The Dispatch Podcast - Pandemic Politics

Episode Date: April 9, 2020

Sarah and the guys discuss the politics of coronavirus from the election in Wisconsin to the 2020 veepstakes, missteps by the World Health Organization, and why coronavirus numbers have become another partisan debate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, joined as always by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. This podcast is brought to you by The Dispatch. Visit the dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters and podcasts. And make sure you subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. Today, we've got a lot to cover the politics of coronavirus, mail ballots, what is going on in Wisconsin, and Veep Stakes as Bernie Sanders. leaves the race. We'll talk about the World Health Organization funding stream and China's role in this, as well as whether the death toll is being over or undercounted and why that's become such a partisan debate. David, we're starting with you this. David, we're starting with you this week. A lot of politics around the virus before we get into, you know, epidemiology here. There's been some lawsuits filed this week and certainly a lot of drama in Wisconsin that we'll get to in a moment. But I want to talk generally about mail ballots. We've seen a lot of states grappling with how to deal with November. How do you see this playing out? Are we

just headed for 50 different lawsuits and 50 different states at this point? The short answer to that question is, I'm not going to say 50 different lawsuits in 50 different states, maybe 49 different lawsuits and 49 different states. No, I think we're headed unless the unanticipated occurs and we flattened the curve into non-existence and the virus is a non-factor, which is I don't think something we should plan for or anticipate in November. We're looking. at an increasingly contentious battle that is going to play out state by state. And what may end up happening is that it may end up that we have very different looking elections in November depending on the politics of your state.

I'm going to, it's going to be very easy to imagine that your big blue states are going to double down on vote by mail. They're going to double down on a number of measures to make it easier to vote. with vote by mail being the principal, being the principal method chosen, which is going to, in all likelihood, boost voter participation. Now, the red states, and we can get into the merits of vote by mail, but there seems to be in the red states, and not all of them, Utah does it quite a bit, but almost an instinctive recoil against any measure that appears to be explicitly designed to boost voter participation. We've talked about this on our own podcast that I think we should feel

a little uncomfortable. Conservatives should feel a little uncomfortable about an instinctive recoil against measures designed to boost voter participation. But there's this, and you saw a little bit of it in the Trump news conference, as sort of a blanket assertion that vote my mail is rife with fraud. And so what we could end up with, I don't think there's any political appetite, unless the lessons of Wisconsin's election yesterday sort of sink in fully. I don't see any real appetite on the part of particularly red states to boost vote by mail, for example. That could change between now and November. But as of right now, I don't see a lot of appetite for a lot of innovation designed to boost voter participation. So we could end up with a situation where we have on the

one hand in the big blue states a large increase in voter participation that is cultivated through vote by mail. And in red states, a decrease in voter participation in part because people are reluctant to leave their homes and go and stand in lines with other people, even if they're masked up to vote, which may not result in much difference in the electoral college, but could result and big differences in the popular vote is one way that I could kind of see this coming. Myself, I tend to think that the fraud concerns surrounding vote by mail are overblown. There is a signature matching process that is involved, and a lot of the objections to vote by mail are really objections to a practice called ballot harvesting that you have in California,

that is permitted by state law in California. And plug for our advisory opinions podcast, we're actually going to be talking to someone named Rachel Kleinfeld at the Carnegie Endowment who wrote a piece in National Review that was very good about vote by mail dealing with some of these objections raised about vote fraud. But I think the vote fraud objections are overblown. I think vote by mail, especially in a time of pandemic,

is a good and wise idea. And I would hope I would like to see red state legislatures embrace it, quite frankly, even if they just decide to do it on a pandemic only basis. Because I do think that the integrity of this election and the in the availability of voting in this election is going to be absolutely critical. And another plug for our podcast where we can dive a little more into the weeds on the difference between male, by mail voting, absentee voting. witness requirements and absentee ballots.

And then with some of these lawsuits, I think you will see a difference between so far they have been sort of blanket challenges versus what I think will be more successful now, between now and November, which will be as applied challenges. I am testing positive for coronavirus and am not allowed to leave my house,

but I need to vote. Right. So speaking of that, Steve, you are our native badger. And Wisconsin, against all odds, had an election yesterday. Politically speaking, how does this play out? It was mostly a primary, but it had the Supreme Court seat. And what I found so interesting was that the Trump campaign never really stepped in to this.

And yet you had, what I can only imagine are some pretty annoyed voters in Wisconsin who will hold the Republicans responsible for, some of those pictures yesterday. I mean, one woman holding a sign that said, this is ridiculous, kind of summed it up for me. Yeah, I think she was right. I mean, I think, you know, as a native Wisconsinite, it was embarrassing for the state. It was an orgy of incompetence and stupidity.

And I think there's blame really to go around for everybody. And the governor initially didn't want to take a serious look at postponing the the election when he was being urged to do so, then later when he decided that he wanted to do so, Republicans sort of dug in their heels and said, we're absolutely not going to do this. I think the politics, I mean, you know, hard to say at this point, we don't know what the results of the election are and won't until next Monday, so five days from now. I think the long-term political damage coming out of what was, I think, a debacle is likely to fall more heavily on Republicans than Democrats. I think the governor certainly made his share of mistakes.

But when you saw those images, people waiting in lines that were in some cases a quarter mile long or even longer, standing through rainstorms, trying to social distance, maybe not having that much effect. You had the Robin Boss, the speaker of the Wisconsin House, that other iconic image from the day standing in, you know, full hazmat suit wearing gloves and a mask saying it's totally safe to come out and vote. It was very animal house all as well. It really was. And I think, did you get that reference? I think it's, what's that? Did you get that reference? I just want to make sure. The animal house? No, I can. I'm good with animal house references.

It's all your sci-fi stuff that just passes me by. I say proudly. No, it really, it was an embarrassing day, I think, for the state of Wisconsin, for Wisconsin politicians. I think credit to the people who stood out in line to cast their ballots. We will see, I mean, there were early estimates. Craig Gilbert, who's a political reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a very good one, tweets at WIS voter, he had some early breakdowns of the numbers, and it looked, knowing that more numbers will be coming in, it looked like Milwaukee County voting might have been off by

as much as half, at least preliminarily. Again, more numbers probably coming in. But that's a problem. That's a problem. And I think they would have been wise to postpone it, to find other ways to accommodate voters, at least to have gotten together Republicans and Democrats and given it some forethought. You had yesterday, again, Republicans in the state saying, well, you know, it was really important to go ahead with this. And in any case, it might be worse later. Their argument on the one hand

was it's totally safe to come now. That's why we're dressed up in all of this, you know, these hazmat materials. And it might not be safe later. Difficult argument to make. I think they didn't they did not handle this very well. And I think if there are political ramifications, they will fall on Republicans more heavily than Democrats. Well, speaking of that, Jonah, you had a column in the L.A. Times this week that talked about the future of the Republican Party

post-coronavirus, post-2020 to some extent. And you had a few different paths. I'd be curious for you to walk through some of those. I found it interesting, enlighten. I'll shed light, not heat. Yeah, so, I mean, it's so it's funny. It's like, you know, my editors at the L.A. Times every now and then, they're like, we love, you know, something about, you know, the politics of all of this or whatever.

And it's part of the problem is that, as I say the thing, is that politics itself are kind of on lockdown. You know, the, the Wisconsin primary, which is kind of an important. It's bellwether in all sorts of ways. And, you know, it's where Bernie, you know, performed well, it's, it matters in politics. But to the extent we're talking about it, it's mostly as a public health story, right? It's like these, these nimrods are forcing people to gather in place to, to vote during a pandemic and not making it easy, you know, I mean, so it's, it's weird that even something like that is, is, has whole different, you know, frequency or, or, or.

or you know vibe in in during the pandemic and there's very more broadly there's just very little non-pandemic politics going on one of the I would argue lamentable in all sorts of ways consequences of the pandemic is that Trump is actually more central to our politics than he's ever been before no one else really has a megaphone except for say Andrew Cuomo and the presidency is where the media focuses during a national crisis. Trump likes that very much. He clearly sees this as free media and is using this as a substitute for his rallies and whatnot.

And meanwhile, Joe Biden, you know, releases a new hostage video every couple days. And it's just it's so, but the one thing I think is sort of interesting, which sort of got me on this in the first place was, you know, Tom Cotton really does. We, we plugged it in the morning dispatch a few days ago. Our friend John McCormick had a really good interview with Cotton. And Cotton gets credit as the guy who saw this coming first among the political class. And, you know, at least his people will tell you that he's the one who convinced Trump to do the travel ban. They'll also tell you that Trump didn't do the travel ban the way he Cotton wanted, but so, you know, I for one am not, I'm of the school that Tom Cotton

wants to be president to the United States, not just because all senators want to be president to the United States, but because that is, you know, sort of an Aesopian part of his nature, right, is that he's running. And if I'm wrong about him, I apologize. I don't mean this as a character flaw necessarily. He's running. And someday. And the interesting thing is about that shows you where the politics are right now is that in a normal world, he would find a way to signal that if you guys had listened to me, this wouldn't be going on. Right. I wanted the travel ban to be tougher. We should have done these other things. We didn't Trump squandered February after the travel ban

by not getting masks and all that kind of stuff up. He's not doing any of that. In fact, he's running ads in Arkansas supporting Trump's response to this, which tells you that Trump still has kind of a

stranglehold on Republican, at least primary politics. So what would be interesting to me is like you try to think about who are the people to watch to see the normal maneuvering towards either a Trump defeat or a lame duck second term.

And, you know, Cruz is obviously one of them to a certain. set, Nikki Haley, who my wife worked for, is another one. And I think Tom Cotton is one. And if he starts talking about how, you know, I was right, people didn't listen to me as much as they should have, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that will be a real tell about how the party is organizing for either a post-Trump or at least a post-Corona landscape. And so just he's sort of a, you know, he's a bellwether. And I thought, you know, that's what I intended to write about. and then there just wasn't enough there for the air,

so that's how I just sort of concluded the gallon. What I find interesting, we're only a month in. Cotton is running these ads. At the same time, Arkansas is one of the very few states without a stay-at-home order. And if I were advising someone like a Tom Cotton in that position, there's no upside right now to putting space there. You wait.

So I think you could still turn out to be quite, prescient in what you're suggesting a little bit of wiggle room will look like down the run here. But I think that's a fall or even a post-November wiggle room. Yeah. I mean, his interview with McCormick alone may be the kind of like placeholder that he just wants to lay down and then just not put any distance between him and Trump for the foreseeable future. I mean, one of the things, you know, because I'm, you know, a fan and friendly with Nikki Haley, that sort of I thought was interesting was, you know, early on in this, she resigned, you know, last month she resigned from the board of Boeing to protest their request

for a bailout. And I thought it was a probably good politics, a good principled stand thing to do when she did it. But as time goes by, I really start to wonder, will a post-corona virus and a 25% unemployment GOP really be all that negative on corporate bailouts. I'm not so sure. And so it's just an interesting thing to think about, about where things go six months or six years from now. You know, one point on that, Jonah, I found that resignation from Boeing a little odd. I mean, I get on a super surface level, yeah, I'm opposed to corporate bailouts. But if there was ever a National Defense Essential Company in the United States of America. It's Boeing. I mean, it's not just national defense essential. I mean, this is sort of our last flagship airline

manufacturer. I know it's been having all kinds of problems lately, but do you really want to cede the world airline, you know, the world airliner manufacturing to Airbus? Boeing is national defense essential. I just found that to be odd, and it looks more odd with each passing day. I mean, I don't think it'll be ultimately relevant maybe to her political future. But I thought, you know, if you're a strong national defense conservative, which she's always been, I mean, this is one of the most essential corporate entities in the United States. Yeah, but David, you're making a substantive argument on this. If you're making the political calculation, She's getting X number of dollars from the Boeing board and it can't like is a talking point that could be used against her in the future and will never be a positive for her in the future.

Why would you ever stay? It's it's all risk, no reward. Well, I mean, you can make the argument I just made in a sound bite form as well. This is a national defense essential company and this is our last major airliner manufacturer. And if you remove Boeing from the board, you're going to remove. an enormous amount of our air power from the board. So, yeah, I stayed on there. She can defend Boeing without needing to be on the board and take money from it. The money is the problem. Donate it to charity. And news has come in. Biden is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Bernie Sanders has dropped out of the race. But it leads nicely into what I was going to ask you

anyway with Steve, which is deep stakes for Biden. You know, a month ago, we might have had a short list and if Gretchen Whitmer was on it, she was pretty far down on it. She might have been on the middle list. But we've really shifted from, I think, senators to governors in a lot of ways. Is she now the presumptive frontrunner for that Veep slot? Yeah, I'm not sure I'd say she's the presumptive frontrunner, but certainly she's getting a lot of attention that she wouldn't have gotten earlier. And I don't think she's necessarily getting that attention because she's performed so admirably

as governor during this coronavirus crisis. I think it's more that Donald Trump picked on her and she has sort of leaned into this confrontation with Donald Trump. Remember, he singled her out as a governor who he was having trouble with. He's done that with Jay Inslee and Washington and others. And I think referred to her as that woman from Michigan, if I'm not mistaken. And then she, of course, had a T-shirt printed and has worn that T-shirt in interviews and things. So, This, I think, speaks more to the extreme polarization of the moment, and the interest that Democrats have, particularly the Democratic base, has in having somebody who's willing to pick a fight with Donald Trump, and she was that person. You're seeing in many of the other governors, they've taken a somewhat different tack because they want to be seen by Donald Trump as praising his efforts throughout this thing. think there's a sense, and Donald Trump has suggested as much from the podium, that the

governors who, quote, unquote, treat him well are likely to benefit from the federal government's response to this. That's a sad state of affairs, but I think it's the perception and it may be the reality. Beyond Gretchen Whitmer on the VP stuff, I mean, I don't think Bernie Sanders is a candidate because Biden has already committed to picking a woman, so that would be a challenge for Bernie. Particularly for Bernie, unless you were Bernice. The, you know, I think there are some other candidates who have been mentioned. But I think you're right that the focus has shifted from just the public attention has shifted from senators in the presidential race to governors and their performance in the middle of this crisis.

I mean, so, David, what can. and Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris. I mean, these were considered sort of the three main names heading into VP time. And they're having a lot of trouble finding their footing media-wise, but even, you know, leadership-wise, I guess I would say. Yeah. I mean, once you've passed the various stimulus packages, what does a senator do? I mean, try to get TV hits, sort of talk about a plan that they would have that isn't actually going to become law. I mean, they just, their, their role has been overtaken by events. Now that may very well be that we sort of see a coronavirus legislative response 4.0, at which point the senators will have that chance to weigh in on

national policy. But again, this is where, I'm going to be a bad feminist ally here, Sarah. intersectionality has been overtaken by events and what was seemed like a politically astute promise by Joe Biden a couple of months ago or a month ago or however feels like eons ago when he initially said I'm going to nominate a woman as my vice presidential nominee lots of people in the center and center left and left applauded that as a very smart move politically but in in the midst of a pandemic, a lot of people, all of those kind of concerns that that box checking kind of concern recedes and the competence concern surges. And so just by the accident of history, it's there have been a man, a man has been governor of New York State, a man

has been governor of California. Those are sort of the two of the left, you know, two of the Democratic governors who have been most prominent in, and during this pandemic, who've been on television, whereas Cuomo is sort of a now a media star. Gavin Newsom can lay claim to being a not a media star because he's out there on the West Coast, but a results star because California is in a substantially better position in spite of having multiple major urban centers with high population density that have a large degree of international travel with China and elsewhere to be in a much better position. And so there's a, I think that this idea of, it has to be a woman as opposed to it has to be the best person equipped to handle a nation

that might still be in some degree of pandemic conditions come the fall of this year. I think Joe Biden might look back on this and say, I think I narrowed my choices too much. I'm not sure I agree with that. I think that Whitmer, for instance, being the governor of Michigan is sort of a twofer at this point. But, you know, a name that has dropped off every short list that the Biden campaign and his allies have mentioned is Stacey Abrams, probably for the reason that you're mentioning. Someone who is prepared to be president on day one certainly moves, I think, far much further up the list than it was two months ago. Yeah, can I just, can I chime in on that for just two seconds? I have never friggin understood the Stacey Abrams thing.

I mean, I just do not get it. it to me is like the most quintessential inside the beltway progressive bubble watching way too much MSNBC kind of thing to think this person who's biggest claim to fame I'm not saying their biggest credential but a biggest claim to fame is that she decisively lost a bid for governor and then claimed it was stolen from her when it wasn't and that is just like a own the own the cons bit of punditry that has just never made sense to me.

I mean, like, I'm not a big Elizabeth Warren fan. I'm not a big, you know, there are a lot of people that you could pick who I don't think would be great picks, but they're at least,

they're obviously qualified. The Stacey Abrams thing, Democrats should be very glad that this thing has put that to bed because it just never made sense in the first place. I think there were

some potentially Sarah Palin-esque problems with that pick, but politically, if you were really trying to zero in on someone who could energize the base through media performance, et cetera, and don't forget there are two Senate seats up in November in Georgia, which, you know, if there were evidence that she could increase turnout in Georgia, flip that state blue. I think there was some for that in January. I assume that's

probably gone down at this point. You know, it did make, at least made sense to keep her on the list at that point, Jonah, though I take your point. But, okay, Jonah. Speaking of political cul-de-sacs, if you will, we would have been spending a good amount of time talking about the strategic pros and cons of the Democratic nominee offering to have a phone call with the incumbent president and whether that was brilliant, what the upsides were, what the downsides were, what the potentials of that phone call were. Instead, this week there was a 15-minute phone call between Biden and Trump after, you know, the Biden team floated it, the Trump, I think very surprisingly said, sure, give me a call. Then Biden dropped it. Then Trump tweeted about how Biden dropped

it. Then Biden picked it back up. They had this phone call. Nobody cared. Yeah. I mean, this is, I mean, the Trump show stuff can be overdone. But this is just another one of these many, many, many weird little episodes that on the alternative timeline on Earth 2 or a 7 or whichever one, I particularly like the one where Mitch Daniels is president, and there's an enormous scandal about how he split in an infinitive in a public declaration. But, you know, you get these kinds of things all the time, which are kind of like, you know, the Russian and the in the Pine Barron's episode of The Soprano, you're just left hanging and you have to come back to it later.

I do think, though, that it's interesting, I mean, just sort of, you know, pulling back. I mean, I don't think we fully appreciate the degree to which not just like the economy is on lockdown and our lives are kind of on lockdown, but politics is kind of on lockdown. You know, Biden is, you know, basically in an undisclosed location.

I mean, we know where it is. We just don't care. Running the equivalent of a front porch campaign from his basement. And there's all sorts of stuff that, so getting to David's point about what's a senator to do, you know, this is one of these moments where the system and the media climate

favors people in the executive branch, whether it's at the state level or the national level. and senators, as they should be, are much more of an afterthought than they normally are. Steve, in the debate about WHO funding, the World Health Organization, just to back up for a second, it's under the umbrella of the United Nations, started in the late 40s. The United States still provides the lion's share of the funding, but China has been providing an increasing amount. They have upped their voluntary contributions, a small amount, but still noticeable.

and I think perhaps most relevantly to what's been going on in the last two months, they were specifically backing the current head of the WHO for his election, which was just a couple of years ago. And so the debate at the president's press briefing last night was whether he was going to powerfully hold funding back from the WHO. Then he sort of backed off of that. Where does that debate stand and is it fair? Yeah, I think it is fair. I mean, I think it is fair to scrutinize what the WHO has done in this context. There's pretty clear evidence that they've bent the knee towards communist China. There was that one very awkward interview that I think the senior WHO official was named Bruce Ayleward gave to a reporter who asked questions about Taiwan, and he even refused to acknowledge the existence of Taiwan, tried to turn the question.

to China, faked that the call was dropped when it came back up, wouldn't answer the question again. There's just a horribly embarrassing interview for the WHO, and it's consistent with how the WHO has conducted itself throughout this thing, accepting Chinese reporting as gospel truth, even when there were, I think, very early on, some pretty obvious questions to be asking about China, particularly if your role in a pandemic like this is to be asking those questions rather than just conveying without scrutiny the things that are being told to you by a government that has every incentive to misrepresent those numbers. We've seen that continue, I think, unfortunately. And the WHO has to be more than an amplifier of bad information from the populist country that was at the origin.

of this. Now, there's a contrary view, and it's made by Tom Engelsby, who's a public health expert at Johns Hopkins, and he says, in effect, look, even if you're critical of the WHO, it's lunacy to talk about disbanding it or withholding funding from it because of the other things that the WHO does in a moment like this that are sort of outside of the public attention. And, you know, he in one tweet that he had, if he said if an organization like the WHO didn't exist, you'd have to invent it quite literally. And poses sort of an alternative scenario where he says,

there's not a guiding international institution to help coordinate the information flow, to help countries compare what they're doing with one another in any kind of a systematic and methodical way. And I think he makes a good point. But certainly the case, for reasons certainly substantive and I'd say beyond politics, but obviously including political, that the U.S. government should scrutinize very carefully what W.8, with the role W.H.O. played in this situation, both as it's unfolding and in particular at the end. I mean, these international organizations are not beyond scrutiny. And it's certainly possible for them to have. played or tried to play a role that, you know, you'd hope they would play or was launched with good intentions. And then it devolves into something else as something unfold. You think of the

oil for food program back with respect to Iraq, which ended up becoming a disaster. Now, I'm not suggesting there's corruption necessarily here, but there's certainly been a lot of credulity on the part of the WHO as it's dealt with China. And David, this also plays out domestically. When the president has said he wants to pull funding from the WHO, there's been this almost knee-jerk reaction to defend the WHO. Right. Of course.

And can I use a Battlestar Galactica analogy before you do? So I'm reminded of the memorable moment where the viper pilots from. the Galactica and the Pegasus are about to initiate a civil war with each other. And they're kind of going through the motions of dogfighting in space, waiting for the next one to fire first. And then Dratus picks up what appears to be a Cylon contact. And they all immediately lock into unified combat formation against the presumed Cylon.

Jonah, I know remembers this. Vividly. Caleb, our producer, has marked the last 30 seconds for deletion. So please continue. Thank you, Caleb. Thank you. That is, that's the right getting the gang back together again to take on a multinational organization like the WHO or an arm of the UN like the WHO for which we provide a disproportionate amount of funding, which is also disproportionately pulled into the orbit and under the influence of an authoritarian regime that is opposed to and hostile to American interests. It's the same song, different verse that we've experienced really since the formation of the U.N. Well, to greater or lesser degrees since the formation of the U.N.

And there is a difference between saying we're going to try to defund and destroy the WHO and saying, you know what, if we're going to give more than anybody else gives, it's not that we want you to be our lap dog the way that, say, the PRC might want the WHO to be its lap dog. but we just don't want you to be the lap dog of the PRC. We want you to tell the truth. And to the extent that we have influence over you because of all the giant piles of cash that we send you, we want that influence to be pulling you away from the orbit and influence of these hostile authoritarian regimes. And you know what? That's a completely reasonable ask.

And I completely get it that in our polarized times that you're then going to have, you know, tweet thread, one of 117, here are all the great things the WHO does, just to sort of go to own Trump. But the WHO has not covered itself in glory in this pandemic, which is one of the most consequential public health disasters in generations. And it's not covered itself in glory, in part because of its relationship with the PRC. And something has to be done about that, period. And because this is not going to be the last pandemic that afflicts the human rights. race. And so there has got to be reform and to the extent that we can be a constructive force in that reform, in part because of the cold, hard cash that we provide, then by all means do it.

You know, there's an interesting poll out that Josh Rogan at the Washington Post wrote about today. It's a Harris poll. And what he reports is there is cross-partisan condemnation of China in the current context, which is pretty interesting in this polarized moment. If you look at some of the results of this. Certainly Republicans are more critical of China than Democrats are, but Democrats are awfully critical, too. 90% of Republicans said the Chinese government is responsible for the spread of the virus. 67% of Democrats in terms of trusting the numbers that have come out of China or the information that has come out of China. Similar kind of split with Republicans being particularly skeptical, but Democrats sharing a lot of that skepticism. What will be interesting

to see as this unfolds is whether the fact that the Chinese were so obviously misleading with their information is enough to continue to bridge the typical partisan divides on anything and everything, or if you start to see Democrats and others warm to the WHO or be less critical of China just because Trump and the Republicans are being so critical yeah so I mean that that sort of gets to one of my big gripes about the world that we live in these days and I went on a tirade about this last week about the yamishal cinder stuff where you know if Trump attacks a journalist and also that journalist becomes a hero and the press rallies to that journalist even if Trump's criticism of that journalist had merit but Trump's attack also was

over the top and you get these sort of retreating to your corners kind of things Trump's criticisms of WHO is totally valid everything I agree with everything that Steve and David say about the WHO at the same time you get the way Trump does it invites you know the mainstream media to all of a sudden have you know go into this defend WHO as a martyr and hero kind of mode which then makes it that the dumbness of that makes it easier for Trump to attack that position and the media position and you sort of have this race to the bottom of assininity which is extremely frustrating and this sort of gets to this this larger dynamic that as a conservative

I've had a problem with a very long time where if one of the most one of the most vexing things that can happen to you as a public intellectual or as a politician or as a journalist is to have the president agree with you for the wrong reasons or to have the president just simply try to make your argument for you. You know, the prototypical example that I often use about this is that I'm a deep and passionate proponent of peacefully annexing Greenland. And I knew that the second that Donald Trump embraced annexing Greenland, that meant that that position would be considered moronic for the next 50 years,

even though it's, I don't think it's a moronic, position. When Donald Trump said he's no longer going to be a conservative and he's going to call himself a nationalist, I immediately started tweaking my friend Michael Brendan Doherty saying, how do you like them apples? Now people are going to think that whatever you mean by nationalism doesn't matter because it's what Trump means by nationalism. The very coherent and entirely correct by my light's criticism of WHO and what its proper role should be that David and Steve offers is and the whole problem with this getting the band back together and unifying around China hawkishness is complicated by the fact that Trump is incapable of doing a sincere,

incoherent, nuanced indictment of China and President Xi. He will consistently undermine the people who want to rally around him and make the arguments that need to be made because he likes dictators and he likes these personal relationships that matter more than these coherent ideological constructs. And it makes it very frustrating to try and take his side because he will always pull the rug out from under you at one point or another. Well, let's move from something that perhaps unites a cross-partisanship

to something that has turned into an oddly partisan debate, in my view, which is whether the death toll is being over-undercounted, and let me just spell out the different sides of this, There is on the one hand, a group that believes the death toll is being overcounted because, you know, for instance, if you look at a chart of pneumonia deaths, week by week in the United States in previous years, those are down right now while COVID deaths are up, meaning that someone who died with pneumonia and COVID is counted as a COVID death, and therefore it's being overcounted the number of COVID deaths. On the flip side, they're those who believe that the number is in fact being undercounted because coroners, et cetera, are saying they're not necessarily testing everyone post-mortem, and that the number of deaths at home has skyrocketed in New York in particular compared to previous years. And Deborah Berks was asked this at the last White House briefing,

and she said that she thought the deaths were being counted entirely accurately, that yes, if there was comorbidity, someone had pneumonia, and tested positive for COVID, they were counted as a COVID death, but that she did not believe that we were missing deaths and that there were post-mortem tests being performed. So, and this is weirdly turned very partisan in terms of who's on which side of this, which I'm not totally sure I follow why, Steve. Well, I think there's definitely a throughline from the people who were originally coronavirus skeptics or truthers or what have you.

you, who downplayed the potential damaging consequences of the virus, who then sort of shifted to a grudging acceptance, I think many of them following the lead of President Trump, but then took up the argument that, you know, the public health experts wanted to shut down the economy for years and sort of were reveling in the damage being done to the economy and to President Trump now to the same people who are saying, in effect, oh, there's all of this overcounting of deaths and this isn't really as big a deal as people have made it out to be. Throughout those stages of this argument, you have a consistent point, and that is that this isn't the big deal that public health experts and others have said it is. I think we're likely to look back on this

in five years when the histories are written of this moment and learn that we will. were undercounting the victims of coronavirus and perhaps very significantly undercounting victims of coronavirus. There's a story in El Pais in Spain, big newspaper in Spain today, that's just looking at the Comunidad de Madrid, the area around Madrid. And a deputy regional premier there said that the official figures probably undercounted deaths, by some 3,500 people in the last month. And if you look at the fatality rate in 2020, March of 2020, and compare it to the fatality rate in the same region in 2019,

there is an obvious and dramatic spike of several thousand deaths. I think we're seeing some of the same things around here. There was a report in the Gothamist yesterday. that in New York, whereas typically 20 to 50 people would die, I think the figure was in a day at home, you're now seeing 10 times that many die in a day at home. So I don't think there's a very convincing argument to be made that we're undercounting at this point. And particularly last point on that, if you look at the way that the CDC has counted in both in past, epidemics or past pandemics or just counts the flu or counted the swine flu.

There's a consistency there as well. So I think we're likely to see these numbers continue to grow over time. David? Yeah, I'm going to plug the remnant for a moment. I just last night when I was on my evening run, I listened to the remnant and ran longer than normal so I could listen to it all the way to the end. But that's kind. And Jonah and Lyman Stone, right, Jonah?

Yeah. So Jonah and Lyman Stone had a fantastic conversation about the numbers. And Jonah can summarize it better than I can. But the basic reality is we're going to know these numbers. Now, we don't know the numbers right away. We don't know the numbers at the speed of Twitter. but using conventional, accepted, routine methods of calculating mortality, ascribing causes of mortality, we're going to know these numbers, and we're going to probably know them, say, for April,

sometime in June, maybe mid-June. So a lot of this argument is going to become moot, and we're going to have real answers. But there are some preliminary answers that we can have that, and I think go back to what, was talking about, there are some people who really staked the claim and staked a claim around that this is sort of flu-like, that the coronavirus is flu-like. And they're kind of trying to figure out a way to maintain the argument, or at least maintain the credibility of their original assertions. And that's just hard. Tim Carney has been on this beat and has written some really good stuff. And about a few days ago, he wrote comparing hospitalizations in New York State. And so the

worst week of hospitalizations ever, week for the flu, was week ending February 3, 2018, and it was 2,500 people hospitalized for the flu. Now, the week before in New York State, the number of people who were hospitalized for COVID-19 on a Friday, 2,879. On a Thursday, 2,449. I can just keep on going. There was a, there were several days that were, right at the worst flu hospitalization week ever, days. Also, he has an interesting piece where he says on a given day, 145 people die in New York City on a normal day. Last week, coronavirus alone, according to the New York City counts, killed over 200 people per day. And that's going with the counts of the people who were diagnosed before they died. And so a lot of the preliminary numbers

are really not hospitable to the idea that the flu that hospitaled old to the idea that we're overcounting. But we'll see. Again, this is something that we will find out. We just won't have something definitive enough to go dunk on anyone on Twitter right now. And so we just have to, as with so many things in a fog of war type of scenario, we just have to wait. Yeah. If I may, I think that's, I agree with all of that. And I really thought Lyman did a fantastic job explaining a lot of the data stuff. And I agree. So like David's point, which we talk about a lot around here, about the people on Twitter who always want to win the race to be wrong first, this is a very bad event for those people because the numbers

are going to take a while to come in. It's a rolling thing. You've got thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people. We don't know, but you have a large number of people who have this bug but are asymptomatic, and so it's just, it's not moving in the time frame that people want, but I think there's sort of a broader thing, you know, you asked about this being partisan. It's less than it's partisan than intrapartisan. And there are the people who are, I mean, the way it goes partisan is that the Democratic Party, by nature, forget they agree with anybody who's critical of Trump, but they generally are. are in favor of government experts.

They don't care about the deep state. They don't care about the administrative state. They say they believe in the science as a way to almost proclaim their religious anti-religism. But this thing is also, you know, so there are people out there who just want it to be true that Trump is being undermined by people like Fauci. And the Fauci truthers are, I think,

the really hardcore ones are being pretty repugnant. And there's a weird disconnect in their argument because it holds that, you know, that Trump somehow, it's basically a let Trump be Trump argument and that Trump has been hoodwinked by, Anthony Fauci, which is a hard argument to make if your standard position is that Trump is infallible. But there's also a real problem, you know, outside of that sort of wagon circling around Trump or, you know, that kind of stuff, like Richard Epstein, who we, you know, all have

no, you know, no to one extent either by reputation or personally, I think we all would basically agree is a brilliant guy. And he was a hugely influential. influential figure on the right, legal right, and all that. And he got himself into real hot water. And I asked a mutual friend, who I won't get in trouble because it was a confidential thing, what his take on it was. And he said, look, this is basically the perfect kind of story to trip up Richard Epstein.

Richard's whole thing is that the experts tend to be wrong, that centralized federal responses to problems are bad, that the media misreports things. I mean, you can go down a very long list of things that are sort of Richard Epstein's comfort zone that are correct 95% of the time to one extent or another. And this just bedevils that. And so part of the problem is that there are a bunch of people who are looking for the permission structure to stay in their comfort zones. And the problem with a pandemic is that, look, I'm a big opponent of centralized state action. I'm a big opponent of doling out trillions of dollars in direct aid and propping up businesses. I'm also a big opponent of peeing on my window dressing when they're not on fire.

But when there's a fire in your house and you got to put it out, you've got to do things that normally are not allowed. And there are an enormous number of people who don't want to get out of their normal comfort zone about how to articulate problems, how to articulate responses, and it trips them up. And I don't think anybody here would disagree that Richard Epstein's a brilliant guy, but it shows you the power of a certain sort of getting into a rut of a narrative can have on people. And that's for brilliant people. Then you talk about pundits and it's an even worse problem. You know, on that point, Jonah, about the sort of the fire Fauci crowd, that's the thing that has been so puzzling to me.

What they are arguing is that the man at the top where the buck stops with him has mistakenly afflicted one of the worst economic downturns in the history of the United States or maybe the worst immediate economic downturn in the history of the United States because he couldn't discern that he was getting bad advice. Are they not saying that this is a presidential failure on historic scale? I mean, that's what is mystifying to me about this argument. Well, and it turns out, too, I mean, who knows? I mean, it's always hard to tell where these arguments are going next. But it turns out, too, that Anthony Fauci wasn't the only one making that argument, right? I mean, was revealed this week that Peter Navarro, of all people, was writing memos to the president back in as early as January, describing a scenario that could have seen, I think, the figure. was 543,000 deaths.

And Trump claimed that he sort of claimed in his briefing on Tuesday night that he didn't read the Navarro memos, but then later said that he had done exactly what Navarro had recommended, which would have been hard to do if he hadn't read them. But he contradicted himself, stumbled a little there. But the point is, this was not just Anthony Fauci saying this. was sort of a consensus or close to a consensus as you can get. And it's not just the U.S. government.

It's the governments of most of Western Europe, Sweden accepted, you know, it's what they did in China to a certain extent. And the idea that somehow it's Fauci, insorcelling, you know, Trump in some way, when this is what like every expert around the world, for the most part, is advising the same way. It's really, it's a weird argument. Well, I want to put a bow on this. this for now. And also flag that for next week, I think there's some big topics that we didn't get to. I wanted to give them more time was a lot of it. Some of the racial disparities in the

deaths that we're seeing, I think we'll have more numbers on that for next week, but are going to be a huge story in this country and a really concerning one, I think, as we try to move forward after this pandemic, as well as you were mentioning the difference between some of these countries, Sweden versus Denmark, UK versus Spain, and even then intrastate. We still have states without stay-at-home orders, and then we have states that have done the same thing around the same time with wildly different results. So we are running a sort of worldwide experiment of sorts. Although, can I push back on that very quickly?

This is a really important point that Lyman Stone makes on this fantastic podcast called The Remnant. his argument is that the stay-at-home orders are ultimately not that important. It's the free flow of information. When you convince the public, when you convince the population that this thing is serious and dangerous, they start doing things regardless of whether they've been ordered to that stop the spread. And I think that might- And the experiment is there were, the numbers were dropped.

well before the stay-at-home orders went into effect nationwide. Okay, but I do want to end on a lighter note per usual. So I have felt incredibly like this is the best quarantine situation in America is mine. I have nine weeks until this baby comes. And so my husband and I get to spend all of this quality time together, cooking and having these sort of second date conversations, if you will. So I wanted to bring y'all into our second date conversation. from last night.

Okay, so you've got a seventh grader, boy or girl, I'll let you guys pick. And you need to recommend one book for them to read right now. What book are you recommending to a seventh grader? And David, I'm going to start with you. Yeah, that's super easy question to answer. The obvious answer, the correct answer is if they haven't read it already, which if they haven't read it yet, that's a problem. is Lord of the Rings. If they have read it, which they should have, then it's the Silmarillion,

which is much denser, but in many ways, it's more tragic, more philosophically rich. It's fantastic. It's absolutely fantastic. I think it's Tolkien's best work. And then, you know, once you've read Lord of the Rings and you've read the Silmarillion, it just opens up the whole rest of the high fantasy universe, which will move you in as you get older to George R. Martin, but a good next one would be Brandon Sanderson and is the Way of Kings series. And we can make sure they never talk to a member of the opposite sex for years. I mean, just guaranteed. Keeping them out of trouble and away from heartbreak in their early 10 years. Jonah? Well, obviously, the ideal book is the Holy Quran.

Happy Passover. Thank you. Thank you. Nor is it Dianetics. But I would have to say continuing on the sci-fi fantasy realm, because they should have read the Narnia books in grade school, right? So this is seventh grade. I would say Dune by Frank Herbert and the whole Dune series, which gets you,

there's all sorts of really great comparative politics in it there's all sorts of stuff there's a vast amount about the role of religion in society and there's a lot of drug use good good amount of sex but all done in ways to hold the attention of I will concede probably a 13 year old boy more than a girl but but I'm still going with Dune Steve please save this experiment this conversation experiment. Yeah, it's just so weird that I got mixed up with such sci-fi geeks. I really don't understand how it happened. And also let me temporarily, Sarah, become your feminist ally.

Yes. Since those were sort of skewed, I would say, to boys, I will start with a book that my wife read with our girls, and they absolutely loved it. It's called The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate D. Camillo, and it is, the writing is beautiful. I've read some of it. I haven't read the whole thing. The writing is beautiful, and it's a wonderful, sort of heartwarming story. I will give a suggestion for boys, too, because it's what I read when I was this age, and that was the entire Hardy Boys series, which was fantastic, and I would just devour these books. seventh grade, really? I mean, isn't that a little basic for a seventh grader? That's late. I mean, I know you were a jock, but I mean, still. I mean, I had other things to do. I, you know, I was going to soccer practice and I was doing other things. So other things. It may have been. It's where you go after green eggs and ham, Jonah.

Later. It's big print. But they're great books and not too difficult to read. I guess I'm not sure. shocked. All of you are wrong, obviously. You know, we're in a moment of a pandemic, and the seventh grader clearly should be reading a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, boy or girl. The world ended on a Thursday, which is actually when March 8th was. So I just think it's completely appropriate. Fantastic book that's funny. And honorable mention, though, will go to Miss of Avalon, Ender's Game. And I'll throw in Edith Hamilton's mythology. So that was the correct answer that we were looking for. Just stating for the record, those are more deep nerd that's more deep nerdery than

Jonah or I advocated, just for the record. That's not true. That is correct. And also, you can't really appreciate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy unless you've read some of the canon that it is pinging off of. So I think you're just review, you know, you're trying to come across as sort of prom queenie. But in reality, you're chess club treasurer here, and you would have been hanging out with me and David in high school. So let's just be clear about this.

If you and David were ever talking to girls in high school, which I'm not convinced we have any evidence of that, despite your happy marriages now. I can tell you stories, but that's for another podcast. Oh, God. Well, thank you listeners for coming along with us on this interesting ride today. Do subscribe if you have the chance. a review on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you're getting your podcasts. And join the Dispatch.com and let us know what you think about the WHO, Miss of Avalon, any number of other topics, some Veepstakes in there. And we'll look forward to talking to you next week. Thanks again.