The Dispatch Podcast - Schrödinger's Trump

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

Sarah, Steve, and Jonah discuss Trump's indictment for the listeners not privy to niche legal podcasts. Can special counsel prove Trump's intent? Will Trump voters care? Also: -Addressing stupid arguments -Jonah's grudge against lawyers -NYT Siena Poll on Trump indictment -Fitch downgrades our credit score -(Not?) Worth Your Time extended Show notes: -The Collision newsletter -David Brooks: What if We're the Bad Guys Here? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And we'll also talk about Fitch's downgrade of our credit rating. Not great, y'all. And maybe we'll have a little not worth your time at the end. Let's dive right in. Okay, I do not want to get in the weeds on the legal stuff, But I do want to address some of the stupider arguments that I've seen from law people, you know, across the board trying to like simplify this down for their side to then win the argument. And it's annoying me.

So I just want to start with the one that I think has been most prevalent on the left. I saw Mark Elias post this. He's a democratic lawyer, though recently fired by the DNC, which is a, well, anyway. So his analogy was, if I go into a bank and I rob the bank, the prosecutor doesn't have to prove that I didn't think it was my money. I can't tell you the number of things I think are wrong with this analogy. So let me start with a few points. One, there is a specific crime of robbery. There is not a specific crime of sending in a fake slate of electors. and that's going to be really important

because on the specific crime of robbery, then, there's just elements to robbery. And Congress, or most likely, you know, states, etc., have set out what those elements are. Specific intent's not going to be one of them because robbery itself is the crime. Now, when you move over to something where, like, fake slate of electors

isn't itself a crime, then you're going to try to fit it into some broader thing. in this case, for instance, conspiracy against civil rights. Well, because that's so broad and like anything could fit into it, Congress didn't want it to be clear that you have to prove that the person was trying to prevent someone from exercising their civil rights. So look, the point is there's a lot of analogies out there and they're deeply annoying to me. So just to frame this up a little bit more for people who haven't been following the legal back and forth, all of this matters as much as it does because jacksmith will have to prove intent for trump is that is that a

correct layman's understanding of why that distinction that you just made matters so much yeah and i think the argument that is fair is how hard that is prosecutors prove intent all the time that is accurate also intent's really going to matter in this case and trump's state of mind both are accurate at the same time. Got it. And if I can just ask you a couple more questions, since I was not privy to your conversation with Jonah or David on these other podcasts that the dispatch does, I think some people listen to them, but they're not the flagship. They're not this one. So we want to be sure to keep these listeners our most important as well informed as possible. On the question, Sarah, of of intent and of Trump's state of mind.

It's your view, if I'm understanding correctly, that that's sort of the whole ballgame. They have to show that Trump knew he lost the election and did all of these things that he's charged with doing despite knowing that he lost the election. Yes, with a slight asterisk on the fake electors. Okay, first address. the yes, and then we'll do the fake electors.

Yeah, so they put the criming into four categories here. First category is calling and pressuring state election officials to, like, change the vote count. Yeah, you're going to need to prove that he believed that he was falsely changing the vote count, corruptly changing the vote count. Another one is pressuring the Department of Justice to investigate. Again, you would need to prove that he was corruptly doing that, that he did not believe that he had won, nevertheless wanted DOJ to help him stay in power. And even there, you know, a separate conversation of whether I think that's a crime regardless. And then there's pressuring Mike Pence. Again,

similar situation on the vote certification. The fake electors is a little different because there's actually a process that's followed for that, right? The state certifies a vote. Then electors meet based on that state certified popular vote, yada, yada, yada. So you still will need to, to prove some intent element, i.e. some mental state that Trump had. But it's not going to be as high as the other ones because simply sort of fraudulently sending in, knowing that you were sending in a fraudulent state of a slate of electors will be enough there, regardless of why you did it. And following up, the indictment, of course, lists all of the people in Trump's world who told him or attempted to tell him that he

had lost the election. It goes into some detail. It's your view that that's not sufficient. It is not sufficient. It's a jury can weigh that and say, look, you know, he trusted Bill Barr on everything else that Bill Barr told him about, but not this. Now I think it's more likely he did trust Bill Barr on this and he just wasn't saying it publicly. That's why it's relevant, but it is not relevant in the sense that those people were right. Got it. And what about, I mean, one of the things that I think is not included in the indictment, are the number of times that you had people say, in some cases, testify under oath that Donald Trump had said he lost the election. Cassidy Hutchinson, in her testimony before the January 6th committee, several times, testified

that Donald Trump had acknowledged that he lost the election. Alyssa Farah Griffin, another Trump aide at the time, claims that she directly heard Donald Trump while he was watching Joe Biden on television, say, can you believe I lost to this guy? There's another instance where Donald Trump is giving an interview in 2021 to a number of historians, apparently. these are all linked by Cal Berkeley Law Professor Orrin Kerr. And Trump says, at least in the first description of what had happened, I didn't win the election. So two questions there. One, how much did those matter? It seems to me those would matter a lot more.

And two, why wouldn't those have been included in the indictment? I can't answer number two for you. Number one is, yes, of course they matter. And this is going to be for a jury. I mean, this is the great thing about our legal system. there's going to be 12 Americans chosen at random, basically, who are going to get to weigh all of this. And it's actually a beautiful part of our justice system,

that it's not going to be us, it's not going to be the judge. You know, it's going to be these 12 people who are going to weigh the credibility of those witnesses against Donald Trump's credibility and against the prosecution's credibility at times and against the defense attorneys. So, yeah, those of course matter. That's great evidence.

Would there have been a strategic reason that he didn't include that? I mean, surely it wasn't because he didn't know that those statements existed. Correct. He knows the statements exist. I don't have a great answer for you. So we're 11 minutes into this or so, and I haven't said a word. It's been the best podcast we've ever done. For that reason. For that reason. I don't think you needed to add for that reason twice, that people figured out what your intent was there. For that reason. But just to be wedged into the conversation at the pointing end of pedantry, pedantry, not punditry. the jury will not be, in a significant statistical sense, random, right?

Because if you do it, you said 12 random Americans, no, 12 Washington, D.C. residents. And like a statistical sample of 12 random Americans would almost surely have between zero and one Washington, D.C. resident at most, right? and so how many of these finer distinctions of the law will matter to a very friendly to the prosecution jury with a judge who at least people will make a credible case is not ideal for Trump to draw and so these points might matter on appeal but you could like even the bank robbery analogy which I agree with you is dumb on technical merits if you could get that analogy to a jury without the judge or the defense saying, you know, out of order or whatever, I would think a jury would find it pretty compelling.

So, like, how much of that factor plays into this? I think if you talk to people who try jury trials and especially judges who oversee, you know, a zillion of them, they'll tell you the juries are not as caricaturable as you think. and that people by and large are not their demographics, et cetera, that people take jury duty actually pretty seriously when they're on it. So A, I wouldn't be so quick to assume that a D.C. jury is so fundamentally different than some other jury. B, I think the point about the judge is interesting to me, and I've made this point about Judge Cannon down in Florida, that actually there's something not great for Trump's team about that.

because if Judge Cannon basically rules for them on all of their motions and then he is convicted, they do not have grounds for appeal. It's done. Well, something similar here, if, you know, I would imagine that it would be very frustrating to be a judge with Trump and his attorneys before you. They're going to throw tons of crap at the wall. They're going to be exasperating on 57 different things. And you can get into a mindset where it's easy to just assume that if they're bringing it up,

it's a nonsense argument. You know, they bring you 100 arguments, 99 of which are total, you know, as Justice Scalia would say, pure applesauce. The problem will be when you rule then sort of in a knee-jerk fashion on number 100. And number 100 wasn't applesauce, and now not only do they have grounds for appeal, the whole thing is going to get overturned and you get a new trial. I think the like good judge for Trump, bad judge for Trump also isn't as clear cut as all of that. All right. Can we get to the politics? Are we done with this? Jonah. Why doesn't this matter? Uh, so I'm in a major super positional mood, which by which, you know, like Schrodinger's cat.

It's sort of like with Trump and whether he, he, he, he, he, knew what he was, whether he had intent or not. Trump is very good at both simultaneously pretending that he believes the best possible set of facts for himself while operating as if the worst possible set of facts are in play. You know, like he would insist that online polls are valid when they said nice things about him and invalid when they don't. And he said his net worth was better when he felt good. And, you know, it's a very postmodern kind of guy. And I feel that way about a lot of this stuff, too, is that, of course, this matters a lot. This profoundly matters. It is the thing about the indictment is I am willing to credit most of the critics.

I think you make good case. I think Annie McCarthy makes good case. I think lots of people make good cases about the flaws in these indictments. But what comes so glaringly through is Trump's fundamental unfitness for the job? You could say all of these things are not crimes and cannot read the indictments without saying well, this is what the articles of impeachment should have been about, right? This is why this guy shouldn't be president of the United States.

And I think the problem is cumulatively his base, just, I mean, there's a tendency in punditry and in politics in this country not to blame voters. Trump's base is just frigging wrong, right? They've concluded that Trump is this avatar of their grievances, that if you look at that New York Times-Syenne College poll, something like 34% of the Republican electorate, does not believe he committed any crimes

and that he did nothing wrong, and that he's not even sort of basically worthy of criticism. That's a difficult group of people to argue with. And the problem is that they are like a giant magnet next to the political compass of the rest of the party, None of the voters want to piss off the... None of the politicians want to piss off those voters. So they pretend that those voters' position has real validity to it.

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and telling them, basically, that he would have influence over his father and his father's decision-making. Either Hunter Biden was lying to those people, in which case Joe Biden knows his son is sitting on these foreign corporate boards, taking in millions of dollars, pretending to have influence over him. or he actually did have influence over him. Like, either way, that's not a good position to be in if you're Joe Biden. And the left doesn't seem to care.

The left isn't talking about how, like, oh, hand-wringing, we really need to replace Joe Biden because of this corruption. And to me, at least, I do see why, like, on the right, they're like, Donald Trump literally committed a paper crime in the Mar-a-Lago indictment. And if you want to talk about unfit for office, then let's compare who's unfit for office. but the one side's pretending like their guys, you know, like there are as much sticking their head in the sand as the right is. Do you see a comparison there?

I mean, I see a comparison. I don't see the same strength of argument. I think it's pretty clear at this point that Joe Biden lied about what he knew with respect to Hunter Biden. There are several times where his earlier claims of ignorance or naivete have just been shown to not be true. Even the Washington Post gave him four Pinocchio's at the debate for saying his son had never taken money from China. Just not true.

Yeah. I mean, it doesn't work and it seems highly implausible that he didn't know this when he made those statements. I think it's hugely problematic. It's the kind of thing that, I mean, I think it's a scandal. Like, it's a legitimate scandal. There are problems certainly with the way that Republicans have handled. it. You have sort of leading Republicans in investigatory positions making claims that they often can't back up and are sometimes later contradicted by facts and details that emerge that show

that the things that they had claimed in public that they had claimed on Fox News to rile up the Fox News audience are exaggerated, overstated, or just not true. And that's a problem, but it doesn't obviate the fact that Hunter Biden did a bunch of bad stuff, and Joe Biden pretty clearly lied about it. So I do think it's a scandal. I think there should be questions about Joe Biden's fitness for office, and I think you should take a ton of grief. And I agree with your sort of central point that Democrats would do well to be more

introspective about this, or at least acknowledge, hey, this is a problem. having said all that, Joe Biden didn't lie about an election for two months and instigate a violent attack on the Capitol in order to stay in office after he'd lost. That seems to me to be far more significant. You know, I think, you know, at the early stages of the Trump administration, certainly I was alarmed.

I was alarmed before he was elected, warned about the kinds of things that I thought he would do, including things that would sort of fundamentally alter the character of our country. Even I wouldn't have predicted that he would have done what he did. And I guess I hate to keep turning these questions back to you guys, but I will. When I talk to people who look at this, I mean, if you look at the Mar-a-Lago case,

So what you hear from Republicans is, yeah, I mean, sure, the evidence is compelling, but probably those shouldn't even be laws. And if there are laws, they're so small that we really ought not care that much that he violated them. I mean, I think that's a fair summation, not of your views, but of the views of sort of everyday Republicans, Republican elected officials for sure. And then you look at this latest set of indictments where, You know, as you say that the theory of the law is on sort of shake your grounds, it'd be difficult to prove, more difficult to prove than the Mara Lago documents case. And these things might be wrong and this might be a very disturbing fact pattern, but it might not be illegal. I guess my bottom line question is, shouldn't there be punishment for lying about an election, trying to stay in office, effectively fomenting a violent attack on the Capitol to those ends. Can I make light of your question? And then I'll answer it seriously. I mean, if I said no, you're going to do it anyway. Probably, but it would matter to me. I mean, not much, but a little.

I mean... Yes, you can. There's a road near my house, and it's two lanes, and it's going to merge into a freeway. And one of the lanes gets backed up with people who are waiting to get onto the freeway during traffic time. And what inevitably happens is that 10% of the A-holes that drive on this road will drive past the long line in the right lane and then cut at the last minute to skip all of us waiting to get on the freeway.

Shouldn't that be illegal? Like, the point is, there's all sorts of wrongs in society that we haven't made illegal because we don't base our criminal laws on moral judgment. We base them on legislation passed by Congress. And sometimes Congress is going to pass legislation. after we discover a new moral wrong or after there's an outrage about it. Let me give a more serious example,

which is domestic violence, right? That's not necessarily illegal for a criminal for parts of our history. Certainly wasn't, of course, enforced. And then we're going to decide as a society and culture, like, oh, actually, it should be. So that's part of the answer to it to me.

But another part is, be careful. Because unless you define the scope of what you're talking about very narrowly, I think it can apply to things that you don't want it to apply to. And the impeachment power is, in fact, meant to be broad and applied

to anything you want it to apply to because there's that political accountability element to impeachment in a way that is not there on the criminal element. We don't take away people's liberty and then be like, well, as long as there's political accountability later on for someone,

like, that's fine. And so, for instance, you have, have to sort of go out at a broader level to say, well, wait, is it that he was advocating for something that he knew to be unconstitutional? And I know I've used this example with Jonah already, but in that case, George W. Bush did that with the McCain-Feingold bill. Remember in his signing statement, he said he believed that parts of this were unconstitutional, but nevertheless signed it. That's a president knowingly doing something, using his powers to do something that he believed was unconstitutional.

So we don't want that to be the line. Presidents do that all the time. What about presidents lying to the American people? Well, they do that pretty often. We don't want to criminalize that. Again, impeach someone for lying. We don't want to throw them in jail. And so it's actually not that I'm even disagreeing with your point.

I'm not disagreeing with your point, Steve. But I guess what I'm saying is you're going to have to get really in the weeds and really narrow to convince me that you're not then sweeping up a whole lot of other. I think that this politician, this president, is uniquely dangerous. But I've created a precedent that's now going to allow us to

criminalize being president. So, Sarah, I'm going to push back on this in two ways. And both are going to be some, at least one is going to be somewhat unfair to you. But I'm going to treat you like you are the human avatar, the manifestation of all TV lawyers,

which is very unfair to you. Do it. You've got to be freaking kidding me. Because when for two impeachments, you people, again, I know I'm being unfair to you, you people consistently treated impeachment like it was a legal proceeding. You people go on TV and oh, that's not the, that's not sufficient evidence and oh, and every now and then you would do this sort of like get out of jail free rhetorical trick and saying, well, of course impeachment is not a court of law and then go right back to analyzing it like it was a court of law for months on end. TV lawyers

did this. Partisans do this. This is, you know, no one's above the law, no one's beneath the law, as if the law was the actual important criteria for an impeachment, which now all of you people are saying, well, that's a political thing, and it should be political considerations

of judgments and statesmanship, and really it's not, and we shouldn't be outsourcing these things to courts. But when he was actually impeached twice, everyone was like, this is for a court to decide. We don't know if this is illegal? This is not for us to the side. This is, this is a legal question. Does this really reach the threshold that the founders meant by high crimes and misdemeanors and yada, yada, yada? It was

consummate, self-aggrandizing, self-declared authority over an issue that they were not authorities on, the lawyers, right? At the same time, utterly cowardly buckpassing about actually trying to make a decision by saying, oh, you peasants, you don't understand that these are very fine legal considerations and you have to check Dershowitz v. Tribe and D-Bag Vs, whatever. And it was so frigging annoying. And now you guys want to tell me that,

oh, you blew it. You missed this opportunity to do this where you should have in the political realm with impeachment. I agree with you, getting back to treating you like fairly as the actual human being here. Impeachment is where a lot of this stuff should have been handled.

But our political system cannot comprehend. hand removing someone from office through impeachment. So it's essentially a dead letter. And I would be open to a constitutional amendment that treats impeachment more like a parliamentary vote of no confidence, set the threshold much lower, let the political consequences to be determinative, but give no sort of, you know, like wiggle room and, and lawyerly safe harbors to claim that somehow impeachments are like a court of law. I want to give you an unfair a somewhat glib analogy back,

which is O.J. Simpson got acquitted. We all know he murdered his wife. I understand that we don't try people for the same crime twice, but you've got to be kidding me. This guy murdered someone and we're just going to let him get away with it and we're not going to punish him.

We're not going to throw him in jail for murdering two people? Who cares about the rules? Throw him out. This guy's guilty. Doesn't that sound pretty persuasive? Well, but he had his, he had his process.

He had his proceedings. They didn't produce the outcome we might want. That sounds an awful lot like how impeachment went. We did the process of impeachment. You didn't like the outcome. I didn't like the outcome. But I think these are, these are entirely different questions.

They are. You're right. That's why I'm, that's why I'm asking on the legal front. Jonah's point is well taken, except, of course, that I never said any of that. because I was very much about high crimes and misdemeanors being whatever Congress defines them as. What I particularly agree with that Jonah said, though,

is the various senators who had a vote in the impeachment process should have done some history if they wanted to on their roles in the impeachment process and we're saying, oh, no, this isn't for me to decide this should be left up to the criminal justice system? That was the dumbest stuff I ever heard. I mean, that was Mitch McConnell's concluding comment. Yeah. And Mitch McConnell, by the way, is not a dumb person. Mitch McConnell wasn't saying

that in a dumb way. Mitch McConnell was saying that in the most cynical way possible. I can't remember my second point. And I'm just too angry now. I'm too angry now. Steve, Steve, you were talking and I interrupted you so rudely. No, I guess for me that all of that is well and good. You'll have the luxury. This is, oh, I'm interrupting you again. This is the, the best part of the podcast and the worst part of the podcast with you guys is you guys just have this like luxury of getting to argue like what you want. Of not being lawyers. That's the luxury.

I feel this burden to defend. You pay for your decision. To defend a system that actually like double jeopardy. Like I, you know, as the lawyer, you have to defend a system that lets murderers go. And it's like, I know, I feel very strongly that we should let murderers. go. But you guys get to then, like, have the moral high ground about how murdering is bad. And I'm like, no, murdering's not that bad. It's not worth. Okay. So my rage is subsided to manageable levels. And I think I remember my second point. I'm one of these guys who is still

shouting at shoe shine guys up and down the eastern seaboard that neoconservatism isn't about foreign policy. So, like, I can hold an intellectual grudge for a very long time. So, like, original neoconservatism was all about laws of unintended consequences, overreach and policy. And see moral hazard, sort of, you know, being mugged by reality. So I get the point about the moral hazard of bending, twisting, reaching outside the law to get Trump, so to speak, which is why I kind of would prefer if this just focused on the Mar-a-Lago thing and the document stuff, because he's just so obviously guilty, right? And even your characterization of the defense of Trump, paper crimes, implicitly, actually explicitly, concedes.

But it also concedes that he's guilty, right? I mean, it's like, oh, yeah, sure, he committed paper crimes, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so committed crimes. Now we're just to have a conversation about what the consequences of that to be. And this is more convoluted. At the same time, the beauty of the jury system, which you, you know, you use. described that aesthetic quality to it, is that it's basically a circuit breaker against the law being an ass. And that can cut both ways. And it does not seem obvious to me that a jury

if Jack Smith can lay out the case as sort of as I see it, right? Not necessarily as all of the specific corroborating facts would would corroborate but like of Trump knew what he's doing he has a lifetime pattern of the super positional thing of pretending X while believing Y and he doesn't break character because he thinks he's in the mob and yada yada yada and he speaks in euphemisms but look at all the people who said these things these are his actions these were his deeds this is what he did this is this was the consequence, barring some very explicit jury instruction from a judge, it doesn't seem like that heavy a lift to convict Trump. Maybe that would get over their own on appeal.

But first of all, the question is, if we're going to talk about politics and not the law, what does that do to his presidential prospects if he's got a good appeal coming? But the appeal would no way come down until after the election. but his best possible deal would be before the election, right? So there's going to be some really complicated things going on. And that applies to the Mara Lago case as well. But second, I'm just less worried. Maybe I lack the imagination,

but I'm less worried about the possible like unintended consequences here because Trump and his behavior are so sui generis that like you have to come up with some really weird hypothetical to say, well, if we convict Trump for this thing that we know he did, they'll use this against so-and-so down the road in this unacceptable way. Maybe, but maybe not. Okay. A couple things here. One, just like whenever David French pronounces something differently than I do, I assume that my pronunciation is right because David pronounces everything incorrectly. It's entirely possible my pronunciation is wrong. I can see. I'm deeply concerned the other direction.

with Jonah, because I've always pronounced that sui generis. Yeah, I could have missed on it. It's possible. I'm just, I'm actually flagging this for listeners because I'd like someone to hop in the comment section. We generally have Latin experts that listen to this and for someone to tell me which one is correct. And I want both Latin correct and also colloquial American correct.

Like, I don't want to just sound like a jerk all the time. So that's pretty important. Okay. So fine. Trump is unique. And so maybe this won't happen again. But you raise a different problem, which is the timing of all of this, how this all plays out. And I think it's really, really hard to say sitting here right now.

50-50 chance. Either of these two trials goes before the 2024 election. Certainly not the appeals, as you note. Donald Trump wins. This gets really messy in terms of, we don't know whether a president can pardon himself. We know that certainly a president can't prosecute himself, so all of it then just sits on ice until he leaves potential. I mean, that's, it's just so messy. Donald Trump loses.

I think it's a real problem. And Steve, this gets to, I think, the political side of this, set aside who's right and who's wrong and who has the better arguments and all of that. a very large percentage of the country does not believe that Donald Trump should be criminally pursued for this does not believe that he should be convicted for this does not believe that it should prevent him

from serving as president if he is what happens in a country where there's that political reality yeah I'm very concerned about all the things that you all discussed as potential consequences or complications inside our political system and inside our legal system.

I'm far more concerned about the kinds of consequences that will flow outside of those two realms for exactly the reasons that you suggest. If you go back and you listen to the speech that Donald Trump gave in Erie, Pennsylvania on Saturday night, on the one hand, you can hear it as just a plea for his supporters to rally to him, to back him. And in that sense, it's unexceptional. My way of hearing it, however, was that he is setting up a situation where if he's, first all, the mere fact that he's being prosecuted for these crimes, and I do think he's committed

crimes, is inherently problematic and biased, because Joe Biden, the most corrupt president in the history of the country, he says only being targeted because he's Biden's principal opponent on and on and on. Do you think Trump would be charged if he wasn't running for president if he had decided to retire and said him out of politics forever? Do you think he would have been charged with this? I think you could be charged in the Mar-a-Lago. I agree. Do you think he would have been charged in this case? I don't know. I think you should. I think you should have, whether he would or not. I mean, actually, you guys had at the beginning of the of the collision newsletter yesterday, which for those of you don't know is our.

terrific new newsletter that Sarah writes with Michael Warren about all of this, the collision of law and politics. Really interesting history about why we got to this point, which sort of proceeded through the Mar-a-Lago case and went to Merrick Garland's, the necessity of Merrick Garland appointing a special counsel as a result of the Mar-a-Lago documents case, which led to Jack Smith doing what he did in this case, super interesting history that I either had forgotten or didn't know about. But back to my bigger point. I think, you know, Trump is, he's created this environment. I mean, he's taken advantage of an environment that exists where Trump backers,

the hardcore Trump backers, are living in a world where they're not getting information about the things that he's done. There was a Marquette University. poll last week that found that 50% of Americans don't believe Donald Trump even has classified documents. So we know that Donald Trump had classified documents. We have photos of them taken by Trump aides. We have Donald Trump on tape talking about the classified documents that he's taken. We have Donald Trump in interviews with Sean Hannity in effect saying, I don't need to give back these classified documents. They're classified documents. So half of the Republicans interviewed for this poll, have claimed that something isn't true that everybody in the world understands

is true, who's paying attention. The kinds of things that Trump is saying, I think, are designed to get his most ardent supporters so agitated that if the outcome that he doesn't want, the outcome that they don't want is what we see. They're not going to be content to cast a vote for Donald Trump. They're being told that their government is corrupt and the end of the country is near. I think we should expect that they'll act like it. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything

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slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Did you lock the front door? Check. Close the garage door. Yep. Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision. No. And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection, and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web.

Uh, I'm looking into it. Stress less about security. Choose security solutions from TELUS for peace of mind at home and online. Visit tellus.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply. Jonah, let's put a pin in this for now. I want to talk about the Fitch credit downrating. No way.

We're never going to have an opportunity to talk about Trump and these indictments ever again. Like, this is going to be out of the news. This is our shot. This is it. We've got to get it all out here now because when are you going to be possibly talk about this again? All right.

Fitch downgrades our credit score as, you know, the United States of America, from AAA to AA plus. What does that mean? So I've been thinking about this. I need to talk to some people who care and know this stuff better. But it feels to me like there's a real distinct possibility that this is sort of like, it's not the right analogy.

I was thinking it's sort of like this is the scene where you see the crate with the arc of the covenant being put in the warehouse with all this foreboding. I don't know that's not quite right. But it's like historians, it's entirely possible, historians will look back and say, you know, this is the Gavrillo Princip kind of thing. This is the real historically important thing because it was the beginning of a trend. If you believe, just staying on the politics, if you believe as I do that like a lot of our populist politics right now and for the last 10 years, 12 years, are all downstream

of the financial crisis, 2007, 2008, and which we've talked about a bunch, if America's credit rating continues to slide. And we go to real sustained high interest rates for a long time. Are we stopping the reserve currency of the world? The financial dislocations and upheavals that will be caused by that and the profound cuts that would be necessary to basic entitlements that everybody thinks our sacrosan would be so great or the need to raise taxes so much, it could make our current politics seem fairly stayed and reserved.

Or it could focus the mind and get Americans to get their act together. You can go either way. But I don't think it's gotten nearly attention. It deserves because on the face of it, it's a very minor downgrade. And it's complicated. And there's a real attitude that is pervasive among elites, in part because of left-wing ideology, in part because the right no longer cares about

entitlement stuff, to just not talk about it. We don't talk about crazy Uncle Ed in the basement. We just put the tray inside the door and lock it. That's how we talk about our financial problems in this country. And so I think it's potentially a really big deal, but we just don't know yet. Steve, I think that Jonah raises exactly the point that I wanted to of having this little segment in the first place, which is, okay, it's something I've said about journalism as a whole, that there's this change where you used to have a journalist who had the beat of like budget negotiations and they'd know everything about the rules of the house and about the intricacies of how budgets are written. And it was hard and it was thankless and they were not

fun at parties. And they'd be doing it for 20 years. And now baby journalists come through and you don't need to have any expertise or experience to write your thoughts on the Barbie movie or the woke culture war thing that someone said on Twitter and it's sort of the dumbification of media in a lot of ways. Well, the same kind of like, look, squirrel thing can happen in even important things. And I feel like Donald Trump has, hey, squirreled us

so much in the last six years that we think the biggest news story is the Donald Trump indictment, and what if it's not? Yeah, I mean, several really important points buried in there, although I think to answer your last point first, I do think it's the biggest story because it's, because it is truly unprecedented and because of what I think it portends for the country in the future of our politics. Having said that, obviously we spent a fair amount of time at the dispatch thumping on. about debt and deficits. We do it for a reason. We care about them. They're going to matter. I mean, I've said more times than I care to remember. Nobody cares about the national debt now,

and everybody will care about it at some point. It's going to happen. It's the most predictable slow-rolling crisis we could possibly face. And I think this downgrade reflects that. It was an interesting Washington Post editorial about this today and the beginning of the editorial is something like it feels like Fitch accidentally hit published too early because they're describing these crisis moments that we've averted because the economy's improved or sort of aren't right in front of us. There was no precipitating event necessarily for this and therefore we shouldn't read too much into this downgrade, even if it ought to make us think about longer-term reform. It's a sensible editorial argument. I think I come to the opposite conclusion. The fact that

there is no precipitating event, the fact that, you know, many economists think that we're not facing an imminent recession is exactly the time to talk about this and exactly the time to raise these alarms. And it's a little surprising to me that we haven't. seen this kind of a downgrade earlier, given our fundamentals. And while it remains the case that U.S. debt is better than dead anywhere else, it's a problem for us. It's a problem for the United States. I don't expect that this is suddenly going to get people to pay attention to entitlements and entitlement reform. One of the reasons that I'm as concerned about this stuff as I am is because we had a system two, a decade ago, where you had one political party that

was pretty squarely in favor of entitlement reform in the Republicans. They included it in their budget from 2011 to 2016 in the House, and you had people actually making arguments about this. And another in Democrats who didn't seem terribly concerned about it, to the extent they were concerned, they wanted to solve the problem by just raising taxes, even though that can't actually solve the problem. Today, we're looking at a system where both political parties and the leaders of both political parties don't want to talk about this, are not serious about these kinds of reforms. That in and of itself makes this a huge problem. And my final point, Sarah, to your first point, it is the case that we don't have journalists who are focused on budget

process the way that we did 10 years ago, 20, 30 years ago. In part, that's because the budget process doesn't exist. There isn't a budget process anymore. This doesn't happen. Fair, fine. It's a bad example in that sense. It's a good example. It's a great example because I think that's...

But Sarah's point applies to all sorts of beats. For sure. Totally right. Yeah, one problem applies to Congress. Congress doesn't really function that way. And the other is a journalism problem in that it's just far easier to hire 25-year-olds who don't know anything but have strong opinions about everything. That's right.

to go and rant and get you clicks. But then a story comes along that either requires legal expertise, and there are great legal journalists out there who don't have law degrees, or a story requires these 25-year-olds to cover a campaign story, and they're asking what an FEC report is or how you read it, or they're just going ahead and reading it incorrectly. And that didn't used to happen. Or just requires having sources.

Also that. People who used to work the police beat on a local newspaper, for new dozens of cops and judges and court officials and they could get people on the phone and ask what the hell's going on, right? There's less of that today. Exactly. And they brought, in doing that, it's not just that you have sources,

it's that you've been covering the same thing for long enough that if your sources tried to BS you about something, you knew as much or more than they did at times and could call them on their BS. Part of the problem today is to the extent that we're seeing, you know, young reporters do real reporting, there's no sort of foundation of knowledge in many cases. So they just take what a source tells them and prints it.

Well, that's not good sort of in any situation. But it's really not good when you have, as I think we've seen here in Washington today, this culture of lying. You know, people are lying to you. They tell you so-and-so said such and such, and that's just not true. It's not good enough to print it. You can't just print it and say, well, source A, says that this thing happened if it didn't happen. What matters is if it happened.

All right. I want to do a little bit of an extended not worth your time question mark and a little bit more substantive one. David Brooks has a column out. What if we're the bad guys? And I wanted to get y'all's take because I think it's a really interesting, roar, shocky test of how one views American society. So I'm going to read from parts of it. And then And then, Jonah, I'm coming to you first. So, again, David Brooks in the New York Times. This story begins in the 1960s when high school grads had to go off to fight in Vietnam, but the children of the educated class got college deferments.

It continues in the 1970s when the authorities imposed busing on working class areas in Boston, but not on the upscale communities like Wellesley, where they themselves lived. The ideal that, quote, we're all in this together, was replaced with the reality that the educated class lives in a world up here and everybody else is forced into a world down there. Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves. Skipping ahead a little bit, he notes that members of our class also segregate ourselves into a few booming metro areas, San Francisco, D.C., Austin, and so on.

In 2020, Biden won only 500 or so counties, but together they are responsible for 71% of the American economy. Trump won over 2,500 counties responsible for only 29%. Once we find our clicks, we don't get out much. In the book, Social Class in the 21st century, sociologist Mike Savage and his co-researchers found that the members of the highly educated class tend to be the most insular measured by how often we have contact with those of jobs like our own. His point here is basically about people who support Donald Trump. So to the very end, are Trump supporters right that the indictments are just a political witch hunt? Of course not.

As a card-carrying member of my class, I still basically trust the legal system and the neutral arbiters of justice. Trump is a monster in the way we've all been saying for years and deserves to go to prison. But there's a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Balthsell wrote, what an amazing name as I'm name-shopping, wrote decades ago. History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership. That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populace all day until the cows come home. But the real question is when we will stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.

So, Jonah, I want your just initial reaction to this, and I want to clarify a few things. He is not talking about socioeconomic level, or rather, he's not talking about income level, just economic level. He's really talking about education level, which is sort of fascinating, and sort of an elitism that is different than pure income-driven. levels. Two, this is my own pet thing. I was so radicalized by David Brooks's Bobose and Paradise book from the late 90s, but thought it actually didn't go far enough to bring in the genetic, heritable qualities of IQ and of how that would affect American society. And my example is,

you know, 50 years ago, definitely 100 years ago, men were maybe going off and getting highly educated, but they were marrying the girl next door, they were marrying someone in their social class, not someone in their education class or IQ class. And so in terms of the heritable qualities, and I mean genetically heritable here, you were still going to have really, really smart people who were born in some other quintile, and they were going to have a great idea and they were going to pop up, you know, into a different quintile. But what's sort of fascinating to me now is what happens to a society when Harvard guy doesn't go back home and marry the girl who we live next to, Harvard guy now marries

Princeton girl. And so now those IQs, which are heritable qualities, are going to be passed onto their children, along with their wealth, along with their social connections, so that the quintiles become really calcified. And those in the lower quintiles are going to realize there is America sort of promised to Tocqueville-era social mobility doesn't exist anymore. So is this what created Trumpism? Jonah? I don't want to get you in trouble,

but your critique of Bobo's in Paradise is basically saying he didn't incorporate enough bell curve. And, you know, the bell curve by Charles Murray, everyone focuses basically on one chapter and really one paragraph in one chapter about the race stuff. But the larger argument was all about this, this sort of made problem, right? Which David Brooks has written about in the past, where you read the New York

Times wedding announcement thing. It's all about, it's a mix between corporate mergers and acquisitions, you know, Goldman Sachs, Marys, you know, Morgan Stanley or academic, you know, badminton teams, sports announcements, you know, Yale versus Harvard in all that kind of stuff. And there's a lot of that. And I think, I think you raised a perfectly valid point, which as the reaction of the Bell Curve showed can elicit many hysterical and overreacted responses, but there is something to this problem of sorting not just socially, but literally genetically, for the skills that get you through the academic meritocracy stuff. And there's something to be said about that, but we're not going to say it today. Actually, the more relevant book in some ways is, you know, David's column today is

really just downstream of Charles's book coming apart, which was, you know, all the stuff he had this very popular thing. How thick is your bubble? You know, which asked all sorts of questions, have you ever been on a factory floor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And were it not for some of my journalistic work and the fact that I married in Alaskan, I would have scored very badly on the bubble test. Jonah, you're the epitome. You're the, sorry, the personification of the David Brooks column in a lot of ways. New York to D.C. You're on the Acella Corridor, your parents, all of it.

Yeah, except I got rejected from every college I applied to, went to an all-women's college, and I grew up as a conservative on the upper west side of Manhattan. So I have some outliers, right? But I take the point. I certainly know the milieu quite well. I was trying to explain, by the way, how, you know, someone pointed out like, oh, well, but there's these people

who own businesses and are really successful, and they don't send their kids to college, and they vote for Donald Trump. like, no, no, David Brooks's milieu is people who use the word millew unironically. Exactly. That's right. That's right. I mean, like, you can own 34 Chili's franchises and be a multi-millionaire and not be part of the high social status people that David's talking about. So I agree with a lot of the big picture stuff that David's describing in the column. And I think, like, A lot of David stuff.

I mean, I'm a big fan of David, but at high levels of generalization, I think he's really wise and perceptive and catches on to things. But the problem with high levels of generalization is that they leave themselves really open to all sorts of counter examples and exceptions to the rule that are so broad that they're really, they're not just exceptions to the rule. They're arguments that maybe the rule is wrong. So you don't think this explains the rise of populism. Trumpism for a second. Just populism. I think it is a major contributory factor to some of the

populism that we have. And this is this sort of gets back to their conversation from the beginning of this podcast. For someone who spent 20 years hating all forms of both sidesism, I am such a passionate and committed both sides are that it's really hard for me to come to grips with because I think both both sides have enormous problems. They're just not the same problems. And so there's a real asymmetry. The elitism of the left stems from the fact that they still control almost all of the high status institutions in this country. You were talking about this a little bit on AO the other day about why you can't have a left-wing federalist society is because the left-wing, the federal society, by its nature, had to be oppositional to the elite institutions where it sprung up. You can't be

oppositional when you wildly agree with the administrators and the faculty at your law school. It just doesn't work. Right. Left-wing Fed Sock is called law school. Right. Exactly. Right. It's called a faculty meaning. And so whether it's Hollywood, journalism, museums, academia, the left not only is calcified and bubbled up, it's so concentrated in the corridors of cultural and in some ways financial power that the people outside of it feel like. they are permanently outside the walls of the citadels of power. And in those kinds of situations, you're going to get populism. Trump is not a traditional populist for all sorts of reasons. He doesn't fit the normal, like in 2016, the two populist leaders were a billionaire Manhattan

real estate guy and a quasi-communist Jew from Queens. Those are normally the people populists aim their pitchforks at, right? Not the kind of people that the populace rally around and defend. And so I just think that the causes and nature of the populism we have today are so bound up in media and other factors that general theories are going to fall apart. And the only last thing I'll say is I think part of the problem with David's analysis, and again, I put it in Slack saying this is a fantastic column. I think it's a fantastic column. And there's a lot I agree with. But there is a tendency to do critical theory with everything. Oh, the way our institutions are organized, it's unstated biases.

We don't see it. Everything's invisible. Nothing is visible. Sometimes stuff's just like super visible. And people just don't want to own the fact that they're being jackasses. And it has less to do with sort of like deeply, you know, literary theories of things and more to do with the fact that people are being drunk on their own power. they don't feel like they should be held accountable to the other side or credit the other side with anything. And they're pissing people off. And I think there's a lot of that going on. Steve.

Well, I'll pick up on Jonas' last point because I share that critique of the piece. I agree. I think it's a fantastic. This is exactly what you want to do. If you're a newspaper columnist, what you want to do is have is write something like this that everybody wants to talk about. And that forces people to see things in a different way. I mean, it's sort of we're, we're what, now at eight, nine years into the, to the Trump era, or at least the era, which we've been talking about and people have been obsessing about Donald Trump, it's hard to write new things. And there was a lot that was interesting and new and provocative in this David Brooks column. And I think he's terrific. Two main critiques, it's sort of parallel Jonas.

My first is the second one, is that the way that Brooks describes the Trump class, it's as if they have no agency. They're not making decisions they're sort of put upon. And while I think there's some truth to the way that he describes them just as a reflection of reality, it's also the case that his is a static analysis, right? It makes certain assumptions. Can I give an example from, for instance, the out of marriage, out of wedlock births.

Like he gives the statistic, of course, that it's the elites who are like, oh, these bourgeois social norms, we need to tear that down. But of course, the elites are still almost exclusively having children within wedlock. And this, you know, the rest of society is now increasingly having children out of wedlock,

even though that's a high predictor of poverty, a high predictor of education levels and all this other stuff. as if pregnancy happens to one. Right, right. No, I think that's a good point. And I guess my second critique would be that while what he describes in the broadest senses is true, it also doesn't take into account things like income mobility.

If you want to talk about sort of the hard grip of income inequality fair, and we have seen, I think, statistically, we've seen that there's been a rise in income inequality over the past couple decades. You also have to talk about income mobility because the people in the bottom quintile of incomes, household incomes, in any given year, aren't necessarily the same people who will be there the following year or in 10 years or in 15 years. or in 15 years. Now, it is the case that where you're born has great influence on where you end up, but it's not the case that people are incapable of climbing out of those lower quintiles, which he sort of implies is the case. I'd be interested to see how he responds to those critiques, because it's not that he hasn't thought of them. I guarantee you that. And as I say, I think the column succeeds on its own because it's it's kicked off this kind of big conversation, which is helpful and useful. All right. So David Brooks's column, definitely worth your time, but not a definitely agree with all parts of it, which was never going to happen anyway, because that's not what either of you are capable of doing.

Just actually not in a skill set that you have. Just me and Jonah, though. You are. Oh, definitely. I'm easy. I'm so easy. Steve can tell you, as someone who has to manage me on a hourly basis. With that, I am sure that y'all have all sorts of thoughts about this podcast.

If you want to share them, become a member of the dispatch. Hop in the comments section. Share away. If you would like to rate this podcast, do it on wherever you're listening to this podcast, because it helps other people find the podcast. guest. And otherwise, yeah, as Jonah said, we're never going to have an opportunity to talk about Donald Trump or these indictments again. So that's the end of that conversation. Definitely not because he's being also arraigned this week because we'll have trial dates set, because motions

practice will start. And because we're still waiting for the Georgia indictment to happen, which we at least have some expectation will happen before the end of the month. So it's really a race between me having this baby and Fulton County indicting Donald Trump as sort of the last expected indictment. So we'll see who wins that race. Until then, have a great week. You know,