The Dispatch Podcast - Performative Bravado

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Sarah and the guys discuss the protests to reopen the economy amid the coronavirus outbreak, testing capacity and the divide between the federal government and states, and the president's move to block new green cards. 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 to subscribe to this podcast so you'd never miss an episode. Today, we're talking, reopening in the States and protests in the States, ramping up testing, the President's Immigration Announcement, and albums. that give the guys joy, that bring joy to our lives, music. Today's episode is sponsored by ExpressVPN, but we'll get to that a little later. There is lots of talk about reopening the economy, reopening states, ending stay-at-home orders, this week. There's also been several protests around the country, notably Pennsylvania, Colorado, Michigan, Texas. Some have ranged from a few dozen to there were several

thousand in Michigan. Of course, as the spokeswoman for Governor Hogan of Maryland said of their protests there, quote, there was more media inquiries about this than there were participants. Jonah, how real are the protests? How real is the protests? How real is the rush to reopen? I think they're, I don't know, zero to ten McLaughlin style of ten being absolute adamantine metaphysical reality and our physical reality and one being total abstraction.

I'd say they're, I don't know, is seven. I think that they definitely started pretty astroturfy. And the problem with a lot of astroturf things, and this is not contrary to the media coverage, simply a phenomenon of the right, is that it turns out, as a mixed metaphor as this may sound, AstroTurf can lead to real turf. And if you start covering the stuff like it's real enough as a remarkably large number of media outlets, this thing is just basically catnip for the cable news networks that need something to fill today, the MSNBCs and CNNs get to say, oh, my God, look at these

yachts with their, you know, their assault rifle, quote unquote insult rifles, and their gads and flags, and Fox gets to say, look at these guys with their heads and their hearts wired together for some full-tilt boogie for freedom and justice, and you have content. And so at the same time, just as the guys at the morning, you guys at the morning dispatch have been covering, they're still wildly unrepresentative and of where just simply most Americans come down, according to any poll that you look at. And, but I think they're going to take on more of a life of their own. The last thing I'll say is, look, I used to be friendly with Steve Moore. I have a column, I wrote my column for the other times about this this week.

I find the effort to turn these people, in his words, into Rosa Parks so morally grotesque and so insipidly asinine that I find it personally embarrassing. And, you know, I mean, whatever you want to say about Rosa Parks, what she wasn't doing was grabbing her, you know, her rifle and her camo, and going down and fighting back against a medical quarantine, for God's sake. And what bothers me about it is not just the just, I mean, the obtuseness so large you could see it from orbit about trying to do this.

But the cynicism that says that you have to turn people of good intention who are trying to save lives into villains to fit your preconceived narrative, right? Oh, this has to be like Tea Party's 2.0. This time it's real against a freaking quarantine. It's just so incredibly dumb. And meanwhile, Steve Moore, who sits on the president's super terrific happy fun hour committee to reopen the economy is simultaneously helping organize protests against the governors who are following the president's guidelines who he says call the shots. I mean, I just, I want to sort of nuke the planet and let the German Shepherds start over

when I start paying attention to this crap. Dear listeners, that we apologize that you got your Jonah rant so early in the podcast. I'm sorry, I'm cranky. I'm very cranky today. I apologize. I do want to cite some of the polling, though, that you mentioned. So NBC Wall Street Journal poll most recently,

only 3% of respondents believe the coronavirus has already been contained enough to reopen businesses and return. to work. 15% believe we'll get to that point in the next few weeks, and about three and five are more worried about loosening coronavirus-related restrictions too soon than they are of leaving them in place too long. Now, on the flip side of that, Steve, though, you look at approval numbers of how governors are handling this crisis across the country, and if you ask that nationwide, do you approve of your governor's handling? It's about 72 percent, pretty high.

But one Detroit free press poll had Whitmer's numbers closer to 57 for that. So a bit of a gap in some of these states where the restrictions have been higher. If you want to riff on the astroturf element of this, where do you see this shaking out for some of these governors? Well, I agree with Jonah's first point, which is that there's likely to be some combination of astroturfing going on here and then real sort of grass moots movement on this. First, I think we should give a shout out to Von Hilliard at MSNBC. I was actually listening to MSNBC as I drove over to Governor Hogan's press conference in Annapolis a couple days ago. And he was at one of these protests and did a very good job of putting it into context, said, look, this is a small protest. There are 100, 200 people,

people here. I think he was in Arizona. He said, you know, in this, in this area, there are five million residents. So this is a small group, and it doesn't really speak for a broader slice and pointed to some of those polls. That's exactly, I think, the kind of reporting that we need that puts it into context. And I thought the morning dispatch item that Jonah mentioned of a couple of days ago also did a good job of contextualizing some of what we're seeing. I do think it's likely to grow for a couple of reasons. One, just because I think people are getting increasingly sick of being quarantined, of being stuck in their homes, and running out of patience on these things.

Two, President Trump is basically giving life to these things now, at least rhetorically. And as Jonah points out, he's doing so in a way that contradicts what he himself has been saying. And there's this odd disconnect between, you know, his tweets saying, liberate Virginia, Liberate Michigan, Liberate Minnesota, and what he usually says from the podium at the White House coronavirus briefings, he seems to have, for the most part, bought the arguments of his public health advisors. He seems to be, more often than not, articulating the kinds of things that he's hearing privately from Anthony Fauci and Elizabeth Berks and others. But he, he, His base, or at least significant chunks of his base, is agitating to get things open.

Some of these, I think, are pure bad faith efforts, and there have been, there's been good reporting about some of the people who, some of the grifters, who basically just seek to monetize politics, going out and setting up these Facebook pages in order to collect names and addresses and then basically squeeze money out of them. That's how these things started. In that sense, I think there is an astroturf beginning to them. But with the president agitating on behalf of getting open with the, I think, increasing sense that people just want to be done with this. And the fact that this gets more and more pushed into our preexisting frame of polarization, I think it's a safe bet to.

to say that we're going to see more of these kinds of things. David, I know you have feelings on this, but I also want to make sure that we talk a little bit about some of the legal aspects. You had the Attorney General saying that he would step in with a statement of interest in some of these cases where the states don't leave in these restrictions too long. You've also seen some conversations about businesses reaching out to want liability waivers if they do reopen. Yeah. So, I mean, it is absolutely the case that the legality of these restrictions is dependent upon the circumstances of the pandemic. I mean, it is not the case that governors have a freestanding ability to ban mass gatherings. I mean, they just absolutely don't. So the reality is these restrictions are legal that are based on the timing right now, the particular timing within the curve of this And so I think it's right for the Attorney General to be vigilant. I do think it's also would be really premature absent those individual instances of overreach like the Louisville mayor seeming to ban drive up church services where people would not get out of their cars, or other individual instances of overreach. It's appropriate, though, for him to stay on the sidelines for now. I do think these protests are a little bit more consequential.

and the numbers would indicate for a lot of the reasons that Steve said, but also for another reason, if Donald Trump is watching television and he's looking at these protests, he is looking at his rally crowd. I mean, this is his absolute core base out there in the streets. The signs are going to be holding up, the things they're going to be wearing, the gear there. It's his rally crowd out there to greater or lesser degrees. Now, it's much smaller than one of his rallies, but that's his rally crowd. He's going to look out there. He's going to see his people. And, you know, look, I share all of Jonah's frustrations. I mean, this is not Tea Party 2, the steeping. I mean, this is this is performative bravado at its absolute worst. I mean, you know, and the thing that's so

ridiculous about it, which is also ridiculous about a lot of the online bravado you see about reopening, you know, where someone would say, I would rather get the coronavirus and die than, you know, find myself in a position not to support my family. Well, that, you know, the whole thing with a pandemic, y'all, is that it actually ends up not being an individual isolated decision that I can just decide I'm going to expose myself and nobody else. You know, the guys walking around out there with the AR-15, which I'm not quite sure what the R-15 will do to the coronavirus, but, you know, until I see controlled trials, I'm not going to make a final judgment.

But the reality is that the pandemic is a poor fit for this kind of performative bravado that marks a lot of modern discourse because the real concern isn't what happens to me, Lord willing, as being a, you know, relatively healthy guy on the, not well, I'm not on the younger side anymore, but on the younger side of the core risk zones, it would still be a rough ride for me, probably if I got it. But I'm thinking about my mom and my dad. I'm thinking about my wife. I'm thinking about all of the, you know, the people you encounter. It's not. to be a super spreader. There's nothing courageous about that. And I just don't think that it's gotten into the heads of the people who are dealing with this. The real enemy here isn't Governor Whitmer.

And I guarantee you, if she lift the restriction, because it's not a restriction on getting seeds anywhere, I don't agree with the restriction, but it was a walling off particular parts of department stores, you could move that tape and their lives would not change very much. at all, if at all. So the real enemy here isn't Governor Whitmer. The real enemy here, as we've said, and many of us have said at the dispatch and elsewhere, the real enemy here of the economy isn't the governors, it's the virus. And look, I would be completely in support of a protest where if these restrictions are remaining in the same phase, even when the viral curve has dipped substantially, down, then we can have the conversation. But 2,800 Americans died yesterday to this virus.

So Jonah, we have some reporting coming out in the dispatch later this week. So I'll give a preview of what Declan, one of our super stellar guys who's not on this podcast, is working on, which is even if you lift these restrictions, it's still up to the individual businesses about whether to reopen. And they're going to make that decision based on whether they, A, believe their employees can be safe and healthy and come back and be whether they think the customer base will be there to support the outlay in employee time, et cetera, to reopen. And so, and not surprisingly, Declan so far has been finding a lot of businesses saying, no, we're not quite ready yet. Politically speaking, what happens when some of these states lift restrictions, but the

businesses themselves don't come back online? How does that affect? effect, the president, the daily press conferences, and even in some of these swing states. I mean, Georgia has two Senate seats up in November. Yeah, I mean, I've been banging my spoon on my high chair about this for a while now. And, you know, ever since that now legendary Lyman Stone podcast, about, you know, the fact that most businesses shut down on the East Coast, at least before any a public official ordered them to. Most people started social distancing

and staying at home before any government told them to, at least in the places that there were hot spots. And the idea that people are going to rush back to work and rush back to parties and bars after this is lifted is fanciful. And the polling

is pretty explicit about this. I mean, something like only 20% of the American public says they would go right back to normal if all the bands were lifted. You cannot get the economy restarted if 80% of the people aren't going to behave as if things are back to normal. And there's also the variable that you didn't mention was there are a lot of businesses, like really important businesses, like professional sports leagues and Disney and all these guys who are terrified of the liability issues. you know if you can't and frankly for shame that the two harvard law school people didn't bring it up

uh and i did bring it up i just i forgot to answer the question i was i was on my rant i forgot to answer the question and uh but so anyway i apologize to to sarah um noted and and noted um but so like and this is the thing that drives me great what's the guy's name Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas? You know, he's talking about how the economy is more important than death. And, you know, there are this, it's sort of this whole notion, which Bill Bennett and other people peddle is of this sort of choice between continuing to fight the pandemic or reopening the economy is such a fictional choice, right? You cannot get people to go back to normal until you deal with the pandemic, and it feeds into this notion that if you're in favor of protecting

lives, you're against reopening the economy. And it feeds into this notion that says there are good guys and bad guys here. And if you're on the side that's in favor of quarantines or in favor of dealing with the pandemic, that you're one of the bad guys against the real Americans working is one of the things that really poisons American life. So I think we're going to come to a fork in the road. The question is, what are politics going to look like down the road? I think if you start opening up the economy and the economy doesn't get restarted, a lot of people are going to look like idiots even if they don't realize it. But I think the other variable to look at is the new NBC Wall Street Journal poll said that only 40% of Americans

know somebody who's gotten the virus. That's not going to last. And pretty soon we're going to live a country where everybody knows somebody who got it. And that could change the politics, too. Right now, the people who don't know anybody who got it, they can still follow politics as if it's this form of entertainment on cable news and not something that touches their own lives beyond the economic stuff. When that changes, I suspect, particularly if we make it into the fall and we have a big spike with this and the flu, I think politics could change very dramatically and they could change in ways like they did in 1917, you know, or 1918, 1919. But what it exactly looks like, I don't know. Steve, one of the major things that people are looking to, to determine

whether they can reopen their states or their individual businesses is testing. And so we went from less than 10,000 tests a day in the first half of March to around 100,000 by the end of March. For the last two weeks, daily tests have been between 130,000 and 160,000 tests a day. But that has not really ticked up much in the last two weeks on a day-to-day basis. And so you had this great piece on, I don't know, the spot that Larry Hogan finds himself, in in Maryland, but I think where more and more governors are going to find themselves in, where on the one hand, the federal government is telling them to hustle on their own and get these tests. And then on the other hand, Hogan reached out to South Korea to get more tests, and they said

he shouldn't have done that, that he should have reached out to the federal government. Can you expand on your reporting on this and why this is such an interesting spot as we talk about reopening the economy? Yeah, I mean, I think in Hogan, case, to a certain extent, it's not terribly complicated why the White House is going after him. I think President Trump teed off on Maryland Governor Larry Hogan at his press briefing earlier this week because... And worth noting, this is a Republican governor. A Republican governor, who's also the chairman of the National Governors Association,

so he has sort of a platform, and he's doing a lot of media in connection with his role as a governor of a D.C. adjacent state, and also with the National Governors' Association. So Hogan went to, on March 28th, which was a day in which Maryland at that point had had only five deaths. There was, you know, there was certainly significant reporting about how bad this was going to be and, you know, we're three weeks into the president's national emergency at that point. But Hogan reached out unilaterally to the government of South Korea to try to broker, his efforts to get tests, which the federal government had made clear at that point were likely to be a state issue. They negotiated for three weeks, a little more than three

weeks, with Hogan's wife, Yumi, doing some of the negotiations in Korean. She speaks to language. And he managed to obtain nearly half a million tests that came to Maryland over this past weekend. Hogan made an announcement of this on Monday. He did not, notably, he was on, excuse me, the White House coronavirus call earlier that morning and did not mention this on the call, but made an announcement later in the day,

and it got quite a bit of media attention that the White House press briefing later that day, first Admiral Brett Jourois, who is running, he's the sort of testing czar for the White House was asked about this because he had gone on an extended rant about how testing was very widely available in the United States and a reporter from CNN said, well, if testing is so widely available, why is the governor of Maryland needing to go to South Korea to obtain these tests? And the Admiral sort of smirked and said, you know,

I don't know what he was doing in South Korea. The president then later weighed in. perhaps not surprisingly. And Sarah, as you say, took real shots at Governor Hogan and said, you know, if he just had had more knowledge, he would have known that he didn't need to do this. And he could have just picked up the phone and called Mike Pence and gotten the tests that he needs. Now, virtually everybody understands that that's not true. The president and the White House have spent weeks telling governors that they are on the front lines of this, that they are responsible for providing the PPE, the ventilators, the testing.

supplies that they need for their own states. If the White House has been consistent on anything, it's been consistent on that with the president's, the exception of the presidents one day where he said he has total authority, total power to shut down the state-based lockdowns. So the message was very clear, as Governor Hogan put it, I did what the White House told us to do. And yet President Trump and the White House sort of dumped on him from the podium. It'll be interesting, to see what progress other governors make in getting their own testing supplies. We are woefully short in tests, not anywhere near what the White House had said. There's some dispute between the White House and governors on whether the White House had been promising testing capacity

versus actual tests, but it was clear that the White House, beginning with President Trump on March 6th, saying, anyone who wants a test can get a test, wasn't true then. it's not true now and we're six weeks later. But they have made promise after promise after promise about how many tests we would see. Admiral Dwar at one point said 27 million tests by the end of March. None of that has happened. So I think governors have gone out to try to secure these things on their own. But Hogan did this, you know, started this process three weeks ago.

So governors are just now starting it. there's going to be a lag in when they actually get their tests, which I think will keep the increase in testing that we need to see from happening in the short term. One final note that I think is interesting in bears, we're trying to do some more reporting on it, but it's not an insignificant issue. The last question of the press conference, Hogan was asked by a reporter, were you worried that the federal government would interfere or intercept with the delivery of these tests that you'd obtained? And Hogan said he was. He said it was a big part of his concern that the federal government would intercept these tests. We've seen this with other governors.

J.B. Pritzker and Illinois, Charlie Baker in Massachusetts have either had a experiences where they've had some interference with the delivery of supplies. There was a harrowing story of a doctor who wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine talking about how he had been harassed by basically the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security as he tried to obtain PPE for his hospital. And it's unclear exactly what the federal government is doing and trying to track these things. perhaps they're concerned about some black market trade on these things, but that certainly wouldn't apply.

You would hope to the governors to whom the White House and the president have said repeatedly go out and get this stuff. David, the president's answer to some of those questions that were related to the testing ramp up at the press conference last night was we have conducted more tests than any country in the world. In fact, we have conducted more tests than all the other countries in the world combined. Is that message working? Well, I don't know much about, I don't know what exactly is working for him politically right now. I mean, the rally around the flag effect that we saw very early in the polling surrounding the coronavirus pandemic and the shutdowns was very, very, very

modest by historical standards. He briefly bumped over 50%. I think he's down now down now to his normal range of 43, 44, 45% in approval. So it seems to be, as far speaking politically, we're back to status quo ante with the public perceptions of Trump with perhaps some erosion in older voters at one poll. And Sarah, I already hear your voice in my head. You can't pay attention to one poll. Especially one poll that I think you're about to cite, which had a pretty massive swing. Please continue. Yes, yes.

So we'll see. We'll see what other polls say, but there might be some erosion amongst older voters. So as far as perception of what's working, I think Trump is back to just being Trump, even though I agree that a lot of things are going to change as a result of this. but one thing that seems not to be changing is Trump's approval rating. But putting aside what's working politically, let's just talk about truth. And let's just talk about for a minute how you can't compare apples to oranges. So, for example, South Korea has been held up, rightly so as perhaps the democracy that has responded the best to an actual outbreak within its borders. I mean, you can say that Taiwan, for example, has perhaps.

responded the best of them all because it prevented any real outbreak at all. But Taiwan, I mean, South Korea had an actual outbreak within its borders and did super saturated testing combined with contact tracing to an extent that probably we'd have to, you know, repeal parts of HIPAA to accomplish here in the United States. But it did flood the zone testing, got the curve under control. You can put the charts of the growth in cases of the U.S. and South Korea side by side. in which you will see is something incredibly striking. South Korea surged and then it receded.

And now, you know, the difference in the two countries is almost unrecognizable. And they don't have to test as much now. So we, on the other hand, are much larger. We have many more people. We had community spread before we locked everything down. And so to get a handle on the extent of the disease in the United States after community spread with a continent-sized country, with 320 million people, you're going to have to test the hack out of the place on a scale that's going to exceed every other country that reports

accurate numbers. And I'm excluding China from all of this. And so, yeah, if we're ramping up testing, we're going to quickly pass other countries in raw numbers. But I think where critics have a valid complaint is, as of right now, by and large, you're still testing people that, quote, unquote have a reason to receive a test. Maybe they're showing symptoms. Maybe they can identify direct exposure to somebody. And a lot of epidemiologists will say we have to test more than that. When you listen to Scott Gottlieb, who's been on a number of podcasts talking about kind of the scale of testing we need, he talks about, well, if I go to the doctor, for almost any reason, they should swab me. Like if I, when I go the doctor, I get swabbed. And you just sort of begin to get a

much better sense of where the disease is. And we're obviously not there yet. And we're not even really close to being there yet. So you can look at raw numbers and they're impressive. But what's the timing on that? Too late. What's the extent on that? Too little. And that makes the raw numbers look a lot less impressive. And we're seeing some of the problems with not having those raw numbers because what you end up with are these studies that people are trying to piece together to determine what the raw numbers would be if we did have larger testing. And so, you know, Jonah, we saw these two studies that have the obvious flaws. And I think that the people who put out the studies would acknowledge their obvious flaws

in Santa Clara County and L.A. County about what their best guess is on what it would look like if you had tested everyone in L.A. County or Santa Clara County. On the other hand, there was this really interesting two doctors in the Washington Post yesterday put up this op-ed. I don't know what else to call it. They're at New York Presbyterian Columbia University Irving Medical Center. And for two weeks, they did universal screening of all patients who were going in for delivery in the maternity ward. So these are people, to David's point, that weren't showing symptoms or had been exposed necessarily.

They were truly getting universally randomly tested. The only selection bias was that they were, you know, more or less 37, 38 weeks to 40 weeks pregnant. That found, and this is New York, no question a hotspot. 15% of all those women going into the delivery room tested positive for coronavirus. and 88% of that 15%, so roughly 13% of all the women who went into delivery, had no symptoms. If we can ramp up testing enough that those are the numbers, what does that mean for the future until we have a vaccine? I, you know, I know a lot of people confuse me for an epidemiologist. You look like one.

I actually, as I was saying to somebody yesterday, I looked like I should be in my cabin writing my manifesto against technology. I have not groomed myself since the lockdown. And as people on the Skype conversation know, I, I look like I should have a 1970 TV show where I'm friends with a giant friendly bear. So anyway, you know, I don't, I mean, the reason I say I'm not an epidemiologist is I don't know. I have a, you know, I had a long conversation with Megan McArdle yesterday and you've all of in some other people from AI. and, you know, Megan, in part because her dad has this, has it and is hopefully coming home on Thursday, we'll see, and partly because she's just a numbers geek, she's been pouring through this stuff, and she's pretty pessimistic, and then surprisingly, Evol was pretty

optimistic. And you have this feeling where you think the way things are going to go based upon the last write-up of the last study you read, you know, and then you have to wait until you see somebody else say, oh, here are the problems with that study and all the rest. I think the numbers to look at are, you know, first of all, I think we're finally achieving escape velocity from this is just the flu, which is a nice thing, you know, a nice stupid talking point. to put to bed. But the number to look at is, is like, if you think the prevalence of this virus in society is something like, you know, 2 to 5 percent or something like that, then until the number of cases, until that ratio shows up in the testing numbers, you know that we're not testing properly. And, you know, I can't remember what I think it was in the morning dispatch today that

it was about 20% of the people who were tested have the disease or have the virus. If that number needs to go, you know, needs to go way down. And one of the problems I have with the way we talk about tests is we make it sound that if you tested somebody three months ago, that somehow that is a accomplishment of lasting epidemiological value, right? I mean, you can, you can, you could test all five of us or four of us on this podcast right now. And a week from now, we could get exposed and have the virus. The test that we did a week ago is only useful as some sort of statistical snapshot of where the thing is progressing. So I think the stay-at-home orders cannot last. I think that you're going to have to start letting businesses, let people in

one at a time. You're going to have to start letting, you know, people figure out on their own how to socially distance to a certain extent, you know, and you still ban large gatherings. And that's probably what we're going to have during the summer. And then everyone is going to be just biting their nails about what the fall looks like when we enter flu season. And that could be truly terrifying. And I got to say, I'm pretty skeptical. Uval is very optimistic. that we'll get a vaccine. It'll have to be a vaccine that you take every year, like the flu vaccine, because the antibodies for coronaviruses do not last very long. But we've never really had a successful coronavirus vaccine. So we just, you know, I'm just, I'm trying to make peace with

the fact that this could be a grim journey for the next year or so. So that's why. Sounds like a pretty good manifesto that you're writing in your cabin. With that, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. I want to talk to you about today's sponsor, ExpressVPN. Being stuck at home these days, you probably don't think much about internet privacy on your own home network. Fire up incognito mode on your browser. No one can see what you're doing, right? Wrong. Even in incognito mode, your online activity can still be traced. Even if you clear your browsing history, your internet service provider can see every single website you've visited. ExpressVPN? Make sure your ISP can't see what's sites you visit. Instead, your internet connection is rerouted through ExpressVPN secure servers. Each ExpressVPN server has an IP address that's shared among thousands of users. That means everything you do is anonymized and can't be traced to you. ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of your data with its best in class encryption, so your information is always protected. Use the internet with confidence from your computer, tablet, or smartphone. ExpressVPN has you

covered on every device. Simply tap one button and you're protected. it. ExpressVPN is the fastest and most trusted VPN on the market. It's rated number one by CNET, Wired, The Verge, and countless more. So protect your online activity with ExpressVPN. Visit ExpressVPN.com slash freedom and you can get an extra three months free on a one-year package. That's Express EXP-R-E-S-V-P-N dot com slash freedom. ExpressVPN.com slash freedom to learn more. All right, Steve, immigration. The president tweeted on Monday night, pretty out of the blue,

that he was stopping all immigration into the country. I was sort of sending frantic texts to our team like, hey, guys, got to change the morning dispatch. Since then, the order is supposed to come out later today so we can dive into the super nitty-gritty-gritty. it. But in the press conference yesterday, it appears to be a 60-day block on most new applicants from receiving permanent work visas, which we call green cards. But it'll have a ton of exemptions, including health care workers, seasonal farm workers, family members. They'll continue processing

visas for temporary workers, which at this point is the largest source of immigration into the country. On the flip side, this seems like perhaps more of a political announcement than a real change in policy. Because we don't have any immigration coming into the country right now, it is on a more or less full pause. Wondering how significant you thought this announcement was. I think it could be significant for two reasons. Neither of them, at this point, terribly substantive. I mean, the key point, I mean, the way to frame this discussion is with the last thing you mentioned. There is no immigration right now. I mean, people don't want to come to the United States as we're fighting a pandemic. It's just not happening. It has stopped by virtually every measure. It has

basically stopped. And then you have the president announcing that he's going to stop something that's already stopped. Didn't make a ton of sense, unless you look at it through the prism of politics and potentially as a setup for what he wants to do next. On politics, you can see, as we discussed earlier, elements of the president's base becoming uneasy with the current state of affairs. And again, we don't know how widespread that dissatisfaction is. I wouldn't read too much into those protests, but you are hearing from a lot of the president's top outside amplifiers on cable television and talk media, this growing sense that we need to get the country back to full economic speed, and we need to do it now. And the president has thus far, mostly other than his occasional rhetorical feints in their direction or tweets,

he's mostly stuck with his public health professionals in terms of what he's actually doing on a day-to-day basis. That is unsustainable, it seems to me. And you wonder whether, and I want to be very clear, I'm speculating here. I don't, I have no reporting on this, talking to the president's team or anybody in the campaign. But it makes sense to wonder whether this is not something to keep that base sort of happy and with him. there is this odd disconnect between the protests and that growing dissatisfaction with the status quo and the fact that they're training their frustration and anger on Anthony Fauci and Dr. Perks rather than the President of the United States.

So I think in part this is a sob to his base. This is a way to say, hey, I'm listening to you, I'm with you, I'm still the guy that you always thought I was. The second possibility, and I think equally likely, is that this is an attempt to tee up further unilateral restrictions down the road. The president, as David, wrote in his newsletter yesterday, has a wide latitude to make these kinds of decisions, and he seems to be setting up additional fights about this with Democrats as we move toward November. Early polling on immigration in the context of this pandemic is very strongly in favor of the president's position. I think there was, I don't remember who did the poll, but it was something close to... USA Today, Ipsos poll, last week was eight and ten Americans supported a temporary

stop and immigration from all other countries. Right. You can see why the president would be eager to embrace that just for the short-term political effects. And, you know, Joe Biden almost immediately came out with a statement saying that the president was distracting. But the president, Democrats will not go along with this. And it's a pretty good political issue for the president, at least right now. So you can see that it would make some sense for him, both in terms of what he'd like to do and in terms of making sure that he's having a fight on these issues through November, and also in terms of keeping his base juiced and enthusiastic about him. Jonah?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, particularly since I'm always getting grief from people for being, you know, reflexively anti-Trump on this fully functional podcast, I should just note he's got a good argument on his side, you know, and I'm not sure he's articulated it. I'm not sure he's doing it for the reasons I think are best aligned for a persuasive argument. but the there's a there's a certain amount I mean I think Steve's right there's a certain amount of just sort of Twitter theatrics here when he first announced it it kind of felt like the transgender ban I wasn't going to believe it was actually happening until the responsible officials confirmed that they actually got the order to do it because there are lots of things that he says he's doing on Twitter that then just go down the memory hole but and let me jump in real quick just to read what he said at his news conference of why he's doing it to your point, by pausing immigration, will help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens. It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad. We must first take care of American workers.

Yeah, look, and so, I mean, I think that one of the things you're asking before, and I kind of completely whiffled on the answer about what our politics look like in the future, one of the things that I think may actually be a good outcome of this is a reorienting culturally about, when we've talked about this before, the people who are right now considered heroic essential workers during a booming economy were, economy were considered sort of, you know, uh, you know, ignorable American citizens. People who are doing, you know, cashiers at supermarkets and all that kind of stuff. I'm not saying that they were, were ignorable. I'm just saying as a sort of cultural matter, they weren't front and center.

And now these people like nurses and doctors and technicians and cops and firemen and all of the rest, you know, in cashiers and delivery men, people recognize how much we need them. And I think that is a good thing culturally and morally and politically. And it changes the calculation about how you think about immigration. And when you have 20 million people out of work and there could be more, talking about jobs Americans won't do. it's kind of BS. Right. And talking about them as if their stupid hamburger flipper jobs is BS. These are important jobs, particularly given the pandemic, and there are going to be people who want them.

And I think that there are potentially long-term consequences to immigration in the United States coming out of this. You have, there's a non-trivial chance that you actually get some kind of, at least partial turning off of the spigot of sort of automatic family reunification immigration in the United States. And if that happens, I think we'll have an economic hit. We will become poorer for it. I believe in the economic case for immigration. But it becomes politically much more difficult to turn that thing back on than to say leave it on. And it makes Democrats all of a sudden have to come up with a positive argument for importing new laborers and new citizens into this country,

particularly when the pandemic is not over and the developing world and the poor parts of this world are going to have this pandemic far longer than the rich world are. And it's going to complete, it could conceivably, I don't want to get grandiose,

it could conceivably change the entire way we talk about immigration in ways that are probably very exciting to jags like Stephen Miller. David, to follow on something Steve said, he hinted at something the president actually hinted at yesterday at his press conference, which is that this is phase one, the order that's going to

come out today, but in fact, he said there could be a phase two. And sort of where, whether there's authority for this, whether there will be authority for a phase two, I want to read you, you know, we can all sing it together, 8 USC 1182F. About to quote it, Sarah. I was about to quote it. It's a famous song among lawyers who are interested in immigration and got its real day in the spotlight around the, quote, travel ban and Hawaii v. Trump, which was at the Supreme Court just recently. So, David, I'll let you sing the song. Yes, 8 U.S.C. Section 1182F.

And I won't actually sing it because then we will lose all of our members and subscribers immediately. Sing us a song, he's a lawyer, man. And we're losing them now. Wow. We're losing them now. Wow. They're gone.

We're now speaking to no one. Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interest of the United States, he may by proclamation, which isn't that a nice royalist word? And for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants or impose on the entry of aliens any restriction he may deem to be appropriate. Unless you think that is... Now in English. Basically what that means, I like how Justice Roberts said it in the travel ban case. By its term, that statute exudes deference.

to the president in every clause. So basically, if the president finds that any group of people, or maybe all people who are seeking to enter in the U.S. would be detrimental to the interest of the U.S. as he defines it, because that is not a defined phrase in the statute, he can prevent entry. Now, this statute dates back to 1952. This is sort of, this is middle of the Korean War stuff. this is apex of confidence in the executive immediately after World War II. So this is 1952. Hey, Mr. President, we trust you to decide in your own timing, in your own discretion,

who can enter the country and who can't. And it's really interesting to me, because Steve raised something about legal precedents going forward. It's always been interesting to me that the president, after the travel ban case, emphasize things like the wall and the and declarations of emergency over this statute in his approach to immigration because this statute gives him such enormous unilateral authority with a 2018 Supreme Court precedent saying we're not going to step in on this. And I think Jonah said, I can't remember. I wish I could remember who said this, but a person left of center on Twitter said, I think after coronavirus, the open borders argument is dead. Like this whole thing that we saw in the Democratic primary

where, oh, I'm going to decriminalize illegal entry. And then people would, you know, one up that. Well, I'm not even going to deport anybody. I'm going to, you know, and it just this sort of like auctioneering, like outbidding each other and how open the borders the United States would be. I feel like that's just gone. And I don't think Twitter has absorbed that yet. But I think that the American people in an atmosphere of a pandemic are not going to be saying, and Jonah said this very well, other parts of the world will likely be dealing with this longer than us. And to just say, come one, come all is not going to fly. It's going to be fascinating for me to see how the Biden campaign responds to this.

They responded very adroitly, I thought, to Trump trying to pin being soft on China on Biden. and Biden fires back with this immediate ad showing all of Trump's statements about Xi, contrasting with Biden's record in January and February of being much more skeptical of China. So it's almost as if China Biden outflanked Trump on demonstrating greater toughness. On this issue, it's going to be harder. But I think the American people are just not going to be in a position to say, yeah, let's decriminalize illegal entry. Yeah, you know, we need we need more people coming in. I don't think that's going to happen.

And I think that the president going forward is probably going to use 8 U.S.C. 1182F to degree that he probably regrets not using it before. To do some quick takes, if you will, Congress passed another 500 billion in funding for coronavirus relief. The small business loans had run out. This had led to lawsuits against several of the banks that had been issuing those loans saying that they prioritized larger loan applications over smaller loan applications. There's also been some controversy over publicly traded companies getting, quote, small business loans. And then some name brand companies, Ruth Chris, Shake Shack. Shake Shack has returned or said they're going to return the money that they received. but the president has picked Harvard as a main target. I guess just very quickly for each of you,

private companies right now struggling on the one hand, but not wanting to take a public hit for taking the money. How does this shake out? Are we going to see some companies not take money when they should? Or is the money too great Harvard, by the way, has not said they're returning the money. In fact, they have doubled down and said, we didn't get this from the small business loan.

We got it from the higher education loan. Their endowment worth approximately $50 billion. Jonah? You know, look, I think this is perfectly great political fodder for people to argue about. I'm kindly with Jim Pethakukas on this one. You know, when you, you know, when you. you need to get vast sums of money out into an economy to keep it on life support, you're going to misallocate from someone's perspective, some amount of it,

and we should just have a certain amount of tolerance for that rather than getting all freaked out about it. You know, if you've got a forest fire and you've got one of those super powerful hoses, you know, you're going to occasionally hit a branch of a tree that isn't on fire. That's okay. The time for precision. is later, and there'll be time for, you know, going over the books about who took what loan and all the rest down the road. I'm not particularly horrified that Shake Shack took the money. I mean, it is a loan after all. At the same time, would I rather that 99.999% of this actually went to mom and pop small businesses? Yeah, I would. But, you know, this is all hands on deck in a

in a sloppy, difficult time, and I'm willing to give both the administration and these businesses some benefit of the doubt on this one. One of my greatest joys this month has been sneaking out to five guys and eating a burger in my car. Steve, thoughts on the money? Yeah, I mean, I think it's right that we can expect that we'll learn a lot of horrifying details about how the money was dispersed and what happened. You're already seeing evidence of the problems in the drafting of the legislation that led to this in about 30 different ways that legislation is problematic. The way that the legislation was written and the way that it's being implemented is problematic, leading to a number of unintended consequences.

I do think to a certain extent that's unavoidable. I would like to think that we would learn lessons from that. and say, you know, this kind of emergency, this is an actual emergency, and so some of this was unavoidable. You had to move quickly. But we were doing this long before there was a pandemic. This is how the United States Congress was operating. It's not a good way to operate. I'd like to think the optimist in me thinks that we might learn these lessons as we watch. I mean, the number of stories that we will see about how, you know, about no-bid contracts going to people with ties to the Trump administration or, you know, members of Congress, what have you, it will be mind-boggling.

And I think the risk is it will take the already sub-basement level of approval of the federal government down even further, unless there's a sense that the federal government has helped us get through the virus aspects of this. That I think is, even when I try to be an optimist about this, where I think we're more likely to end up. And David? Yeah, you know, passing massive emergency legislation and then relying on social media shame campaigns for accountability strikes me as less than ideal. You know, look, we're going to have that wave. We are going to have that wave of social media shame campaigns. By and large, they're going to be totally, utterly, completely ineffective, except for those businesses that decide they can't endure a nine-hour negative

news cycle. The real issue to me is much more what Steve said, which is underlying, rather than focusing on whether Shake Shack did what people on Twitter think Shake Shack should do, is, well, what about sort of the friends and family bonuses, discounts, advantage, et cetera, to people connected, well connected with government officials. And that's why we have, hey, let's bring this back to previous content, inspectors general. And I do think that that's going to be a necessary accountability follow-up to this is going to be, hey, look, when the smoke clears, we do need IGs looking at this to make sure that powerful committee chairs didn't get to shove giant sums of money towards favored constituents that Trump organizations

weren't put at the front of the line or those allied or affiliated with Trump organizations. And that's the kind of thing that matters a heck of a lot more than whether a business that I from the outside think should be financially healthy is receiving more money than I and all of my Twitter expertise believe that it should receive. And that's just uninteresting. All that is here today gone tomorrow, I do think the thing that Steve said, what about, what about connections with powerful officials? Let's just make sure that that kind of corruption to the extent that it exists is exposed. That's far more important in my view. Okay, I think it's, now we move to the most important topic of this podcast, perhaps, which is I know a lot about your viewing habits and

reading habits at this point, which have said a lot of horrible things about all three of you, frankly. But this week, as morning dispatch readers will know, I turned my sites to music and thought with some of my free time, I would create a playlist for the impending alien joining my household in now seven weeks. And so I've been spending a lot of time curating this playlist of how you introduce an alien to all of, I don't know, all of the, you know, the music that America has so loved for the last 70 or 80 years. And it's been a really fun task. And so I really wanted to know from you guys the album, start to finish, not one song, not just a band in all of their work, an album that you take great joy in listening to start to finish. I'm too terrified to start

with David. God only knows what that's going to be. I think I trust Steve the most on this. You may regret that decision. I took this assignment very, very seriously. And I went back through all of my albums. I did sort of a cataloging. I set up something that looked like a March madness of my best, my favorites. And I want to just say before I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, unveil my winner that the phrase I keyed in on in your assignment was brings you joy because there are other albums that I probably would have chosen had you said you know serve as a salve to your you know your mental state during this global pandemic and it was something that was more contemplative or

something that spoke to me when I was down but brings you joy was a very specific request. So my final four was OAR, rain or shine, which is a live show that OAR did in Chicago. It's phenomenal. It plays for like two hours and it's glorious. Midnight radio from Big Head Todd and the Monstras, which is a throwback to my college days. I think I saw them a dozen times. Bright morning stars by the Wayland Jennings, which is this terrific

a cappella group that would be very good to play to sue a baby but the winner was three feet high and rising by de la soul which every time i listen to it i can listen to the whole thing front to back it puts me in a good mood sort of no matter when i listen to it to it no matter where i am no matter my mental state at that time so that's that's the right answer too that's not just my this is not one based on taste that's objectively the right answer i like that okay david i'm sandwiching you with whatever scary sci-fi version of music you listen to so um sarah you know as the youngest at heart of this of this group um albums that's what that's what boomers listen to Oh, my God.

Like, boomers listen, boomers listen to albums, young people like me, like we go down YouTube, rabbit holes, you know, just whatever the algorithm feeds us. But if you make me plug into my boomerism. By the way, I'm a millennial who listens to albums, but okay, boomer, like just. But if you make me, no, so people who read art, my Sunday newsletter know that I always end the newsletter with music. And a lot of readers like that. They send me suggestions. And so I've actually been listening probably to more music over the last several weeks since I started doing that than I normally do. I'm not much of a music listener.

I'm more of a podcast listener and video game player. We're well away. But there is a artist and an album that she's phenomenal. Her name is Sarah Groves. she and the album is floodplain and it's a few years old and it's just absolutely wonderful like just fantastic so i would wholeheartedly endorse sarah groves floodplain and then aside from that i mean like anything that came out in the golden age of music which began in like roughly 1983 and ended when nirvana killed fun um i'm i'm all about that i pretty much start

with Nirvana. Jonah. So this is a difficult one for me because because you have poor taste or some other ones? I'm open to the idea that I have poor taste on this. I mean, this is something where I have never invested in music with some of my friends invest in music in terms of like

the source of my meaning and all of this kind of stuff. And I'm kind of with David on this whole albums thing. I, there was a time when I listen to whole albums, mostly on cassette tapes in my Walkman, as I would brutally walk through Manhattan in the 1980s. And I think the word brooding is really important here, because, you know, how they say, like, the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 16. The Golden Age for me of listening to albums just happens to coincide with

a level of self-seriousness that does not overlap much with the word joy picking off on something. Well, he's going to say Alonis Morissette. No, but, you know, there was a lot of Pink Floyd listening. You know, there was a lot of, you know, dark side of the moon and then later in college, a lot of R.E.M. and all that kind of stuff.

And I don't associate joy with any of those things. And so, like, you know, albums that I'll still listen all the way through these days are few and far between. They're mostly like greatest hits kind of things like, you know, Johnny Cash, because I love Johnny Cash. But the only things that these days, coincidentally enough, that qualifies albums that I listen to from beginning to end are Broadway show, Broadway musical things that I listen to with my daughter on long drives, which actually does give a certain sense to.

joy, right? Because it's this sort of nostalgic bonding thing. And so I don't know, I think it would probably have to be, you know, I mean, as unbelievably unmasculable as this is, it would have to be like Annie or Bugsie Malone or the soundtrack of Hamilton because these are things that I associate driving around with my daughter listening to. That is a great answer and I definitely can't make fun of you for it. I won't make fun either, but I will say, it is believable that it's not masculine. You said it's unbelievably.

Thank God I have a daughter, because if I had said Annie, without that, it would have been brought that. Then it's a dateline episode, Jonah. Yeah, I just like listening to the show to and with other people's daughters. It's a weird thing I have. Mine is like a mix of joy,

nostalgia, a whole bunch of other things. So my uncle lived in Austin during when Austin really was, like, weird and stuff. And he lived on South Congress, which is like the super weird part of Austin. And when I was in fourth or fifth grade, he would take me to like, you know, the cool, weird kid, Austin toy stores or whatever. And he also gave me the, they might be Giants Flood album, which includes such. classics as Birdhouse in Your Soul, Istanbul, not Constantinople, Particle Man, Your Racist Friend. I mean, the album from start to finish is so joyful and cool and weird. And it does. It makes me like dance around in the house. And I've been enjoying re-listening to it. And with that,

I think I ended up with the sci-fi version of music here. And it turns out I'm the old person on the podcast, I guess, because I still like albums. Um, with that, thank you for joining us as always. We'd love for you to subscribe to our podcast, leave us a review and become a member of the dispatch at the dispatch.com and we'll look forward to talking to you next week.