The Dispatch Podcast - The End of Fiscal Conservatism | Roundtable

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Megan McArdle to explain the consequences of passing President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Is fiscal conservatism officially dead? The Agenda:—Big beautiful bill—God save us from “the groups”—The political process is broken—Abandoning Ukraine—Republican divide on Russia—Alliances don’t matter—The Next 250—What makes America great The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Dispatch⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Is this the end of any pretense of fiscal conservatism in favor of anything goes Trumpism? We'll also discuss Ukraine and two reports this week indicating the Trump administration's increasing abandonment of the longtime U.S. ally. Lastly, we chat about the next 250, a year-long project we're launching this week here at the dispatch to celebrate America's 250th anniversary. I'm joined today by dispatch co-founder Jonah Goldberg, the New York Times, David French, and Megan McArdle from the Washington Post. I want to start by asking you, Megan, there's a lot of Republican. support for this, all but three Republican senators voted for it. There seems to be, I don't know if I'd call it enthusiasm, but at least a lot of conservative and libertarian outside groups are backing this legislation, saying nice things about it. And every time I take a deep dive or

try to look at the details of it, I'm perplexed as to why conservatives or small government people would be excited about this bill. Should conservatives and libertarians be excited about this? No, no, they should not. They should be horrified. It's going to increase the deficit by trillions of dollars over 10 years or increase the national debt by trillions of dollars over 10 years. Look, fundamentally, as the Washington Post wrote in a very perspicacious editorial recently,

to spend is to tax. There is no such thing as a borrowed money tax cut. You can pay now, out of revenue, or you can pay the bondholders later, but one way or another, you got to pay. And so Republicans who are out there, they're all excited about their cutting taxes. They're not cutting taxes. They're cutting taxes on some people now, and then we're going to have to take that money back later when the bills come due. And that's especially true because America's debt is now really high. And the more than a decade-long era of what seemed like free money is over.

You cannot go out to the markets and get, you know, for a tenth of a percent money to fund your borrowed tax cuts. Now you're paying real cash. Our interest, the interest on the national debt, that now costs us more than Medicare or defense, just paying our interest every year. And so for one thing, what they're excited about is the tax cuts, and the tax cuts are not real tax cuts. They are fake. And then they are a little bit excited about the spending they're cutting, but they're doing that. some of the stuff in there I think should be cut. Big item on the agenda is cutting off this scam that states have been running on Medicaid where they tax their providers. And then they use that

money to give the providers higher reimbursements. Why do they do that, you ask? Because that means that the federal government, that increases the share that the federal government pays and reduces the state share. This is absurd. It is completely indefensible. It was allowed. I mean, this was kind of within the law, but it never should have been. And cracking down on that. But also Medicare work requirements, Medicaid work requirements, they've been tried in a bunch of places. They don't really do what you want. They just kind of randomly kick people off Medicaid for being bad at doing paperwork. And the other spending cuts are not particularly well organized. And then if you look at the way the taxes are structured, you know, things like no tax on tips, that's not a tax cut that's going to spur growth.

In fact, you know, there's long been this fight in Washington over something called dynamic scoring, which just means when the Congressional Budget Office estimates what it's going to cost, does the Congressional Budget Office factor in the fact that when you cut taxes, you give people more incentives to work and save and invest, and that that makes economic growth higher? And when you do that, it usually reduces the net cost of the bill somewhat because you assume you get a little bit of it back in higher growth. The tax cuts don't never pay for themselves, but they can reduce the bill a little bit.

This bill, because of the borrowed money, is actually going to increase the deficit more when you work out the economic feedback effects because it's going to raise interest rates, which is going to raise the borrowing cost for the federal government. But it's also going to crowd out private investment. When the government is sucking up, you know, there's a limited pool of capital. It's not actually infinite. So when the government goes out to the markets to borrow more money, it means there's less money of a. for mortgages and for businesses that need to expand their operations. And so overall, this is a terrible bill. Republicans should absolutely not be excited about it.

Rant off. Sorry, it was a little long, but I have a lot of feelings about this bill. Well, I'll come back to you. I cede my time to Megan for more ranting. Keep going. Keep going. No, Jonah, let me pick up on Megan's first point. She calls these fake tax cuts.

And, you know, there are some, you could make an argument that the no taxes on tips is a tax cut. There are other things in there. There are probably close to real tax cuts. But Republicans, people who support the bill, would say, look, this prevented a pretty significant tax hike. If we hadn't done this, taxes would have gone up at a time that we don't really want taxes to go up. Republicans support keeping taxes low. Why is this bad? That's the main feature of the bill.

yeah so first of all i'm going to and this is i listen carefully because i'm not referring to the swedish band i'm going to call it aba for one big beautiful i guess i don't know what the a stands for but i saw people calling it aba and i like it the one big beautiful bill act act there you go yes so aba so um i look i i agree with megan on all the points i could add a couple more about how like it's the stuff it's a lot of the stuff it does with social security is a further example of prioritizing the least growth-driven parts of the economy. You know, and the only way that the ability to pay that debt that we're accumulating gets easier is if you outgrow it.

And this is not nearly the growth-oriented kind of legislation that I would like, which I, if you could point to stuff in it that seemed even remotely plausible, that that was the strategy behind it. I would be more inclined, but I don't see anything like that. The reason why it's got a pass, and the reason why Republicans are voting for it is it's too big to fail. I mean, that's the long and short of it. And I agree, look, it's worth reminding people that if Trump had won re-election, the sunsetting of these tax cuts would be screwing probably whichever Democrat replaced him. And so one of the ironies here is that because he lost, he, his second term was four years later than it would otherwise would have been. And so the gimmick of

sunsetting this stuff, which Republicans have always loved because they love running on tax cuts, almost as much as they love tax cuts. One of the ironies here is it bit Trump rather than his successor. And the simple fact is that they're, I think, rightly, politically terrified of arguably the largest tax creaks in American history, which was what you would get if you allowed the the 2019 tax cuts to sunset and everything else is sort of commentary and so then the strategy was Congress we have a very narrow control of Congress and we can't get stuff passed through regular order or anything like that so let's cram everything we can conceivably want to do into one giant thing and then if anybody complains we go full Tom Tillis on them and that's

where that is Donald Trump's strength is like scaring the hell out of Republicans with primary challenges. What happened? Joe, could you just explain to people what happened with Tom Tillis? Yeah, so Tom Tillis, the Republicans had, they could only lose three votes and they lost three votes. And I think one of the reasons why this crazy compromise with Lisa Murkowski was worked out, where Lisa McCrowski said all of the bad stuff about Medicaid cuts that everyone, I shouldn't say, I'm okay with reforming Medicaid payments. We just got to figure out how to do it smart. But none of that's going to apply to Alaska, right? So, like, if this had happened during normal times, this would be called, you know,

Murkowski's Folly or something like that, right? And it would have a fun nickname and people would make fun of her about the Anchorage purchase or whatever. But we didn't get any of that. So she voted for it with those carve-outs. And so Tom Tillis said that these Medicaid cuts are going to be terrible for my constituents. I'm not going to do it. And Trump went nuclear on him, said, we're going to get a primary challenger for this Rhino-Cuck. loser, and probably anticipating that response, Tillis had lined up his announcement that he

wasn't going to run again. But we've seen this, I mean, how many senators, how many normie, you know, traditional green eyeshade set Republicans and congressmen, have we lost in the last 10 years from this dynamic? You know, the corkers and the Jeff Flakes, I mean, it's a very long list. And this is, Trump used his superpower of being able to threaten people with primary challenges. And that worked with the first time this came through the House is that precisely because their majority is so small, no one wanted to be the vote that killed this thing. Goes to the Senate, same logic kind of applies. Now it's coming back to the House.

And even though a lot of these people have said, oh, they've changed it so much, I can't possibly vote for it. Maybe Chip Roy is running on fumes of the benefit of the doubt. He'll actually vote against something. He says he wants to vote against. But I think this thing is just too big to fail. No one wants to be known as the one who destroyed Trump's domestic agenda, the one who prevented him from deporting millions of illegals, the one who made him a failed president and all that kind of stuff. And so they're all going to get in line and has nothing to do with the substance of this thing other than the fact that, yeah, they didn't want to have to run on raising taxes.

It has to do with the fact that this is Trump's lifeline. David, I need to try this line of questioning one more time with you. you're a strong lifelong movement conservative classic small government guy like megan and jonah i think people listening here today will look at the overwhelming republican sport in congress they'll look at outside groups like americans for prosperity backed by charles coke they'll look at mike pence's advancing american freedom they'll look at the heritage foundation they'll look at these outside groups the chamber of commerce others saying business roundtable this is great this has to pass we're for This is a good bill. Why shouldn't somebody who's listening hear Megan and Jonah and think,

ah, these are just sort of whiny Trump skeptics. They've never really loved the guy from the beginning. And they just can't get on board with what's good for smaller government. So a couple things. One, God save us from the groups. I'm just so tired of the way in which outside advocacy organizations are bombarding our body politic with statements and positions and all of this stuff that often is just getting on side with the team. I think the progressive groups have had it much worse, honestly, than a lot of the conservative groups. But it's all about team ball here, guys. I mean, how many of you all are exercising real independent judgment here in Washington? Everyone knows the cost of going against Trump. So just like just spare me the

groups. The second thing is, look, I love a good tax cut as much as the next Reaganite. Like, I mean, this is something that, you know, I remember back in the day the tax, the Reagan tax cuts and how much economic growth was spurred in part because of those tax cuts. I remember mourning in America. I also remember that when he left office in the first quarter of 1989, debt as a percentage of GDP was 49.8%. At this moment, debt is a percentage of GDP in the quarter 1, 2025, 120.8%. That is a problem. Everybody knows this is a problem. I mean, everybody who looks at this in a serious way knows this is a problem. And so a policy that can be beneficial when there's a debt to GDP ratio below 50% can be idiotic. when there's a debt to GDP ratio over 120%. And when you add on the interest rate elements that Megan mentioned, it's just very hard for me to see this as anything other

than the same kind of very short-term thinking that we've been seeing in Washington for a very long time, which is, my constituents want X, they're going to get X, and then we'll deal with the consequences later. And this has just been happening and happening and happening. And I keep thinking back to, there's this Noah Smith piece I read, oh, gosh, four or five years ago, where he talked about America's national debt as like, imagine you're walking through an infinite hallway that has an invisible pit. At some point, you're going to fall into that pit as you walk down that hallway. You don't know for sure when it is. You don't know what magic number, what time until the pit opens up beneath you and you fall in.

but there's a pit and it is coming. And he compared that to the way we're handling the national debt. And we had, I feel like we had a warning about the pit when we had the interest rate surge early in the Biden terms when we had giant amounts of government spending, giant amounts of deficit financing, and we had inflation. So I feel like we're in a world where we've had that warning. We've had a taste. We've just had a tiny little bitter taste of something like the stagflation of the late 1970s. But, you know, when Megan says things, like we're spending more on interest on the debt than we're spending on Medicare or national defense. That's really constraining us. And so I don't think conservatism, the fiscal responsibility

and the limited government of conservatism, you can't separate the two. You can't go limited government at the expense of fiscal responsibility. And so where is the fiscal responsibility here? I just, I defy somebody to show me the fiscal responsibility, and I just don't see it. Yeah, Megan, if you think about fiscal responsibility and you think about what this bill is, I mean, you pointed to liking some of the changes to Medicaid as part of the bill, there are so many different things in this bill. I saw a former colleague of mine on Fox News the other night. I caught a clip of them on social media saying, in effect, Republicans have to vote for this bill because it contains the entirety of Donald Trump's presidential agenda, this vote that's taking place six months into his second term. How do we get here where we're voting on incredibly

complicated things, different policies that have nothing to do with one another, sort of crammed together so I think that people who want to support tax cuts, who want to prevent tax hikes, have to vote for a bunch of stuff that they don't like. And what's striking is you listen to these interviews with members of Congress in the hall, Republican members of Congress in the hall. And they're as quick to trash the bill as they are to praise it because there's so much not to like in it, even as they support it. How do we get to the point where we are voting on effectively Donald Trump's entire legislative agenda in one bill six months? into second term? I think in part that's because the constituent parts couldn't pass, right? They've got to jam it all together and tie it to the tax bill so that no one can say no. But I think the bigger issue is that Republicans, part of the Trumpian takeover of the party because Trump is not a policy guy, right? Like Trump, Trump is like the world's best AB tester. If you know what that is where credit card companies, for example, they'll try to, they'll test mailers by creating two versions, sending them out.

seeing which one gets a good response, taking that mailer, turning, tweaking that into two versions and doing that over and over and over again. And, like, the secret to Trump's political success is that he has no shame. He has no fixed principles. And so he can just A-B test stuff endlessly. And it turned out that saying no tax on Social Security income, no tax on overtime, no tax on tips was really successful because the people in the crowd, and most people, like, have no idea what the math is. And so they're like, yeah. And that's always been the case. But responsible policymakers had to restrain that because they knew that ultimately the result of this would be a disaster.

Trump does not have that kind of restraint. And even before that, though, the Republican Party had started to lose its policymaking mojo. And I think that, you know, you had Paul Ryan, who was very, very serious about the budget, very, very serious about workshopping things and trying to, like, you know, you're always working with compromising. within constraints, but try to come up with, like, a serious fiscal plan for the United States, which included because we're conservatives, we understand, the world requires tradeoffs. There is no free pot of money. You've got to make hard choices that included making hard choices. But that had already started to wane before Trump was elected. And famously, after Trump's elected, and, you know, they've taken like, what, 90 squintillion votes on repealing Obama.

And they go to their congressional retreat right after Trump's elected, and they're talking about what they're going to do. And it becomes clear they have no idea. They've just taken all these votes endlessly. No one had come up with an alternative to Obamacare. And a backbencher stands up and is like, we didn't mean, you mean I took all these votes and we didn't have a plan? And it's like, did you not check? No, no one checked. No one thinks about this. And then, of course, you know, Trump, because as we've talked about with Tom Tillis resigning, he has slowly stripped everyone out of the party who has an agenda that is not just whatever Donald Trump said last week. And so that capacity was already declining, and now it's just gone. And so we just ended up with this huge mess that is equal parts. We got to reauthorize the tax cuts from 2017, which also weren't particularly well thought out. And then we got to do stuff Trump said on the stump because it sounded good and he never looked at the math because he doesn't care. And then there's, you know, legislators looking at stuff they really can't accept. And so, for example, Marsha Blackburn, looking at the 10-year AI moratorium on state efforts to regulate AI just said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not doing it.

That was actually a measure that I supported. But that thing, like those three forces have come together to create just a steaming pile of garbage. in the middle of Capitol Hill. Yeah, so Steve, just very quickly, just to level set a little bit, when I hear you asking these questions in your earnest cheesehead, Wisconsin, good government, conservative voice about,

why would conservatives support this bill? I mean, I know you heard doing this because you're in the moderator role these days, but it's a little bit like, imagine driving in a really slow car across a vast desert, like the Sahara or Death Valley. And the kid in the back says,

why is it so hot? And you have to say, well, because we're in the desert. And an hour later, why is it so hot? Because we're still in the desert next day. It's still in the desert, right? And so, like, you asking these questions about these problems that we've been identifying for like 10 years, there are no new interesting answers to them. I mean, this is one of the reasons why punditry is so exhausting these days.

Congress is broken. Congress doesn't do regular order. It doesn't have hearings. It didn't do it really under Obama and Biden. And that process has gotten worse. David's well-taken point about the groups has been a problem for a very long time. At the end of the day, they have to be partisan and loyal Republicans. You know, I remember writing, I first got this idea from a blogger, and I've sort of, it's really gotten home to me for a long time.

When Obama was trying to get comprehensive immigration reform, he kept saying, look, Congress has to do this. I can't do DACA on my own. We have a constitution. I'm not a king. I don't have arbitrary authority to do this. And the broader liberal punditocracy was like, good for Obama. He's fighting for immigration reform. We need immigration reform.

Congress has to pass immigration reform. Gang of eight this, blah, blah, blah, blah, that. And then that all falls apart in Congress. And Obama's like, okay, well, I'm going to do it unilaterally with my pen and my phone through executive orders. And virtually not a single mainstream MSNBC panelist host type person said, wait a second, didn't Obama say that was against the law and unconstitutional? Instead, they said, good for him. He wins, right?

He wins this fight, even though the Supreme Court eventually, because it's the only institution that still plays its proper role, overturned a chunk of it. And the point I was trying to make is that in film, we call the thing the hero wants the MacGuffin, right? So the Maltese Falcon is the McGuffin. And we don't really know why sometimes, like in North by Northwest, we don't know what the plans are. We just know that the guy wants to get them.

We don't know what's in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. We just know the hero wants it. And you root for the hero to get the thing that they want. And our politics has become such a form of entertainment. And we cover it as one team winning and the other team losing that the one big beautiful bill might as well be the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Most people don't know what's in it. All they know is that Trump wants it.

And we know that the other team doesn't want them to have it. And that's how this crap is covered. And that's how these guys vote. because they don't actually have any real power over the legislative process anymore. And then, you know, sort of like, hopefully in the sequel to Pulp Fiction, we'll find out what's in the briefcase. And hopefully when this thing passes, we'll find out what's in the, you know, in Abba. And that's the end of it.

But like, no one's doing their jobs the way they're supposed to be done. And then you come in here and ask, why aren't, why are conservatives, you know, more opposed to this thing, which is obviously something conservatives should be opposed to? and it's because everything's friggin' broken. Yeah, and I should add, this is very bipartisan, right? You know, if you look at most of the national debt that we've accumulated is from the pandemic and the financial crisis. But Obama ran higher deficits than he needed to to deal with a financial crisis.

And then Biden comes in in 2020. And Democrats had really gotten the idea that the money was just free. It had no cost. You could borrow as much as you want. I can't tell you the number of conversations I had where I would say this is unsustainable. When we have to roll over our debt at higher rates, this could be a real problem. And people would say a country that borrows in its own currency can't have a Greece-like fiscal crisis. And like that's technically true and totally irrelevant.

First of all, borrowing in your own country is not like something God handed out to the countries at the beginning of time. And poor Greece didn't get that. And we did. You get to borrow in your own currency because people, trust you not to inflate away the value of your debt. But second of all, you can have crises that look just as bad as Greece. They just don't happen to involve a run on your banks, like a currency mismatch. They have just as big problems where the government throws out an offer to borrow some money

and markets just look at them and say, eh, no, I don't think so. Not really interested. And then you have a giant honking fiscal crisis that requires cuts right now. now because you can't borrow the money that you need to to cover your deficits anymore. And we are running a huge, what's called a primary deficit, which means that even once you take out our interest costs, we are still borrowing net money. So, like, we can't fix this by inflating away the value of the debt. We can't fix this by defaulting. It's not a very good fix, but it's not even an option because we still need to borrow money just to fund the money that isn't our

interest costs. And cutting it would be painful. And it's a lot better to do those, make those painful choices slowly in a measured way where you were giving people plenty of time to adjust. But not only did the Biden administration not do this, they blew up the deficit, 6%, 5%, 6% for the entire post-pandemic term, as if money didn't matter and they didn't have any obligation to take care of America's fiscal future. And that is absolutely a bipartisan disease and it is doing sick, sick things to America's fiscal health. Megan, I think you could have just said all that in the following phrase. Romney Ryan, 2012.

I, you know, sometimes I dream that that happened and, like, I'm so happy. And then I wake up and I'm like, no. David, just to wrap up here, why is it so hot in this car that we're driving in, in the desert? The real question, should we be more upset at this bill and what's in this bill? Or should we be more upset at the process, the broken process that's led us to this? Yes. They're just inseparable. I mean, the broken process, as broken processes do, is yielding unacceptable results.

And so this is one of the things that really gets me about the current moment is people like me are called proceduralists as an insult. like you really care about process and I care about outcomes and outcomes are more important than process how do you think you get to good outcomes processes really matter for reaching good outcomes because not one of us is possessed with all of the wisdom and all of the foresight to be you know to dictate all of the greatest outcomes in this democratic society the democratic process to function well the democracy to function well means the democratic process has to function well. And so the denigration of process is irrelevant, I think, has been one of the really negative aspects of this moment. And it's one of the reasons why I very much like,

and I very much prefer talking about legal issues than the political nonsense, because I feel like commentary about Congress is just commentary on analyzing different angles of the train wreck. look how much the train demolish the car when you take this picture and look how the damage from the train from this angle whereas with the law at least arguments still matter like there is still a way to persuade decision makers and to create sometimes surprising outcomes that confound political expectations Congress that's just it's just over for now as as any sort of entity that has a meaningful, independent exercises, meaningful, independent judgment in American democracy. It just, it just doesn't. Well, there is, Joan, I'm happy to reveal. There is a method to my madness.

You'll notice that we haven't talked much about this creptastic legislation on this podcast for the last several weeks. And we've done that for precisely the reason that David suggests. First of all, it's not a good bill. It's filled with a bunch of bad things. I think it's a problem on a number of levels, as you all have pointed out. Second, there's no point arguing about it or discussing it because most of the people who are voting on it don't know what's in it. And you're not going to change anybody's minds by having these discussions. In fact, even at this late hour, I think most people, you go up to any member of Congress in the hallway and ask them to name five provisions of the bill and explain what they do. You probably, you probably get a 50-50 chance that they can do that. But I do think what's important about this is that it's the result of a fundamentally broken process, broken Congress, but a broken Washington sort of beyond that. And if my, you know, dewy-eyed questions, my Wisconsin naivete, can elicit the kind of impassioned answers that I got from you and Megan and David, that's the win. It's almost like you're committed to the journalistic process.

And so you're asking these necessary but annoying questions. Look, annoying is a feature, not a bug, if I'm hearing that back from you. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that. extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain, on top of everything else, is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance

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in your podcast app and make sure you hit the follow button. Now let's get back to our conversation. David, I want to get to Ukraine before we get to America's 249th birthday. There were two new reports this week that suggest the Trump administration is basically abandoning Ukraine. The first from Politico revealed that the Pentagon has stopped shipping weapons to Ukraine promised under Joe Biden. The second came in an analysis from the New York Times, which found that the U.S. has systematically stopped enforcing sanctions known as maintenance sanctions. And of course, despite Donald Trump's repeated promises to impose more sanctions every time Russia does something aggressive, we've had no new sanctions. Is this finally the abandonment of Ukraine that many have long feared? Is this the moment? I mean, it could be. It probably is. You know, I do think there is what we have seen, this whole, I think the taco word,

was insightful but misapplied, which was Taco Trump always chickens out. And it was coined as a result of some of his erratic behavior around the tariffs, that he was, he came in on Liberation Day with these giant tariffs and nonsensically applied. And all of a sudden, you know, the stock market starts to tank. The bond market looks very, very scary, and he pulls back. And he's been doing this on a number of fronts for much of his administration. But the CO, the chicken out, are of Taco is not related really to, is Trump a chicken? It's much more related to Trump doesn't want to pay a political price for his, a lot of his decisions. And so when it began to look like he was starting to pay this political price as the economy was beginning to tremble after Liberation Day, he

backs away. He's doing weird and erratic things around immigration. You know, we've had the on again, off again reprieve for hospitality workers and ag workers. So it's very clear that if there is something happening that begins to create a domestic political problem, even if it's part of his core agenda, I mean, find somebody in your life who loves you as much as Donald Trump loves tariffs, but he's still backed away from those, right, at least to a large degree. So part of me thinks, that if you begin to see some horrible images out of Ukraine, if you begin to see a crisis on the front at Ukraine, or you begin to see Ukrainian city is just burning, that I wonder if that's the taco part of Trump will kick in. That's the only reason, though, why I'm qualifying.

Are we abandoning? Yes, we're abandoning, I think, up and until the moment when Donald Trump believes that abandoning Ukraine is going to be cost him more than he's willing to bear. But I think that's absolutely the case. Does the withholding of these weapons make that more likely? Do you have a sense of how important this is? Well, you know, so if you look at what was withheld, you had 155 millimeter artillery shells, very, very important. But the thing that really stood out to me was withholding the Patriot Pack 3 missiles. This is what keeps the center of Kiev safe, or at least relatively safe, from the hypersonic missile threat.

And these hypersonic missiles are just unbelievably destructive. And so I do wonder, and I was in Kiev in May of 2023 at the first big confrontation of Patriots versus the Kinsal hypersonics. And I remember, I will never forget seeing those Patriots flying up into the air to shoot down those Kinsal missiles. I mean, it was an unbelievable moment. And that is the kind of thing. If you began to have a lot of these hypersonic missiles and cruise missiles,

getting through and hitting civilian areas and causing mass-scale civilian casualties, that's going to be broadcast on every news report around the globe. And I do wonder, I do wonder if that might cause Trump to crack and relent and to reopen and to supply weapons that we've already agreed to provide, that have already been, the appropriations have already been made. But it's terrible situations strategically when you're Ukraine, because, you've done everything that he's asked. He's still cutting you off. And you realize that he's probably not going to turn the spigot back on until lots of people have died and horrible things have happened on

the front. And now, is it possible that Europe can step up enough and Ukrainian ingenuity can step up enough to keep Russia at bay? Yeah, absolutely. That's possible. But withholding the Patriot missiles is to me, that is the most grievous aspect of this. These are the things, it's hard to describe, and a lot of Israeli citizens have now experienced this after the Iranian missile attacks, this thought that you have arcing towards you and towards the center of a city, dozens of incredibly destructive weapons, and the only thing keeping you safe are these hyper-advanced anti-missile systems, and we're saying no about. that. We're saying no. We're saying to Ukrainian civilians, you will now face a greater risk of

horrific tragedy and death. Why? How is this in our interest? I've yet to see and understand how it's in our interests to not use a small portion of our arsenal to keep Russia at bay in Eastern Europe. I've never seen that fully and adequately explained. Megan, some of the Republicans who've gone along, we talked about a moment ago, who've gone along with Donald Trump and this big beautiful bill, supported him despite their reservations, members of Congress and folks outside,

have spoken up in sort of to challenge the potential abandonment of Ukraine that I think people are worried about. Mike Pompeo, former Secretary of State in the Trump administration, who's been very supportive of Donald Trump rhetorically for these first six months, said today, Ukraine has never asked America to send the 82nd airborne. They've asked for weapons to defend their homeland and people from Russian attacks. Letting Russia win this war would be an unmitigated disaster for the American people and our

security around the world. Is there a divide among Republicans? It seemed after the president ordered the strikes on Iran that even some of the non-interested. interventionists among the Republican members of Congress and outside came around. I mean, there were polls showing 90 plus percent support of what the president was doing. But Ukraine seems to be different. Why is it different? You know, I think that one reason it's different, unfortunately, it speaks to a larger political problem, which is that people just polarize around stupid stuff, like once Trump says something or doesn't say something, suddenly we're polarized on that issue. And a great example of this is masks. Right. Early on in the pandemic,

I watched conservatives say people should be wearing masks at the time when the CDC was saying no, because as it turned out, they were afraid people would hoard the masks and providers wouldn't be able to get them, healthcare workers. And then Trump was going to a factory tour and he didn't want to wear a mask because he thought it would make him look unmanly. And so he said no. And then suddenly I just watched this flip in real time. Suddenly conservatives are like master dumb and liberals are like master the awesome. Like what's wrong with you? And I think with Russia in a couple of ways, right, there's a there's a social conservative element that started to see like Russia and Hungary as the last bulwark against the social justice hordes, particularly on sexual issues, LGBT issues. And then there is the fact that, you know, liberals decided that Trump was like a Manchurian candidate puppet of Putin. And because of those two things, you have gotten this completely bizarre, effective polarization about Russia, where anything Russia does is bad and liberals love, like, thwarting it, and where conservatives get their backs up when people start talking, when liberals start talking about how Russia is bad. And look, in this particular case, I am very clear, Ukraine are the good guys here and Russia are the bad guys.

But it could have just as easily been anything else because what's ultimately driving so much of this is just this, you know, some other issue tangentially involves something and that everyone picks a team and takes aside and then you can't move them. And I think that's a lot of what's happening here. And it's really stupid. It is really stupid that America, look, I think there are real questions about, you know, how far can we push this before we're risking a wider conflagration we do not want to get into with a nuclear armed power raid? There are all sorts of legitimate arguments. We're not having the legitimate arguments. We are having a dumb argument over whether Ukraine or the bad guys. And ultimately, the thing is that Republicans are not going to stand up to him on that.

They may have different opinions. But they're going to fall in line just like they're falling in line on no tax on tips and overtime. Like, because they are afraid of a primary. They want to be good team players. They're really mad at the wokes. All of these have, should have no place. They do have a place. They should have no place in deciding what is in America's national interest and in the global interest when conducting foreign policy.

But that is not the world we live in. Jonah, do you expect Donald Trump to try to win back the support of people like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green and others who were disappointed with what he did in Iran by pulling back further in Ukraine? Or was he going to do it anyway? I don't know that that's his motive here. I think, you know, his priors about Russia are pretty well known. You know, we are now, I think, three weeks past his two weeks, two week deadline for Russia to start doing something positive and seeking a peace deal or whatever. Um, you ask, why is Ukraine different? I think that, than Israel. And I, I think you get it backwards. The question is, why is Israel different than Ukraine? Uh, pollsters have been talking about this in the lead up to the Iran, Iran strikes. And David can probably speak to this better than I can. But like, um, there is still a really fundamental commitment to Israel among sort of the evangelical wing of the Republican Party and to non-evangelical, um,

Republicans that I think Trump is sensitive to and that there isn't that sort of sensitivity to any other foreign policy situation. And so Israel is the exception. And look, I'm a supporter of Israel. I like the idea that Israel's, you know, that America will get Israel's back. I do not want America to only get Israel's back for a bunch of different reasons. One of them, and not the primary one is I don't think that's good for Israel. But like if it's just looked like Israel gets special treatment and is the exception to the rule of what these jobos define as america first long term that's bad for israel that turns israel into as we've seen already a kind of one of these polarizing issues that the republican parties for israel and the democratic party is against

israel that's bad for israel long term moreover what's really bad for america is the idea that none of our alliances matter um except for israel right i mean like so like yeah um my My fundamental problem about this decision with Ukraine is, look, I think it's bad policy. I think it's really bad policy. I think it's bad policy for the United States. I think it's bad for the world. I think it's bad for our alliances and all that kind of stuff. It is fundamentally dishonorable.

I don't know. David might remember back when we were both at National Review, there was a, I'm not sure if you ever met him, but one of my favorite National Review super fans who was on all the cruises was this guy we called Dr. John. And he was an Australian eye. Oh, yeah, yeah. Australian eye surgeon. I remember Dr. John.

Yeah, really, he was a crumajum, but a really sort of cute, sort of like, like to seem like a crumajum more than actually be one. And he had like an unbelievable number of adopted Vietnamese refugee kids and did all of these things

because he had been an eye surgeon, a military surgeon in Vietnam. And if you wanted to see him turn into a real cremugent, truly get angry, mention Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon in our abandonment of the South Vietnamese.

and he lost his mind about it and he could never forgive it because among other things he had friends and family who died over there because they were abandoned and couldn't get out in time and it's not exactly analogous

because we don't have boots on the ground in Ukraine but these are people who have been counting on for their survival certain promises to us and it's one argument to say we will not make new promises

I think that's a mistake but you know it depends what the promises but like it's one thing to say we're not going to make new promises It's another thing to say we are not going to follow through on promises we've already made in the name of the United States of America that innocent Ukrainians are going to live or die because of our breaking of those promises. And to do this on the cusp of a Russian, you know, massive new offensive is just simply a boon to Russia. And I think it's not so much that Trump has these feelings about Ukraine, although I think he still blames Ukraine for getting him, you know, impeached the first time. It's that he's always had this man crush on Putin and on Russia, and it considers that to be

like a sophisticated foreign policy position. Yes, this position definitely divides Republicans. So does trade. So do lots of things that divide Republicans. The question is, what will prompt Republicans to speak up on these divisions? And I'm very skeptical. I mean, I don't want to get into a fight with Megan about, you know, libertarians and the libertarian party. I know she's a huge fan of the Libertarian Party. But I have to say, like, the worst thing that has happened to me is when Angela McArdle was elected president of the Libertarian Party, because of course everyone assumed that, like, we were related. And in fact, we are both descended from the same 12th century warlord. Excellent. But as far as I know, there's no closer relationship. And the number of, like,

NPR confused me with her. Nice. So I then started getting angry people, like, flooding my Twitter mentions, demanding to know why I had done things that Angela McArdle had done. So just very briefly, my biggest gripe with Libertarian Party and very political libertarians for the last 30 years until the fight over pot came to an end was that libertarians are divided about a lot of things, right? And Megan can attest, you can get into arguments, weird arguments about privatizing the police and all sorts of weird things with libertarians, and it's a lot of fun to do. But you don't judge political movements

by the full menu of their positions. You judge them by what they actually prioritize, what they were willing to fight over, what they are willing to sort of like put their, you know, put asses in the seats at a, about. And for the Libertarian Party, it was always about drug legalization, right? That's the thing that became the Libertarian Party for one of them.

The Republican Party, you don't judge it by what the closet normies say on CNN or on Fox about how we need to stand by Ukraine, you judge them by whether or not they're actually willing to pick a fight with the administration over it in public. And I don't have a lot of confidence that any of them, or at least many of them, are going to want to like burn political capital for Ukraine. And that's tragic and it's dishonorable.

You know, think about for half a second how much our domestic political polarization is now wrecking our foreign credibility. Because if we're going to a point where Israel is the Republican ally and Ukraine is the Democratic ally or NATO is the Democratic alliance, and I'm not sure what the, you know, the Hungarian, the great Hungarian American pact of 2028 is the Republican ally. I don't know. The Saudi American Qatari Bun. It's risky. It's risky to float these things. Yes, don't give them many ideas, Jonah. I know. But if that is the reality that we have the Democratic alliances and we have the Republican alliances, we won't have real alliances. Because if you're a defense planner, if you're a strategic

planner for, say, you know, France or England or Germany, and you think, well, America will come to our help when Democrats win and it won't when Republicans win, then you have to plan as if America's not coming. Right. And similar with Israel. And one thing, there was just, Many of us are here on the podcast or friends with Corey Shockey, and she wrote a really excellent piece about how America's global influence has always been more cooperative than coercive. And if it becomes coercive rather than cooperative, we will diminish because we don't, we literally don't have the capacity to coerce everybody. And the MAGA movement seems to have this really interesting paradox at the heart of it, it's foreign policy, which is America is not strong enough to police the world, but we are strong enough to tell everybody exactly what to do and they'll do it. And that's, no, that is not how this works. We have always magnified our strength through our cooperative approach and minimized it when we're isolated. And we will be isolated. more and more as our alliances devolve into partisan affiliations. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back shortly.

Bankmore on course when you switch to a Scotia Bank banking package. Learn more at scotiabank.com slash banking packages. Conditions apply. Scotia Bank, you're richer than you think. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's get back to our conversation. would like to end with something that's very much worth our time. On July 4th, we'll celebrate

the 249th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the Birth of the Country. We, at the dispatch, will also be launching something called the Next 250. It's a series that will feature exclusive essays from historians, political leaders, and cultural commentators on the country's founding ideals, kicking off a year-long conversation about the American experiment. What's worth preserving, what needs reform, how might we renew the American civic, cultural, and political life? I want to end by asking each of you, as you think back over the history of the United States. What's one thing that the founders did or said provided that contributed most to, you know, what I consider to be the most remarkable accomplishment in self-government in human history?

Is there anything that sort of jumps out at you as you think about why we've had the success that we've had over the past 249 years? And I'll start with you, Jonah. We should have informed listeners also that I have the inaugural essay in this series that will be out on Friday, July 4th, and you can read all that there. I would say the one that I think gets the least respect and attention is the fact that the founding father, completely and forthrightly in an unbelievably radical way, rejected all notions of formal nobility and aristocracy. That you have to remember was aristocracy is the oldest, I would argue it's the oldest form of identity politics.

It is much older than notions of racism, which are kind of modern. It is even much older than notions of like sort of religious identity in a lot of ways. This idea that people of good blood, that nobility, are simply born better. but with better natures than other people and that therefore their status as you're better is inherited over time was considered completely natural and normal throughout the quote

unquote civilized world everywhere you went and the fact that the founders rejected that at a metaphysical level right that said that is just simply not how it works um men are all were, people were born equal. We can talk about slavery another time, but that was incredibly radical. And people in Europe looked at that, well, people who wanted freedom and wanted to live in a,

you know, in a more just society, looked at that with envy. But people in power, people of status, people who were nobles and descendants of warlords that happened to take some hill in ninth century France or whatever, they looked at that, like, that's crazy talk. And it seems so obvious and natural to us now that we don't think about the fact that that sort of social organization is in fact natural.

And whenever humans are not constrained by the rule of law and by these kinds of founding principles, the impulse towards aristocracy, the impulse towards nobility, the impulse towards saying, I want to leave to my children, my status. simply because it is a birthright of being my children. That is how societies tend to reorganize the second those sorts of protections are missing. One of my favorite examples of this is in Mexico. There are parts of Mexico where if you are a member of the Teachers Union Guild, whatever it is, your job as a chemistry teacher or a math teacher is heritable, that you can inherit whether you know how to teach it or not. It is just simply passed on to you.

And that is the way North Korea is organized. that is a way China, to a certain extent, is organized, as a way Saudi Arabia is still organized. Lots of parts of the world are still organized according to those assumptions that simply through accident to birth, some people are more noble and deserving of resources and status than other people. And America, at least as a matter of formal law, rejected that entirely. And that was a wildly radical thing to do at the time. Pretty strong answer for having put you on the spot. Megan? I'm going to go really, I'm going to go with the incredible.

incredibly predictable libertarian answer, which is first amendment. Pretty great, actually. Copyright protection? No. First Amendment, baby. Because the First Amendment is what gave us the ability to change, to progress. You know, I think if you look back, right, the founding fathers in many ways would be very surprised about what America turned into. You know, like, I'm Catholic. The first Catholic church was legal in New York City in, I mean, I believe 1884 in the early 1880s was when Catholicism was legalized. And even then, they're complaining about the Germans. They would be very surprised. I think heartened, for example, that we got rid of slavery, somewhat surprised and perhaps dismayed about other things that we did,

but we turned into this great pluralistic nation that has changed, that has progressed, that has moved towards a more perfect union for 250 years, precisely because we always, we always, has had the freedom to debate what we were going to do, to meet with other like-minded people without the government interfering, to practice our faith without the government interfering. And those things are the most incredible foundation for what I truly believe is the most incredible nation on earth. I want to start singing the national anthem at this point, but I won't. Oh beautiful

There you go Oh wait like Megan can sing So maybe we'll Overlay these answers On Megan's Star Spangled Banner The Star Spangled Banner is like the hardest song in the entire world to sing I sang it at a public performance once

With a bunch of other people I was by no means like the soloist But it has this incredible range And it's incredibly difficult To hit both the lone notes and the high notes, which is why you will often see this pause as people launch into Osay, does that star-spangled banner yet wave? And they're kind of, even professional singers kind of like girding themselves to launch into the category five hurricane of national

anthems. If you ever want to appreciate just how difficult it is to sing, go to a minor league baseball game or a lower level professional hockey game where you have high school basketball games, you know, out there, yeah, doing their best, but often coming up a little bit short. David, your thought on what the founders gave us that's led to our success or contributed to our success. Well, before I get into the very serious and inspirational discussion about America. I do want to have a little bit of levity. The Fox, I've discovered, has figured out a way to minimize its defamation risk. After its giant settlement, there are people are posting online that Fox just sent out a breaking news alert that said, Judge sets Diddy Free on Bond or Diddy

to remain locked up until sentencing. And that's the news alert. So that is what you call covering your bases. Fact check true. Okay. Fact check true. So I'm going to go with federalist number 10. And I'm going to go with the vision that James Madison marks out that is a lot of people would say that federalist number 10 is the foundational document, philosophical document of American pluralism. And what he's dealing with and talking about is the problem of a faction. This is a problem we talk about a lot, except we call it partisanship, but the problem of faction and the problem of how one faction might try to oppress another faction and the danger and how do you deal with that. And there's this famous line in there that we need to, and I'm going to, here's the quote, extend the sphere. He's talking about the

republic. Extend the sphere. And you take in a greater variety of parties and interest. You make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens, or if such a common motive exists, it'll be more difficult to all who feel it to discover their own strength, to act in unison with each other. Besides other impediments, it may be remarked that where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the numbers whose concurrence is necessary. That's a very kind of flowery way of saying when you extend the sphere of the republic and you bring in more voices and different voices, just the very act of extending that sphere is going to diminish the

possibility of tyranny. And one of the things that I think is so powerful about the American story is how we have extended that sphere time and time again, sometimes after a ridiculous amount of bloodshed and after, you know, an extraordinary amount of protest and unrest. But that has been the pattern of America is that we started with this small sphere. We started with a republic in which the liberties of this republic were confined and limited. And then steadily we extended and extended and extended the sphere. And I think that's in many ways the mission statement of the United States of America is extending this fear of liberty, extending this fear of democracy. And I'm not talking about in a imperialistic way. I'm talking about it within the

internal boundaries of the United States of America. This is a country that its mission statement, its driving purpose has been to extend the sphere of liberty. Now, doesn't mean we've done it perfectly. It doesn't mean that there haven't been strong forces fighting against the extending the sphere. But that statement right there in Federalist Number 10 in many ways is setting it's setting the moral and philosophical tone for what this country is supposed to be. Well, these were terrific answers. I'm glad I asked the question. If you liked these answers, these meditations, reflections on what's made America great, please do check out America's next 250 and Jonah's essay released on July 4th. Thanks everyone for joining us today. Join us again

next week for this batch podcast. Thank you.