today is fundamentally a different person than Donald Trump was in July, he exhibited the exact same kinds of behavior that we're seeing, it is definitely the case that as he's less and less constrained, he's free to act on his whims and his whims are destructive and dangerous to the extent that you have people around him doing everything they can to rein him in, I think it's important for potentially for the national security of the country. that they remain in place to do so. You know, it is a simple fact that the moment that Donald Trump became president of the United States, we were stripped of good, clear options of how to deal with him. I mean, we just never, I don't think we ever had a real path that said,

this is the obvious right way to deal with the existence of this man as president of the United States. he didn't walk in the office having committed impeachable offenses for example there was so we've been confronted with just a series of bad options from day one here and a lot of what we've had to do was try to muddle through in good faith and so there's an incredibly strong argument for example to say yeah you serve in this administration and you try to prevent this man who's clothed with immense power Just immense power, even though he's hemmed in by the Constitution, to prevent him from using that immense power in a way that could destabilize the world, much less destabilize this country. There's a tremendous argument for that.

there's also an argument that as Sarah has laid out, that the very effort to cabin Trump and wall him in has hidden the reality of Trump from the American people and with, you know, has restrained the system from imposing accountability on him because there's still this argument that's that is advanced that in part because of the efforts of people are trying to restrain him, that elements of his administration have been good. And so there's just never been a really good option here. It's one of the reasons why when those moments have occurred of clarity that I've urged very strongly that decisive action be taken. For example, in impeachment, in impeachment, there was not a credible argument that what he did with

American foreign policy was an appropriate use of presidential powers. It's one of those reasons where I thought, hey, there are between the bad and less bad options, by far, the less bad option here, is impeachment. And, you know, one of the things that's sad about that is I just keep looking about at 2020. Yeah, there would have been a lot of upheaval if Mike Pence had become President of the United States in January, February, 2020.

There had been a lot of upheaval. There had been a lot of anger. But does anyone think that he would have been less well equipped to handle this pandemic? Does anyone think that? I mean, we're heading with, the speed of a freight train towards 400,000 dead Americans. And it won't stop there.

400,000. That is staggering. And anyone who says that that's an inevitable death toll here, that's just wrong. There are many other countries that have handled this far better than this country. And then this upheaval, if Mike Pence had become president, he might have won if he'd handled the pandemic well. and even if he hadn't handled the pandemic, I mean, even if he didn't win,

we would not have had the capital taken over by instructionists. That wouldn't have happened. And we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you guys for joining. And Jonah, you meant to not to speak in tongues. Don't worry, David. You and I get to do a whole other hour on this advisory opinions today. Well, we will dive into the 25th Amendment

and, you know, the rules surrounding impeachment, et cetera, about barring folks from office. But in the meantime, happy New Year, everyone. Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you again next week. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime.

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