The Dispatch Podcast - The Department of Justice After Pam Bondi

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

Sarah Isgur is joined by Mike Warren, Kevin Williamson, and David Drucker to discuss the firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi and the White House's proposed 2027 fiscal budget.The Agenda:—Pam Bondi's DOJ—The future of the DOJ—Fallout from the Epstein files—Trump's proposed 2027 budget—Trump's midterm messaging—NWYT: TMZ's political coverageDispatch Recommendations—Marriage Got Better—So Why Is It Disappearing?—Welcome to the Party, Christmas and Easter Christians—What the No Kings Protests and Tea Parties Have in Common—The Last Conservatives Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss Donald Trump's firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi and the White House's proposed 2027 fiscal budget, as well as the return of an actual not-worth-your-time segment. I'm joined today by Dispatch colleagues, Kevin Williamson, Mike Warren, and David Drucker. Oh, and guess what? Now, through April 14th, Listeners who purchase my new book, Last Branch Standing, and submit their order numbers as proof of purchase, will receive 25% off a dispatch annual or premium membership. Current dispatch members will receive one additional month added to their current membership. Just email members at the dispatch.com with your confirmation number and we'll take care of it for you.

And consider becoming a member of the dispatch. you'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. And if ads aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and more. All right, let's dive in. All right, gentlemen, let's hop right in. President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi Thursday afternoon.

after reports that Trump had grown increasingly frustrated with the political heat from DOJ's handling of the Epstein files and her supposed failure to go after the president's political foes. So let's start with this. Mike, was Pam Bondi a good attorney general for Donald Trump? Sarah, I feel like you are qualified, more qualified than I am, as you are a former DOJ employee, to answer that question. But I would say that she was not a good attorney general for Donald Trump because nobody can be a good attorney general for Donald Trump, even the best attorney.

In fact, almost certainly not the best or most qualified attorney general. There is no chance that that person could be what Donald Trump wants the job to be. And I think what the Bondi sort of the whole saga of Pam Bondi's tenure, you know, starting off with her, you know, declaration. and what was it, back in February of 2025, that she had, you know, a stack of the Epstein files on her desk that were going to be released imminently. It's something that she felt she had to say and do to sort of play the MAGA media, what expectations game.

And, of course, she couldn't deliver. And she couldn't deliver because there were things in the Epstein files, which, again, we should clarify, there's no such thing as, like, the Epstein files as this, like, you know, compendium of damning information that has the exact client list, right? That was the actual claim

that the Epstein files were a client list of famous people, mostly probably Democrats who were clients of Epstein and his sort of operation. But that wasn't what the Epstein files were. The Epstein files were just this big tranche of email communication,

some of which revealed some very bad things. But she couldn't deliver on the promise to Maga Media and I don't think she could deliver on this in part because there are some embarrassing things about Donald Trump in some of those files. And at the end of the day, she is serving in that role not for justice, not for the federal government's chief law enforcement officer. She is expected, she has been expected, to serve as Donald Trump's attorney, as his attorney general, as his lawyer. it's an impossible job because that's not what the job as written in statutes and as the long history of the Department of Justice dictates, but that's what Donald Trump expects. And so she sort of had this approach, which was to suck up to the president, which was to defend the president.

We saw that congressional hearing from a few weeks ago in which she just sort of went aggressively at members of Congress, including some Republicans, who were asking tough, difficult questions, and she essentially just said, you're only asking these questions because you hate Donald Trump. That wasn't sufficient because ultimately she wasn't able to deliver completely on the expectations that he had,

which was just go after my political enemies and don't make any problems for me. I think it's an impossible task, and I don't see why any sort of attorney, even someone who was very friendly to MAGA and to Donald Trump, really wants to take on the job from here because it's been proven to be an impossible task.

All right, David, let's pick up from there then. Where does the Trump Department of Justice go from here? Which David, Sarah? Oh, me. I'm the only David. I was like, am I having a stroke? What do you mean? Which David? Leave that in. You know, it's been a, it's Passover.

I'm not eating enough bread. What can I tell you? I always think of Kevin David Williamson, and it's just it messes me up, and there's David French. It's Kevin Daniel. Oh, yeah. Okay, so I'm even more messed up than I thought. Hey, Drucker, where do we go from here? You know, I think it's, you know, what does Donald Trump want out of his attorney general, right?

I mean, I'm going to now suppose something that I don't think is actually in play. Let's suppose that Trump says to himself, everything that we, we've been doing or trying to do so far hasn't worked. I'm now going to try to do things differently. I want a more qualified federal prosecutor who can also manage and implement my broader agenda, you know, prosecuting fentanyl trafficking, prosecuting human trafficking, prosecuting illegal border crossing, all the sorts of things, right? There are a whole range of laws that the federal government enforces that the Department of Justice is in charge of enforcing. I mean, there's counterterrorism.

There's a whole bunch of things. I just don't think that's what Donald Trump, the President of the United States, wants, right? I think the reason that he dispensed with Pam Bondi is because she wasn't doing what he wanted in a way that people said, hey, this place is really operating well. They're doing a great job.

In fact, the way she went about satisfying her boss's requests were roundly mocked. I don't actually. know that that's her fault. But I suppose you could say that Todd Blanche, who's the deputy attorney general, and Sarah, you once explained to us that that Blanche was probably the guy that was running the trains at DOJ, if I'm remembering this correctly. And, you know, Bondi was sort of be the front man, if you will, right? Bondi's the lead singer. Blanche is writing all the music and making sure this stuff goes to a beat. And so maybe he's thinking to himself, why can't this stuff look

competent. And so in that case, I can imagine him hiring somebody who he thinks, oh, you're going to do what I want, but do it competently and not end up getting mocked on Saturday Night Live and in a whole bunch of other places. And so, you know, that remains to be seen. Can he pick somebody who can do that, I guess? But I do believe that the ultimate answer to your first question, which is, you know, was she a good attorney general for Donald Trump? Well, she was following orders, at least to the best of her ability as she interpreted those orders. She didn't try and counterman the president. She didn't try and protect the president.

She didn't try and protect the integrity or the history of the Department of Justice. She tried to do what Donald Trump wanted. But it's very hard to do what he wants and have results when you have federal judges that require a higher standard for indictments and prosecutions than a lot of county and state courts around the country. And so can anybody ultimately accomplish what she couldn't? I don't know. But I suppose they could try to accomplish what the president wants without being laughed at as much. Kevin, I guess I feel like on the spectrum of Bill Barr to Pam Bondi, you actually learn quite a bit, right?

You have Bill Barr who had been Attorney General before, knew how the building worked, and was very sympathetic to in line. with Donald Trump's legal policy agenda. But he was also going to be a counselor to the president, as is his job of Attorney General. And there were certainly going to be things that he wasn't willing to put his name on or do, and he was going to say, no, like a very traditional cabinet secretary-to-president role.

And then Donald Trump thinks he doesn't want that. And so then he goes with Pam Bondi, someone who is not going to know how DOJ works. you're going to have to, you know, trade that off. But what you get in that trade-off is someone who is not going to be a counselor to the president. They're just going to do what you want, finally. But he doesn't actually want that either. And I've always thought that's a really funny and very obvious misunderstanding of Donald Trump

that all of these people think that he just wants, like, cheerleading yes men around him. And there's just no history of that working out for anyone. That being said, Kevin, I guess. my question to you is, what has worked out? What is the model? You know, what has Susie Wiles figured out that no one else has? You know, I'm just sitting here thinking that one person on this panel knows what it takes to get fired by the Justice Department. None of the rest of it. And she's asking the questions. I kind of want to hear from you on this. I mean, it's hard to see Barr standing up there, you know, talking about, I've got binders full of pedophiles. You know, that's just, that is not really going to be his thing.

You know, I think everyone's already hit on this, that Trump wants two incompatible things. He wants servility, people who will take his orders, and then he also wants good outcomes. But of course, if he take orders from a jackass who doesn't know what he's doing and has the attention span of a three-year-old and a rage problem and all the rest of it, you're going to get bad outcomes. Again, sir, I think you'd be a better position to speak to this than I can. But if you compare the DOJ to, I guess, something like the Solicitor General's office, which seems to be doing good work run by, you know, people who know people who know. know what they're doing and don't seem to get in the president's way that much. They're going to lose some cases that he cares about, but he doesn't really seem to be blaming them for it so much as he blames the Supreme Court. I actually wrote this to someone who got on the wrong side of

the president. I don't really talk to people in elected office that much, but every now and then I need to send someone an angry late-night text message. And you will never be servile enough for this guy, right? I mean, because servility doesn't alone get it. You know, Trump wants his name on the building, but he also doesn't want the building to fall down. And so he, you know, he hired Pam Bodding to build, you know, the most spectacular Department of Justice building that there's ever been and put my name on the front of it. Then the thing fell down and the plumbing didn't work and whatever other metaphorical building malfunctions you want to insert into there. So I think it's an undoable job, of course. And I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea to take people from state offices and to put them into

the, you know, sort of nearest parallel federal office. But they do have, as you mentioned, a lot to learn in those positions. That's why, you know, you would think governors would be better presidents and they historically have had runs of being. And certainly they're not great presidential candidates for the most part. So I don't think being a state AG and then going to a attorney general in the United States is necessarily a bad move for someone with the assumption, of course, that there's going to be a lot to learn in that job where you need good, experienced professional support staff and deputies around you to help you learn that kind of stuff. The problem, of course, is always one step removed from this. The problem with the Trump administration is Trump. He just wants things

that are incompatible with one another, and his goals for the Justice Department are not the proper goals for the Justice Department. He wants to use it as a personal legal service as a weapon to beat up on his political enemies and various things like that. And as abject and servile as Pam Bondi was in that role, she's never going to be abject and servile enough

to make Trump happy on that front while not delivering the goods that he wants delivered, which shouldn't be delivered because they're the wrong goods to get from the justice department, department. Partly, I think, and I think you were maybe hinting of this earlier asking about whether she was a good AG for Donald Trump, because I think you and I have maybe different ways of looking at this. That one way of looking at it, and correct me if I'm misdaining your view here, but, you know, the strong presidency view is the president's in charge and the cabinet secretaries work for him and

they're there to carry out his wishes, which is fair enough. But there's this implicit idea in that I think that accountability sort of stops at election day for presidents. Like, I got elected, I'm the guy who got elected, and now I'm going to do what I want. And if the people don't like that, and they can vote against me next time around. And I think we may maybe a slightly different view of that, that, you know, the responsibilities that come along with the office and the duties and norms and all the rest of the stuff that we bore people to death talking about are there from day one,

and it's not just an election day thing. And that it maybe is a proper role for people in cabinet-level positions and other senior advisors to help remind the president of those things and keep him within the guardrails. Now, for a normal administration, that would be a relatively light-touch kind of for a Trump administration, you end up probably having to either defy or subvert the president because his goals and expectations about how to use presidential power are so out of line with our constitutional norms that it's just difficult to do the job properly.

So, of course, the best thing to do about the Trump administration is don't serve in it because I don't think there's really, especially the second time around, just a very honorable way to do it. We know what the guy is. We know what his motives and style is. We know he did try to overthrow the government the last time he was in power. I just don't see what sort of person goes to work for this administration. As much as I like and admire some people who've chosen to do that.

Okay, so I'm in a John McLaughlin this segment here and, you know, tell you all the correct answer now to a question I didn't ask. So the answer is Todd Blanche is the right attorney general for Donald Trump. I actually think that could work out very well for the combination of tradeoffs and everything else that Donald Trump wants. This is his former attorney who had extensive experience at the Department of Justice as a well-regarded federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. He has been the one basically who has been Attorney General since roughly October when Donald Trump really lost confidence in Pambandi. That doesn't mean it will be smooth sailing for Todd Blanche by any means. But if I'm picking an attorney general for Donald Trump, there's just no one else. else on the list who hasn't been tried before or some version of them tried before.

So I'm picking Todd Blanche. Now, that being said, there have actually been some of the things that were done in the last 14 months that will have much longer-term effects for this administration than I think they fully let on. For instance, they get themselves in this Epstein mess, which I just, apologies to everyone, I just can't care. I guess maybe I'm with you. No, I don't wish I could care.

I can't care. I don't care. None of the caring for me on this. Worked on human trafficking, you know, cases. They are outrageous, egregious, like, throw away the key. But this one is not special except that people see partisan gain to be had from it. They don't care about human trafficking. Or else I'd be hearing about a lot of other cases that were well done at the Department of Justice

or poorly done at the Department of Justice. But like, tell me you don't care about human trafficking is you knowing everything about the Epstein files. That being said, something they have done here will have reverberating effects. It was a huge mistake. And by the way, let's just back up. Republicans start this whole thing on the Epstein files,

the drumbeat of like, we need the stuff, we need this, we need that. And of course, then Democrats hop right in and are like, yeah, great idea. We do need all this stuff. And that's how you end up with this horseshoe moment where everyone's like, let's get the Epstein files from DOJ. The Department of Justice either brings an indictment against someone that they believe they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt committed a crime, or you don't hear their name. They do not just trash people publicly that they don't have that evidence that they didn't bring an indictment for. And yet, again, horseshoe politics, Republicans and Democrats, combine in Congress to pass this Epstein Transparency Act and release all of the internal DOJ documents that include lots of information about people who not only weren't charged because they couldn't prove beyond a reasonable doubt the person committed a crime.

They have nothing to do with a crime. And now their names are all wrapped up in this. This will have long-lasting and really detrimental effects on the Department of Justice, on the rule of law, on everything. everything else because now every time there is some outrage in the public mind, there's going to be this political pressure to give us all the information about this investigation maybe before it's done next time so that we can all be part of the process. And the Jonah Goldberg message here of like too much transparency is a bad thing could not be more true in law. Sarah, I just want to stop because I think there's something bigger that I have a question maybe for you about,

which is sort of a hallmark of the way Donald Trump, his justice departments are run, which is without process or without any, like, clear process at all these points because what you're talking about with the Epstein files is a good example of just kind of the way that sort of a media frenzy kind of took over what would normally be a more deliberate process for investigating and deciding whether, you know,

all of the things you just discussed. But in my discussions with people in this administration during this administration, there's, you know, there's so much of this. I think it was happening in the first as well of just around the process, people going around the process, particularly someone like Stephen Miller from the White House, just calling up folks at lower levels within the DOJ and having these kind of conversations that just don't follow any sort of process or protocol or the way that you get things done. And this seems to be, I mean, let's just look at the way Cash Patel has run the FBI as another example of this. I mean, you can see in the reporting and, again, in conversations that I've had across the DOJ, where like the rules that are in place so that everything kind of proceeds in a way that maximizes justice, or at the very least sort of gets you to a point where you can prosecute cases as cleanly as possible, as efficiently as possible, and those sorts of things.

none of that is being followed because the guy at the top doesn't care about it. And that seems to be another problem because this is a massive department that needs to be run through these processes. And that's just not happening in a way that's sort of unique to Trump. Am I wrong about that? I guess I feel like a lot of the process stuff is administration to administration, like each administration has their own problems that will end with the next administration largely. what I guess I'm upset about about the Epstein Transparency Act first of all is

we have a Congress that can't pass any legislation and this is what they spend their time on. Fine. Like, well done, everyone. And second, that Democrats who went along with this because they thought they could use it to hurt Republicans and Republicans thought they could use it to hurt Democrats

and nobody thought about what the longer term, by longer term, I mean, three weeks later implications would be, we now have, of course, the drumbeat to release the files on Eric Swalwell that the Department of Justice had gathered related to this Chinese spy. And now Democrats are like, no, you can't release these files because it would include evidence about people who could not be charged, you know, indicted because you didn't have evidence to prove their guilty on a reasonable doubt. And I'm like, well, are we joking? Is this a joke? You guys, oh my God. It goes to this larger moment problem, a transparency problem, a partisan broken brain problem. And I think we have just begun to see some of the longer-term implications of decisions that they made that were very short-term. Yeah, it seems like a rules-following problem, too.

I mean, you know, I'm a stickler for, like, if there's a process for following, you know, the procedure for getting to some kind of end in the Justice Department, and we seem to just have no interest in pursuing that. And that just seems to me exacerbated by Trump's approach, which he doesn't care. Like, he really doesn't care about process at all. And so everybody's acting accordingly. That was my point. Well, the good news is that federal courts still have a process.

Exactly. Yes. So. All right, guys, I want to talk about the budget proposal. And more importantly, I want to ask you all, why are we talking about the budget proposal? Who cares about this budget proposal? We're never going to hear about it again. When we get back.

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the defense budget to $1.5 trillion up from $206 is $1 trillion. The new defense budget also seeks to fund a Golden Dome, which would cost an estimated $175 billion. Here's Donald Trump's take on it, quote, it's not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare, and all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can't do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing. Military protection. We have to guard the country. Kevin, I'm going to start with you on this and go back to my original question before the break. Why are we talking about this budget? It has been largely irrelevant what budget a White House puts out in the modern era. It's a press release about their priorities. And this press release, again, going by like Donald Trump's quote there,

would seem to be a really bad message for Republicans right before the midterms to basically go all libertarian that states should take care of Medicaid and Medicare. And the only thing the federal government does now is military defense. But again, that's not actually going to happen. So why am I talking about this? So a fun, weird little fact of American political life that a lot of people don't know or appreciate is that basically no president has ever passed a budget in American history. They all have their little budget proposals.

Congress looks at them and laughs, and that's that. Now, it used to be that Congress passed budgets, which sort of meant something. And now that it's sort of lurched from crisis to crisis and from one continuing resolution to the next. I hate it when Donald Trump does something that makes me kind of have to agree with him a little bit. But let me say this much,

when I hear my progressive friends talk about how the Eisenhower years were the greatest time in American history because we had tax rates that were 91%. I want them to go back and look at the federal budget from the early 1950s because in the earliest part of the Eisenhower administration, about 80% of federal spending was on military defense and related things. About 20% was everything else put together. And then over the course of the next several decades that essentially reversed where military spending ended up being around 19, 20%, of most budgets and everything else ended up about 80% military spending is down to about 13%, depending on how you look at it in the most recent year. And even the math in a really abstract way kind of works out. The proposal was essentially to increase military spending by 47% and cut overall non-military spending by 10%, which actually would be a budget cut. That's never ever going to happen because to get that 10% off, of course, you would have to cut essentially non-entitlement spending to zero and cut entitlements on top of that. if Donald Trump accidentally said he might be open to Medicare reform there, that would be great. Of course, he's not because that would be unpopular, so it's not going to happen.

So this is some Trump versus Trump argument here. And once Trump settles out the argument with himself, I'm sure he'll be on the wrong side of it just because that's always a safe bet. So, yeah, these things are, I mean, I'm a guy who writes about budget stuff a lot. I kind of love this stuff and I care about it. And I've got all the stupid little spreadsheets on my computer with all the historical, you know, spending and tax. is by source and outlay by program and all that stuff. And these things just don't mean a damn thing. Drucker?

Okay, let's talk about this in relation to the midterms. Okay. Are we even going to hear about this again? Because again, it seems like a messaging boon for Democrats heading into the midterm. But I just feel like not only do the presidential budgets not ever make it into law or a budget, I don't even really hear about them from like a campaign or messaging standpoint. I feel like the only place I've ever heard about a budget coming out of the White House is this podcast every year.

And every year I ask the same thing, why is this on my list of topics? I can't imagine something more irrelevant, except, like, you know, is a leprechaun, like, dropping off rainbow poop to my house? Like, we can talk about that. I think it depends on the venue. You know, there are nerdcasts all over town that are going to geek out over elements of the president's budget proposal. Trust me, they're there.

whether they're about defense or entitlement spending or, you know, ag investment or something or other. So people are going to talk about this. In fact, last year around this time, and I wrote about this for the dispatch at the time, there was real confusion in defense circles in Washington about exactly what the president's defense policy was going to be in the second term and whether he was going to support robust defense budgets. There was such a concern that Republicans on Capitol Hill were basically screaming at the administration,

albeit quietly and away from the cameras, that we need to be able to be able to be. more money for defense. We've got to get it into reconciliation. We don't like your budget proposal. And they were actually very concerned about it. And so here we are a year later, and the president's all in on spending a ton on defense. So you're going to have a lot of Republicans on the hill breathe and a sigh of relief. And now you're going to have a bunch of policy people in the sectors that are going to be on the short end of the stick. Again, just a proposal. But they're on the short end of the stick. They're worried how far this can go. And then they're going to start freaking out.

The other place where this is often a concern, because I've been a Capitol Hill reporter before, based on the Hill, is you have a whole bunch of members of Congress that have to answer questions about, are you going to support the president's horrible, no good budget proposal? It's going to put people, you know, basically going to throw Granny off the cliff to borrow that old Democratic ad against Paul Ryan. And if it's no, no, you know, he, it's just a proposal. We will legislate, blah, blah, blah. And so there'll be a fair amount of that that will happen. But, you know, to the grander question here of do these budget proposals matter, no, not really, because it's the one thing Congress is still kind of good at, so to speak, is like, yeah, no, we're not doing that. The one thing they're also good at not doing. Right. Hey, budgets are something we don't do.

It's actually a really good point. Congress is really good at doing something when it's something they don't have to do. Uh-huh. Like if they actually had to pass legislation to keep the president's budget proposal from becoming law, like, you know, automatically in some other universe, they might fail at that. So that's a good point. But as a messaging vehicle for the 26 midterm elections, the president who just likes to say the quiet part out loud every day, I think this is something Democrats will use in their ads. And especially when we're at war, they're going to be able to say, hey, listen, this is what he. he's interested in doing as opposed to helping you. And there is some fodder there for them because it's the president himself who criticized his own party for trying to reform and overhaul Medicare and Social Security. We're not going to do that. We're going to keep this stuff flowing. So he's been on the side of the government spending angels before and saying how horrible it is to try and reduce government spending on non-defense items. And here he is now. saying, yeah, we can't afford any of that stuff. So there is messaging there for the Democrats

to use if they're able to use it wisely. But obviously from the standpoint of does this matter because it's going to become law? No, therefore, no, it doesn't matter because it's not going to become law. Do you know what Paul Ryan should have done like the day after that granny over the cliff ad, by the way? Such a missed opportunity. He should have made an ad of his own with Nancy Pelosi in the wheelchair and running the cliff and dumbing her off and then like, you know, brushing his hands off and say mission accomplished. That sounds like a White House meme that we would see today.

Yeah. I'm disappointed. He would have been a man ahead of his prime. He would have been a man ahead of his prime. Mike, I want to put this in the context of Donald Trump's approval rating, what the White House is spending its time on, what its message is. Because while I don't think Donald Trump, I mean, this is actually a tension that maybe I shouldn't preview my own thoughts on.

Go ahead, Sarah. Why not? It's very difficult for me, you know, to hide my own feelings. It's not a strength of mine. On the one hand, you have Donald Trump's historically low approval rating. On the other hand, as Kevin said, the sort of version of presidential accountability,

at least one version of it, is like, yeah, their accountability is every four years, and if you're in your second term, like, you can tell voters to jump off a cliff, good luck impeaching me, and then stick your fingers in your ears and say, La, I can't hear you. For most presidents, the midterm elections

are part of that political accountability because they feel some desire to not have their party lose altitude, both for selfish reasons for their own agenda getting passed, but also because it's a reflection on their approval rating. If you're the president who lost 40 seats in the House with your midterm election, like that's not good for you in your political, you know, power and capital.

I don't feel like those are the same inputs to Donald Trump's calculus. And so in the context of this budget, what should I take away about Donald Trump's priorities when thinking about the midterm elections and the House, which everyone thinks Republicans will lose, that that's a given. But the question is whether they'll lose, you know,

10 seats or 40 seats. And the Senate, very hard for Republicans to lose. So maybe Donald Trump is just being a rational actor here and being like, look, the midterms are kind of baked and like, you know, we almost certainly lose the house and we almost certainly keep the Senate, so I don't need to spend much time on this. Or there's a version where he doesn't care for other reasons.

You know, it's hard to sort of divine any kind of logical steps that Donald Trump may be making in his, you know, I'm trying to imagine what Donald Trump's decision tree looks like in all these things. It's, there's like lots of lines crossing and little distracting bubbles. Weaving, maybe. Yeah, exactly. More of a decision fungus.

Right, exactly. Decision, a decision liken something crawling all around. So look, I think that he doesn't think too much about the midterms, except as it maybe reflects on his own, as you say, Sarah, as sort of his own legacy. Like, he can't lose. And if Republicans lose the House, that's sort of a strike against him. And he doesn't like that.

I look at this more in terms of how does he make a decision? to release essentially a glorified press release like this at this moment. The war in Iran is going on. I think he's got a lot of people in his ear who are correctly pointing out that the defense budget over the last decade plus, you know, has not been at the level that it needs to be to sort of give us the material, whether it's weapon systems. I mean, for instance, there is a lot of sort of rejiggering of existing planes. and other equipment like this to do new things in this war with Iran.

And I think there are probably a lot of people who are, again, correctly in the president's ear saying, we need to get ahead of the problem that we have, which is we need new equipment. We need more money for acquisition of, you know, these kinds of new planes or new ships or whatever. All of that is very good. The concern that I have is somebody who believes that the defense budget needs to be increased from where it is right now, is that Donald Trump is a terrible messenger for that. This idea here that we have to increase the defense budget, and therefore we have to make all

of these other cuts that are politically unpalatable. It's just not a good or winning message, and it's not the message that he has to make in order to win this argument. But he's not really interested in winning arguments. Again, this budget is not actually going to happen or be implemented, but it can be be a tool, it can be a tool for sort of making big picture arguments about priorities, which is what a budget is, right? A budget is an actual iteration of priorities, of a president's priorities, of the Congress's priorities. And he is an imperfect messenger for that, which

ultimately hurts not just the defense argument, but also what Kevin hinted at, which is, you know, Trump may have stumbled into a reform entitlements argument here, which he doesn't actually believe, but even his sort of gestures at that idea probably hurt the very sound arguments that there are for that as well. So great job, everyone at the White House on this one. Can I make a brief point about the midterms? Please. Trump didn't become president in 2016 because he was good at beating up Democrats. He became president because he good at beating up Republicans.

And he became a popular figure in the movement that became the Trump movement because he didn't give a damn about Republicans and their priorities and their pities and their policy histories. and he thought they were dumb and their leadership was bad and all that. And then in the middle of his kind of political career, he becomes a very partisan Republican for a few years, but basically because the Republican Party became a Trump organization and ceased being what the Republican Party had been. As he gets toward the end of his presidency, I think it's very likely you see them going their separate ways again,

where Trump really doesn't care very much about whether Republicans get reelected or not, except for the fact that it would impact. Oh, man, I used to impact as a verb. I've got to hit myself to that. That's bad. Straight to jail. Don't worry, Kevin. I didn't know who was on the podcast. Yeah.

Except to the extent that it would have a potential effect on his impeachment, which is all but certainty if the Democrats take the House. But I think it's entirely imaginable that he ends the last few months of his presidency, entirely estranged from the Republican Party saying these people are dopes and losers. They never really had my back. And I would have had a much more successful run of it if I had better people to work with. And it's really all their fault. And look how badly they did in the midterms in spite of all. all the great things I did for the economy and all the money we were getting in the tariffs and how well I did in Venezuela in blowing up Caribbean people in fishing boats that may or may not have

had drugs involved in that awesome campaign we had in Iran that really didn't cost us anything. And we got the guy back when he fell out of the airplane. And it was all their fault. And it's not hard to imagine. You know what that's going to require, though, and I mean this seriously, it's going to require them to actually, Republicans in Congress, to actually distance themselves from Donald Trump in some significant fashion. they will not break with him, they will not argue with him because they are so afraid of being

ousted in a primary. The president's relationship with Republican voters, which is what he cares about first and foremost, remains really strong. And unless Republican voters begin to drift from Trump after the midterm elections heading into 2028, I can imagine them all being afraid that he won't endorse them in 2028, right? And they'll still tread cautiously. I think the one thing we've learned about Trump over the past decade is that he's a very good candidate for president when he's not the incumbent and he's a questionable, if not very good political leader of the party when he is president. I mean, a couple things on this. One, it is just a truism that Donald Trump defeated the Republican party before he defeated the Democratic Party in 2015 and 2016, as Kevin said. I question whether we're

already seeing Donald Trump's grip on the Republican Party soften. Drucker, I totally agree that when you actually look at sort of polling numbers and where Republicans are, they still look pretty solid and there's not a whole lot I could point to in those numbers to support my thesis. Granted. Okay, here's the data I'm going to point to, though, that you're all going to be like, okay, Sarah, wishful thinking. I feel some vibes coming on. Oh, you're going to feel some vibes. reality TV viewership has dropped off a cliff they are not greenlighting any new shows they are canceling long-running shows

the American people are bored with reality TV it kind of jumped the shark and the actual historical version of what jumping the shark means you had to keep doing more and more outrageous things people realized it wasn't really reality it was all scripted and the outrageous things just couldn't keep up with like what you have to do

to like, you know, keep that high going. And I think the same thing is happening in our politics. Again, this is only vibes-based. I don't have a lot of polling data to point to. Then again, I think the polling data on this stuff wouldn't be very reliable because of all my problems with issue polling. But you look at Talariko versus Crockett

in that Democratic primary, and I really feel like you had the reality TV, you know, Donald Trump model of a candidate in Crockett versus a far more old school, like I'm actually going to have campaign mechanics on the ground. I'm going to have a Ted Lasso message instead of a apprentice message.

It's not just going to be social media vibes. And Talarico won when he wasn't supposed to. I get it. It's one primary. Crockett was flawed for other reasons. I mean, I can poke holes in my own thesis all day long, but I want it to be true and therefore I'm going to keep looking

for facts that fit my worldview. Thank you very much. For those of you who are listening rather than watching, you missed Sarah Isker doing a Keith Richards' arm heroin wicker cap thing there to get the veins ready for the opium. The opium. Mainlining that hopium. I want to be clear, as a woman who has done so many IVF round,

that's also something you do daily, basically, when you're doing IVF. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from this Motley crew. This episode is brought to you by Tellus Online Security. Oh, tax season is the worst. You mean hack season? Sorry, what? Yeah, cybercriminals love tax forms.

But I've got Tellus Online Security. It helps protect against identity theft and financial fraud so I can stress less during tax season, or any season. Plan started just $12 a month. Learn more at tellus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. When WestJet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different.

People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us,

and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's do this. All right, gentlemen, moving on. Before we go to Not Worth Your Time, and by the way, since I am hosting, you know it's going to be an actual old school, not worth your time. None of this Steve Hayes do you like mustard or ketchup, despite Steve's amazing takedown of me, which there has never been anything better than that in my whole life. Peak podcast. Peak podcast. So I'd like each of you to tell me something you read in the dispatch this week

that you would like to recommend to listeners. And Drucker, I'm starting with you. All right, listen, guys, one of the dispatch pieces that I really enjoyed that was really interesting recently was from Patrick T. Brown, marriage got better, so why is it disappearing? And I thought I thought it made a really great case for like everything that I think is really great about marriage, being that I am married, and it'll be 17 years this year. And I was single for a long time. So like I actually have a frame of reference with like married, not married. And I just, I thought that was a really great piece. I also, as much as I'm, you know, a campaign hack and I love campaign politics and I do all this stuff for a living every day, it's great when I can segue for a minute and just read about people or something that has to do with how

live. Anyone want to recommend against marriage here? Anyone, all of you are married? Anyone want to say, I made a huge mistake a la Joe Bluth in Arrested Development? No. That's an easy one. Mike, what you got? So I always love Dispatch Faith. It's a newsletter that comes out every Sunday edited by Michael Renaud, one of our terrific editors here at the Dispatch. And he always has a second writer, an essayist, do something. And, you know, it's quite ecumenical that we've had things written by folks from all religions and denominations. The most recent Dispatch Faith featured an essay from Alan Jacobs about Easter and Christmas Christians, those people who show up just to those two kind of big pillar holidays at church and sort of how to think about it

and how to think about it as someone who might be there every Sunday in the pews. It was a really thoughtful, thought-provoking, and kind of one of these essays about religion and faith that makes you sort of question your own presumptions. Highly recommended Alan Jacobs in Dispatch Faith this past week. Kevin. Wow, I get my name sunk. I really enjoyed Jonah on the parallels between the No Kings protests and the Tea Party protests back in the day.

That was unreal. And I'm always, you know, I go to a lot of protests and I've written about a lot of protests. And I think that other than a couple of big exceptions in American history, like the draft riots and the civil rights movement in the Vietnam War. The protests just don't really mean very much. They don't do a whole lot. But I'm always curious about what gets people out there

and what they think they're accomplishing. So I went to a couple of the very first Tea Party rallies way back in the day. And I was actually a little bit freaked out by him. I was like, these people are, it's right wing, but it's not conservative. And it was at the beginning of that sort of populist outpouring that always kind of creeps me out. And so I've been following that for a while. And it's just, it's an almost anthropological thing of like, what are you doing

out here. What is your business and what do you actually think you're accomplishing? And Jonah had some similar useful meditations on that. So go read it. Also put in a good word for the ongoing coverage of the birthright citizenship stuff, which for us and non-lawyers out there has been, I think, really very useful. So thank you for that. Well, I am going to pick a piece by this guy who works at the dispatch. He wrote it called The Last Conservatives. The Supreme Court as a whole is still defending the constitutional order. His name is Kevin. D. Williamson. And I don't know about all of you guys listening. I have a confession to make that when I read Kevin, it's sort of like a version of hate reading, but like it's not. I notice. I know it's

but I like I go into reading a piece by Kevin wanting to fight. Like I assume Kevin's going to pick a fight with me, that I'm going to pick a fight with him in my own brain and we're going to like fight it out as I read his piece. And I just am always disappointed because I find Kevin like, like winning the fight every time. He persuades me of something, or I learn something, and I can hear him being really pedantic and gloaty about, you know,

knowing something that I don't know. And every time, it really annoys me. So I guess I like, I read Kevin knowing how annoyed I will be. So it's not like hate reading in a traditional sense. It's like self-loathing reading of Kevin. And so I just, I want to recommend that posture of reading Kevin also. You know, Sarah, there's an impression that you and I don't get along. Someone was mentioning in the comments here

that there's a reason they don't have Kevin and Sarah on the panel at the same time ever. What? And of course they do from time to time. And you and I have some disagreements about some things. Yeah, but I hate Drucker way more than you. That's crazy.

But that's not an achievement. Everybody hates me way more than you hate other people. We love you, Drucker. Those of you who are doing dispatch criminology, Sarah and I actually get along quite well. Like really well. I think so highly of Kevin. But mostly because she like,

My wife. I'm more, like, you want to talk about anthropological. I find your wife to be a total curiosity in the sense of marrying you. Yes. That's, you're not the first person to bring that up either. You know, it's like your tea party thing. Like, why are you here? What brought you to this place?

Yeah, you know, I've said this before, there's this like sort of conventional thing like men do like, I'm married above myself and that. And that sort of thing. But like, y'all, she's an architect. I don't understand. Among my friends, like no one thinks that's like me being nice. They're like, yeah, we get it.

We get it. It's not. We're all confused by it too. All men think this, though, because we can't believe we actually got somebody to like us. Not all men think that. There's such a load of, there's lots of men out there being like, you know, my wife really actually kind of is the lucky one here. And they're no longer married.

They're no longer married. There are a lot of men who think that. But in my particular case, a lot. People do bring this up from time to time, including a lot of our mutual friends. They were sort of like, you know, we first met her, we were like, hmm, how did that happen? How interesting. She must have been hate reading you also. Okay.

We're doing not worth your time. And TMZ, the famous Hollywood sort of paparazzi site, has said they are going to beef up their hill coverage and political coverage. And they really showed us what they had. during this last mini shutdown. I don't really know what we're calling this thing of not funding TSA and the ransom demands, et cetera, but whatever it was. And so they went and got these like paparazzi pictures of a bunch of members of Congress, most notably Lindsay Graham at Disney World. And I'm no Lindsay Graham defender, but I do have to say, like the picture of him holding the bubble wand at Disney World that he is holding for another, like a child that he is with.

On the one hand, I'm glad they didn't include the picture of the child. That would have been wrong. But it did make Lindsay Graham look like extra stupid in a way that like any of us who are holding things for our small children would look if you took out all references to children. And I'm just holding, you know, Easter baskets overflowing with, well, this year, by the way, the Easter Bunny brought a barf ball for each boy. This is a yellow ball that barfs slime and then sucks the slime back up. If you've ever needed to see two-year-old Joy, just get one a barf ball. This episode brought to you by barf balls.

I didn't know that such a thing existed, and I resent whoever invented this, by the way. Okay, so the question is, is TMZ moving into political coverage worth our time? Is this going to actually have influence, notice how I didn't say impact, on how congressmen act, on their ability to take vacation, will it be good or bad? Or back to my reality TV point, are they getting into the game too late? Drucker, I'm starting with you. Look, I don't think it's ever too late. I mean, I always say when it comes to political coverage or DC coverage, like the more the merrier, you know, more jobs for journalists. It's more robust.

It's more competitive. there are a lot of different niches that can be filled. But, you know, the big bud here is, let me let's see what they produce, right? And I still can't tell if they're going to try and, well, I mean, maybe I'm answering my own question here. TMZ, I would presume, is going to try and cover members of Congress very salaciously, right? Like, where are they eating lunch? What SUV are they driving around in? Or like with the Lindsey Graham photo, like, when you're not in Congress working, like, what are you off doing?

and can we embarrass you? And that's fine so far as it goes. I would say that, you know, one of the downsides of social media, among the many downsides of social media over the years, is that it has made it harder to cover members of Congress on Capitol Hill and get it in terms of getting them to just talk to you and walk and talk.

And that includes a lot of U.S. senators that for years were like, I'll tell you what I think I'm a U.S. senator, I don't care. And what we saw over the years was a lot of these senators saying, call my office, maybe I'll sit down with you. I don't want to have a five-minute conversation with you in which you crop one sentence and tweet it, completely bereft of context and you make me look like an idiot or proposing something that I don't actually propose. And to the extent that TMZ is going to run around trying to embarrass people, I don't know how good that is for political coverage in finding out the sorts of things that we want to find out.

But look, I don't want to cover scandal. It's never interested me. and, you know, depending on how they do this, you know, it could fill a void or be useful. Mike, I guess for me, this is going to be like my most unpopular take aside from, you know, hate reading, Kevin. I actually think that members of Congress,

like just because you've been elected to some office or confirmed to some position, does not mean that you lose the right to have a private life. And they not only should be allowed to take vacation, we should encourage them to take a job. actual vacations, not time where they fly back to their districts. That's still work for a lot of them, most of the time. Real vacations. And we've seen this happen in the Supreme Court context or any of the context where people aren't allowed to like meet a stranger and have a conversation with them

because they're probably being secretly recorded and it's probably going to be weaponized against them so they can't have normal human interactions where they find someone kind of weird so they just agree to get out of the conversation. You can't do that anymore because that person is recording you. And You can't go on vacation with your kids if there's something sad going on in the world because then there's going to be a picture of you smiling when other people think you should be sad or mad. I think that's really unhealthy. I think it makes these people less normal. It attracts less normal people to go into these positions. And it makes them more secluded and isolated. We've again seen this with the Supreme Court justices where they become more and more cloistered

and the only people they can talk to are there eight other colleagues. Like, that is a bad thing. We want these people to be a little bit normal. And more importantly, we want to attract people who like normalcy to run for office instead of the freak shows that can't get a job that pays more than a member of Congress. And that's why they're running for it because they're like, ooh, pay increase. That's bad. So, Mike, that's my fear for TMZ.

Yeah, so is the question, is it worth our time to care about, TMZ taking photos of members of Congress on vacation, or is the question, is it worth our time to be interested or talking about TMZ expanding these sort of political and Capitol Hill operations? There's slightly different questions. I'm 100% agreement with you about the former, about that this is a bad thing that it is not worth our time

to care about these sorts of vacations and other private sphere elements, unless we're talking about something that's happening that's criminal, explicitly corrupt, you know? Right, if Lindsay Graham had kidnapped the child and taken the child to Disney World and was holding the bubble wand by all means. Exactly, exactly, but which there is absolutely no evidence that has happened.

I just want to be clear about that. Which won't stop people from believing it. If there's a sort of paparazzi-style picture of a lunch in which the envelope of cash is being transferred from one bad person to an official, yeah, let's do that. But otherwise, I think that I agree with you about the private sphere. needing to remain private and us acting as if this is a normal part of being in the political sphere that you're going to have a camera shoved in your face and asked all these questions. But I think of the question of TMZs, like the particular company of TMZ sort of getting

into the sphere, it does feel like they're a little late to the party. I mean, the reality show element of politics is we've been in this for a decade plus now. So what is TMZ doing now in 2026? They should have been sort of expanding operations back in 2016. I think it's just sort of they're a lacking indicator, not a leading indicator of where politics is going. And so, you know, I don't like them sort of jumping into this thing. They don't really do real journalism as a rule. I think they kind of stumble into real stories here and there, but their sort of calling hard is salaciousness.

And I think it does have the effect that Drucker is concerned about, which is it causes members of Congress who should be talking to the press as representatives of the public or the public's interest, it means they're going to talk less to reporters, and that's probably on the whole a bad thing. And so it's just not worth our time to care about TMZ, except that to say, it's not good. Kevin Williamson, is Mike Warren worth your time? Always. Don't lie. What D.C. could really use is someone should do a really smart Washington gossip column. Like there's no really good gossip column in Washington.

And you can see an organization like TMZ contributing that. I mean, someone like, that sort of outlook, that sort of way of doing things. But I don't think they're going to do it. On the subject of politicians trying to go on vacation

and getting camera shoved in their places, I think I've established by this point that I no longer think very much of the entity that used to be called Ted Cruz and I still goes by that name, whatever he has come. When everyone was on his case for flying to Cancun during the ice storm in Texas. I actually did a little defensive

Ted Cruz because if you've got the means to get yourself out of the way in a crisis, like the one good thing you're doing is like ensuring that no resources have to be invested in making sure that Senator Ted Cruz is okay. And the guy's from Houston, he probably doesn't have a snow shovel. It's not like he's going to go out in clear streets or something. What the hell were you expecting him to do? I can't think of anyone in any context more useless than Ted Cruz right now. But in the contact of a blizzard, it's really hard to think of anyone who would be of less help than Ted Cruz. I just, I don't see him out there in his Gucci loafers shoveling the snow and clearing out the slush. It's just not going to happen. You're going to climb up on a ladder and fix the down

power wires. It's just not where, not Ted Cruz's contribution in life is to deal with emergencies like that. And yeah, they should go on vacation. They should stay on vacation. They should take really long vacations. And you mentioned something that actually is an interesting little bit of trivia. I'm not quite remembering, but I think it was 1996, was the first congressional election in which most people elected to the House would be earning more as congressmen than they had in their prior jobs. And that was an interesting turning point, I think. Interesting. That is. Okay, we're going to end on that. 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. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections for Kevin alone, you can email us at roundtable at the dispatch.com. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and thank you to the folks behind the scenes

who make this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.