The Dispatch Podcast - The Debate That Didn't Matter

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Sarah, fully ready for her hiatus, is joined by Steve, Jonah, and Dispatch Politics reporter Audrey Fahlberg for a dispiriting recap of the first GOP primary debate. Also: -Vivek Witherspoon's moment -A crummy night for DeSantis -Death of Wagner leader Prigozhin -Biden's response to Maui -Not Worth Your Time (?): Jonah's writing Show notes- -G-File: Who Will Stop Him? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgar. We've got Jonah Goldberg. We've got Steve Hayes and a special guest, Audrey Falberg. Steve and Audrey have been in Milwaukee for the debate. They've got lots of on-the-ground stuff. But also, if you're looking for even more debate content, for members of the dispatch, we did a special dispatch live right after the debate. We had David Drucker. We had David French. Kevin Williamson hosted with Mike Warren. Jonah was there. Steve was there. I was there. Really, it was just fun for the whole family.

And so if you want to hear even more, you can become a member of the dispatch, find that dispatch live recording, and just bathe in all of the fun that was the first GOP primary debate in Wisconsin. But before we do, quick housekeeping, this will actually be my last time hosting the podcast for a few weeks. As many of you know, I have to go do something else for a little bit. But I'll be back. Don't worry. And in the meantime, Jonah's having a Hunger Games-esque competition to see who will fill in for me.

Make sure you don't like them too much. But be kind. Be kind. All right. With that, Steve, you're in Milwaukee. I don't know. Give us the vibes. It's hot.

It's still hot. We're recording this about 9 a.m. on Thursday, and it's already 80 degrees. It was well over 100 yesterday. Two days of very un-Milwaukee-like weather here at the end of August. This is usually about the most pleasant time to be in Milwaukee. You know, you fill in your own, make your own metaphor, make your own jokes. The debate last night was interesting in a sort of, I don't think it matters much kind of way. Um, you know, if you went to the debate and you've done these before and I've been doing

these for, for way too long, I don't know when my first debates were 90, probably 96, um, everything felt the same. It's the same sort of, you know, very important kids in khakis and blue blazers running around with borrowed authority, bossing people around, getting people to places, media types looking extraordinarily busy, the same kind of pre-debate analysis. So, but so-and-so has to do this and so-and-so has to do that. I heard someone say someone had to defy expectations. Someone had to defy expectations, yeah, you know, the setting the expectations game. I mean, there are probably like 50 debate-related cliches that we could roll out.

But it was a, I would just say, it was a weird experience. to be there, given that my impression is that so little of this really matters. Like, I don't think it matters if Nikki Haley had a great comeback in minute 47 to Vivek Ramoswamy or she did, as it happens, I don't know if it was the right minute, but she did, she had a couple nice moments. You know, I thought Mike Pence had a few nice responses, you know, Ron DeSantis, if this was about Ron DeSantis, if this was Ron DeSantis' debate to lose or he had the most to lose going in,

I think he lost it. I think he stood out. Didn't talk enough. When he did talk, it was sort of weird. So we can look at the debate and analyze the debate that way, and we will.

I guess my overwhelming sense was that it just doesn't matter. There's so many other bigger things happening here, given Trump's lead given what's going on with his legal problems that this just felt really small in comparison even if everybody was doing the same things

and going through the same emotions. I think that's exactly right. That was a debate for second place. Winning isn't enough when you're 40 points down. You know, and some people had some good moments. I think you named them. I think, for instance,

the Vake was very strong in the first half. I get why everyone's talking about him. I think the shtick kind of wore thin by the second half of the debate when fewer people were watching. Nikki Haley really shined in the second half of the debate, again, when fewer people were watching.

Mike Pence had some strong moments. But you needed a game changer to actually make any headroads in this race. Trump's not up by five points, seven points. Again, like in some of these polls, he's up by 40. And there was nothing that changed the game last night. I think Ramoswami will move up in the poll

and overtake DeSantis in that number two slot. So what? The reward for being in the number two slot is absolutely nothing, Jonah. I thought it was steak knives. It might be an Ohio Senate endorsement is what it actually might be for Ramoswamy. Yeah, so, like, I agree. We chewed a lot of this leather last night

for our special dispatch members' only live episode, which was fun and exciting and lubricated. But I generally agree, with Steve. I think that Ramoswami won on his own terms and his own terms that would be blocking tack over Donald Trump and to be the person that people are talking about. You know, there's this report recently. I can't remember one of these profiles

which said that he was thinking about running for president because he just wanted to be famous. And so far, mission accomplished, right? I mean, he's getting there. But I do think that there's a problem for Ramoswamy that he thinks he can emulate Trump's shtick, but the problem is that it comes across much faker than Trump.

Trump legitimately seems who he is, and that includes being a liar, and that includes, you know, making stuff up and being an ignoramus, but he owns it. You know, he sells it with conviction. And, you know, Ramoswami, you know, comes across, you know, I think I tweeted last night that Rees Witherspoon played Ramoswami really well in election. I think that he comes across as the kid who always raised his hand first whenever there's a math problem on the board, always thought he was smarter than everybody else, and he likes to show it. And so I think it creates a ceiling for him as much as it lifts him up,

but it also limits how far he can go. And the amount of hatred that he invited from the other people on the stage, I have to say deservedly, because a lot of his arguments, a lot of his claims were utterly disingenuous lies, utterly disingenuous slanders, you know, that he's the only one who's not bought and paid for up there, that people who visited Ukraine did it to visit their Pope Zelensky.

This idea that he is the bold truth teller who opposes climate change thinks climate change is a hoax when he is on video and the DeSantis campaign put out the video talking about how man-made climate change is real like a few months ago. I mean, he is just a fraud,

but he's really good at it. And I think that limits his appeal. And as I was saying last night, think it's funny how his favorite go-to line is to accuse other people of wanting to be cable news hosts. And yet no one comes across more like they're auditioning to be a cable news host than Ramoswami does. Yeah, again, like there's this prediction that will probably come back to bite me in any number of ways. But I think what you'll see is a real bump for Ramoswami, again, overtaking to Santos will be in that number two slot. But it'll be relatively short-lived.

It'll be the way that voters, especially Republican primaries, tend to, you know, tell polls. that they're interested in someone. And then once they get to see them a little more, it's like, never mind. And, you know, you see these like ripples up and down. I don't expect Ramoswami to be a threat to Trump at any point. And, you know, Nick asked me, okay, but if he goes back down, then who becomes in the number two slot?

And my answer was maybe someone else, maybe Ramoswami stays in the number two slot, but he's down at like 9%, in which case, is that really the number two slot anymore? When again, you're 40 points down from Donald Trump, Trump, there's just an irrelevance problem here, I think, to Steve's overall point. Like, I was going to label this entire episode, not worth your time, question mark, as we talk about this debate for number two.

Steve, I wonder if we should bring in Audrey, because she was in the spin room last night, seeing firsthand how the spinning was going. I'll set this up a little from the other side, you know, from 2016 and what this can feel like. So before the debate, you know, every campaign will have its own room, whether it's, you know, a sort of a green room or since we had a debate in 2016 at the Reagan Library, we had single wide trailers and they had their little starlit names on them on a piece of paper on the door, you know, when you step up the little three steps or whatever into your trailer. And it can feel a lot like dropping your kid off at kindergarten.

I mean, all these operatives, remember, have worked together on campaigns before. we all would know each other and then the candidates you send them off like a nervous parent and you know hope little Marco doesn't bite anyone and you're incredibly nervous and then you're watching the time and you're just waiting for those two hours to tick away

you want it to be over so badly then you're going to the spin room and it is just a crush Audrey why don't you take over from there and tell us just the feeling in the spin room yeah thanks Sarah. So this is my first Republican debate to report on in person and my first time in a spin room. But even before I could go into the spin room, which was incredibly chaotic, you know,

you have Chip Roy and Ken Cuccinelli running around on behalf of DeSantis and Senator Thune and former Senator Cory Gardner from Colorado spinning on behalf of Scott. But before I went in there, I spotted Don Jr. who made a huge deal about Fox, how Fox News wouldn't let him into the spin room. Because I didn't have credentials and see they're, you know, they're just terrible. They're, they're cutting us off from the establishment. This is why my father should not have come. And there, this was originally that the Fox, sorry, that the Trump people wanted to, you know, not have their candidate in the debate, but still be able to benefit from the debate logistics. And Fox News said, no, if your candidate isn't in the debate, you can't then participate in

the rest of the debate, which includes the spin room. Right. No, it's extraordinary stuff, Sarah. But I thought my most interesting takeaway from Don Jr. was how much they really wanted to prop up Vivek Ramoswamy in conversation with reporters. You know, Don Jr. and all the other Trump circuits were telling everybody that he did the best job, which I don't think is surprising. Clearly their goal last night was to undermine Ron DeSantis as much as possible. And, you know, Don Jr. kind of flirted with, you know, should Ramoswamy be vice presidential? material and he's like, yeah, you know, maybe, blah, blah, blah. So that wasn't really surprising. Meanwhile, you go talk to Desantis people and they say that Vivek had the worst performance of the night. So it's kind of clear that those two who were in the center of the stage were

really going after one another. But I think my most interesting conversations last night in the spin room were with Thune and Corey Gardner, who I mentioned, were spinning on behalf of Tim Scott, who I think there were really a lot of high expectations for him last night because he's been pulling in the single digits for a while. has been seen as potentially doing pretty well in Iowa if he can get his campaign together but he didn't really meet the moment last night he was pretty invisible on stage,

did not have much speaking time so I think that that really mattered in the sense of who's competing for you know second place spot. Steve, you've said that you just don't think anything that happened last night is going to matter four months from now.

We're not going to be talking about this debate as moving the ball forward backward or any other way in between, will Donald Trump's surrender in Fulton County move that ball? No. I mean, not that discrete event. I think all of the legal problems that Donald Trump is having, I mean, I think they're already affecting the race. They're certainly affecting the Republican primary and in the fact that they're strengthening Donald Trump. But there's no doubt they'll affect the general election. So I think that everything that's happening in the background of this debate is much more likely to have an effect on the actual outcome of the race, the two

races, the primaries, and then eventually the general election, than anything that happened in this debate. That doesn't mean, I do think that there were meaningful things that happened last night and likely will have effects. I thought Ron DeSantis had a poor night, a bad night. It was interesting to see some people I, you know, respect and whose opinions I seek out sometimes who have already sort of made clear that they're in the DeSantis camp, arguing strenuously that Ron DeSantis had a great night, that this was sort of the knockout night. And you just read that. And you think, are you saying that because you've already sort of committed to Ron DeSantis? Or are you saying that because you watched the debate that I watched and came away with that conclusion

when he spoke sort of the fourth most of the other candidates. I thought he had several very awkward moments. I think the moment of the debate came after the question that Brett Baer posed the eight candidates on the stage about whether they would still support Donald Trump if he were a convicted Fallon and had the Republican nominee where they still support him in a general election.

And as you could see on the video, Vivek Gramoswamy raised his hand confidently forcefully right away to be the trumpiest of the candidates. And then others gradually raised their hand. And the person who was last or close to last was Ron DeSantis. And before he raised his hand, he sort of looked to his right and looked to his left to see what everybody else was doing.

And then kind of, I think the morning dispatch described it perfectly when they said, sheepishly raised his hand sort of just up to his shoulder. Wasn't enthusiastic about it. didn't know what the right answer was at the start, wasn't making a decision based on conviction, but wanted to see where everything was. And if you're the candidate running on strength, on being more alpha than the alpha, you can't have that moment. And I, you know, we've already seen Trump's war room had it teed up within 20 minutes, 15 minutes. It was being

replayed everywhere. I do think that's a big problem for Ron DeSantis. He had a couple of other awkward moments. He had an awkward moment at the end of his first answer where he sort of forced to smile. Obviously, he had been told to smile for the debate. And you gave a, you know, every answer he gave was a super forceful answer. So they said, project strength. You know, you can imagine his advisor said project strength, answers forcefully. But they were often forceful answers in support of a wishy-washy position, if that makes sense, and the contrast just really didn't work. So I thought he had a crummy night. It would not surprise me if given what we've seen in his polling this continued or accelerated that downward trajectory. Can I give

an alternative, though, about why if you were a DeSantis supporter coming into this, you want to say DeSantis had his knockout moment, breakout moment, et cetera. Because if he didn't, this thing is kind of over. By which I mean, if I'm right that you're about to see sort of the 2012, 2016, everyone kind of goes up in the polls and comes back down in the polls.

That is wildly in Trump's favor. The only opportunity, really, that this primary was going to turn into a real primary was that there was going to be one person who was consistently in that number two slot to take on Donald Trump and this would turn into a two-man race early enough that it actually would be a choice

for primary voters between Donald Trump and an alternative. You know, you cannot be that into Ron DeSantis but see that he was clearly in that mold for the previous six months. Heading into this debate, obviously he'd lost some altitude already. But, you know, if you don't want Donald Trump

to be the nominee, can see why you felt heavily invested in Ron DeSantis having a good night. Yeah, even though I'm pretty fatalistic about the meaning of this debate in the long term, I'm not where you are in terms of handing Donald Trump the

nomination. That's because it's going to cost you a steak dinner. Maybe too. Maybe too. The dynamic that you're describing, I think absolutely is at play. If you're a conservative or somebody who's supported Ron,

DeSantis and you don't want Donald Trump, you're going to say that, I mean, I still don't think this is good practice. If you think, if you're a supporter of Ron DeSantis and you think he had a crappy night, you should say he had a crappy night, people will take you more seriously next time. So, like, some of the canned spin that we're hearing from the Protasanta stuff is, it's forced and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But I think the dynamic that you're describing is absolutely a play. I just think there are so many, there's so much volatility. here. There's so many other things at play that it seems

possible that something blows up this Trumpian March to inevitability, inevitable nomination before we get there. Jonah, I want to ask you a question and then you can ignore it. That's the proper sequence. If Donald Trump's up by 40 points and nothing last night changed this

and we can't come up with something that's going to change this other than the sweet meteor of death, then this is a sudden. all predicated on something happening to Trump that we don't know right now in which case the 40 points isn't real, we should ignore it, and the race for number two actually does matter, right?

Yes. Like if it doesn't matter, it didn't matter. It never was going to matter. And if it does matter, we don't yet know why it's going to matter, but it will matter. Right. I mean, there's a weird fatalism that seems to be overtaking a lot of the GOP field,

which is that none of them think they can beat... It's not the old Belling the Cat thing, right? Because no one's... No one thinks anyone else is going to bell the cat either, right? It's... Yeah, in 2016, people were sort of pushing each other forward to Bell the Cat. Like, that's not happening now. Nobody is expecting any cat belling or that it would matter if you did.

In 2016, it was kind of like... I mean, the bit goes back to Abbott and Costello and probably earlier, but I always remember from Stripes where Bill Murray pretends to step forward to volunteer, tricking Harold Ramis to step forward, right? In 2016, people were constantly doing that kind of thing to sort of get somebody else. Like, can you believe what he said about you? But I think that there's a weird fatalism here, which is that at some level, a lot of these campaigns seem to realize they can't beat Trump and neither can anybody else. So you might as well run based on this interpositional Schroedner's cat kind of thing that if it turns out that Trump actually falls by the wayside or goes to prison or is,

you know, killed by a surly badger or whatever, that you'll be well positioned to fill the void. And it makes everyone seem a little more cowardly than even normal these days. I should say I thought in the first hour Nikki Haley was smart to be the first person to criticize Trump by name. I thought it was very interesting that the first hour was very GOPT party circa 2012 stuff with budget and entitlement things

and all that and you know, we need an accountant in the White House. And part of the reason why I thought it was smart for Nikki to go after Trump by name is she's basically the, because she's a woman, she's the only candidate who would actually arguably benefit

from being viciously and personally attacked by Donald Trump, because even people who are MAGA adjacent don't like that stuff. There was, so that the whole hand-raising thing about supporting Trump, there's this famous bit from Soljanitson

where he talks about the guidance from officials saying, you never want to be the first person to stop clapping when Stalin enters the room. right? And it kind of has that, it had a little bit of that feeling where nobody wanted to be the first one, except for, you know, Beria, who was, you know, Vivek Ramoswamy. Nobody wanted to be the first one to raise their hand, but no one was sure they wanted to be the last one to raise their hand. My question for you, Sarah, about that is, how the hell did you not game that out before you went into a debate? You may not have known that the hand raising would be for, the question would come in the form of raise your hand, but you. Yes, you did. But, but. Yes, you did. You had to think it was efficiently possible to say, hey, let's think about this, right? It would have all practiced 10 versions of the hand-raising question.

The hand-raising question was always going to be about Donald Trump. I'll guarantee that one of the versions was, do you think Donald Trump lost the 2020 election? I bet that was everyone's sort of top bet of what the hand-raising question would be. I'm still mad they didn't ask that, by the way. but your number two had to be something to this effect, you know, will you support Trump as the nominee? Maybe they didn't include the if convicted part. You know, there's iterations of this.

But like, but absolutely. Because I remember talking about sort of how this works behind the scenes ahead of time, this isn't a debate. We call it a debate, but it's not one. A debate at best is what happens in the general election between two people who go back and forth. this is competing sound bites and striving for attention.

And so all you're doing is really practicing your zinger's, learning how to pivot from whatever the question is to the thing you want to say about that generalized topic so it doesn't look like you're totally dodging. And the hand-raising questions. So they absolutely practiced that ahead of time. I was more surprised at how bad the opening statements were and the closing statements,

because the other thing that they obviously won't tell you the questions in advance, but generally, I will say, in 2016, we got a heads up that the opening question would be broad enough that you could give a version of an opening statement.

And the closing question, be broad enough, that you could give a version of a closing statement. And so you're sort of preparing for that regardless of what the details of those questions are. And those didn't really work either.

I don't know what was going on with debate prep this time around. But speaking of that, Audrey, could we get some read on some of the candidates that were maybe a little bit more on the, what are you doing here side? So the two governors, Asa Hutchison, Doug Borghum, you know, you mentioned Tim Scott kind of disappearing, but the three of them had by far the least speaking time. Yeah. So Ralph Norman, Congressman from South Carolina, was spinning in the spin room on behalf of Nikki Haley. and I asked him who had the worst performance last night and he was like, I thank Asa

and that governor from North Dakota, what's his name? So I think that perfectly kind of sums up how they did on stage. I did have one note about the show of hands question. I think you're absolutely right that Sarah, that the candidates should have been way more prepared. Particularly Ron DeSantis, who as Steve mentioned, looked around the room

before raising his hand about whether he'd support Trump if convicted. So obviously I wanted to go ask Desanis surrogates about that moment. I had a really fun conversation with Chip Roy. So if you recall the first show of hands question about whether climate change is a hoax, DeSantis completely derailed it, you know, said, you know, we're not school children here. He decided to take the mic rather than really, you know, just raise his hand or not raise his hand. Which, again, to be clear, from a strategic standpoint, is about taking the mic. It's not about wanting to dodge the question or anything else.

Any time that you get more speaking time in that format is a pure, pure win, which makes it all the more baffling if you're Hutchison or Boreham that you weren't finding more opportunities to do that. But from a strategic standpoint from DeSantis, he didn't care whether they ended up with the hand-raising question or not. It was an opportunity for him to talk when no one else got to. Right, absolutely. But Chip Roy said basically that second show of hands question, that's why he looked across the stage because he was like, we're not school children here. And so it's because he didn't think that the show of hands question was appropriate in the first place.

And so I thought that that was kind of a fun response from Chip Roy there. But, yeah, I mean, again, I was particularly surprised that Scott really did not interrupt more. You know, the people who are surrogates in the room on behalf of him said it's because, you know, he's a happy warrior type who was the adult in the room and wasn't screaming and shouting like all the other candidates. You know, I think maybe that's fair. That is the kind of campaign that he's running. But I think this is the first opportunity to really kind of push back on. on that narrative and show that he's a strong voice on stage,

and I don't really think that he did that. And I think, you know, a lot of different media narratives are saying, DeSantis was the winner, or Vivek was the winner. But I think there was kind of this unified understanding that Scott had a pretty bad performance us tonight. So I wonder, you know, been that memo? The Super PAC memo were hundreds of pages of polling opposition research and then a page and a half memo from the Super Pack

to Ron DeSantis was put on the Super PAC's website for the New York Times to find? Yeah, you're not obsessed with it or anything. The bit about, you know, Roger Ailes' observation that if you fall into the orchestra pit, that's what everyone's going to remember kind of thing. Mm-hmm. That seems to me to be the less relevant bit of wisdom

from Roger Ailes, who, which always have to stipulate, was a flawed human being. But he... Jonah, I'm a flawed human being. human being. Roger Ailes is something else. I thought I conveyed my understatement through sarcasm quite well. Ailes, you know, was famous for watching newscasters with the volume off and just looking

at their body language. And one kind of got, or one, I should not refer to myself as one, I kind of got the sense at times last night that a lot of these candidates were following that. rule. So there was a lot of inconsistencies, internal inconsistencies in what Mike Pence had to say, what DeSantis had to say. I mean, Ramaswami was basically a Mobius strip of self-contradiction or an Escher drawing of self-contradiction. But if you had the volume off, they all looked really confident saying it. They all looked really, you know, in charge. And, um, It's kind of, I kind of felt like that might have been the smart way to do it because

that's where it turns out that the lizard brain vote is more important than the rational brain vote these days. That's one of the things that Trump has entered into it. I'm not saying I 100% believe that, but it feels like it was part of the calculation more than in previous debates. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online

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All right. I think we're going to leave the debate topic. You know, the one closing thought I have is that all of these candidates also understood that even if one of them had a breakout moment, it was all going to be blunted by Trump's surrender in Fulton County this evening. We're going to have the first mugshot of a former president. And I can't begin to imagine the amount of money that the Trump campaign is going to bring in with mugshot-related merchandise

over the next few weeks. So just, you know, hold on to your horses for that one. Steve, there have been other things in the news, for instance. This news out of Russia, a plane is shot down by the Russian military. We have video of the plane falling from the sky, and we are told on the passenger list for that plane

is pregojin and nine people, nine other people. What confidence are we supposed to have in any of this information? And also, as has been mentioned a few times, why would you ever get on a plane with that guy or fly into Russian airspace with that guy? What? I mean, I think this was inevitable. It was not only predictable,

but predicted by virtually anybody who follows what's going on in Russia and even the most casual way. Vladimir Putin sort of had to do this. There's been lots of smart speculation, even some good reporting, but I don't think anybody can confidently tell you that they have a full picture of what happened

with the Bogger Group, progoshans attempted mutiny and the aftermath. What we do know was that Vladimir Putin looked very weak as progosian even before this attempted mutiny was openly defying Putin and the regime criticizing Putin criticizing the strategy and tactics

of battlefield leaders in such a way that was embarrassing for Putin and I think had an effect on his ability to consolidate support among the Russian people. This brings, I mean, the failed mutiny helped Putin and this brings an end to that episode and obviously sends a message I mean this is the way

that Vladimir Putin's regime operates you don't step out of line or you pay for it and you pay for it usually in a public way and there have been lots of jokes about how the preferred mechanism is defenestration or a balcony push

or something like that. Side note, I remember learning that vocab word in eighth grade from my wonderful teacher, Mrs. Healy, And defenestration just really became a favorite word of mine. I was like an eighth grader running around trying to find ways to get that word in a casual conversation. It made me very popular at school, as you can imagine, and quite precocious at cocktail parties that I didn't go to. Did you ever use that word with Sean Spicer?

I guess we're cutting that, right? That was so well done, Steve. Otherwise, we have to explain it. So here's what happened. Steve saw Sean Spicer at the debate, and I said that I was happy to ask all sorts of things about the spin room, but that if Steve talked about Sean Spicer, I was going to cut it. And so Steve didn't talk about Sean Spicer in the context of the debate

and is basically seeing what I'll do if he brings up Sean Spicer in a totally different context. And the answer is, I don't know. Like, you're a child. See, I don't think you're quite explaining it entirely right, Sarah, because I think what Steve was doing there was trying to punish you for adding a little personal history and charm into this otherwise super serious conversation. And so he was basically using the name Sean Spicer

like a rolled up newspaper. I got swatted. I'm not sure I'd characterize it that way. But your initial explanation was closer to accurate. I hope you've lost your train of thought. I really do. So I kind of disagree with Steve, just so we're going to be serious for a second. I don't think that the revolt was good for Putin.

I think it was bad for Putin. I think that it did two things that were, at least two things that were bad for Putin. One, it took the Wagner Brigade off the battlefield, and given how inept the Russian military has been, military has been, losing your most aggressive and effective fighters was not good for the military effort. And two, it broke the monolithic facade of the regime and forced Putin to come out and acknowledge what he would rather insinuate, which is that I kill people who get in my way. And so now the, even for a lot of spectators inside of Russia who wanted to give superficial plausibility to the legitimacy of the Putin regime, now kind of,

have to come to grips in a certain way that essentially the regime is a mafia regime and that it loses, you know, it loses some degree more of its pretense of being a legitimate functioning real government rather than... You don't think it lost that before that? I'm talking about within Russia.

I'm talking about within Russia because you can't have the regime boosting Progoshin as this hero. And Progelsen, I think you mischaracterized it. Pergson did not openly defy Putin all the time. He openly defied Putin's generals, and there were a lot of people who... It's a fair distinction. A lot of people thought that Putin was using Progoshin, putting Progen up to it to sort of scare the crap out of his own generals.

We don't know, right, obviously. And, I mean, it would be interesting to know what was the last thing going through Progogian's mind other than his trade table when he was trying to, you know, figure out how... Because a lot of this still doesn't make sense. There's this report that there was a second Progosion plane that went to Azerbaijan. They don't know who was on it. It would not, I don't think this happened. Wouldn't not shock me if it turns out Rogosian wasn't on this plane

and that there was a body double or whatever. But this is why they came up with the word criminology in the first place is because the place is a black box and you can't make judgment based upon any of the sort of Potemkin facade of the regime. I think if you would ask Vladimir Putin, would he like it if the last three months hadn't played out the way they would have? He would say yes. I don't think it's been to his advantage.

Obviously, he's come out the winner, but making the best of a bad situation. I want to talk about Maui and the fires and Biden's response to them because I've been a little confused myself. And I'm curious, Steve, if you have some deep level thoughts on this. So obviously we have just an enormous tragedy with more information coming out each day about the preventableness, perhaps, of a lot of the loss of life, one of the times that Biden was asked about it,

he said no comment. And on the right, this has been used to, you know, do sort of Katrina comparisons and to say that Biden, you know, doesn't get it, to try to undermine sort of Biden as, you know, for one of his strengths, you know, empathy, etc. It is a really weird thing to say no comment when you're asked about a national,

disaster in your country. But so weird that I can't really wrap my head around it as well. Joe Biden has now been to Hawaii. I'm just curious, Steve, does this have any policy impact, political impact, change anything, you know, thoughts in the administration, or is it just the presidents in general are no longer good at these sort of moments? I mean, Trump wasn't. Obviously, George W. Bush did have that Katrina moment that didn't.

go particularly well for him politically. I don't really understand why when this, in some way, seems like the easiest part of the job. Yeah, I don't think it's that presidents in general aren't good at this anymore. I think it's that Joe Biden isn't good at this. I mean, the no-comit thing, two things are true at the same time. Republicans have, they saw an opening with the no-comit question, and they tried to blow it up and make it a bigger deal. undoubtedly true, there was coordinated messaging on it, it became a thing in the way that these

things can become a thing. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't, as you say, sort of cold and odd. I mean, how could you possibly say no comment to a question like that? If you don't want to answer, just walk by. Yeah, you've seen my media training slides, Steve, that I, you know, give whenever I'm sort of teaching people how to do TV. And like literally number one is never say no comment. Right. Just don't comment. Why would you say no comment? For Joe Biden, who's been doing this for hundreds of years, it was a really strange moment. He can't help himself. I think it was a weird moment, and it's certainly, I mean, he certainly lacked empathy in that moment. The stranger moment to me came, and this is again, we've talked here before about the Fox effect, when Fox covers

something or, in many cases, overcovers something. It's a signal. to the rest of the media, not to cover it at all. It's not worth coverage because Fox is covering it. We had this other answer that he gave, where he expressed, he started the answer by saying, look, I'm not trying to draw comparison. And then he talked about this incident in 2004 where lightning struck a pond near his house

and it started a small kitchen park. I mean, you're talking about the devastation of, you know, huge chunks of a time. potentially thousands. Right, there's parents running into the ocean with their children in the hopes of surviving. To save their lives, a thousand plus people potentially burned to death in this thing that is sort of the definition of a catastrophe. And Joe Biden gives this glib answer about a kitchen fire.

This is one of those moments where if that had been George W. Bush, there would have been no other discussion for days but about this comment and about this incident. And it also turns out that he exaggerated his incident, which is part of a long pattern of Joe Biden, either exaggerating or flat out lying about his own personal history. You want to, we don't do a lot of media criticism on this on the show, but you want to talk about one of the things that gave Donald Trump the opening he took to exploit frustration with the media. And one of the reasons that that we have what I think is one of the biggest problems of countries facing is this crisis of noise

where people don't know who to believe or what to believe. It's because of moments like this. That's a real issue. You have to cover this. There's a benefit of the doubt problem with a lot of reporters when they feel some ideological alignment.

Then when one of the people who they're ideologically aligned with says something that is strange, they're willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they couldn't possibly have meant the bad thing. And then when someone who's not ideologically aligned with them says something strange, that's when they run to sort of the worst case.

Well, it must come from a place of racism or come from a place of not caring about poor people or whatever that may be. I mean, I use it in the context of women all the time that something Carly used to tell me, like men walk into the room with credibility. Women walk into the room and need to prove their credibility. It doesn't mean you can. Of course you can.

Just like a lot of the times you will see mainstream media saying really negative things about Democrats or Joe Biden, et cetera, you will. But it's how you walk into the room that is going to affect a lot of this and be really, really frustrating for the people who feel like

this isn't, you're not all starting from the same square. Yes, I, I am, I'm glad Steve you brought up this thing. I was telling my wife the other day, like, you know how it takes time for Saturday Live? when they choose to make fun of politicians

to figure out what the quirk is about someone's character that they're going to make the sort of the lynchpin of the caricature, whether it was like Gore's exaggerations or whatever. This turning everybody else's tragedy into an opportunity to talk about your own thing

is, I think, a real Achilles heel for Biden. And I have a theory about it, which is that he's been doing it for so long when he would talk about losing Bo or losing his family, that, and that could be very affecting when he was more on his game. When he actually talked about grief and the power of grief as a way to empathize with people. But I think he's losing his nuance here. And he just simply goes to talking about himself.

And I think that gets him in. to a really, really bad place because it's actually kind of Trump-like, right? Every issue really has to come back to me. And it's one thing when you're talking about your son dying a brain cancer or your wife

and, you know, dying in a car accident. It's another thing when you're talking about a small fire that singed your garage being like what happened in Maui. And the other thing that I think, just as a political point, I think is weird is it was obvious to me at least

and I'm not usually the one who catches obvious things first that the death toll was going to go much, much, much higher because after a week in a place like Hawaii if you still got nearly a thousand missing people it's because they can't be found. I mean, yeah, you know, like there are some people who live the hobo life in Hawaii, you know, and so there's some drunks and some weirdos,

and some hippies just disappeared in their vans or whatever. But most of those people, new people. Most of those people had family and homes and jobs or whatever. And everyone's checking in on each other. And if you don't make it known where you are a week into this thing where everybody's worried about you and you're worried about everybody else, it means you can't. So that White House had to have known this,

officials in Hawaii had to have known this way in advance of when it started to dawn on the media and everybody else. and yet they slow-rolled this whole thing like it really wasn't that big a deal that Biden didn't need to be there he didn't need to be there long he didn't need to be there soon he didn't need to be up to speed on it

so much so that I think the reason he said no comment is because he didn't know what to say because he didn't know not that you know what to say he didn't actually know the facts of what was going on. That's what I mean and like it's like literally

he just didn't want to freelance something because he didn't know what people were talking about and some of that might be the old age factor, because I think that happens more and more with him, where it's not that he doesn't actually know something, it's that he can't recall it. And as someone who's only 35 years younger than him, I have some sympathy for that. But there are lots of things I know. I just can't find the drawer in the file cabinet in my head anymore. And says the guy who quoted Solzhenitsin earlier in this interview. Okay. There's other things I can find because they're just lying around

all my desk. I mean, I'm not saying, you know, my brain is a rational thing. But, um, And nor is Biden's. But I think on this case, he just, he whiffed it because that was the best possible option for him. And this just, again, bodes really badly for the 2024 campaign. I mean, it's just, it's hard to exaggerate how badly this bodes for things where, you know, it's not like Trump will be generous of spirit if Biden has a senior moment at any point in the campaign. and he's going to have a lot of them. Biden very clearly benefits from Trump

as the context in which Biden lies, right? Because Donald Trump was such an absurdly aggressive liar lying about things large and small, meaningful and meaningless, that by comparison, nobody can be that kind of a liar, really. But, Joni, you mentioned Biden's expression of empathy with respect to the passing of his wife and then later his son, Bo Biden.

But even in his attempts to express empathy in that context, he lies. He keeps lying about how and where Bo Biden died. Bo Biden died of brain cancer at Walter Reed. That's what happened. And three times in the past year, Joe Biden has just flatly asserted that his son died in Iraq

and makes him out to be, or implies that, I mean, he misstates the facts there and implies that he was some kind of a war hero, that he lost his son as a war hero. This is not quite fair, just explanatory, because I don't think it really lets him off the hook. But part of it, my impression of this is that, because he said other things that point to this, he thinks that Bo got brain cancer from the burn pits in Iraq. and so he sees his kid as a victim and essentially a combat victim by proxy of the Iraq war and because his brain skips a lot of steps sometimes it just comes out as and it's not only does his brain skip a lot of steps

I think your part your interpretation is also true which is that he also, his brain goes for the most boastful possible interpretation of the events of his life which is why he was arrested with Nelson Mandela in South Africa. You know, speaking of benefits of the doubt, I would be inclined to accept that explanation, even though he has directly stated without qualification that his son died in Iraq, which didn't happen on Drew, I'd be much more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt if there wasn't a long history of Joe Biden just making stuff up.

Like, just make stuff up. Yeah, I don't agree. We all exaggerate things from time to time. That's human nature. I never exaggerate. I just don't think this is one of those, like the criticism of Joe Biden isn't that he occasionally exaggerates, it's that he makes stuff up. And this incident in particular, I just think if you're a Republican rank and file voter and you've learned about this from Fox, and you've seen the video,

this is not one of those places where it's like, you know, Fox anchors and commentators might have one opinion and liberal people might. You can just watch the video of what he said when he told this story about his house and he understands what they've gone through. It was a really, really bad moment for Joe Biden and it goes virtually uncovered anywhere

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All right. Now we're going to do a little not worth your time for maybe the 10th time on this podcast today. Who knows? Depending on your viewpoint. But Jonah, actually going off something you wrote this week. And it's about the, as far as I know, only law review article to ever be mentioned on a GOP primary stage. This is the article by William Bode and Michael Paulson that actually has not technically been published yet as a law review article, but is certainly making the rounds, arguing that Trump is disqualified from appearing on the ballot

because of the language in the 14th Amendment, Section 3, that he cannot take office, having previously taken an oath to support and defend the Constitution and then participating in or aiding in an insurrection or rebellion. Lots of people have been arguing about it. Larry Tribe and Michael Ludig have come out in agreement that this does bar Trump from appearing on the ballot. David French and I did an entire flagship podcast with special guest Stanford Law Professor

Michael McConnell, he was also a former circuit judge, and which Professor McConnell's like, maybe not as clear as you think. And then Jonah comes in, and it always annoys me when he does this, which is makes it a broader, more important point that everyone else is missing, and it's so well written and deeply frustrating to me.

So I'm going to read part of it. And then we're going to talk about whether this 14th Amendment argument is worth our time, briefly. So here's Jonah's point. Intellectuals love ideas and systems. By the way, I love that I'm going to do the dramatic reading of Jonah's own writing instead of

letting Jonah doing. Yeah. No, I prefer. Can I tell you what a disappointing and surprising turn this took? You start the segment by saying, not worth your time. I want to talk about something Jonah wrote. And I'm so excited. Like, this is perfect. And now you're praising

him and you're doing dramatic readings of him. And for those of you who can't see what Jonah's doing, he's doing the hand gesture, like, keep it coming, keep it coming. He's also blushing a little. Terrible. Yeah. All right. Maybe if Steve wrote something from time to time, it might just be

morning scotch. Yeah, he is drinking out of a mug where we cannot identify the color of the liquid in it. Oh, there's two. There's two vessels. All right. Intellectuals love ideas and systems. Lawyers not only love them, they make a living

off of them. So it's not surprising and many lawyers and intellectuals gravitate towards arguments that boil down to word magic. They want a silver bullet idea to solve problems that take things out of our hands, or the hands of voters. I'd love to live in a country where the average American simply agreed with Bowden Paulson's conclusions, not as a legal theory, but as common sense. In such a country, Trump would never have been elected in the first place. But that's not the country we live in.

And the country we live in, now and forever, the Constitution limits people in power only because the people in power agree to its limits and because the rest of us enforce that agreement. So I have two questions for you, Jonah. One, am I going to be the voiceover for your next book? And two, yeah, so then does this argument matter at all? If it's not quote unquote self-enforcing, and there's people who are arguing that it is

by which they simply mean that everyone can enforce it, they don't mean it's not self-enforcing, which is sort of funny because they're saying, it is self-enforcing. Everyone can enforce it. Well, that means it's not self-enforcing. Is this argument... It's like jumbo shrimp.

Is this 14th Amendment argument worth our time if we're just... It's kicking a can to a different road. So I'm torn about this. I think it's... Intellectually, I think it's worth our time. I thought, you know,

like the conversation you guys had on A.O., you know, on your banner boat podcast, was really interesting. And I find the arguments really interesting. But as a political matter, I do think the thing is just entirely a dead letter because it's like everybody out there wants to say, look, I don't have an opinion about this one way or the other

or I can see both sides. But the law says we have to do this. So I'm going to go with that. They don't want to actually own any of these decisions. And you saw this with Asa Hutchinson in the debate last night. where he brings up this thing as if this will solve my problem. And he was courageous compared to the others. But there's this idea that I don't want to actually own this decision.

I don't want to own my own judgment. I don't want to be responsible for the consequences of how I see the world. So I'm going to invoke the law or the Constitution as a way to absolve me from the consequences of anything. And that's just not how it's going to work. You can persuade Donald Trump that these guys are a thousand percent right about what the Constitution requires. He's still going to run, right? This gets back to my problem with the way legal punditry took over the impeachment stuff, where we tried to turn impeachment into the standards and practices of criminal law as a way to exonerate or absolve or alleviate.

senators from actually having to do their fricking jobs and make serious decisions based on on questions of statesmanship and politics rather than on criminal due process procedures, which is what not what impeachment is supposed to be. And so I think

it's unbelievable to watch Nicole Wallace and that crowd on MSNBC talk about this thing as if this is going to solve everything. Like this is it, guys. We feel figured it out. We found it, yeah. Yeah, it's the, it's, we didn't know that you had to, you know, offer the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the

chancement spell in ancient Celtic. But now that we can say it in those terms, Trump will go away, right? And, it's all nonsense. So I have not read the article in question or studied in any kind of a serious way the case that they've made. And certainly not listen to the podcast. I know that for sure. Which podcast? Yeah. You know we mention you like frequently now, just to test whether you're listening. Well, I don't think that's going to work. Now I'm not going to tell you that I'm listening when I actually listen. You won't be able to help it. We put in such good bait. We'll know. Your episode in Spanish wine was actually interesting.

It was the first time I was actually interested in the topic. I knew about that one. I got a note from Sean Spicer. I haven't looked at the sort of the merits of the case. But I think just from a, let me benefit from my own ignorance. If this were the open and shut argument that people like Nicole Wallace, and others are pretending it is, we would have heard about it three years ago, right?

I mean, why is it just happening now? If this was sort of sitting there in plain view and it was so convincing, presumably we would have heard about this a long time ago, you would have seen people advancing this argument more than we have in recent memory. I think that it's a convenient way for those who don't want Donald Trump

to be the Republican nominee and potentially the president again, to make that case. I don't think they're likely to have much success with it. All right. And with that comes the conclusion of this exciting episode of the Dispatch podcast with Jonah, Steve.

And thanks to our special guest, Audrey Falberg, for coming in hot off the spin room. Yeah, I will make sure to let everyone know when things happen over here in this household. We're definitely on the final countdown here. Still struggling to find a name. I will tell you that husband of the pod last night, maybe it was just the debate. I don't know. He came around to my idea from a month ago about

naming the kid Stone Cole Keller. So we'll see. Could be really going anywhere at this point. But thank you all for all of your kind notes and support and prayers. I feel like I'm very warm and fuzzy. It doesn't really just tract from how much I couldn't drink during the debate or how uncomfortable it is to try to sleep. But nevertheless, it's really kind. So I will see you all in, you know, about a month. And while I'm gone, try to keep these guys in check.

Just best you can. Anything you can do. Really, Steve, I'm thinking about Steve here. And talk to you soon. Good luck. Don't. We have impressionable young staffers here. He hadn't that record yet. I checked. You have no proof.