The Dispatch Podcast - The Decline of Donald Trump

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and Mike Warren to discuss Donald Trump's interview with Kristen Welker and the latest developments in the Iran war. The Agenda: —Trump's Meet the Press interview —Election integrity claims —California vote counting —Trump and Netanyahu —Negotiating with Iran —Reporting on the president —NWYT: Tip creep Show notes: —Kevin on Trump's character—Steve on DOGE and deregulation The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including audio versions of all our articles and newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss Donald Trump's disturbing interview with Christian Welker on Meet the Press. And we'll debate the question, is Donald Trump in decline where is the same guy who ran for President 2016? Then we'll take a look at the strained relationship between the U.S. and Israel with the president telling reporters that Israel should not respond to Iranian missile strikes and that he wants to resume negotiations over an end to the war. Finally, we're not with your time tipping. What's with the constant invitations to tip everywhere, all the time? And is there a boomerang effect where tipping fatigue leads to lower tips for the people who do the kind of work that really does deserve tips? I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues, Jonah Goldberg, Mike Warren, and Kevin Williamson.

Let's dive in. Okay, gentlemen, I want to start with an interview that Donald Trump gave to Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. Sunday morning. It was, I would say, a disturbing interview, much discussed in the immediate aftermath of its airing. And while we're not going to play the whole thing, I do want to play a chunk of it to remind you what we have seen

and to give our listeners a sense of how the interview unfolded. I will say before this clip that we're going to play, Kristen Welker asked the president about the, $1.776 billion slush fund that was to pay people who were allegedly wronged by the U.S. government that was thought to have been killed last week, then it was potentially resurrected, then it was killed again by the Department of Justice itself. Kristen asked the president about that. He said he loved the slush fund.

Not everybody loved the slush fund, but he really did love it. And then there was this exchange. Do you think anyone who attack police officers on January 6th should get taxpayer money? I wouldn't be inclined to say so, but I have to see it. I can tell you this, 97% of those people, you look at them, the FBI or whoever it was, because you had a lot of crooked cops, you had dirty cops. Comey was a dirty cop. A guy like Bolton was a dirty cop.

Wait a minute, wait a minute. Oh, you think Colby was a dirty cop. People who treated guilty to assaulting police officers. Call me was a dirty cop. No, no, but they had FBI, listen to me. They had FBI agents ushering them into the building. They had FBI go into the building. Those people walking around, they're looking, oh, isn't this night.

They weren't in, they were being ushered into the building. There's no evidence of you. You had a bunch of dirty cops. And frankly, what they did was weaponization of our government. But, sir, there's no evidence of that, more than a thousand people. No, well, yeah, no, there's none. You know what you do? Try looking at the tapes one time.

Would you take it off the table? Look at the tapes one time. But 172 people did plead guilty to assaulting police officers. You know why they pled guilty? Because they told they were going to jail for 15 years if they didn't. Should they? They pled guilty because they were frightened. They went down.

They were ushered into a building. Many of them were arrested without even doing it to the building. So you'd be okay with them receiving taxpayer dollars? The people were destroyed by dirty cops and by weaponry. Many of those people should be compensated. Now, with that being said, as I understand it, the weaponization fund was going to set up a group of people, people that could be picked by anybody, fair people, smart people, and they will go on an individual case basis. Okay. Now, I don't know what's going to happen with the weaponization fund.

I love the idea, because people like you, the fake, dirty press, Dirty press the crooked press people like stupid Biden he's not smart enough to know what's going on but people that surrounded him Surrounded his beautiful resolute desk in the Oval Office What they did to the lives of people they destroyed people they sent people to jail who did nothing wrong Just it just be very clear. There's no evidence of what you're saying but there's a lot of evidence Let me listen to me listen to me. Let's talk about Todd Blanche. There's tremendous evidence is nothing but evidence The election was rigged. It was a dirty election.

And it's happening again right now in California. It's happening right now in California. Right now it's looking, look at what's happening in California. It's four days. In California, it's, no, they're not there. They're dropping fast because it's a rigged election. Let me tell you, it's four days and they aren't even close to coming up with them. You know why they're doing that?

Because they're cheating on the election. Do you have evidence? To support that? All I have to do is look. All I have to do is look. But that's not evidence. And I listen to people and let's see what happens. But, sir, that's not evidence.

Do you think it's appropriate that they count the votes in the House? Do you think it's appropriate that they have an election and five days later they're nowhere close to pick it? Sting local officials acknowledge they are slow. They're urging. No, they're crooked. They're crooked. They're crooked. That's how they're in California.

They're crooked. You're crooked. And meet the press is crooked. To be fair, I'm not crooked. Really? play right into their hands in. Let's continue. You're either crooked or you're stupid.

You play right into their hands with a scrap. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they're rigged. You know that I won an election in a landslide, and I got 94% bad press. You know why I got that? Because you have no credibility. But you've never presented evidence that it was rigged.

Let's keep talking about, I want to talk about Todd. You have more evidence. There's more evidence than ever presented. Let's talk about... Your elections in this country, we're like a third world country. Your elections are crooked and you're crooked and meet the press is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. But Mr. President...

You're one-sided crooked networks. So, let's call it quits because I've had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time. Mr. President, let's please, I traveled all the way to Wisconsin. I've stopped the rain with you. I know. I've sat around with you for an hour.

On and off in the rain and I've given you enough time. You ought to straighten out your press because you know what? A country can never be great with a dishonest. Listen, we traveled all the way to Wisconsin for the cinema. Well, Jonah, your reaction. Gold. Well, first of all, let's be clear, I think the funniest part of all of it, the rest of it's not that funny.

It's kind of sad and pathetic. But the funniest part of it is the way she just kept saying, I traveled all the way to Wisconsin. Like, that's Timbuk, too. But, no, look, I'm not the biggest fan of Kristen Welker, but I think she did as good a job as you're going to get at someone in that situation. It's funny, there was a lot of sort of anti-anty-Trump criticism of Welker by basically saying, well, why is she bringing this up?

You know, why do we have to talk about the 2020 to stolen election stuff? And the thing is, he's bringing it up, right? He's the one who thinks it's a live issue. He's the one who just appointed the head of the directed of national intelligence where he said the only thing he wanted to do while there was to look into the stolen election stuff and get to the bottom of all of that. He is setting policy based on this lie. That's what the point of the 1776, you know, slush fund was predicated on this lie.

And I think just as a matter of calm stuff, it's kind of fascinating and, quite a tell. And I think it's actually a failure of Welker, but also a lot of other journalists, because we've been down this road a bunch of times with Trump, he keeps saying people's lives were destroyed. Like, give us a name. Who? Who is your poster boy? Who is like the signature victim of the justice department, of the justice system that, which by the way was his justice department at the time, right? And he talks about this, like how the FBI, you know, staged all of this, if that were remotely true, that means that he went all four years as president with the FBI desperate to set him up with 14 days left to his presidency, which is, you know,

is, I mean, it's a very minor point, but it just adds to the stupidity of the conspiracy theory point. But, you know, these guys, they're great at coming up with all these meat props at the state of the union address, so-and-so, you know, stub their toe on a woke textbook, you know, that kind of stuff. They're great at doing this door-dasher just happens to be getting through all of security coming by the White House to deliver lunch to talk about no tax on tips, but they can't name one person who is their absolute like horse vessel, martyr, you know, innocent. Here, frankly, my own opinion is I actually don't think this fund was ever really about the January

six people. It was about him having another unaccountable source of political power, and it wouldn't shock me, given the way he talks about it and how badly treated he was, it wouldn't shock me if he had actually gotten the 1776 fund that the handpicked board that was going to figure this out, the Kennedy Senator board, decide, you know who the biggest victim was? Donald Trump and give him a huge slice of cash.

So, I mean, it shows you how derange the guy still is. It shows you how much this drives his thinking about domestic policy and how to run the government. And people should be disturbed by it. So, Kevin, I'm an NBC news political analyst. I appear on Meet the Press. Like Kristen, I do think she handled herself very well there. I don't think that was a shot at my beloved native Wisconsin.

But I think if the job of a show like Meet the Press and the moderator of the show, the person interviewing in this case, the president is to show people sort of what he's thinking and how his mind works. in many ways this was a very successful interview because I think we all saw through the core of what Donald Trump is today. Kevin, there's been sort of a long-running debate in Washington, in the country, certainly among Trump skeptics. And it roughly falls like this.

I was involved in a debate like this just a few weeks ago with some people who cover the White House. Is what we're seeing from Donald Trump in this interview and at other times, sign of his decline, his deterioration, is he getting worse? Or is this the Donald Trump that we have always seen? And it's just another example of the kinds of things that we saw, you know, as early as his 2015-2016 presidential campaign. Do you have a view on that? Well, you know, my longstanding, off-repeated view of the easiest explanation for this stuff when it comes to Donald Trump is he's just, he's not real smart.

And what we're seeing, I think, is the race to the bottom between his moral decline and his intellectual decline. And right now the intellectual decline is kind of taking a lead because the moral decline was so far ahead that it got kind of lazy, I guess, and thought no one could catch up to it. But intellectual decline is working its way closer in the race. But this doesn't seem that different to me. This is the guy he's been, as you say, in 2015, 2016. This is the guy he was in the 1990s and even the late 1980s. This kind of, you know, blustering, superficial, kind of bully my way through the conversation. guy on a bar stool except for the fact that he doesn't drink kind of character that he's always been.

You know, something I wrote last week that I think maybe is appropriate here is that Donald Trump has made the presidency worse and he's made American political life worse. But the presidency's also made him worse and American political life has also made him worse. It's brought out tendencies that he already had to be that sort of, you know, bullying, hectoring kind of superficial sort of person. And now he's surrounded by people day and night telling him he's the most important person in the universe. and he is one of the most important men in the world, weirdly enough. And that has made his vanity and his benality and his susceptibility to flattery and that kind of thing

just a million times worse than it was when he was just a businessman or a guy who had a reality television show and that stuff. So he's been declining in both of those senses, I think. You know, he really reminds me of, though, is, I mean, he's going to be 80, what, in a couple of weeks? His birthday coming up, it's in the summer, isn't it? Flag day, six days. Oh, dear Lord.

I mean, we've all had relatives. like this, right? You know, and I remember I having conversations a million years ago with a guy who was old and wasn't very bright and he was under the impression that Judaism was a branch of Christianity and was talking about this thing. And I said, you have to understand.

That's, I mean, the basic difference between the two religions is, like, their position about Jesus, one of them believes that he was the, you know, Messiah and one of them does, and that's like the whole difference. And he got like fighting mad. Like I had insulted this thing that everybody knew and everybody understand. And I was like, you could, if you could

read, you could go home and look it up in your encyclopedia, because this was a long time ago, back when people still had encyclopedias at homes. But you do meet people like this who are just so unused to being challenged on preposterous kinds of ideas that when someone does push back on them, and if you're sitting down with Meet the Press, you are going to get some questions. He fakes so much in life, but his sense of grievance and offense at these sorts of things is legitimate. He's not acting on that stuff. He really is genuinely, I think, offended that people question him and really aggrieved by this, which doesn't, of course, speak very well of him. But yeah, I mean, he was a dangerous, delusional dimwit before he was elected.

And we knew it the last time around. We knew it this time around. And he's not going to stop being that. He's not going to get better. I mean, most people don't get much better in their lives after 50. Most people sure as hell don't get better after 75 or 78. He's not going to suddenly, you know, turn into Cicero on the eve of his 80th birthday after being, you know, the pro wrestling and pornography guy.

Mike, Kevin just basically summarized what my view has been on Donald Trump for more than a decade, that he is who he is, he's for the same guy, and what we see when we see these outbursts, we have these moments, where there are these controversies, or cooks up a new conspiracy, is basically just Donald Trump being Donald Trump, nothing knew, nothing worse. I have to say, and as I said, I had this discussion, this debate with people who cover the White House on the regular, this is like less than a month ago. And that was the view I articulated in that conversation. And some of those people were saying,

nah, I think this is different. I think this is new. And I think it's worse. I have to say, I'm after watching that interview and watching, in particular, the level of his anger and frustration, you know, he sometimes does treat these things as if they're all a joke. You know, the people who are so critical of him, in their reporting, he comes in and gives him a pat on the back and puts his arm around them.

And he treats it like it's professional wrestling. Right. And this is all part of the act. That didn't seem like an act to me. He seemed very angry. And you can sort of see it in his face for people who are watching the interview on NBC or who saw it when we just played it on YouTube. And if you put that sort of as the last of several other examples from just this past week,

he had this outburst against CNN's Caitlin Collins in the Oval Office, where, again, not the first time the president's been nasty to a female journalist, but really seemed sort of angry about it. And then, of course, there was the widely reported fight that he had with Benjamin Netanyahu, a longtime close ally of the president who praises Donald Trump in public every time he can. Trump was reported to have, you know, laced Netanyahu with this angry, expletive-laden tirade. about screwing up the potential for peace and on and on. Trump people initially denied that. The president himself confirmed that he did go after Nanyahu this way. It does, to me, feel like this is a guy who's increasingly just losing his grip. Yeah, I watched the entire interview, which is pretty long.

And obviously what we just played four and a half minutes of it is the final section of it. So, I mean, there's a risk of over-analyzing, you know, like NFL tape, like too much of this. But I had a lot of thoughts after watching what seemed like roughly 40 minutes of for the Trump era kind of almost a normal meet the press interview with the president of the United States. There was, you know, taking things that the president had said and putting it up against his record or putting it up against the things that are happening. happening now in his administration. And there was pushback. There was back and forth. It was, you know, Donald Trump saying, I never promised no wars. Of course, he did. I mean, he did it sort of implicitly and explicitly during his 2024 campaign. And so Kristen Welker pushed back on him on that, asked him questions about this Iran war. But it had this almost this, it had the cadence of a

normal interview. And if what you played showed this moment where, to use, like a word that we used a lot in the woke era. Like there was like a triggering moment for Donald Trump when she started to ask about, right, you know, there were people who could have received money from this fund who, you know, assaulted police officers. And at that moment, there was like a switch that you could see go off in the president's head where he began to kind of associate, okay, cops on January 6th, we're talking about dirty cops.

These weren't legitimate cops. They're dirty cops. And you know, who's the dirtiest was James Comey, right? Like, all of a sudden, he brings James Comey into the conversation. And, yeah, he was the, at that point, former FBI director on January 6th. James Comey was fired in May of 2017. No, this is, I mean, this is exactly my point. I don't mean to interrupt you.

But, like, this is almost four years hence. If Joe Biden had said that and invoked James Comey's name, call him a dirty cop, and used him to talk about the dirty cops that were there on January 6th, we all would have had this moment where we said, Joe Biden's losing it. And I'm thinking about this because I went back and I reread some of the things that Joe Biden had said in the interview that he gave to Robert Her,

who was the special prosecutor. And he mixed up all these dates and he didn't know when he was vice president. And it was, it's exactly the same as what we just saw from Donald Trump, that he's bringing up James Comey to talk about dirty cops on January 6th. It makes no sense. But I will leave it to the psychologists to, like, determine, you know, what sort of cognitive problems the president may or may not be having.

But in terms of what substance kind of triggers these moments, I mean, it all comes back to January 6th and the weaponization of government against Trump. Like, that's how he sees James Comey, the dirty cops on January 6th, the way that the Biden administration went after his guys. Like, it's all the same to him and it all makes him mad. And so, again, just if you listen to those four and a half minutes that you played at the top of the show here, it is a sort of deterioration of his own kind of composure. And he's getting angrier and angrier.

And you're right. Like, I think Jonah pointed out that it was Trump who brought up the 2020 election and they're stealing it again. because it's all rigged, it's all rigged against me and my people. There's like a word association thing happening here, and he can't be stopped once he's on that kind of tear, once he's kind of, you know, playing all the hits. And I think it's instructive, not just to hear those four and a half minutes in context,

but to hear it in the context of that entire interview, you can kind of see where the grip on reality, the ability for even someone who's, like, angry about, perceived attacks on him, he's sort of unable to hold himself back and direct the interview in a way that helps him or gets it back on his message in the way he did earlier in the interview.

I think that four and a half minutes tells you kind of everything you need to know whether or not it's a cognitive problem or it's just he's an obsessive person on this issue. It tells you everything you need to know about how he is approaching the job at the moment. And yes, It's telling us stuff we already knew, but it's good for people to be reminded because unlike us,

people forget these kinds of things, and it's good to have it in front of them and be sort of confronted with that. Jonah, he mentioned, the president mentioned, the California vote counting, which has been a story over the past several days. On election night, Republicans in both the L.A. mayor's race and in the California governor's race, looked like they were doing pretty well. sort of overperformed expectations. There was likelihood that they would be in these runoffs, California, the way they do their elections, has sort of a jungle primary and then narrows down to two candidates for the general election.

Word came last night that Spencer Pratt, this reality TV star who had done very well in the first round of voting and was thought to be likely headed to the recount or to the general, had been overtaken by another member of Progressive Democrat, and this has given rise to all sorts of conspiracies on the right that they are tanking Spencer Pratt's candidacy and elevating this progressive because California's corrupt. That's what the president gave voice to yesterday. Is he right?

Well, California's got some corruption problems, but I don't think that's what's going on here. Just for level-setting, people don't understand it, like, Spencer Pratt wildly overperformed for a Republican and ran an interesting race on issues that I credit him for and all that. But L.A. City is bluer than L.A. County. And L.A. County is bluer than the rest of California, with maybe exceptions and pockets in the Bay Area or something like that, right? So the registered Republicans are something around two and ten people in L.A. So he would have to have, you know, three out of five of his voters would have to be people crossing the partisan line for him.

And that's just really a steep climb. And so we shouldn't be shocked that the Republican guy did not win a runoff in L.A. even if we liked his social media advertising. That said, the way California counts its ballots is outrageous. It is one of these things. like for decades, there were stories about how Jaguars broke down. In fact, it became one of these things that, like, Jaguar owners thought, it was kind of like a kind of conspicuous consumption. How much have you spent on your brand new car for repairs this year? You know, that kind of thing.

And they never fixed it. And it was just bizarre to me. And that's like California with its vote counts. You know, I had a friend actually who, when he was out of college, he had a painting company in the Bay Area. And their jockey motto was, we may be slow, but we're expensive. And that seems to be sort of the motto of almost the entire public sector of California, whether it's high-speed rail or anything else. And so in that context, when you are already believing long election periods, which I think are problematic, right? I like election days or election weeks kind of thing.

I think deadlines focus the mind. There are all sorts of problems with these rolling, mail-in-battling, all these kinds of things. But the problem with them isn't that they are sources of stolen elections. The problem with them is that they're bad for civic virtue, they're bad for certainty, they're bad because they create people wasting their votes by voting too early before events change.

There are all sorts of problems with it. But you have to add in another one, which is in an era where you have, led by the President of the United States, tens of millions of people who believe in conspiracy theories about elections and election fraud and election theft, and all that kind of stuff, if you're going to take a week, two weeks to count votes,

you're going to invite this kind of stuff from the President of the United States. And, you know, there is a very quaint argument that this is unstatesman-like from Trump. There is an obligation among elected leaders to maintain confidence in the system and not to speak irresponsibly, but those days are long, long gone.

And so I'm not shocked at all. California should be ashamed of itself that it can't do this better. I think Gavin Newsom saying, why do people have a problem with counting every vote, is such intellectually dishonest garbage. Like, Florida cares about counting every vote. They just count them really quickly. California doesn't do it. Again, I don't think it's because they're stealing votes.

I think it's because they suck. But, like, they kind of deserve some of this, knowing what this climate is like. And it doesn't mean it's good for anybody. It doesn't mean anyone's a hero year. but, man, it's annoying. Yeah, it's frustrating, and I think it does, as you say, it creates fertile ground for these kinds of conspiracies.

It should be said that, as you pointed out, nobody's surprised that the Democrats would have done better in the post-election day count. And there were trends pointing to greater participation by Democrats as the voting went on. That said, it does create an environment where people who are, you know, more responsible than Donald Trump are leaning into questions about this. Ron DeSantis, Florida

governor, as you say, Jonah, they count their votes pretty quickly and pretty efficiently in Florida. Ron DeSantis tweeted on June the 3rd, California keeps dumping votes. Odds are shifting because the vote dumps always seem to go one way. Count until you get the result you want, question mark. You know, this is Ron DeSantis. And maybe it's just DeSantis deciding that Donald Trump has done well as a conspiracy theorist. He might as well join, too. But you get more and more people saying things like this, and you begin to have a real crisis in the confidence in our elections. You know, it's probably worth noting for context that there are European countries in which they will announce that they're going to have an election,

have the campaign, count the votes, and have the election over in a month. And California says it needs a month to count the votes after the campaign. That's bananas. Malta's not a huge country, but they just had an election. There's 33 days that passed between announcing the SNAP elections and the results being in. And, you know, California, which I hear has a lot of tech businesses, and they like to do things that involve information management. You think that state could figure out a way to tabulate some records for a system that has been in place since like the 18th century, you know, a process of voting. I'm not in California, But, you know, in general, this kind of go to the ballot box, make your preference known,

tally them up, decide who won. It's not like we're breaking new ground here with some kind of, you know, theoretical mathematics that has to be done. It's just arithmetic. You think they'd be able to do that. California, I think Jonah's right that they take their underperformance as a kind of badge of courage. It's sort of look how exceptional we are. We're special.

We're California. We can do things whatever way we want to. And, yeah, they're on their way to being a very large Rhode Island, which is not where you want to be. Kevin, how concerns should we be, given what the president is saying here, given sort of rising concerns expressed by sitting Republicans, Republican rank and file voters about election integrity, election security, given the fact that the president once again claimed in his interview with Kristen Welker that he won 2020 in a landslide, that it was stolen. You know, he has, as we have pointed out here before, dispatched the federal law enforcement to Arizona, to Georgia. and elsewhere to seize ballots, looking backwards, the MAGA world has systematically and methodically moved across the country,

focusing particularly on swing states, working to get its own adherence into positions of power in running state and local elections. We saw in the lead up to in the aftermath of the 2020 elections, Donald Trump claiming it was rigged, trying to, you know, making the argument the election was stolen from, him doing everything you could to mess with the certification of the votes, how concerned should we be about election security and election integrity in 2026? He's made it very clear he doesn't want to

lose the midterms. Yeah, about DefCon too, I think. You know, there's a very, very high probability that they will do something to try to nullify the results of the election or to monkey with them going in one way or the other. No, this is going to be a problem. It's going to be a problem in the midterms. It's going to be a problem next presidential election. I still don't something who's a 50-50 chance the guy doesn't voluntarily leave office. And, you know, he claims something about, well, there's an emergency or this, that, or the other, or it's not fair that my first term got so, you know, interfered with. So I'm going to take a mulligan and give myself another one. Yeah, we're going to have to fight this stuff. It's going to be a real mess. And it's going to ultimately,

it's not just going to lead to a perception that our elections are less trustworthy. It's actually going to make them less trustworthy by making the procedure and the incident. institutions less worthy of trust because of how they're managed and the people who are in charge of them. So never mind the perceptions and the confidence, the actual underlying facts are going to get worse as well. And I don't see an easy way to fix that. And if anyone's got any real good ideas, I would love to hear them. So one of the things you do here, not, I have no solutions. That's not why I'm here. But one of the things you do here is that this is all preparatory to Trump being able to say the Democrats illegitimately took Congress back. and therefore I don't have to abide by what Congress wants me to do,

and he'll just have a sort of Napoleon III kind of presidency for his last couple years or whatever. I'm not saying I buy that, but that's one of the arguments that you're starting to hear people. It is far from implausible, I would say. It's definitely not a zero likelihood, and it doesn't have to go all that way, right? It can just simply be rhetorical flourish that kind of got set in so that when you do defy Congress, or you do refuse to go along with something that Congress says or refuse to cooperate with an impeachment inquiry, your supporters have that talking point. Well, this isn't actually a legitimate Congress in the first place. So why should they actually, you know, send people for these hearings, which are fake anyway?

You know, you could see that even if it's not a full-blown constitutional crisis. you can see it politically being the narrative that justifies letting the administration do whatever the hell it wants. Yeah. By the way, is they a dedicated listener to all dispatch-oriented and branded podcasts, I love how Jonah has been telescoping that he's going to make his next Woodrow Wilson, Napoleon the Third. You're paying very close attention. I've heard more about Napoleon the third in the last couple of months on Dispatch Podcasts. Well, so part of, I'll just, I'll tell you why, right?

It's like, I know why. All right. Because I listen to your podcast. But no, people can tell everyone else, please. All right. So the phrase Caesarism, which I spent, you know, from my first book onward, for 20 years, I've been reading stuff about accusations of Caesarism in American politics. And I always, for completely legitimate, I think, understandable reasons, assumed people were talking about Julius Caesar. And they kind of, they are to a certain extent, right?

Or Augustus or whatever, but like one of the Cesar's. But it turns out that word did not exist. Caesarism as a term did not exist until Napoleon III. Because what Napoleon III did was he practiced illiberal democracy. He's basically the archetype for it where he would do these referenda and plebiscites to get the nominal support of the people as a way to then unilaterally rule without any checks and balances of any kind. And it was called, and sort of like with Caesar going to the, you know, going to the plebs,

this is where the term Caesarism enters political discourse. It really didn't exist. Because why would you talk about Caesarism in the age of the divine right of kings, where everybody thinks they're a Caesar, you know? It's only in you start having democracy and liberalism that people see it as a throwback. And I think that this is sort of Trump's, it's, the populist approach to everything. I speak for the people. I don't need these formal institutions and processes like elections.

to be the authentic leader of the people, for I have a deeper organic connection with the people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And to the extent that that's papered over with BS sort of indicia of democratic support, that's called Caesarism and enters the discourse with Napoleon III. I think that's really interesting.

But points for paying attention. Vox populi, Vox Dei. That's right. Can I say, as a word of caution, about assuming that there's a plan here, look, maybe there are people within the Trump political operation who are thinking about these things

ahead of time. But a lot of this is attributable gestures of Donald Trump and the kind of the gut of Trump. He doesn't trust elections in which Republicans don't win. And so he then therefore constructs an explanation

for that that I think is fed by existing and I would say long existing, even pre-existing Trump kind of populist conservative ideas about what's really happening in elections in California or in elections where the sort of the red mirage phenomenon where you have in states with mail-in ballots, you have this magic dumping of a bunch of blue ballots because Democrats in many states, not all states, prefer to vote by mail as opposed to Republicans who generally are sort of more inclined

to vote on election day, and so their votes end up getting counted earlier. Like, he is, in many ways, feeding off of that and reacting to it and sort of building kind of a view on this that may well be used for tasks that you guys have been discussing about sort of casting the 2026 midterms as illegitimate. And I see what Ronda Santis is doing is, in many ways, it's just, it's an echo of the Facebook comment on this stuff, right? that's reactive and that's sort of reflective of what the people on social media that they are sort of getting their, taking their points, you know, taking signs and signals from.

That is what Trump has sort of done with populism on these kind of election issues. It's just listening to what the people, his people are saying, and Rhonda Santis is doing the same thing and projecting that out, not talking back to them and saying, no, it's, we have problems, trying to add nuance. There ain't no room for nuance on these sorts of things. And that's a problem. When people talk about Trump

and grand plans, I always picture in my head, Heath Ledger wearing Joker makeup in a traditional nurse's outfit saying, do I look like a guy with the plan? No, but I think DeSantis has been a pretty effective governor. It's outrageous for him to do this

because he actually knows how all this stuff works. Yes. Right? And second, the most telling, per year sort of this is just a face, book, it's comment at scale kind of thing. The most telling, revealing line from Trump's thing with Welker is when she says, what evidence do you have? And he says, all I have to do is look at it.

Just look. Yeah, that's right. And there's this old rule of thumb that if you don't know how something works, it's very easy to believe there's a conspiracy. And Trump, first of all, doesn't know how a lot of things work. I'm sorry, he still doesn't. And second, he relies on the people who think he knows how things really work, who have that same sort of gut impression, and he feeds into that. But we talk about DeSantis, like he's, you know, the morally culpable one. And by implication, you know, Trump is this guy who's had some sort of head injury or something. We talk about the president of the United States as though he's not a morally culpable

person because he's like just not up to it because he's so useless and essentially, you know, disabled. No, I agree. Yeah, I hate falling into that. It's like the old Dan Dresner thing about the toddler in chief. People cut him slack that they wouldn't come for their next-door neighbor, you know? Yeah. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast.

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com. For a limited time, listeners can get $35 off their best-selling Carver Matframe with the code dispatch. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com. Promocode dispatch. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. So I disagree with you guys on this. I mean, I think it's almost always the right explanation, or you can start with the default explanation being that this is just Trump being Trump, that these are ad hoc comments, that he's just mouthing off, that this might be a reflection of what he sees on social media. All of that is true. I think, though, that's more applicable to Donald Trump in the first term, that it is to Donald Trump in the second term. And we've seen

in other areas where Donald Trump has learned the lessons of the first term, or maybe more importantly or more accurately, the people around him have learned the lessons of the first term and applied them to the second term so that they can be more effective. And, you know, I wrote a piece at the beginning of the administration on how his team had learned from their efforts on deregulation in the first term to try to apply it to what they were doing on Doge. Now, it doesn't mean that Doge was effective. I think Doge failed for all the reasons that it was obvious at the time. Doge was going to fail. And in some ways gave people a greater sense of security, a false sense of security on our fiscal situation, even as they talked about fiscal responsibility.

But that doesn't mean that they didn't learn from it and create a plan. And I think that's what we're seeing here. We're seeing with the proliferation of MAGA people taking up these positions in state and local elections, this is a plan. It may not be a Trump directed plan. I don't have any. I'm under no illusion that Trump himself is sitting in these meetings and deciding who's going to do what. But I think they're taking their cues from him. he was so frustrated in 2020 that he couldn't come up with a way to do the things that he wanted to do,

that he's learned that lesson, and that they're now implementing that some might be a close approximation of a plan, or concepts of a plan, as the president might himself put it. We need to turn quickly to... Before we do that, we should close out real quick on this conversation just by reminding the audience, listening to this, that everyone on this panel is a seasoned journalist who has at one point in his career of travel. all the way to Wisconsin. I like to travel to Wisconsin. There was other news just Sunday.

It's interesting. We talked amongst ourselves before we decided on topics for this panel. And I was attempting to do a panel that was going to largely avoid talking about Donald Trump. This is a balance that we try to strike. This is the most sort of on the news product along with the morning dispatch puts out. But then you decided we couldn't do the hello fresh. thing. Well, we couldn't, we couldn't. There was, there were a lot of things that I think were in contention.

And then the president gave this interview yesterday. And there was also actual news on Iran, again, driven by Donald Trump. And I think it's worth spending a moment on that. We saw yesterday that Iran launched missile strikes against Israel. Within a short period of time after those strikes were initially, reported, the President of the United States was on the phone with several journalists. By my count, he spoke to four. Maybe he spoke to more of them, but gave comment about those missile strikes and what he was going to tell Benjamin Netanyahu before, apparently, he told this to Benjamin Netanyahu. And what he was going to tell Benjamin Netanyahu was, Israel should not strike back. He told Fox News, Trey Yinks, a terrific Middle East reporter for Fox News, spoke to the president. He said to the president,

the president said, everybody should sit back. There was going to be a deal early this week. He was all ready to sign it, and this is going to screw things up. He told Barack Ravid of Axios that he was going to call Benjamin Netanyahu and tell him not to retaliate, which is a pretty incredible thing to tell a journalist. And I think really boxed Israel in or the potential to really box Israel in and at the very least had potentially some effect on what Israel was likely to do in terms of future deterrence. Kevin, I'll start with you on this. Is this something we've seen before where a president is talking to journalists in the middle of these events unfolding and telling them what he's going to do before having these consultations, apparently with his own

national security advisors and certainly with the allies. It strikes me as very new, maybe unprecedented, used as that word is, but you follow this stuff closely. Have we seen this before? I think that the theme for Trump for the last couple of weeks has been that things seem to be slipping beyond his control. You know, gasoline prices are beyond his control. Israeli reactions are beyond his control. The Iran war is beyond his control. Even a few slippery congressional Republicans have not gone along with things. And remember, Trump's style of management as president has always been just to state his preferences, typically on social media

and then end it with, you know, thank you for your attention to this matter. He may as well have tweeted it, Netanyahu, and thank you for your attention to this matter, Bibi. You know, Trump, for all of his talk of, you know, being the grand negotiator and all that sense, it's never actually been very good at this sort of thing. And he likes to talk to journalists,

which is great for the few journalists that he likes to talk to. But he doesn't do much of the rest of the job. And, you know, if the guy really were the kind of of, you know, master negotiator behind the scenes guy, get stuff done, implement U.S. policy and U.S. preferences at all cost by any means necessary, he would have been privately, you know, on the phone with the Israelis saying, look, I know what you guys want to do, and I've got to buy you off somehow to keep you from doing it. So what do you want in exchange for keeping this stuff quiet for a little while?

And I know it's going to be a high price because you're getting hit with missiles. And if we got hit with missiles, there would be nobody who would come and tell us not to retaliate. But he's just not that guy. He's a guy who like, he often seems and acts like a bystander to his own presidency. So he's calling the media and talking in the press like he's a pundit, like he's a commentator talking about, you know, current events as though he were not the person who was kind of at the middle of them. And, you know, the whole Iran war, he increasingly talks about as though it were just like a storm that happened, as though it weren't like a thing that he did. And now it's just this situation we're in by some unknown means how we got here. no one can quite remember where all this started or what decisions were made to get us into this.

So it doesn't surprise me that he's trying to essentially manage the war by making press statements because that's how he's done things as president in both of his terms pretty consistently. Yeah, Jonah, I mean, Trump has done this before, right? He shrugged off a missile attack from Iran on Kuwait less than a week ago. His knee-jerk response now seems to be Iran-strung. strikes or takes aggressive military action, and Trump calls for a return to talks. That seems to me a very dangerous precedent to set. And, you know, for the guy who is supposedly the master negotiator, as Kevin says, the art of the deal, he's making it abundantly clear.

He wants a deal. He doesn't want to escalate. He doesn't want to keep this going. Basically, they can do almost anything they want, and he wants the deal, which pretty dramatically changes the U.S. negotiating position on this stuff. Yeah, I mean, and I'm not the first. doesn't make this point, but the thing that I find baffling is his position vis-à-vis Israel is Israel needs to stop attacking Beirut or Hezbollah in Lebanon because that makes Iran mad,

and Iran wants them to stop. And so, in effect, he's using Iran's involvement in, you know, willingness to participate in a deal as leverage against Iran's. Israel to make Israel stop, rather than using Israel as leverage against Iran. Like, let Israel be the bad cop. Let Israel be the rogue agent here. And Trump was like, look, I'll try to stop them from destroying all of Hezbollah, but you got to give me something. Instead, he's going to Israel saying, you've got to stop because I need to give Iran something.

It's a very weird approach. And it's bad. And, like, let me just say it probably. It is really bad for Israel when Trump just tells us. of the world, B.B. has to do whatever I want. It's bad for America, too, to say, B.B. has to do whatever I want because I'm the one who calls the shots. He doesn't call the shots. Right. There are a lot of people in the world, I think, wrongly. But there are a lot of people in the world who think that Israel is this genocidal monster country that eats babies and does all sorts

of terrible things. I think a vast amount of it is propaganda meeting anti-Semitism in the, you know, in the meaty part of a whole bunch of different historical trends from what the KGB started doing in the 1960s to what China and Turkey are up to. So, I mean, it's a whole other podcast to get into while it works. My only point is it's effective. In fact, it's effective in America. Like, this is one of the few things

where a lot of MAGA people have split off from Trump because they're seen as helping Israel. And here's Trump saying, actually, I'm the one telling Israel what it can do. and what it can't do. Yeah. And that's a bad look for us on the global stage.

It's a bad look for, if he wants to get BB reelected, it's a bad look for him. He has to defy that a little bit because if Israel just takes one on the chin from Iran, then they have to worry about the deterrence. And Israel wants to outlast the Trump administration. And so this is where we're seeing the two countries' national interests diverge and all sort of, or strategic interests at least, diverge pretty noticeably. And, you know, I still think Trump has done a lot for Israel. And if he had stopped at Midnight Hammer, he would probably have done more for Israel than any American president since at least Truman.

But now, like, we're hitting, not only we're hitting the point of diminishing returns, it's entirely possible that he's hurting Israel in all of this. And I think he's hurting America in the process as well. You know, Mike, Donald Trump said to the Financial Times, one of the, at least four outlets he spoke to yesterday as this was happening. I mean, as there was this back and forth, the Iranian instructions taken place. Israel had put out word early that it would retaliate. Trump had said to Fox and to Axios and to others don't retaliate. And then he said to the Financial Times, Israel, quote, won't have any choice, unquote, but to accept whatever the deal is that the U.S. comes up with Iran and said of Netanyahu, I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn't call the shots. and then yesterday evening, in fact, Israel did respond.

Israel did retaliate. Can you help us make sense of that? I mean, Donald Trump does not call all the shots. I mean, that's the explanation. I do think that, to bolster Kevin's point, I think that is something that Trump is not dealing with very well. And I think you can see these calls to the journalists as a reaction to and a coping mechanism for the fact that actually he cannot simply make these, you know, foreign countries

that have divergent national or strategic interests from the United States and from him. He cannot make them do what he wants. And I think Jonah makes a great point that he's got everything backward in terms of how to sort of use what has happened over the weekend to the United States' advantage. And I think it's because he's pursuing a deal with Iran sort of myopically, you know, like the deal itself is what's important and everything else is getting in the way of achieving a deal. Whatever that deal looks like, you know, it's the deal that's important. And that's something that we know about Trump's kind of motivations in general. I just, I agree with you, Steve, about the calling of the journalists as being, you know,

while this is happening, while this is live. And I think some of these are inbound calls. right, all these journalists have his cell phone. Yes. And we're at this weird point. I think it goes both ways. But we're at this weird point, I think, where some big event happens. And the, you know, by my own count in my head, it seems to me, you know, at least 12, 15 journalists have his direct cell phone, which raises all sorts of additional questions.

Yes. But something in the world happens and they all just call the president. And then he talks to a bunch of them. Yeah. And then the president answers, you know, calls it back. I think that's, I wonder, I'm trying to put myself in that situation. You know, I've had the numbers of important people, not the president of the United States, but important people.

And when an event happened, I would call that person. And sometimes that person would be in the middle of that event or in the middle of that circumstance. Just, you know, so I've done, I've been in that situation. And, you know, as a journalist, you want to call them and get their reaction or get their, you know, get their side of the story. or tell me what's happening. And I think that's legitimate.

I wonder, though, like, it's a... I struggle with this because I do look at some of the way in which these journalists then kind of regurgitate what the president says. They have to report on what the president says in these phone conversations. I don't know. We don't have the transcripts of these phone calls and know exactly how, you know, much these journalists are pressing them. But there, I think there is a...

a risk that you don't get the president to pick up the phone next time if you're pushing back aggressively, like say Kristen Welker did in her interview. And so what are we really getting from these interviews, from these phone calls with the president? You know, are these journalists serving unwittingly as tools for whatever Trump's goal is with this? I think it's something that they've got to grapple with. And I don't want to be unfair and say they aren't struggling with it.

But you look at the way some of the, you know, some of particularly stuff about the deal, you know, and certain, you know, reporters are sort of, there's a new deal afoot here. And then, of course, that deal either falls apart or, you know, crumbles under some, any level of scrutiny or the deal wasn't really in existence. It was just the concept of a deal, the suggestion of a deal that somehow got, you know, the stock market to calm down or whatever. I think these journalists need to just be thinking about that. constantly when they have this amount of power. So I don't want to get Steve in trouble with NBC or Kristen Welker, but I did think it was really interesting. If you watch, I watched it all in real time when it aired. They recorded that on Friday. There was virtually no promotion around that interview tied to Trump walking out. All of the way she prefaced it was about the rain being a problem and having some weather-related

problems. That's how she talked about on social media beforehand. And, you know, she reassured viewers afterwards that she's since talked to President Trump and he's agreed to come back on. It kind of had this vibe, even though he's calling her corrupt and either stupid or corrupt and attacking her network, her profession, she just sort of took it all in stride and said, I really hope you'll come back, you know. And I get it. She's got interests beyond the personal. but at the same time it did quite feel acute like it's what you're talking about Mike

that you want to maintain the access and the good relationship even if it comes at the expense of sort of the integrity of the institution that you're running. And I should say it is not an easy call, I would say, right? Like I'm not saying that this is cut and drive.

Yeah. I think part of me is a little like being a boxer, right? You know, boxer goes to work and doesn't complain that someone hit him in the face. Yeah, because what a, What else she going to do in this situation? She wants another interview. Right.

So she's going to, you know, I don't think I would have handled it nearly as well. But then again, if I had the president's phone number, I'd send him like funny stuff at 2 o'clock in the morning. Well, let me put my NBC hat on because I think she certainly does want another interview. Of course, NBC wants another interview. I think she's right to want another interview. And I think if you look at the substance of that exchange, I would say throughout the whole interview, as Mike said, I mean, it was more cordial for the first. three quarters of it, but then in particular, in those exchanges that we played here, she was very aggressive in getting him to answer for his stuff and repeatedly said,

Mr. President, there's no evidence for what you're saying. There's no evidence for what you're saying. I think she pushed back aggressively. I thought it was, as I said earlier, valuable in that we got to see what he's thinking and how his brain is working. And, you know, to me it was a very disturbing thing. But, you know, if somebody had handled that in a different way, I don't think we necessarily would have gotten the same glimpse into the mind of Donald Trump. No, that's all fair.

I guess what I would like to see for these, you know, reporters who sort of say, I just got off the phone with Donald Trump, you know, and this is what he told me. I think it would be better for everyone if they simply published a recording of that phone conversation. If we could see more, I mean, there's a risk in showing too much of how the sausage is made, but I think with Donald Trump, it is always more valuable to show your work as a journalist because 99 times out of 100, it will reflect well on you as a journalist if you're doing your job right,

and it will reflect reality when it comes to Trump. So, Mike, I think the answer is to get you the phone number. Yeah, just drop it in my... You need to make those calls. Anybody listening to this who has the president's cell phone? Just send it to me. Please send it to us roundtable at the dispatch.com, and then Mike can put out these transcripts for you.

Don't ask Captain Quig about the strawberries, you know. Before we take an ad break, we're recording a special live episode of the dispatch podcast on Tuesday, June 23rd in New York City. And you don't want to miss it. We're bringing the round table together to discuss what's left of the right. Jonah and I will be joined by dispatch contributors

is Megan McArdle and Chris Steyerwald in Manhattan to discuss the biggest news stories of the day and the evolving identity of conservatism in the Trump era and beyond. What does the war in Iran mean for Trump's coalition ahead of the midterm elections? Is MAGA still a conservative movement? Was MAGA ever a conservative movement?

And who is the future of the Republican Party? The show starts at 7 p.m. on June 23rd in New York City, head to the events page at 929.org. That's 929.9.9.9. and purchase your tickets today if you're going to be in Manhattan. Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion.

Finally, today, and not worth your time, I need to ask the panel for some help. I need to know how to think about tipping in the United States in 2026. Because on the one hand, I think of myself as a good tipper. My sort of general rule for tipping, if I go to a restaurant, I'm weighted on is 20% for decent service. Average service, I would say. That's where I start. If I get great service, I go out from there.

I almost never go down below 20%, although I'm thinking that I should for reasons that we can get to. So I think of myself as a pretty good tip. The frustration I have is being asked to tip everywhere all the time, including at Starbucks and fast food places, where the poor or maybe less poor than they used to be barista or fast food worker, they never say, now you're going to be asked about a tip. They say, oh, now you're going to have to answer a question.

It's like, okay, well, just ask me the question. What's the question? What's the annual rainfall in Brazil? Yes, exactly. But then it automatically prompts me, you know, depending on the institution. Some places start at 20% for somebody who walked to go and get my cup of black coffee starts at 20% and goes up to 25%. I've seen places that go up to 28% as sort of the auto, you know, one of your three options. And I just find this outrageous.

Part of it is, I have to be honest, kids who are of age where they're waiting tables, some of my kids are actually waiting tables. I'm such a sucker. I have a really hard time declining this very nice offer that they're. making for me to tip and give them more of my money to get my coffee. But it's frustrating for me. Should I, Mike, be frustrated or am I just now, like, officially with frustrations like this entering my old man curmudgeon stage or both? I was saying they're not mutually exclusive. You could be entering that stage, possibly, who could say? But I think your frustration is legitimate. This has become, I would call it a problem throughout the service industry where, you know, I think taking

advantage of a couple of factors, one of which is the kind of the way that the minimum wage conversation has kind of gotten more into the ether. You know, we're talking a lot more about service, particularly like food service workers, not getting enough pay. And I think that has permeated a little bit of the conversation a little bit more. Also, the COVID era, hey, everybody's just doing their best. And if you're in a position, where you can, you know, tip your pizza delivery guy who has to come to your house and drop your pizza off there and he's just struggling to keep a job. You know, if you tip him 30% because you're trying to be a good person in this difficult time, that has kind of allowed for, I would say, tip creep to come in in all sorts of ways. And then, of course.

Tip creep, is that what you said? I like it. Tip creep. I like it. And then you add the sort of technological ways in which it's been easier, right? the infamous flip of the iPad at the coffee shop where like, you know, they have just been typing in your order, you know, you've pressed your credit card to the little square box thing to pay for it. And then they can flip the iPad around for that question, right? It's very easy for you.

And you have to do it in their presence, right? Like, they're seeing that you are making a choice and are you going to be the one who says 0%. Well, guess what? A lot of times, that is me. I will do that. And I make the judgment, by the way, based on whether any kind of special skill was involved in the service.

As you say, turning around, filling from the urn a coffee cup, and then turning it back around and handing it to me, I'm sorry, that doesn't get a tip. That's the service that you're paying for with the upcharge on the, the coffee. On the other hand, I could just say, just literally just yesterday, I took my eight-year-old

son to the Coldstone Creamery ice cream shop where they make the ice cream. And there's a kid behind there who does a little extra work, right? He's like taking the little mix-ins and putting it into the ice cream and doing a little extra work. When it came time, when the iPad was flipped around, I gave him 10%. I mean, it was a small amount. We didn't pay that much for the ice cream. It was like another, I don't know, like a dollar 50 on top of the of what we paid for it. You know, it's a judgment call, but that's my judgment. That's how I view it. But at least he's going through the motions of doing something extra, even though I think Goldstone, I think it's all for show. Goldstone is sort of silly. It's all for show.

Of course. Look, I will tip on takeout. If somebody has to like assemble a meal for my entire family, we'll do this like Uncle Julio's takeout meal. I'm happy to tip 10, 15% on something like that for the assembly. But I think it's the cup of coffee and then the fast food stuff. Kevin, Do you tip on takeout if you were to order a takeout meal for your hoard this afternoon? My hoard. Do you go and tip on that or you just grab it and go? Yeah, I was just thinking the opposite of a tip creep is the creep tip, which is when you're putting strippers through nursing school $20 at a time.

That's a general goldberg thing. Wow. No, but on that front, no, I'm a make-it-rain guy when it comes to tips. I've got a lot of things in life that I care about and that offend me. that bother me. Throwing an extra buck down at Starbucks where I work basically and live at a table, you know, is well within the means. So I don't worry about that too much. Yeah, I think we should just go along with it. I mean, it is kind of, you do wish they would just raise prices and pay people more a little bit because it takes the discretionary element out of it and the little moral blackmail

of the, they're going to ask you a question now. Although, like, some of the ones who are just honest about it, I think it's going to ask you about a tip, and I'll fill it in for you. It's 40%. But, No, tip, tip, tip, tip. Yeah, I think the people who are honest about that, those are the people I'm going to be certain to tip. Yeah. If they, rather than the passive aggressive, you're going to get a question. We were at a Mexican restaurant in Dallas with my son when he was about one and a half years old. And he made such an unholy mess of just rice and beans and stuff that I think our bill.

I love that he blames it on his son. I don't eat rice. Come on. And I think our bill. came to like $42 or something like that, and we tipped them, I think we tipped him $100. Just because it was just, they were just going to have to bring like a crew into people to clean it up. And no, I think just do it. Just take care of them. These people are in jobs that none of us want. And it's good just to spread the wealth around a little bit and to be generous and happy

about it. I am a tip on the high side. I think everyone probably should. And at least people who have the means. Yeah, I was thinking about it the other day. My two largest expenses in life are taxes. and child care. And, you know, it's not mortgage payment. It's not a car payment. It's not anything like that. And that means that I can afford to pay someone an extra buck when I get a cup of coffee.

And by the way, who's getting a $3 order at Starbucks? Mine's like $11 or something. Yeah. That's because you're fancy. I get the Grande dark roast, no room for cream, no sugar. It's now, I think, $3.55 or something. So I do that.

Am I just a Scrooge? Kevin's making it sound like I'm just, A total scrooge here. You Midwestern Protestant. No, I'm more with you. Like, I think, like, a lot of Europeans, a lot of Asians think the way America does it is madness. You know, like, in big chunks of Europe, a tip is like whatever the loose change that's left. It's not, you know, like 30%, 25%, 20%, and I think that this, I mean, American tipping culture had been suffering from inflation or tipping creep.

for a while, but what really drove it over was the back-to-back of COVID and inflation. And like a lot of businesses call it price partitioning, right? They can basically afford to pay their staff less with the expectation that a big chunk of their compensation is going to come through tips. This is why no tax on tips. It became such a, you know, salient issue in some ways. And in part because the tipping is now visible because of these. pads and kiosk things. And I think it's sort of problem. I mean, I would, I kind of would like it

if it was more of a tipping culture in a certain way, where like literally I'm, you know, like I'm always looking for a universe where I can walk into an inn or pub and just throw a little leather satchel full of gold coins to the innkeeper. And then I get whatever I want, right? And, um, Like, the way we do it now is... There are places like that just outside Las Vegas. I understand, but that's not what I'm talking about. There's so many ways that this... You know, bring...

They'll send a lemon for you. Breed mead and haunches for all of my men. That's kind of thing, right? Oh, and water my horses. And the way it's done now... Haunches, huh? Is they are pushing it off on... I think it builds a lot of resentment in the culture.

Like, the customers are resentful for it. And I think staff are resentful for it because if really, if 20% to 30% of their income is now dependent upon the kindness of strangers, they get angry when they don't get tipped in a way that's sort of understandable, particularly when their bosses are saying, we have to keep your wages low, but you're going to make it up in tips. And I don't know how you get out of this, but that's where we are. And I think it's gotten out of hand in places. And there are places where, like, I think there should be more tipping, and there are places where I think there should be less tipping. I don't think there should be tipping in fast in McDonald's or anything like that. Yeah. Not the deal.

But like, we had these moving guys come recently. And, you know, like, I was so impressed by the work and the service of these guys that I tipped wildly. Like, there are places where people put their heart and soul into hard work. A lot more. Because hemorrhaging that kind of cash is a rounding error in my fiscal insolvance day these days. Moving sucks. It really does. And so I'm with you, Stephen.

I just, I think it's been introduced in too many places. It's too legible now. It's too expected. It's not considered generosity the way it's supposed to be. I've become a really, you know, overtipper when it comes to hotel rooms and that kind of stuff because those ladies work hard. And I'm not trying to gender it, but it's just an actual experience. They are.

They are ladies. But I think somewhere we made a mistake getting on this path, I just don't think it's reversible at this point. So here's my theory. It goes along with. with what you're saying, Jonah. I think that there's a boomering effect on tipping now. I've got two, my two older kids have been waiters, waitresses now for the past several years. My oldest is waiting at a pretty good restaurant, really good food, good restaurant.

You know, they have steaks that are in the $50 range, so nice. You'd expect she might get some big tips. And while she does get some, and there are some customers who, I think, treat well. And I think she does a pretty good job waiting tables. there are others, I'm sort of shocked at the frequency of this, you know, who will rack up $180, $200 tab and tip $8 or $10 or $12 or something. And I just can't fathom doing that to a waiter, unless the service has truly been awful. And, you know, the waiter, waitress has an attitude and is nasty. Then I guess I can understand it.

But I wonder if because it's hard to do anything these days without being asked to give a tip, if people are becoming more stingy in those places where you have discretion to leave a big tip. And I think people ought to leave a big tip if you can leave a big tip. Not all of us can take the Kevin Williamson approach and tip even the baristas. But I think there's a boomerang effect and it could be here to stay. Can you tip at the drive-thru? I don't tip at the drive-thru. Okay.

You know, I will say, you say work in Starbucks sometimes. I do the same. I'll take my laptop. And if I'm going to be sitting there for a while, I will gladly tip. It's just if I'm going to take it to go or if I'm driving through, there's no real reason to tip. All right, well, let us know what you think. Roundtable at the dispatch.com. Thank you all for joining us for this discussion of Meet the Press, Iran, and tipping.

Finally, if you like what we're doing here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And as always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones, from people who are Scrooge-like in their tipping habits. That's good to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey, and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.