The Dispatch Podcast - Purging the Pentagon

Episode Date: November 11, 2020

Secretary of Defense Mark Esper got the boot on Monday in a characteristic Twitter announcement from President Trump. Esper’s sudden dismissal was accompanied by a firing spree of numerous other Pentagon officials who were quickly replaced with Trump loyalists, raising a lot of questions and alarm bells in D.C.’s national security bubble. Sarah and the guys break down competing theories that have tried to dissect what the Pentagon purge is all about. According to David, “the moves only really make sense in the context of planning for a second term.” Tune in for a discussion of emerging arguments surrounding the future of the GOP, ongoing election lawsuits, and the conspiratorial trajectory of conservative media. Show Notes: -The Dispatch Fact Check. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to another episode of the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French, all exhausted after our two-day What's Next Event extravaganza. We have the recorded sessions up at what's next event.com. And even so, even though we just spent the last two days talking nonstop to each other, we've got lots more to cover, more news. So we're going to start with the Pentagon. We're going to talk about the future of the Republican Party again, because there is more. Then we're going to talk about vote fraud, and we're going to talk about the media, hypocrisy, and, you know, all the stuff that's going on this week. Plus, a little great man theory of history, indulgence at the end.

Steve has some terrible, terrible takes to share with you. Let's dive right in. Steve, news coming out of the Pentagon yesterday and today. Quite a bit of news coming out of the Pentagon in the last 48 hours. You've seen the Secretary of Defense removed from his position replaced by an interim for the final 70 days of the Trump administration. You've seen the head of policy at the Pentagon, the head of intelligence at the Pentagon, also removed, the chief of staff to the secretary, also removed and replaced by what I think can accurately be described to Trump loyalists. Needless to say, in national security world, this is

raising, I would say a lot of questions, also a lot of alarms. People are worried about it. There are a variety of theories as to why this is happening, but it's unclear exactly what the correct theory is. I mean, there are basically four, the first that the president is putting in his top national security loyalists, two people who used to work for Congressman Devin Nunes, one at the Pentagon, the other is the top lawyer at the National Security Agency, having something to do with their Russia, their internal Trump administration pushback on the claims of Russia collusion and the Mueller report. The second, that this is just Donald Trump peak, he wants to fire people

he doesn't like, and he needs to fill the slots with somebody. The third is that they're actually prepping for a second term, and I communicated with a longtime Trump advisor who said, that's what we're doing. And then fourth, and most worrisome that this has something to do with potential escalation with respect to Iran, as a number of the people who have been put into these senior positions are Iran Hawks. As I say, we don't know exactly what's happening, But it's clear that, you know, both uniform military leaders, national security folks, both inside and outside of the administration, are worried about what this potentially could mean. And there are persistent, I'd say they're stronger than rumors, or we probably wouldn't even discuss them here.

But persistent concerns that there will be additional dismissals, potentially including, combatant commanders, uniform military leaders, the head of the FBI and the head of the CIA. So all of that, having taken place really in the last 48, 72 hours, let me turn to you, David, with my question. Do any of those four explanations of what this is about make sense to you or sound more likely than the others? Well, I've been doing some of my own digging, Steve, and there's a lot of puzzlement because the moves only really makes sense in the context of planning for a second term. Sort of there's a routine kind of turnover that happens at the end of a presidential term

and start of another presidential term. So they only make sense in that context with the exception. And also, you're elevating a lot of people who are known to be sort of Trump cronies. And but at the same time, I'm not getting any whiff of, and hopefully I wouldn't because if there was some sort of impending military action, the last person who should know about it is a dispatch editor in Franklin, Tennessee. But I'm not getting any whiff of sort of anything like imminent military. action. Moreover, these changes at the top of these civilian positions at the top really wouldn't impact, you know, if an order is given, an order is given, and that's really going to be carried out by the uniformed military. I've even heard some speculation as, is this something

kind of a last-minute gift resume patter to some very loyal Trump supporters? And in fact, that seems to be a common bit of speculation in addition to sort of the Russia stuff. But really, a lot of folks are just stumped by this. I don't think it's something to be alarmed about regarding readiness. These guys are really not that material on a day-to-day readiness basis, that they're much more sort of shapers of longer-term policy, and there is no really longer-term policy for them to shape for the next couple of months. So, you know, at some point you just kind of throw your hands up and say, I don't like it.

It doesn't seem stabilizing. I can't quite figure it out. Jonah, you know, the person that I communicated with said this is just simply planning for the second term. Yesterday in a press conference at the State Department, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked about what his department is doing to help prepare for a transition. I think the reporter plainly meant a transition to a Biden administration because President-elect Biden has won the election and has the most votes. Pompeo sort of laughed and said, yeah, we're preparing for a second Trump administration. Your thoughts on that and whether or not this second term planning is the explanation for

what we've seen at the Pentagon? Yeah, so as I think I mentioned on the What's Next Event Recap, and I know I said it on Twitter, and I know I shouted it out my window like Howard Beale in Network. Even if the Pompeo comment was intended as a joke, that doesn't let the guy off the hook. Because it was clearly, you know, there's, you know, remember how Yasser Arafat would always say one thing in English and another thing in Arabic, or how John Stewart, when he was on the Daily Show, would get polemically hyper-partisan. And then the second anyone criticized them or took him seriously, he would put the clown nose back on and said, hey, yo, I'm just

a jokester, that kind of thing. Pompeo was doing that, right? He was doing a mixture of those two things. He was Trump speaking and with his little grin, trying to pass it off to the Normies as a joke. And we saw this morning that Trump, or late last night, I can't remember, because time is a flat circle now. Trump had tweeted out a quote, Pompeo's quote, saying that, and said, see, this is why he was first in his class at West Point. Trump wanted to hear something like that. Trump wanted to repeat something like that. Even if Trump was in on the joke, he thinks his followers aren't, and he wants them to be to think that and what is so wildly recklessly irresponsible is around the world people hear that from the secretary of state who's supposed to be one

of the few cabinet officials who's supposed to stay out of partisan politics and they interpret that as something pretty serious and sinister even if it was intended as a joke that's the line it's sort of like al haig's i'm in charge here comment this is i think what pompeo is going to be remember for. And there is no defense of it. It was just simply outrageous. That said, I have a hard time buying that this has had anything to do with prepping for the second administration. It may be that these guys were told. That's what you're supposed to say when asked. It may be that some of these guys believe that's the case because they're Goulet drinkers. But if you were actually prepping for the second administration, you would make changes at all sorts of places. And right now we

haven't seen those. So I don't know what's going on either. David Ignatius of Washington Post thinks this is about protecting Gina Haspell and protecting sources of methods for all sorts of intel stuff. Sounds like that's part of it. But much like the Pompeo joke, this just represents the reckless disregard of this administration for the decorum that you're supposed to show. during the transition of power from one party to another in the United States of America.

And even if there are defensible arguments behind some of this stuff, it still shows a cavalier attitude about how this is going to be perceived around the world, perceived by Americans. And if it was utterly harmless, there would be more transparency about what the intention is here. But they're letting people, letting people's imaginations run wild on purpose. Yeah, Sarah, is this just more sort of mainstream media Trump skeptic overreaction to silly sort of moving around pawns on the chess board that doesn't really have any significance? Yeah, I think a lot of it is, actually. So I think that it, how do I phrase this?

If this weren't the Trump administration, yeah, this would be kind of weird, but it is. And we've seen three and a half. half plus years of this, this isn't fundamentally different than any of that. Most of the people on that list are sort of part of this little internal cabal and they're all close with each other. And yeah, I am like zero surprised that they've now all found themselves together again at the Department of Defense with sort of high sounding titles with not much time left on the clock. I think it's as simple as that. And I think that they love it when the media then freaks out about it. And as David said, you know, the actual power to do things is pretty

limited in this short of time. Those are all sort of larger policy roles. And when you go into a large organization like the Pentagon, your ability to move those levers of power is so limited by your lack of understanding of the bureaucracy, not bureaucracy in the pejorative sense, like the bureaucracy and the, you know, how large organizations function and how to move large organizations. It's why, you know, this, they couldn't possibly get a lot done in six weeks or eight weeks, whatever it is. So, you know, I think that folks in the Trump administration like to see media wring their hands over what could this possibly mean. And, you you know, sit back and, and chuckle about that.

So, you know. Would you change your, would you change your mind about that if they started actually relieving military officers of their command? Yes. You'd still feel that way. No, no, no. I would change my mind. Okay.

Yeah, I think that, Joan, I think that that's a, I think that's a much, that's a much more serious issue. You know, an actual political relief of a combatant commander, a uniform combatant commander is something usually only done. after scandal or after poor performance on the battlefield. But not after you've just lost an election and refused to compete? Not after you just lost an election. And maybe you think the guy wasn't sufficiently ready to deploy the 1001st airborne

into the streets of New York. Yeah, I mean, that would be so totally different. What this is and why I say it's not that different than the last three and a half years is in every administration, you know, you sort of, the joke is you start with the A team. and then you kind of like move down the teams. And other people have pointed this out. I think Jonathan Swan and Axios had something kind of funny about it a few months ago

that like they quickly moved into the J team. And so this is just more of that. It just happens to come after the election. And so people are speculating about it. But like this happened, you know, throughout every, you know, cabinet agency. in the last year.

It's just, it's DOD and it's happened after the election and there's a whole bunch of other stuff going on. But yeah, Jonah, look, 100%. If they start moving combatant commanders, this is a different ballgame, I am totally wrong. What if they start violating your Third Amendment rights? They will not be quartering at my house. I think the Briscuit wouldn't,

the Briscuit would not be casual about that. No. David, admit it, you've wanted to argue a Third Amendment case. your entire. Finally. My whole life. My whole life. I've wanted it.

So I guess I think I think I'm sort of in between the the true alarmists that this means that they're necessarily preparing for a strike on Iran or something and the dismissive types, Sarah included. I think it's definitely, it is, it is different than just replacing people at cabinet agencies. It's after the election. There's 70 days left. These are, as David points out, the president's cronies. It happened at the Department of Defense. It also happened. As I mentioned, Michael Ellis, an attorney for Devin Nunes, went to become the top lawyer at the National Security Agency, keeper of many, many of our secrets. So it's odd. Maybe, I mean, the best case

scenario is this is just one more sort of petty troll on the way out the door. And they love to see people get up in arms over things that aren't really alarming. But I take my cues from the folks in the building at the senior levels of the building. And if they're alarmed, I'm alarmed. And it's very clear that they're alarmed. I think there is a red line with combatant commanders. I think you all are right. If that happens, I would expect to see hawks in Congress, both in the Senate and in the House, immediately come out and condemn the move and raise lots of very difficult and pointed questions and sort of abandon the president on this.

And maybe that would lead to an abandonment on some other stuff. Jonah, we just spent two glorious days for our What's Next event, talking about the future of the two parties. And in particular, lots on the future of the Republican Party. You have some thoughts. Yeah. So there's a, there's, there's, um, uh, so much thumb-sucking going on here that everyone's, uh, opposable thumbs are now pruned, uh, because of this idea of whether or not the Republican

party is going to be a Trumpy party. How long is it going to be a Trumpy party? What does it mean to be a Trumpy party? what is Trumpism, how many angels sit on the head of a pin, yada, yada, yada. Wall Street Journal has this piece out today, basically asking this question. And I think that sort of the interesting quote that got a lot of attention is from Tom Cotton, who really just devastates a straw man when he says that, people who think we can just go back to the same agenda that we had five years ago

are kidding themselves. We now have to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's more of this, and Rubio's in there, too. Multi-ethnic, working class party, workers party, yada, yada, yada. I typically don't love workers' parties as a banner in American history. but the straw man part of it, which I guess I'll put in the form of a question, for those of you, I'll put this first to Sarah. Sarah, you were on the front lines of political campaigns for a long time before you decided to, I don't know, jump up or jump down to our petty pundit class. In all of that time, have you ever heard from inkstained wretches like me or Steve or David or from lawyers like

David or from think tank eggheads. Anyone who believed in that agenda from, say, five years ago, how many of them said, yes, what we're really going to do is stick it to the working man? You know, I mean, what does it mean for the Republican Party to become a worker's party that would change the political dynamics of how it runs, how it messages, all of that? I mean, what does that mean to you? And is that, would that make it a Trumpy party? Yes and yes-ish.

So I think that there was a lot of talk circa 2012 about the real problem with the Republican Party. This was all sort of in the autopsy was a messaging problem, right? We're just not landing our policies in people's lives and explaining to them how it will help them. And I think that is, and I've heard both parties say that. by the way, every time someone loses, they're like, it was just a messaging problem. We didn't explain how our policies would help people. And I think it is so pedantic and condescending the way people say that as if your voters were just too dumb to understand how great your policies were.

No, in fact, a lot of them understood exactly what your policies were and they didn't think that they were particularly helpful to their lives. So what I think you saw in 2016, I'm not saying some huge sweeping thing, but for a segment of voters was that his stuff on trade made a lot more sense to them than the 2012 Republican Party stuff on trade. They thought that China was taking them to the cleaners. They thought that these foreign governments who were subsidizing their goods and services were just at an unfair competition with ours,

and yet you were hearing sort of think tanky, egghead types trying to explain why actually free trade will be great for everyone, because what you see will happen on this curve. And people are like, no, look, the price of a barrel of corn just keeps going down. So I think there is something to that criticism. I do.

I obviously no one in any political party has ever run on the platform screw the workers but I think that a lot I think both parties in 2012 weren't really running on a platform aimed at them either

okay so a couple things one you said subsidizing which I love which sounds like the federal government offsets the price of your appetizers and And that's actually a big government I could get into, honestly. To somewhere far in the distance, our own Scott Linsicum like dropped his fork as he heard someone on the dispatch team, not only disparaging trade neoliberalism, but charts.

I'm not sure I can protect you. That's all I'm saying. I am not disparaging that. What I'm saying is that voters, there are some voters who didn't like that part of the Republican platform. And then to say that there are no members of the conservative ilk who want to go back to that, I think that's disingenuous too. Of course there are.

There are people who want to go back to a free trade part of conservatism. And there are people who don't. And I think that's a fair fight to have. And yes, is it a little bit of a straw man? But that's not what Cotton says. That's not what Cotton says, right? So it's very different. Steve, as you said to me last night, if you had let me finish my point.

Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. It's on. Yes, the way Cotton phrased it was, you know, silly and disingenuous, perhaps. But I think that that gets to the larger point of what he meant. You know, he's, of course, portraying the side he doesn't agree with as a caricature. And that's the caricature. Steve, should we take Tom Cotton seriously or literally? it. Yeah, I mean, look, Tom's a smart guy. He's made very clear everything he's done with his both his rhetoric and his action that he wants to be seen as sort of the air to the, you know,

the Trumpism without Trump arguments. And that's, that's, you know, certainly that's, that's going to be a crowded lane. But if anybody can can do it, Tom Cotton can probably do it. I take exception to the way that he that the way that he sets it up though i mean i think jona your introduction was exactly right it's a total straw man literally like literally tell me one republican who's saying we need to go back to the where things were five years ago and just ignore everything that's happened in between but you just said you want to go back nobody's making that policy to the previous trade policies to the previous trade sure i would make an argument for free trade that does not mean i want to go back and ignore everything that's happened over the past five years or disregard all the stuff or run

have Republicans run strictly on that one, you know, on that core agenda. I think there's, look, ultimately you're going to find that there is this debate. Everybody understands that there will, that the world that Republicans are running in, that conservative think tanky types are thinking in is different than the world as it was five years ago. And only a fool would fail to take into account all that's changed since then. So, wait, Steve, can I ask you a question? Because this was from our, we didn't get to talk about our conversation with Governor Hogan afterward, but this has been like weighing on me since our conversation because

I did not feel very satisfied with one of his answers to my question. What you or him, like, how is the platform that he wants to run on different than Mitt Romney's in 2012? And I guess I would phrase it to you as how is the conservative movement that you want to create moving forward different than the conservative movement of 2012 minus like what Hogan said. He's like, well, you know, I have a very different background than Mitt Romney. No doubt. A totally different person making the same arguments? Or how would the conservative movement look different to you, Steve, than it did in 2012 moving forward?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm not sure what, you know, know, if Larry Hogan runs what he'll what he'll ultimately run on, but I suspect it'll be something that takes into account what we've seen in the past five years. And as he said to us, would, you know, incorporate policy agenda designed to win over this sort of cross-ethnic, multi, cross-partisan constituency or support base that he's built in Maryland. On the latter, I guess I'm more sympathetic to the messaging argument than you are. And I'm not surprised that a long-time Republican messenger doesn't think that the messengers were at fault. But I do think that Republicans have to do a heck of a lot better job than they've done in explaining why

free trade, in fact, does work. Now, you know, I think some people, maybe Tom Cotton will be among them, will look at what Donald Trump has done and say, boy, those arguments really appeal to the base. And they allow us to make a political case that will help us win over working class voters, just as Donald Trump has. I would argue if you look at the data as compiled or described or analyzed by Scott Lincolm and others, there's not a great case for the kinds of traits. policies that President Trump has pursued. Now, the Republican Party is perfectly willing. Republican candidates are perfectly willing to say, you know what, it's worked politically so we're sticking with it, and we're going to make a good argument about a bad policy.

I would do the opposite. And, you know, I think we saw this a little bit in the conversation that I had with Brines. Is the question going to be, I mean, I think everybody understands that the coalitions have shifted in the aftermath of Donald Trump winning the presidency. The question I think that's going to face a lot of these Republican 2024 candidates is do you then shape your message to appeal to the new coalition or do you believe stuff? Do you argue things that you believe? And what concerns me most about this new conversation is you see this sort of creeping walk away or in some cases sprinting away from

basic limited government conservatism. I can take a bunch of different forms, but I'm a small government conservative. I'm back to my same question, Jonah. How? David hasn't even opined yet. I was going to say, is this a private fight or can anyone get involved? David, fine, David.

Depends whose side you're on. I don't hear Steve or Jonah naming anything in their conservative platform that is different than five years ago. They want to message it differently. I hear that, but I don't hear any different policies. Oh, I have answers to that, but David should go first. David. Well, there's something that we haven't really talked about that much, and that's style. So that's... How is that different than messaging? No, style is very different from

messaging. Style is like, what is your personality, what is your temperament? Like, Tom Cotton can message all he wants, but Tom Cotton also has a tendency to suck all the charisma out of a room. And it's hard to change that. You know, you've got a couple of avatars of sort of, of sort of working class populism in the Senate, Cotton, Holly. But there's a, there's a, let me put it, this goes back to something that Sarah said, talking about George W. Bush's appeal versus John Kerry in 2004 with Hispanic voters.

George W. Bush versus Kerry, he had a, he had a different demeanor. He had a different style. He had a different kind of swagger. He had a different kind of confidence. These kinds of things, I think, tend to, matter a lot. And so I think an avatar of conservatism going forward, sort of a more aimed at working class folks, you might see less a Tom Cotton and a Josh Holly, both Ivy League educated, both of them

very online. They sort of have the ear of the very online populists. What about like a governor? I'm not saying my own governor is it, but my governor, for example, in Tennessee. He's a conservative. He has, but he's also a former CEO of a construction company. And he has a, while he's carrying a conservative message that we recognize and that's been adopted and updated, he also has a natural way of relating to people that connects. And that's not just message. You can, you can tell it's sort of like Al Gore when what was it, Naomi Wolf was saying, more earth tones. That's what I think of.

I think of messaging, but there's also just the person. And there's a way that a person just connects with people or doesn't connect with people. And I think that that is this one of these ineffable qualities that it's hard to put your finger on. And I think that that's an issue. I think that is all true. But I think what Cotton was saying to defend his point, one last time, perhaps, is that there are people within the conservative movement who want to go back to the platform the policy ideas of five years ago and that he is disagreeing with that idea. And I'm trying to push you guys to tell me how the conservative movement in your view would look different than it did in 2012 from a policy standpoint. And I haven't heard policy differences.

Okay. All right. So this is an old hat on my podcast. But one of my great and abiding abiding grievances about how we got Trump is that there were a bunch of people. They were, they were called the reformicons, and not because they could become, you know, a car or a truck or something. And people like Yvallivan, Michael Strain, Jim Pethukas, a lot of my colleagues at AEI, Ramesh Pannuru, they were making serious arguments, the way Yuval would put it, for challenging today's problems with Reaganite principles rather than just replaying the Reagan playbook from 1982. And one of the reasons why this whole issue makes me very, very angry is that people like

Mark Levin and the Wall Street Journal editorial page keep great scorn on these people for deviating from the orthodoxy of the Church of the True Reagan. And what they said, no, no, no, we got to just keep cutting the top marginal income tax rate, even though as Ramesh has pointed out to the point where like even shoeshine guys are tired of hearing him say it, that if you've cut the top marginal tax rate from 70 something to 30 something, you've gotten most of the benefit you're ever going to get from doing that. And cutting it another two or three points is a waste of political capital when there are all these other things that you could do about a family child tax credit.

Michael Strain talks about subsidizing workers so they can move from places that have bad employment, you know, situations, places where they have good employment situations, massive reform of state and local based welfare systems that tend to keep people stuck because they don't want to lose all the benefits that are tied to the local system. There are all of these things that the reformicon types, which I was only reformicon curious rather than a full reformacon, that they were advocating and they got shut down by people who were saying, no, no, no, purity, purity. Then Trump comes along like Godzilla and smashes the entire existing framework of the Republican Party, how it talks, how it thinks, how it moves, whatever. And all of a sudden, the same people,

the Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Wall Street Journal guys suddenly say, why are you so uptight about this Trump guy? He's attracting the white working class. He's attracting, you know, the workers that we need for this party. And the response to that is, screw you. you, we were trying to propose meaningful reforms that would actually change their lives so they didn't become radicalized and think that this giant orange Godzilla was the only answer to their problems. And the idea that somehow, like Larry Cudlow was a dear and wonderful friend and a nice guy, but it's so wrong about so much of this. And Steve Moore, who's not those things to me. They used to call people at National Review racist for our immigration stuff

and all of these kinds of things. And then all of a sudden Trump comes along and they start defending his act because it's gaining traction. And so I think you could go back to five years ago, but not to the Mitt Romney program, but to the stuff that Yvall and Ramesh and Scott Winship were proposing that would be hugely beneficial. What I find just as a sort of metaphysical thing, really funny. I'm thinking about writing about this about Tom Cotton's thing. First of all, I have no idea what policies he's proposing that are substantive that reflect the age of Trump. I think he's so full of crap about that. But more importantly, we've just had a president who gained traction for promising to make America great again like the 1950s. And everyone thought,

oh, we can do that. But we can't go back to 2012, right? I mean, like the time machine can only go back in 50 or 60 year increments, but not in five-year increments. I mean, It's such a weird form of argumentation, like, oh, get with it. Times have changed, even though we got a president who wants to go back and talk about, you know, what General Pershing allegedly did during World War I or something, which he didn't do. So I agree. It's a brave new world. We're in open field.

It's going to be arguments all over the place. I just, I don't concede the substance or the messaging to Tom Cotton. I think he's desperate to be, to get into the Trump thing. And this just gets, the last one I'll get out of this. so much of Trump's appeal has zero, freaking zero to do with substance or policy. It has to do with pro wrestling, k-fabe, entertainment crap.

That's so right. And the idea that somehow Tom Cotton, who would, it would be, if he is basically like the warrior version of Michael Dukakis reading Swedish agrarian form tracks on the beach. The idea that he is going to be an entertaining character is inconceivable to me. And he and Mike Pence and a bunch of these guys think they got the Trump vote locked in out of some sort of loyalty.

And what a lot of that Trump vote wants is bread and circuses, not turgid, nasty, anal retentive stuff. Yeah. I mean, that's 100% right. I mean. All right, we do have to move off this topic. So wrapping it up. Rapping it up. I get a final point.

I get a final point in here. What was Trumpism? It was Paul Ryan's tax cuts. What is Trumpism? It was Leonard Leo's judges. What is Trumpism? It was the failed trade war. What is Trumpism?

It was everything Trump did in the way Trump did it. He filled arenas not because he wanted to do an expanded child tax credit. He filled arenas not because he wanted to do some of these other policies, which might be really good about, for example, I'm open to things like paid family leave. We need to really look at what California did. What's the California experience? Some of that stuff is not, doesn't have the effects maybe that people wanted it to have. For example, there's some evidence that paid family leave in California has resulted in diminished birth rates, not increased, you know, increased birth rates.

So, yeah, let's look at these other policies, the reform of cons of advance, but let's not pretend, let's not pretend, please, that that was Trumpism. That was not Trumpism. Last word to Steve. It's also ironic to me that the same people, who are lamenting the sort of intellectual turgidity of the old conservative movement are now amplifying the themes that were found in, you know, this Ross Douthat and Ryan Slam book, The Grand New Party, How Republicans Can Win the Working Class. And what did that book grow out of?

Well, an essay in the Weekly Standard in 2005. So maybe it wasn't the case that this was all, that this is all staled and warmed over. It also seems to me that the people who, you know, five years ago or five to ten years ago or 20 years ago were making arguments about the benefits of free trade, the benefits of limited government, and are now making, in some cases, precisely the opposite arguments, or at least rationalizing the opposite arguments, like Larry Cudlow, like Steve Moore, are like a lot of these political types and elected officials. The burden is on them to explain why they've changed their mind.

Beyond just this might be appealing politically, has something changed? If we look at what Donald Trump has done on trade, has it succeeded? I have not seen a convincing case that it has. I've seen many, many convincing cases that it hasn't and that it's been near disastrous, many of them authored by Scott Lincolcum. But it seems to me that the burden is,

on them, unless they're making a purely political argument and, you know, they're politicians, after all, many of them, that this is the way that we can win votes, irrespective of whether it's effective policy, then they need to explain why they've, in some cases, flip. Because I'm going to trust the sort of principles and the arguments of Adam Smith in several centuries, more than I'm going to trust somebody who wants to run for president making new arguments based on what he's seen from Donald Trump over the past five years. Let's take a quick break and hear from our sponsor today, Acton Line podcast. Acton Line is the flagship podcast of the Acton Institute for the study of religion and liberty,

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org slash dispatch to subscribe. And with that, we will move to our next topic. So about five minutes ago, the Georgia Secretary of State announced that there will be a full recount of every vote in Georgia and it will be done by hand.

This is interesting for a variety of reasons, and I would like to talk about some of them. Because what we've seen is the Trump campaign filed numerous lawsuits just throwing a lot of stuff against the wall in these states. And David, you and I are going to go and really dissect this on advisory opinions tomorrow in all of these cases. But I just want to do the briefest of overviews of some of those cases, but really talk about voter fraud, you know,

qua voter fraud, if you will. So the three main ways, one could commit voter fraud. I'm not aware of any others are you can add ballots, you can change existing ballots, or you can hack the machines that count the ballots, causing them to miscount the ballots in a way that you want. What's interesting about Georgia is that they have paper ballots for every vote that is cast on a machine. It creates a little receipt. And so they are taking out machines entirely. So they're getting rid of the third problem, which I think will. be helpful for folks. There's a lot of conspiracies out there that like these machines were just flipping Trump votes to Biden votes in Michigan, for instance. And there is no evidence of

that, the glitch, quote unquote, that was found in the machines in Michigan was actually found before any of the votes were reported, for instance, and fixed. So, David, the Pennsylvania lawsuit, and there's a reason we've spent so much time concentrating on Pennsylvania, and why the Trump campaign is spending so much time concentrating on Pennsylvania, because there is no path to reverse the results of this election that doesn't run through Pennsylvania at this point. And so they have challenged 600,000 or so ballots. And my understanding is that the challenges really fall in a few buckets.

One late arriving ballots, ballots that arrived after election day. While we don't have an exact count, the number is probably around you know, between 1,000 and 5,000 ballots. That will not be nearly enough, even if they throw them all out, cast them into the pit, burn them, et cetera. Zero effect. Two,

that their observers were not allowed close enough that they were kept 13 feet away instead of six feet away. And then, but that's not an allegation. that there's any fraudulent votes. Right. And then third, that... But isn't the insinuation that Trump wants people to have?

Is that by being 13 feet away, the close-up magic masters of the counters could flip, do something bad? Yes, but in order to do that, you could now go through all of the absentee envelopes that were separated from their ballots, and you could find ones that you, for instance, don't think have signature matches,

or weren't signed at all or had a wrong postmark. That would be an allegation of a ballot that shouldn't have been separated from its envelope and counted, but they haven't done any of that. So it's just that they weren't close enough. Well, that in and of itself is not particularly interesting. And the last thing, David, is this idea

that some counties were encouraging voters to come fix their absentee ballots or that their absentee of violence had been rejected, so encouraging them to come vote in person, and other counties were not. That's probably the most interesting one, although, again, when you look at the actual numbers that this affected, it looks very, very small,

like 100 to 1,000, not very many. David, am I missing anything on the litigation side? Well, there's this new Detroit case or this new case filed in Michigan. Mind you, Michigan has 100,000. 148,000 ballot difference. So please tell me what lawsuit could possibly overturn 148,000 ballots. Also, new Detroit was the city in Robocop. I just want to point about that. You said new So essentially what this, what this Michigan case did is attach a bunch of affidavits from

people saying, well, I saw something that didn't look quite right. And so what they're trying to say is that because we've sort of created a cloud of, we've, we've, we've, we. We've sort of thrown enough affidavits in your way saying this or that seemed not quite right or maybe the secrecy, I saw somebody not respecting the secrecy of the ballot here or I saw improper curing there that we now cannot certify this election and that what you have to have is, and this is the request for relief, an independent and nonpartisan audit of the entire election and a TRO prohibiting the defendants from certifying the election results. So what we have here, I think Sarah is an interesting, that's a charitable word.

It's a very interesting tactic in which essentially what you're doing is you're taking in the Michigan case, you're essentially taking sort of conservative media versions of evidence of vote fraud, trying to throw enough of them into affidavits that then create sort of a cloud of. and then you go for maximum levels of relief. So, for example, in the Pennsylvania situation, what you have are as you walk through, I believe it's around 10,000 ballots that came in, you know, in the three-day period that was permitted by Pennsylvania courts.

And they had already been segregated. They weren't even in this, they aren't even in this 45,000 or so vote gags, And they're saying, well, because of this other 10K ballots that doesn't bear on the 45,000, then what we have to do is we have to prohibit you from certifying the results of the election. Or because of curing differences, the Secretary of State permitted local election officials to cure, to allow voters an opportunity to cure defects in their mail-in ballots. Well, because some people did it and some people didn't, even though the numbers are small,

We want to, we want to delay certification of the whole thing. And that's where I think some of this gets frivolous, actually, because it's one thing to say, hey, there's a problem with one county allowing a cure and another county allowing a cure. That's an actual issue. But to then say you can't certify the election when we have no evidence that those numbers were at all relevant to the ultimate outcome of the election, that's when you're going way, way too far.

If you have, for example, individuals who say in Michigan, I saw something that might have impacted a handful of votes and therefore we're going to block certification of a race where the gap was well over 150,000 or around 150,000, that's where they're reaching and grasping so far beyond the evidence. Asking a court to stop the certification of an election is a big deal. It is not a small deal.

It is not a, oh, well, no harm done. Let's just not certify this election. You know, that's a big deal. And you've got to come forward with big evidence to justify the big deal. I don't know if that's the actual legal doctrine, Sarah, big evidence to justify the big deal. And it's just not there. It's just not there. But what you do have are lawsuits asking for this big remedy.

And so what that does is it gives sort of the political argument fuel. It says, hey, we have these big lawsuits. And I think it's very interesting that they went to Pennsylvania. So you have Pennsylvania, you have the hand recount in Georgia, and you have Michigan. Michigan isn't going anywhere. It's a big gap. It's a big gap. But even if you're going to win in Pennsylvania, which are not, and even if the hand recount was to reverse course in Georgia,

which it would shock me if it did, you know what? Trump still loses. I mean, that's how wide, you know, that's how extensive his loss was. This isn't Bush v. Gore in Florida in 2000, where if you flip Pennsylvania, or if you flip Florida, the election changes,

or if you flip Pennsylvania, the election changes, no, you got to keep on flipping. And that's what makes this so tough to deal with from a, I mean, from Trump's standpoint. Yeah, so there's like a practical reaction. here that is confusing me. I hear a lot of Republicans, including several that were generous with their time at our What's Next event to be interviewed, who sort of keep repeating this very vague, like, well,

I want all legal votes to be counted. What's the end game here? What do they need to see to call this? Is it the Secretaries of State certifying the elections? Because, okay, fair enough. I'm happy to wait for that as long as when the Pennsylvania Secretary of State certifies the election in their state for Joe Biden, that Mitch McConnell and everyone else will come out and congratulate Joe Biden, President-elect. But I'm not hearing any Republicans set their own standard for when this thing is done except when Donald Trump says it's done, and that's not an acceptable standard for me. Yeah, no, I agree with you.

So let me give the most charitable explanation for what Mitch McConnell and others are doing. I think if you're Mitch McConnell and you're, you want, first of all, you want to win the two seats in Georgia. It's always something. It's on January 5th, right? You want to win that and you want to, you want to stay sentiment. Now instead of but Gorsuch, it's but Purdue. And yes. And you need the enthusiasm of the Republican base and you worry that the Republican base won't be that enthusiastic if Donald Trump is the loser.

and potentially put at risk those two seats. I think that's part of it. I don't think that's all of it. The most charitable explanation is they look and they see the president raising these questions. They see the president's hardcore followers wanting to believe that the president is right about raising these questions. And rather than jump in and make, I think,

the sort of obvious points that you've made that David made, that this gap is significantly greater than the gap with which Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. There are very few substantive serious questions about this. You can't produce much evidence. Therefore, Joe Biden is the president-elect we need to move forward. The reason they're not saying that is because they believe that if you put this through this process and hear them constantly talk about process, it's got to go through the process.

You're right, Sarah, they don't identify the point or the time at which that process ends, but it's important to go to the process. They will say it's important to go through the process so that you can show the Trump, the president's supporters, that it went through the process, that it was looked at carefully, that it's legitimate election,

and then you can move on. I think the flaw in that logic is that assumes that at some point the president decides it's time to move on and that then therefore his followers will go with him or that if the president does it, they will believe people like Mitch McConnell that now it's time to move on.

Look, they're not believing the Republican commissioner in Philadelphia, who said basically there's nothing wrong. The Secretary of State of Georgia before being pressured to do this hand recount said, I see no evidence that there's been systemic or widespread fraud or irregularities. Now he's, I think, succumbed to this pressure and has done this hand recount. And the president has attacked that Republican commissioner in Philadelphia, by the way, which I think is worth noting because that's what I think a lot of these people are actually. afraid of. A tweet. So two quick points, two quick points before I quit. One, John McCormick,

my former colleague at the Weekly Standard, points out in light of this, he points to a 538 study on the success of recounts and says over the course of 27 statewide recounts, the vote margin changed on average by 282 votes with a median of 219. The biggest swing came in Florida's 2000 presidential election recount when Al Gore cut 1,247 votes off of George W. Bush's lead. So the lead is 14,000 in Georgia. This is not going to change that. Second and final point, you look at what the Trump, they're having this fight on two different levels. They're having the legal fight pushing this through the courts and they're struggling for the reasons that David lays out. There's just not much evidence of this. They're having a broader

political fight and I think they're having much greater success on the political front. You know, Steve Bannon, when he was asked about this, said, when you're faced with a battle with the media, you flood the zone with shit. And that's what they're doing. There's this story that's unfolded over the past couple days about this postal service worker named Richard Hopkins, who claimed that he heard, he overheard his bosses talking about the need to systematically backdate postmarks to November 3rd so that late arriving ballots looked like they had come in on time and then could be counted. Well, he made this claim. It was a Project Veritas video. First day blacked him out and kept him anonymous. Then he later put his name to it, and they released another video with him talking about this.

He was called before the U.S. Postal Service Inspector General. He was interviewed about the process. He recanted the whole thing, said, I made it all up. After a Washington Post story about the fact that he had recanted the whole thing, he had said, I did not recant the whole thing. So he's now claiming after the president, look, this was, This incident was in a memo that was sent to Attorney General Bob Barr to look into voting irregularities and potential fraud. It was put out by Kaylee McInney, the White House spokesman, by Lindsey Graham, by Trump family members.

President Trump tweeted about it, gave this guy tons of visibility. It sounded like it might result in a he said, he said, and we would never really know what happened. fortunately it's very good reporters at the i want to make sure i get the the newspaper right at the eerie times go eerie dot com went and actually reported out what had happened and they found that there were precisely two votes with a november third date on them so not two votes that had been backdated to november third but two postmarks at all this is not widespread fraud. This is an attempt to do exactly what David said, to throw out a bunch of specific cases to make it sound like there's fraud everywhere and look at these brave whistleblowers

coming out. They're full of shit. That's what they're doing here. This is the Steve Bannon strategy. I think it's working politically if you judge from the morning consult poll and other indications. You know, Trump voters are Trump supporters are exercised about this. And I think that could do tremendous damage legitimacy of this election. And it's why this is so incredibly irresponsible of Trump supporters, the president himself, and his amplifiers in conservative media. Jonah. So I don't think I've said anything yet. I know, but I have a question for you. Yes, hit me with one. My question for you is do the answer to the meaning of life, obviously, do the Trump supporters have some point when they say that it's hypocritical to attack them for

wanting this process and for pointing out all this fraud when everyone was eating it up when Stacey Abrams said she didn't lose the Georgia governor's race. And everyone was just fine when Hillary Clinton said she didn't really lose the 2016 election because Russia influenced the vote, which she said without evidence at the time. You know, is this, you know, the media putting their thumb on the scale against the Trump folks because they're Trump folks when they were just fine with it when Democrats did it? Okay, yes, but, this is the kind of thing that has so obsessed me for the last four or five years that people move away from me on public buses. That's not why they do that, Jonah.

That's one of the reasons why they move away from me on public buses. Look, one of the defining features of this era on the right has been. to point out the hypocrisy of the left while being hypocritical in doing so, right? If you said everybody was fine with what Stacey Abrams said. You said everybody, I know you're just being rhetorical and framed the question, but everybody was fine with what Stacey Abrams said.

Everybody was fine with what Hillary Clinton said. That's true if you're talking about the mainstream media and the Democratic Party for the most part. The people that's not true of are conservatives, Republicans, Fox News hosts, Fox News guests, Fox News anchors, Fox News reporters, Rush Limbaugh, all the way down. We have been mocking and ridiculing Stacey Abrams for claiming that the election was stolen from her without providing evidence for years. And we've said this is very dangerous. Lots of us, to one extent or another, I mean, it's a little more complicated, have criticized Hillary Clinton for her constant, you know, sort of, I mean, she's such a moving target about why she lost.

the election. I mean, it's going to get to underpants gnomes at some point. But, you know, she got received enormous criticism, particularly from all those people on the right that I just mentioned for not letting go of the Russia stuff. And so you, if you're going to say that if you scratch beneath the surface of this, basically this position, we heard Britt Hume do some of this last night on Fox News. If it was terrible that they did it, and I said it was terrible when they did it, and now we're doing it, and the other side has no right to judge us because they did it, so now we can do it too. I mean, this is as fundamentally a two wrongs-make a right situation as you can get. We are, the conservatives are embracing a position they said

was dangerous and illegitimate and immoral and wrong to own the lives. And it's pure what about us. And I'm perfectly happy to condemn both. Donald Trump is trying to steal the election by accusing the Democrats of trying to steal the election. Stacey Abrams did was outrageous. And just one last point on this, on this sort of hide the, you know, on the BSery, because I know David wants to get into the media stuff on this as well. there was a piece in the Arizona Republic this morning. I don't know if you guys saw it, where Trump's lawyers wanted to have the evidence in their case sealed.

And the state's lawyers were like, no, no, no, no, no. Normally we would be fine with sealing it. That's what we do in these voter fraud things because there's voter data information, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we think there's a public interest right. There's a public interest necessity for the people to know just how unbelievably flimsy Trump's legal case was

because they're undermining the case and the judge said you're right we're just going to release it because the evidence was all hot garbage and so the only question I have for you guys on the factual matter I hear it a lot maybe I've heard it from one of you guys is it still true that if they won all of their cases

it's still the results still wouldn't overturn the election well if they got their remedy you know in one of the Pennsylvania ones they want to throw out 600,000 ballots. So, yeah, okay, well, sure. But even if they did that, right? You still have to overturn Arizona or Nevada, right?

Right. That's correct. That's not going to happen. No, that's not going to happen. So you could get the impossible remedy in Pennsylvania. And really what they're going for is no certification, but you could get the impossible remedy in Pennsylvania. and Trump still loses.

He still loses because Pennsylvania isn't a tipping point state. It's not like Florida 2000. So that's what, you know, we really are watching the flood the zone with shit, you know, reality play out in front of our eyes. And a quick break to hear from our sponsor ExpressVPN. Have you ever wondered why internet access is so much cheaper these days? Like 30 to 40 bucks a month? It's because internet service providers like Comcast or Instagram. AT&T aren't just making money off subscription fees. They're also making money from spying on

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Speaking of conservative media, hit us. Yeah, okay. So I'm starting to wonder what, as I'm watching conservative media right now, and not everybody, okay, there are good reporters out there. So if you're sitting there and you're listening and you're like a good reporter saying, how dare you, David, I'm a good reporter? Just presume if you're a good reporter, I'm not talking to you. Okay. But at some point, you know, what we're watching here is, as Jonah said, is something much more akin to watching a sleazy ambulance chaser pound the table on the on the on the on the on the

on the on the on the on the part of his client in it's some it it becomes intentionally deceptive it becomes pure advocacy on the part of a of a presidential candidate and on part of a president and it feels to me like the chickens are finally coming home to roost and what in the sense of we're now fully seeing laid bare in this condensed symbol of the election contest what the vast bulk of conservative media has become

and what it has become are essentially the low-rent lawyers of the Donald Trump movement. And that's what we're watching. We're watching the low-rent lawyers of the Donald Trump movement flood the zone with the misinformation.

And doing it in a way, I mean, Jonah's what about isn't point is great. Except that, you know, if you're going to go full what-aboutism, Hillary, the Obama administration participated in the transfer of power. There was a meeting with Obama right after the election, a couple of days after the election. So what conservative media is doing is saying, look at what the Democrats did, and then it's okay for us to do worse, not just the same, but worse.

and I don't know what my question is beyond a rant. But we're here for it. Sarah, am I wrong? Sarah, tell me. Yeah, I just, this is the part where I just get incredibly frustrated and turn off Twitter and go read a nice book on fungus, you know? And I actually really mean that. So, you know, pass from me. It makes me too angry.

Steve? no i think david makes a really good point and this is uh you know it's it's incredibly frustrating it's one thing for political operative like steve bannon who you know once was a media figure when he ran bright part it's one thing for a political person to um you know make uh to spin reality for political advantage. We've seen that forever. I think it's something altogether different when that person just flat out lies, which we've seen, you know, repeatedly ad nauseum over the past five years. At a different level, it's different. But it's altogether different and even more discouraging when you see just baseless claims, sometimes knowing falsehoods amplified and promoted to an

unsuspecting public. I mean, I think the real tragedy of this is, let's say, you know, you live in, we won't, everybody always picks the Midwest when they want to use, when they want to do an example. Let's say you live in Colorado. And you have a real job that requires you to work 60 hours a week, but you want to be an informed citizen. You tend to lean to the center right. You want to know what's going on.

So you flip on Fox or you sit down. and read, you know, any of a number of these conservative sites. And what you're hearing sometimes contradicted by other people at those same sources is this election was stolen. You know, you see Newt Gingrich on Fox News saying this election was stolen. Or you see Sean Hannity sort of doling out one after another after another of these claims. And as we have done it at the dispatch working tirelessly with the fact checkers that we had on this podcast last Friday, knocking down one after another, after another, these just false claims. And again, this is not a matter of interpretation. It's not like the stuff that we're talking about,

how somebody could look at it this way, somebody could look at it this way. These are things that are false, demonstrably false, provably untrue, being amplified and broadcast. If you're that news consumer in Colorado, how the hell do you know what you should believe? And you don't know. And I think that makes it so challenging. It's why I don't necessarily fall. the people now, of course, you know, the journalism professor wannabe and me says, well, you should have a very news diet and you should get your information from a wide variety of sources and judge them against one of the other. Fair enough, but people, normal people with lives that don't involve doing what we do, don't have the time to do that. They can't go to 12 different

sources and make these judgments and try to make a determination about what's true or not. I think that's what's really frustrating is here. You have good people who are patriotic citizens want to keep up with the news, conscientious news consumers, and they have no idea what the hell to believe. And that's really, I think, frustrating. Jonah, last word to you. So I'm going to go back to where it was before. I think the real problem is that people are following politics.

Like, it's a form of entertainment. I've written about this a great length. It's a big part of my argument in my book. And when you follow things as forms of entertainment, weird things happen to your brain. you no longer the best way for confirmation bias to seep in is when you've got a preconceived narrative in your head

and then you can throw out any facts that contradict it and every fact that comes in it's very hard for you to figure out how much weight you should give it which is one of the brilliant things about all of these anecdotes that people are throwing around because the anecdotes our brains are wired to hear things in stories So an anecdote that affects actually two votes gets vastly more weight than the statistical argument that seems abstract that is actually more true. And while, you know, Steve mentioned earlier that the argument here is about how we're bringing along, you know, the Republican Party was, you know, we're just, we just need to bring along Trump's voters and prove to them that it's going to be okay and that we exhausted all the things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I get that argument. I think it's also a lot of self-delusion going on there. A lot of the media industrial complex on the right wants this story to be true because it's a good story, not because it's true. And we're going to see this narrative live on. And Trump needs it to be believed by his biggest fans because he can't accept the idea that he lost. So we're bending an entire party, an entire country, and basically,

our political health to the narcissistic needs and business model of one man. And the idea that these senators are at the end of this process going to say, okay, we ran through it all. Congratulations, President Biden, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, without getting beaten up by the people that they've helped convince that the election was stolen. I just think is foolish. I will say on the plus side, there has been, that morning consult poll really

depressed me, the one that said 70% of Republicans think it wasn't a free and fair election. There's been some more polling that's since come out and that pushes back on that and that most Americans now think that Biden did in fact win. But one of the things that we're just simply going to see in the next four years is, you know, I mean, Mark Levine has already said he's a member of the resistance now. We're going to get an incredible amount of hypocritical, bogus nonsense from a bunch of people on the right who, out of the need for fan service, more than anything else, are going to keep alive a birther-like story on a mass scale that the election was stolen. And you're going to have to pay lip service to it. It's going to be one of these things

like, was McCarthy right or wrong, that kind of issue that divided the right for 10 years after the McCarthy period, if not longer. That's going to be one of these things. Which side are you on? Are you on Trump's side or are you on, you know, Biden's side of an issue that really doesn't have sides. It has a true side and a false side. And it's going to get very annoying for a long time. Okay. Well, super awesome, happy times. Final question to you guys.

And I didn't preview this with you ahead of time. So take a moment right now to read my mind and think about what your answer is going to be. I don't know how you'll feel about the great man theory of history. but we're just going to indulge in some great man theory right now. Scott and I have been watching the plot against America, which is based on the Philip Roth novel that posits what would have happened if Charles Lindberg had beaten FDR for the presidency in 1940. Bad things is the answer, I think.

We're not done with it yet, but I've got my hat on, and I think bad things are going to happen when Charles Lindberg wins the presidency in 1940. So what is that, you know, great man, alternate history that you find interesting to play out in your head? David, I feel like you probably out of all of us have spent the most time playing out alternate history options in your head. Which one do you go back to in your track favorites? Well, I mean, mine are going to be tied to military history. Yeah.

Okay. So what happens if in the Battle of Princeton, in I believe 1777, when George Washington comes to the front to rally the continental troops that are faltering, that a musketball takes him down? Does everything change? Based on what we know now about how the extraordinary ability of Washington to both confront the British regulars and maintain his army together and to confront the squabbling Continental Congress and to sort of pull both into the better angels of their nature to forge an army and to forge a government and to forge a republic, I think things go really bad. Here's another one. What happens if Jefferson Davis does not replace Joseph Johnston

with John Bell Hood and resisting Sherman's attack on Atlanta and the worst union general and one of the lowest figures of the Civil War, which is George McClellan, wins the election of 1864. That's another hugely important counterfactual. So those are two that I've thought about, both tied to critical American military conflicts. Jonah? So I have a bunch relating to just what if World War I didn't happen or would have one didn't play out the way it happened. And, you know, and it could be, what if, you know, Archduke Ferdinand weren't assassinated?

What if Woodrow Wilson didn't screw everything up? You know, and there's all sorts of ways to do it. But the simple fact is the entire 20th century is a completely different place without World War I. You don't get, at least not in the way it happened. You don't get the Russian Revolution. you don't get the death you don't get literally the killing off of entire generations of men in various societies you don't get the 1930s hyperinflation you don't get adolf hitler you don't get world war two you don't get the cold war you don't get nato you don't get stuffed crust pizza i mean just

everything goes differently right so that's the one i think is most fascinating to play out in your head because you don't get lennon at finland station i mean all these things the one that's sort of more near and dear to our pundit hearts for me is what if uh colom pow which bill clinton was terrified of had actually run in 1996 for president com pal wins i think he he breaks the democratic party's lock on the black vote um uh loses some people to something you know some people on the right because he's too moderate and all that kind of stuff but because he's a military guy you know, and he's popular, completely shatters the coalition that in 1996, the Democratic Party was still holding on to big chunks of the FDR coalition.

And anyway, so, and then in 2001, let's hold everything else constant, he's just been reelected. And Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs' staff, is President of the United States on 9-11. And how does the Iraq war play out? How does the war on terror play out? what does the Republican Party look like? What does the Democratic Party look like?

I think it was entirely possible that Powell could have run in 1996 and I think if he ran, Clinton would have been a one-term president and Powell would have been the first black president and the first Republican president. So you get no Barack Obama, you get all sorts of things, get messed up.

And I'm a big believer in great man theory. I think individuals do change history. I have problems with the mythologies about Lindberg. I'm not a fan of Lindberg, but I don't think he becomes an American Hitler. That's another story. another story for another time steve i mean those those are those are both interesting i think jonah's wrong about stuff crust pizza i mean obviously that would have happened um it was inevitable um regardless

of the way the history played out there i mean i guess both david and jonah laid out interesting but relatively minor um potential changes to history um except world war one as compared to what i'm the american revolution right that's what i'm the american revolution right that's what i Civil war. Okay. Relatively minor. I mean, I'm not saying they're insignificant. I'm just saying relatively minor compared to the one that I spend.

I mean, I spend way, way, way too much time thinking about this and re-gaming this and working different scenarios. What would have happened if the Green Bay Packers had fired Mark McCarthy just a couple years after they won the 2010 Super Bowl and recognized that. he was holding them back rather than propelling them to greatness. The Packers have had Hall of Fame quarterbacks now for about 30 years. This almost never happens in the history of the NFL, and yet they have two Super Bowls, two Super Bowl victories to show for it.

You build a team around a Hall of Fame quarterback. Mike McCarthy had unimaginative play calling and horrible defenses for the last seven, eight years. If you get rid of him earlier, and now the Dallas Cowboys, of course, are seeing this firsthand, which some of us Packer fans could have predicted. If you get rid of Mike McCarthy and bring in an innovative play caller,

you know, say in 2012, could the Packers have been the greatest NFL dynasty ever? Guys, I'm so sorry. Mind blowing. Why did you do this to Sarah? Did the only answer? The only ground's teacher talking.

Yeah, did Steve answer the question? Mind blowing. For the last three minutes. Think about how history would be different. So I think a lot about Reconstruction and about how the entire country's history would have been different if perhaps Lincoln hadn't been assassinated. Johnson doesn't become president. Reconstruction goes totally differently. You don't then have the sort of swinging wildly back and forth in the South. And perhaps you stave off Jim Crow and perhaps the. the history of race in the 20th century looks totally different. So that is mine. Well, that's no Green Bay Packers, but it's no Green Bay Packers. And unlike Jonas, I'm not sure that

I prevent deep dish pizza in my scenario. So perhaps it's not worthwhile. Stuff crusts pizza. Sorry, Stuff crust pizza. I've done the math. You can't prevent stuff crust. I mean, you can't prevent meat dish. Deep dish cannot be prevented. Not that I love deep dish, but it's just Every parallel universe leads back to deep dish pizza. It's weird. It's really weird. All right. For everyone who joined us for our What's Next event on Monday and Tuesday, thank you again.

We had such a great time. And for our podcast listeners who didn't join us, we have all the sessions recorded. They're up on the website. What's NextEvent.com. And we will see you guys again next week. Not long ago. through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and

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