The Dispatch Podcast - The Grapes of Play-Acting

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

At the beginning of the pandemic, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York drew ire from lawmakers of all political stripes for sending COVID-19 positive patients back into nursing homes. But resentment against the governor reached a tipping point in late January, when New York Attorney General Letitia James released a blistering report showing that his office significantly underreported the number of COVID-19 deaths in New York nursing homes. Cuomo has brushed aside those criticisms as a partisan smear campaign, and went so far as to write a book bragging about his leadership during the pandemic. “What is unforgivable, and really, frankly, kind of evil is this alleged covering up of what they did,” Jonah says on today’s show. Tune in to hear the gang chat about K-12 school reopening efforts, the Senate’s acquittal of Donald Trump, and Tim Alberta’s Nikki Haley piece in Politico. Stick around to hear our hosts chat about their Myers Briggs test results. Show Notes: -American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic by Andrew Cuomo. -“Nikki Haley’s Time for Choosing” by Tim Alberta in Politico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. Boy, do we have some fun, interesting topics today. We are going to start with Governor Cuomo in New York, and the fallout from his COVID-19 handling will move quickly on to school reopenings, whether the Biden administration is on the verge of a sister-soldier moment or something quite different. Then we have to do some impeachment wrap up. Since we last talk to you, the president was, the former president was acquitted on the article of impeachment for his actions around January 6th. And we'll wrap by a forward look at the 2024 Republican primaries as they already get underway with a very long, in-depth look at Nikki Haley in the latest Politico magazine.

Let's dive in. Jonah, why don't you start us off with a conversation about governors and coronavirus fallout still? Yeah, it's, to me the interesting thing is one, I like to set the stage and I'll start over. Andrew Cuomo, who was sort of by affirmation declared the anti-Donald Trump, the hero of liberalism, the man who can tell us hard truths, the hands-on manager, it increasingly appears that he really blew it in terms of how he handled COVID. And I've always been very forgiving of people who made bad decisions in the middle of the early days of the pandemic because we didn't know what we were doing and there's going to be a lot of trial on error. And so the fact that,

that Andrew Cuomo sent so many people back to old age homes with COVID and then ended up killing, it seems, thousands more people than would have otherwise been necessary if they did the right thing. That was bad. But what is unforgivable and really frankly kind of evil is this alleged covering up of what they did. At the beginning of the pandemic, everybody needs. Everybody needs clear information. And the Trump administration got all sorts of grief, rightly so, for playing all sorts of messaging games and being unclear with information. And leading that pack in many ways was Andrew Cuomo and all the people who celebrated

Andrew Cuomo. Meanwhile, he was withholding, it is alleged, significant data that would have been very helpful for public health officials and the public at large. because he was afraid of the political blowback. And the whole point of being forgiving about making mistakes is that people need to learn from their mistakes. If you hide the mistakes during a pandemic, that's just flatly sinister. And that appears what Cuomo has done.

But I think there's something larger and also interesting here is that I think, look, I think even on this podcast, with the possible exception of David, I stand out. out as someone who really didn't, was kind of unable to let Donald Trump go for four years and stayed on point quite a bit. And I don't think David and I combined and squared were as bad as like MSNBC or the New York Times or lots of people who were just obsessed with full resistance mode coverage. And I think that one of the things that we're starting to see now is the tide recedes from the Trump era is there's an awful lot of wreckage of stuff that should have been covered that should have been central in our politics that got crowded out by Trump.

And politicians like Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo are paying a price for it because they were they were so lionized by media that wanted to say the North Star was Donald Trump in all things that they gave these guys passes. and now the typical voters who didn't necessarily give those passes are saying we want some accountability for this stuff fine beat up on Trump but he's gone you guys screwed this stuff up and I think it's roiling our politics in interesting ways in the year to come because people are sick of this freaking pandemic since I name drop David I'll go to David do you think I have it right do you think that this is both sort of a pandemic mishandle

thing and also a corrective after Trump? Yeah, I think you have it right. Some time ago, I said, I think if you're going to have a Mount Rush more of leadership failures in the pandemic, it would begin with sort of Xi from China, and then you would have Trump. But then I said, you'd have Cuomo and de Blasio. You know, the Cuomo nursing home policy was disastrous. and I think there's some pretty righteous anger on the part of, for example, Governor DeSantis

in Florida, where the media just sort of descended upon him as someone who was particularly reckless. Meanwhile, the governor in their own backyard that was being lionized across the political spectrum, well, not really across the political spectrum, across much of the media for his handling of the coronavirus, was making some pretty catastrophic decisions that we now know were enabled by a cover-up. And there's just got to be accountability for that. There has got to be a reckoning. And as the vaccine is being rolled out and we're going to begin to sort of really take stock in the final analysis of who did well and who didn't do well and kind of pull back from the back and forth of the new cycle and the Trump focus, as you were saying,

I mean, this Cuomo scandal is coming into focus as a real thing. And I think that a lot of his momentum was centered around communications and sort of a contrast between his daily press conferences and the, you know, whack-a-doodle press conferences that Trump was giving. But in the bottom-line analysis, his decisions were bad. He may have been communicating better. and he may have appeared to be more in charge, but he was making bad decisions,

and then Jonah, as you say, covering up the consequences of those bad decisions at a really crucial time. And so whatever reckoning is descending upon him now is just abundantly deserved. Steve? Or Sarah? I heard Sarah preparing to hold forth. Well, I also thought it was worth going through

exactly what the two, what information we have about the quote unquote cover up. So Governor Cuomo gave this press conference where he said, no excuses, we should not have created the void of information. We should have done a better job in providing information. We should have done a better job of knocking down the disinformation. I accept responsibility for that. I am in charge. I take responsibility. We should have provided more information faster. Ah, but here comes the kicker. We were too focused on doing the job and addressing the crisis of the moment.

So his excuse for why they didn't provide any of the nursing home information publicly is that, you know, they had a crisis unfolding on their hands and they, you know, had to be doing that. You know what? That would actually have been pretty believable to me, but for the fact that this press conference came about because a leak of a phone call that his,

one of his top aides had with Democratic state lawmakers in which she said, now I'm quoting again, and basically we froze because then we were in a position where we weren't sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice or what we give to you guys, what we start saying was going to be used against us while we weren't sure if there was going to be an investigation.

Well, that's a very different reason not to give information. And the fact that that apology went to democratic lawmakers instead of to the families of loved ones who lost people in nursing homes, or for that matter, just New Yorkers in general, or for that matter, anything public. We would not have had the Cuomo press conference where he said he took responsibility.

But for this phone call that his top aide had, where she says the reason that they didn't release the information is because they were worried they would be helping the Department of Justice do an investigation into what happened. What? I mean, that's disgusting. That is a great point.

I wish I had elucidated it better when I was setting it up. But, you know, here in my bunker in Austin, it's difficult to keep a straight mode of thought. I will add one other point about this, which I forgot to mention, since you raised the, it would have been plausible as an excuse,

because they were so busy dealing with the crisis. Let us not forget that Andrew Cuomo found time to write a book explaining how awesome he was at handling the crisis. No, exactly. Exactly. And it wasn't, yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say. It wasn't, I mean, it's just not true. Look, one of the things that Andrew Cuomo did to earn so much praise from the media at the outset

was hold lengthy press conferences in which he held forth on. every conceivable detail of the crisis unfolding in New York. And he said repeatedly, I remember watching some of these press conferences, he emphasized how important it was to give straightforward, accurate information in real time so that people could make good decisions. That was sort of the basis of his public-facing efforts during that whole episode. So it's not the case that he didn't have time. to talk to the public. He was talking to the public for sometimes hours in a day. And that's one of

the reasons that journalists sort of lapped up what he was giving. I think this is, I mean, this is such a serious moment for Cuomo. You know, there are sort of building calls for his resignation. And usually I hear calls for resignation. And my initial instinct is just to shrug him off and say, ah, gosh, that seems like a pretty radical thing to kind of start with. I don't think it's radical here. I think what he's done, and again, as Sarah points out, this admission comes from his own people, explaining their reasoning, is gives rise to serious questions about whether he should resign and not.

And a final point, not only was he a jackass who went out and decided to write a book about his success when he was failing, he went after, typical of Andrew Cuomo. If you followed his career or covered him, my first major coverage story at the Weekly Standard was a profile of Andrew Cuomo back in 2001. He went after his critics relentlessly, harshly. And Janice Dean, who's a meteorologist at Fox News, who lost both of her in-laws to COVID. in nursing home settings, had been critical of the governor of sort of sounding the alarms on this forever. And his staff went after her in the most belittling, insulting kinds of ways at one point saying something along the lines of, you know, she should stick to the weather. She only

knows the weather. You know, as if she can't speak out about the loved ones, she's lost because, in part, because of his competence, I do think this rises to the level of a serious discussion about his resignation. It puts the Biden Department of Justice in an interesting position. Now, I don't think there's any particular love lost between the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney's Office and Andrew Cuomo. There's, in fact, been sort of, there's famous friction, frankly,

between Cuomo and every other part of New York's government, state, federal, and otherwise. but I don't see how the Department of Justice cannot look into this now. Yeah, and so it's, so assuming that they do, do you actually think that there's a criminal penalty here that's going on, or is this just going to be one of these things that there's a bad report that comes out that says,

shame on you for doing this, and that's it. I don't think there's any criminal penalty for making a bad judgment call in terms of putting people who are COVID positive back into nursing homes. That's what's sort of interesting about this. Cuomo made the wrong call, but calls had to be made. There were, you know, it was very unclear what to do at that point when folks needed to be released from hospitals because you were worried that there wouldn't be enough room in the hospitals for people who needed to come in.

And so he made a judgment call. It was the wrong one, as it turned out. But I'm not sure that's where the major crime is here, and I'm using crime, not literally there. The problem is if they really did withhold data from the Department of Justice and therefore withhold data from everyone else, that's a no-no. It's always the cover-up, as they say. Yeah, and, you know, I just, I want to go back to this notion of,

it really is interesting to me how quickly there was a particular narrative that locked in about the different governor's response to coronavirus. And it essentially was this, those who locked down longest were best. Those who began to ease the lockdowns first were worse. When it turns out that there were a lot of other decisions that had to be made and came and were involved here regarding public health beyond the lockdowns. And look, early on, I think the lockdowns and the lockdowns, for example, that we had in Tennessee, were entirely justifiable because we didn't know what we were dealing with.

And we're just trying to vacuum up information. And if you just let everyone behave as if life is normal, you had a much greater chance of a much greater spread at the time when we were learning. We had the least knowledge about how to treat it. And then, you know, a lot of states like mine in Tennessee, we opened up before, you know, a lot of the folks in the national media said you should open up. And we didn't open up all the way. there's still restrictions here and there.

But, you know, in the end of the day, a lot of these states had opened up earlier, and then this is previewing a future topic, got schools going, still are doing a lot better in sort of the raw totals. And I'm going to go back to Florida. Florida has an elderly population. It has an elderly population.

It is 27th in the country in deaths per million from coronavirus, 27th and New York is second and Cuomo was a hero and DeSantis was a villain and at some point we got to look at the actual results of what happened and it's not entirely in the hands of governors we know that it's not entirely in their hands or they're not the you know they're not emperors they don't control everything but at some point we got to go back and we got to say hey let's do the after action on this thing and see what worked and what didn't work. And I think one of the bottom line assessments is Cuomo didn't work. All right. Speaking of things that don't work, David, talk to us about schools.

Yeah. This is, boy, I tell you, if if I'm a Democrat and I'm looking at whether or not this majority that they have can hold, especially in some of these districts that can go either way in the House, I am going to be, I should, I would be banging down the door of the Biden administration, banging down the door of mayors and governors saying open schools back up. It is, it's really interesting to see this sort of emerging left-right consensus that schools have to be open. Schools need to be open. Number one, of course, there is no such thing as a risk-free environment anywhere publicly, but we now have enough data from enough places outside of the U.S., in the U.S., that schools are not a high-risk vector for spreading COVID.

And number two, we now have an awful lot of data that this remote learning is bad for kids. It's just bad for kids. And number three, it's also bad for a lot of parents, especially working moms. And so we've got a situation where we have less risk than we want. worried about on spreading COVID, we have known costs incurred to kids and known costs incurred to parents. And yet, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction, teachers' unions seem to be blocking the school opening effort. That's a very generous, seem to be. Are. Yeah. And so, you know, one of the things I think is, I guess there's sort of two aspects of

the question. I mean, I'll start with Steve. One, will the Democrats continue to allow the teachers' unions to exert such disproportionate power? And number two, can the Biden administration really do anything about it, considering a lot of these, this is happening in essentially one-party rule democratic jurisdictions, big cities, where there's no. Republican opposition to speak of, and the teachers' unions are at the apex of their power, and Biden can't order them to be open anyway. No, but certainly if Joe Biden wants the teachers' unions to act, I mean, he can pick a fight with them. I think they're picking a fight with him, and he's choosing at this point mostly

to roll over. Look, this is not what Joe Biden promised. This isn't what he said he was going to do. He said he was going to follow the science. Science. He said he was going to listen to public health experts. And he was going to create guidelines based on that. We've already seen, and I think noted here before, conflicts between what his political team is saying, what his White House messaging team is saying, what the CDC, the new CDC director is saying, what other sign what Anthony Fauci is saying. But I think there's a messaging mess there that reflects a deeper a deeper conflict about what exactly to do. And, you know, it's long been the case, of course,

that Joe Biden and others have listened carefully to the teachers' unions. And I will say, just sort of as a parenthetical, inside this discussion, there are some legitimate questions that teachers' unions are raising. Just because the teachers' unions are raising, the question doesn't sort of de facto make them illegitimate. And there will be, I think, when we do the look, back that you're talking about, David, there will be lots of hard questions for school districts and administrators who didn't do enough to prep for the eventuality that people were going

to be coming back to school in mass. So some of the questions that you hear raised about not taking serious preparations to reintroduce teachers to the classroom, not dealing with ventilation systems that are old and outdated and likely unsafe. Some of those are excuses. and are being used as excuses. Some of those are real issues. And just in the year that we've been dealing with this crisis, haven't been dealt with. But I do think there's some political risk here for Democrats.

You know, there is still, even at this point, a year in, things that we don't know about the virus. There are reports coming out of Italy and Israel about higher transmission rates among children, because of these new strains. So there are still open questions. But I think the consensus that you describe, David, is generally there. And it's generally there for a reason, because that's what the data have now shown us for

months and months and months. And Democrats are at this point, and again, you saw this with Kamala Harris and her appearance on the Today Show. Joe Biden did a town hall last night with Anderson Cooper on CNN, where it felt like he was beginning to write the ship. He was more direct in answering some of these questions. He certainly had some misstatements of fact. But the broader message about returning to schools,

Biden was as strong as anybody has been on his team. And then it was mudding again in appearances by surrogates just this next day. So they are really talking and working at cross purposes here. And the message that people are getting is muddied and I think could carry political consequences. So, Sarah, as our resident, LOL, nothing matters. analyst of political developments, especially this far in front of elections. Is this a political danger or is this something that's just going to recede into the mists? This matters so much because it touches everything. So it touches as Steve was sort of saying Biden's core

narrative. I'm going to follow the science. Look, I'm not a partisan president. I'm just here to you know, get these trains moving and running on time. It destroys that narrative. It's really bad for it. Second, it touches, I mean, nearly everyone's life. If you don't have kids yourself, you have nieces and nephews who aren't in school. I mean, everyone knows a kid who is having trouble right now or that had to be moved to private school and the parents can't really afford that.

So, I mean, every single voter is very aware of what's going on and has their own opinion about it. Three, I think it will have profound impacts on public schools moving forward, what they look like, how they function when so many people. I mean, we're talking, you know, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who have moved their kids out of public school to move them into private school. Well, the public schools get paid on a per head basis. Profound impacts on that and on the teachers unions because of that. And lastly, Biden's agenda. So, you know, as Steve said, Biden did that town hall last night.

Harris was on the Today Show today. Schools were the biggest issue, really, that was being discussed that they just kept getting pummeled on. In the meantime, you have millions of people in Texas, you know, without power, the death toll is continuing to rise as people spent their second night, many of my friends, without power in homes that were 40 degrees in a place where people do not have heavy winter coats. they don't have big blankets, they don't have fireplaces a lot of the time. One of Biden's core agenda items was redoing infrastructure, taking care of the electrical grid.

This would be a key moment for Biden to be able to get a whole lot of attention to say, all right, we got to do the grid now, guys, we can't have this happen. But instead, all of the headlines this morning are on school reopenings because he either hasn't figured out how to have the sister soldier moment

or he doesn't want to have it. I can't figure that out because this seems like a really obvious one and you have Anthony Fauci going out there and saying, it is not workable for every teacher to be vaccinated before we can reopen schools.

And then you have Harris saying our priority is to get every teacher vaccinated. And Savannah Guthrie going, okay, but like, are you saying that has to happen before we reopen schools? It's our priority to get every teacher vaccinated, just sort of refusing to answer the question. Her spokesperson was then on CNN, also refusing to answer the question to the point that the person interviewing her, John Berman, said, it's not a

trick question. I mean, that's bad. So I think this will have the largest political consequences with the Democrats' corest of core bases, which are women who work outside the home, suburban women, even urban women, this is huge in terms of affecting their day-to-day life in a way that I'm not sure we've seen another political issue, maybe since the 2008 financial crisis that has been, has landed so clearly in people's homes. So I'm heartened to hear this because two episodes, maybe three episodes ago, back when I lived on the East Coast there was a

we had an episode where we talked about teachers unions and whatnot and I beat up on them pretty hard and there was pushback is strong but there was less than total agreement that this was going to be as salient to political issue as I thought it was going to be and then I got chastised by my wife for not being

even more assertive about it and how everybody on this podcast were weeks sisters on this issue. So it's nice to see that people are becoming galvanized around this. No, I'll give you one. I will say something, though. Steve and I interviewed a woman who is heading up a nonprofit on this issue last week. And we got a lot of emails from teachers who said, look, you know, you should really be interviewing teachers about this. It's very different from our perspective in terms of, you know, there's real questions. What if you are in a high risk category? How are you supposed to go back. The public, you know, the union doesn't speak for me or we already have

gone back or teaching Zoom classes is miserable. It's not like we're just sitting home and twiddling our thumbs. Please don't make it sound like we are. And so I think that there's a story to be told here from the perspective of teachers that is not being told because what we're seeing at this at sort of the front end of this is unions versus Biden administration versus maybe some parents in the middle, parent activists. But I think there's more, there's many more layers to this cake. Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's right. I think that, you know, look, I mean, the Democratic Party basically has a majority coalition on loan from the Republicans in terms of college-educated suburban women. And if you want to design an issue

to really piss off college-educated suburban women, this is sort of it. But, and look, look, I have a lot of respect for teachers. I despise teachers' unions, and I'm not going to be moved off of that one way or another. I think that they are a net force for evil in America, profoundly hypocritical, profoundly pernicious. I think all public sector unions are problematic, but teachers unions are among the worst. But I think, you know, when you asked earlier rhetorically about Biden having a sister soldier moment on this, I think the problem for the Democratic Party is there's a fundamental asymmetry between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.

it is not just a pejorative talking point from Republicans to say the Democratic Party is the government party. It is literally the government party. It is the party about government. It is the party that draws its strength and its sustenance from government. It's one of the problems that Biden has is that all of these, both in the media and in the Democratic Party, which is a very subtle distinction, people keep enormous scorn on Trump for whatever he's, he invoked federalism and that said something was a state's issue. Well, Biden is now saying that this stuff, education is a state's issue. He's right. So was Trump. But they're the ones who didn't see that as a legitimate excuse for not having the one-size-fits-all policy that they

wanted. But anyway, my fundamental point is that it is a very different thing to do a sister-soldier moment with some symbolic group. It is quite another to do a sister-soldier moment with institutions that literally are the ATM machine for state party machines, big city party machines that are in effect the Democratic Party in some states, to one extent or another. And the role that government unions, particularly teachers' unions, play inside the Democratic Party structurally is just profoundly different than any institution on the Republican side. The NRA gets to yell a lot and raise money. The teachers unions and public sector unions like literally are the party in a lot of places. So it's very difficult to sort of throw them under the bus.

But that's all the more reason why there shouldn't be public sector unions because it is a profound conflict of interest. And even FDR considered it a conspiracy against the public good to have public sector unions. But I'm delighted to see them have the problem. I would just rather see the problem get fixed in the short term about COVID or the long term about public sector unions. Instead, it seems like this is going to be the thorn in the paw of the Biden administration going forward.

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And it's worth spending just a few minutes talking about what happened. It was almost exciting. There was a moment on Saturday morning when it looked like Republicans, a handful of Republicans were joining Democrats to call for witnesses. and it looked like that for a minute that some members of Congress's upper chamber were interested in facts and understanding. That went away quickly, I'm sad to report, but it was sort of an exciting couple hours where it looked like everything that we thought we knew maybe wasn't going to happen quite the way that we thought it was going to happen, even if it was unlikely still to change the outcome. What happened was there was a CNN story on Friday night pointing to some comments from Representative Jamie Herrera Butler, a Republican from Washington, who had said that in her conversations with Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader, he had talked about his discussions with Donald

Trump on January 6th. And McCarthy said, in effect, that Trump had told him, you're not fighting hard enough. for me. And the people who are storming the Capitol obviously care more about the election, care more about the outcome than you do, which suggests in a pretty emphatic and I think important way that Trump wasn't at all sorry to see what was happening at the Capitol and confirms contemporaneous reports that we had had that he was delighted, that he didn't see anything wrong with the assault on the Capitol. So there was a moment when, Jerry Raskin, one of the Democratic House impeachment managers, said we want to call witnesses.

We think it's important to get more information. Who else did Donald Trump talk to? What else did he do? What happened in the White House? All of which I think are questions sort of central to the article of impeachment that Democrats wrote, and none of which really got significant examination. Five Republicans, if I'm recalling correct, I believe the vote was 55, 45, 5 Republicans. joined Democrats in the Senate voting to allow witnesses, and it looked like we were headed in that

direction. And then some behind the scenes wheeling and dealing led to a compromise whereby Democrats in the House would agree, Democrats in the Senate would agree to, except for the record, Jamie Herrera Butler's statement about what McCarthy had told her. And Trump's team would stipulate that if she were called to testify, she would testify to what her statement was. And very quickly, everybody wrote their hands together, and it was all done, and it was a couple surprises, 5743, a couple of additional Republicans beyond the ones who voted to allow the trial to proceed. Did we learn anything from all of that scrambling that morning, David, and if not, what did what did we learn from this whole impeachment process about not just

what happened in the past, but I think as importantly in some respects about what's before Republicans now? Yeah, you know, there's a couple of things about the impeachment process. Well, let's say three things. one, I think this confirmed that Congress is the least powerful branch. Just from an institutional perspective, Congress is the least powerful branch. It has no real institutional check on the president as opposed to a partisan check on the president. And there's a difference. Of course, you're going to always expect the opposing party to use whatever power it has to check the

president. But the Constitution is written in such a way that The founders hoped that Congress as an institution would exercise a check on the president. And even though this was the most bipartisan impeachment yet, that institutional check is, it just doesn't really exist. I mean, and it hadn't existed for a while, but my goodness, did this bring it home? And that's a real problem for our constitutional structure, which has been designed, as Jonah has said, a million times for there's not co-equal branches here it's designed for congress to be the supreme branch of government and it's the least powerful branch of government and as a practical matter right now that's a big problem number two i think part of it just showed and i've written

about this a million times not as much lately we've got a real comp can we just say we've got just a massive competence problem and just the basic functions of our government and that's That whole debacle on Saturday with are we going to call witnesses, are we not going to call witnesses combined with something that Sarah's been talking about, about was this actually an impeachment presentation designed to persuade some getable Republicans? Was it constructed in a way to actually talk to the jury that exists? That did nothing. And, you know, it's interesting to see sort of left-wing Twitter just erupt,

just aghast it the way Schumer handled. the entire Saturday debacle. It just felt like, do people even know how to do this anymore? And then the third thing is, I thought the Mitch McConnell episode was fascinating. On the one hand, he votes to acquit. And then on the other hand, he lacerates Donald Trump, just lacerates Donald Trump, to such an extent that, of course, it brought Donald Trump out of his hibernation to issue this extremely personal insults.

broadside back at McConnell. And it struck me that that more than anything else really signaled the onset of the GOP internal civil war here, that yeah, you would expect the Ben Sasse dissent. And I thought Ben Sass did a marvelous job of explaining his impeachment vote. You expected a number of those Republicans to break with the president and vote to convict. I was disappointed in the McConnell acquittal vote, but then that McConnell speech signaled the next phase, and really it seemed to be his, the beginning of his attempt to rest the GOP away from Donald Trump. And Trump seemed to perceive it in the same way, because for the first time since Jack Dorsey really sort of, you know, punched him in the nose, so to speak, and he skulked off

to Mar-a-Lago, for the first time you've sort of seen that Trumpian rhetoric reemerge. And so, you know, to paraphrase Yoda in episode two begun the GOP wars have. So I think we're going to do more politics of the impeachment stuff in the final segment, so I'll stay on the... We'll put a pin in the Yoda talk for two seconds, and I will go back to the actual event itself thing.

David's covered a lot of my views on it, but I think that... it's the one thing that I would sort of focus on Steve, you've got to discipline your interns. Sorry. So, no, the one thing I would focus on is

and since David's already done Star Wars talk, I'll do Star Trek talk. And Star Trek, the original series, there's a fantastic episode called Omega Glory, where they go to a planet that is riven by these tribal wars between these two barbarian tribes, the Yangs and the Combs, of course, I shouldn't say, of course, for you Neophytes, but the combs look sort of Asiatic and the gangs all look like Vikings.

And it turns out that the Viking types used to live in a version of the United States of America and had the Pledge of Allegiance and the Constitution and whatever. And there's this wonderful scene where William Chattner, fresh from overacting school, reads the sacred document that the Vikings no longer know what it even means. And they say, e plebblestra, blah, blah, blah. And William Chatter says, that's not ebblabnista, it's we the people. And he reads the preamble, and it's this great moment, whatever. That's sort of what comes to mind when I watch the impeachment stuff,

is that these people don't even remember, there's no institutional memory of what their jobs are supposed to be. They are play acting as if they're in some sort of Aaron Sorkin made-for-TV movie about what a impeachment is supposed to be like, how the institution is supposed to be run, The fight over the witness thing, I think, was the perfect example of dogs screaming at each other, saying under no circumstances can we catch this car because we don't know how to drive. And so you had Schumer, like not knowing what to do about actually winning a procedural thing that was really important for an impeachment trial and chickening out. And the left has every reason to be angry at it.

The last thing that the, I mean, it just, I mean, you and Sarah know corporate law stuff a thousand times better than I do. But it seems to me, I was saying this on my podcast last week, the guys at smart tech and dominion do more actual due diligence about putting people on record, about finding facts, about holding people accountable than the United States Congress does. And it's, it's, it's just, it's deeply depressing to me that with a few exceptions of individual actors, Ben Sass, Mitt Romney, Pat Toomey, whatever, most of these people just, um, want to play a role. You know, it's like they're not actual doctors, they just play one on TV. And, uh, a great example of this is the, the guy from the Pennsylvania GOP was interviewed about why they are censoring Pat Toomey. And he literally says the words out loud, like they're not the kind of thing that God at the pearly gates looks at his clipboard and starts shaking his head at you about, where he says,

hey, look, we didn't send Pat Toomey to vote his conscience or, quote, unquote, do the right thing. I mean, he actually says these words about why he's mad at Pat Toomey for voting for impeachment. There's this anger out there about people actually trying to observe the actual forms of their roles in all of this, rather than just put on a scripted thing for MSNBC and Fox to run. And it's going to take a generation to fix that. That was my big takeaway from it. That totally reminds me of this episode in the third season of Battlestar Galactica. Oh, which one?

Which one? Which one? Which one? You call your block, dude. That's good. Thanks for calling the bluff because otherwise people would have totally believed that. No, I, Sarah, what, what, this, this basically unfolded with those hiccups that I think, as both David and Jonah pointed out, were hallucinating in their, in their own way. Was there anything that surprised you as we went from a foregone conclusion to the actual conclusion? conclusion? You know, I thought that both McConnell's statement afterwards and Pelosi's statement

afterwards were just both. I guess it's exactly what Jonah said, you know, they were both so Craven, both so play acting. You know, when asked whether they would consider censure and Pelosi does this, that would be an insult to censures everywhere. No, like, they want to move on. They have Biden's agenda to consider. They don't want to be bogged down and talking about Donald Trump for the next, you know, week, six months, anything that it would be. And they felt like they needed to do this to be able to tell their folks that they did something. And that's why they didn't include any Republicans in drafting an article of impeachment.

That's why they didn't include any Republicans as House managers. Because Nancy Pelosi never believed that she could continue. convict Donald Trump in the Senate. Now, I think there's arguments that she was right. I get that. But I think that in and of itself is deeply cynical. If you're not even willing to try to do it and then just say, well, I couldn't have done it. Okay.

That means I just have to take your word for it. And at the same time, Mitch McConnell's speech, where the whole 90% of it makes it sound like he didn't just vote to convict the guy. He, like, had a torch and the pitchfork and was leading them to the beast's castle. And then he's like, but obviously I voted to acquit. What? Huh? Um, and then you have Trump's statement attacking Mitch McConnell, which was the most 2016 thing I'd ever, I mean, truly, it was like the last four years hadn't happened.

So Donald Trump's going after someone in the Republican Party. His arguments are outside of reality where he says that, you know, Mitch McConnell's basically never done anything in his whole life and has these ties to the Chinese and that's why he's the way he is. The only ties to the Chinese, I mean, that's been fact check six ways to Sunday. But is this racist attack basically on Mitch McConnell's wife? The person who Donald Trump had serving in his cabinet for more or less four years. And so again, like everyone's play acting And my frustration is that I feel like that for the most part, reporters still haven't come up with a good way to cover that. And I don't know what that way is, but it's sort of each time things are discussed as they happen at face value.

Oh, well, that's not technically true. We should fact check that. Instead of, it's this like, for me, this 30,000 foot big picture, you've got to be effing kidding me moment. And I, I am concerned about the future. And speaking of the future, next topic is this incredibly long, nearly book length piece that Tim Alberta published in Politico called Nikki Haley's Time for Choosing. It has chapters, like actual chapters in it.

It is so worth reading. Yes, it's going to take you a while to read. We'll put it in the show notes, though, because honestly, like, go to bed early, curl up with your iPad or whatever you read your stuff on and take, you know, whatever this will take 30 minutes, 40 minutes to read, because this is where the 2024 primary start as far as I'm concerned. It starts with her relationship with Donald Trump. it goes to sort of what happened on January 6th and her feelings post-January 6th and then sort of Nikki Haley's history. I wish that I could just read the whole thing out loud because as I was going through wanting to find a place for us to jump off on our conversation,

I was like, ooh, this, no this, oh, but also this. So what happens is Tim Alberta spends hours interviewing her before January 6th. And basically, she's like, look, Donald Trump just believes this. I don't know what to tell you. He believes it. And he's like, well, have you told him that it's just wrong? And she's like, he believes it. And he's like, uh, what do you want for lunch? And she's like, he believes it like to every question that he asked her. And so then, uh, January 6 rolls around and she is stunned, horrified. She says she's, um, she's so angry. She can't even, you know, put it into words. This is not who the Republican Party is. And she says, I didn't think that what he was doing was dangerous.

I didn't think there was anything to fear about him. There was nothing to fear about him when I worked for him. I mean, he may have been brash. He may have been blunt. She goes on and on. Never did I think he would spiral out like this. I don't feel like I know who he is anymore. The person that I worked with is not the person that I have watched since the election.

And so Alberta asked this sort of brilliant question. Okay, you want to be president, more or less. how if you're so, if you so badly misread Donald Trump, as Alberta puts it, a man whose habits and methods, you had ample opportunity to study up close. How can you be trusted to handle the likes of Vladimir Putin? And Haley, of course, reverts back to sort of this very traditional talking point. You can look at my leadership from the very first second I got into the statehouse, to the second that I was governor, to everything I did here at the UN. My leadership stands on its own grounds. I'm not going to apologize.

And so Alberta's conclusion is that there's this contradiction to Nikki Haley and that Nikki Haley's fundamental conflict moving forward won't be with Donald Trump. It will be with Nikki Haley. And I just find the whole thing fascinating because this is the most in-depth look and such a smart look at how a 24 leading Republican primary contender for the nomination is attempting to navigate the Trump issue in real time. Jonah, what were your biggest takeaways? So I am about halfway through it. I find it very difficult to read, not because I'm a big fan of Tim Alberta, not because

it isn't well done, but because I have, you know, my wife worked with Nikki Haley on two different occasions, one as working on her books, two. As a speechwriter at the UN for her and a senior policy advisor, I'm solely speaking for myself here, but I found it difficult to read because I am very disappointed in Nikki Haley. And she's a sort of exhibit A for me. My problem is that it is a tragedy that the alphabet only has 26 characters in it because I have so many exhibits of politicians disappointing me over the last four years. We sort of need the, I think it's the Cambodian alphabet, has the largest number of characters in it.

be wrong on that. But basically, it'd be much easier for me to list the politicians I'm not disappointed in. And so, but I think that the, you focus on the right point about Nikki, and I think the point about Nikki, and I think the point about the GOP. And this is why I wanted to put a pin in the Mitch McConnell stuff that David was talking about, because the, I know for a fact, I can't reveal sources and methods, but I know for a fact that Mitch McConnell, going into his last election, his advice to his senators and to himself and his own campaign strategy was when appearing in suburban neighborhoods and in front of suburban audiences or upscale audiences that the GOP needs to get a majority, he didn't talk about Trump, he talked about vaping in schools

or other issues that concern, you know, suburban moms and getable dads and independence and all that kind of stuff. And then if he was in a rural area that was Trumpy or was a Trump rally, they talked Trumpy. And what they hoped was not enough people were paying attention to media that showed the other stuff. And this is increasingly difficult in some ways and actually easier in others, given the volcanization of media to play this double game. but what Mitch McConnell tried to do in the impeachment was do that all in the same moment, basically. On the one hand, pander to the Trumpers by voting to acquit. On the other hand, pander to the suburbanites by saying he's guilty.

And to me, that sort of Janus-faced thing is just too clever by half and won't work. And I think that's where Nikki is. And I think the last thing I'll say about, the one thing I'll say about Nikki is I think Alberta's question is entirely right. I think that it is transparently obvious that the Donald Trump we saw in January 6th is the same Donald Trump we saw in January of 2016. And what's changed is Nickies and not just Nickies, but all of these Republicans, inability to maintain their own delusions about the guy they saw in person or the guy they rationalized working with

and the guy some of us had been warning about all along. And so rather than accept that their judgment was wrong, they have to go with this, he's changed. That's not the Donald Trump, I know. And that's the problem. He is the Donald Trump that you knew. You just didn't have the ability or the desire or the political interest. in dwelling on that point. And that's why I think that this is a rift in the GOP that can only

be papered over by manifest scandal and incompetence by Democrats, because it's the only thing that would unite Republicans at this point. And that's a really crappy thing for a party to have as its only galvanizing principle. Steve, is this how every 2024 primary hopeful is going to have to position themselves of, I couldn't have guessed. I didn't know. I'm, I'm, I'm shocked to find gambling here? Yeah, I mean, I think, Sarah, you framed this perfectly, and it was exactly the same way I read the Tim Alberta piece, and I would just second your recommendation that everybody take the time to read it if you can.

It's actually even worse, I think, than you described it for a couple of reasons. As Tim gets to the end of the piece, he reminds. his readers, what Nikki Haley did in 2016. And she, her endorsement was entirely based on who could block Trump. And the arguments she made that were sort of the culmination of an entire career of being otherized by people as she came of age politically were marshaled against Donald Trump. And it makes the contrast even more notable. And the other thing is when she had her kind of abrupt reversal on Trump, it was January 12th.

Alberta goes down and sits down with her again, and she basically says, in effect, he can't be the leader of this party. It was horrible. It's terrible. I don't know who he is. You know, sort of the equivalent of Lindsey Graham's, enough is enough, I'm out. I try to be helpful, but I'm out. And that was the day that Mitch McConnell, that there were several reports in Axios, the New York Times, elsewhere that Mitch McConnell was, I believe the exact language was, quote, inclined to convict.

There were also, on that same day, the release of Liz Cheney's very strongly worded statement that she was going to vote to impeach. So you had, for this fleeting moment, what appeared to be momentum toward a real confrontation with Donald Trump. Now, we all know, as we just discussed, that dissipated pretty quickly. This is not the first time that's happened. But for a moment, and for what appears to be the moment that Nikki Haley gave this interview, things looked like they were headed in a very different direction. So I think that's sort of point A on Nikki Haley specifically and how Republican primary folks

are going to wrestle with this. On the Mitch McConnell question, I guess I have something of a contrarian view of on this. I think Mitch McConnell should have voted to convict. I've still done a lot of reporting on his thinking over this time period. I'm still not, I still don't totally understand why his folks were telling people on background that he was looking or potentially open to voting to convict and then and then backed off maybe as a signal that he was taking this whole thing seriously. Not entirely clear to me at this point. But I think he should have given the statement that he made, he should have certainly voted

to acquit. And I agree with David and everybody who said that, you know, it's a Dodge. Having said that, and I'm conflicted on this point, I'm glad that he made the statement he made. And I've found myself in a couple of subsequent conversations defending him. Because if you believe, as I do, that the fight in the Republican Party, the, the fight on the center right generally, the fight in the conservative movement is basically a fight between, you know, reality and non-reality, truth and lies, conspiracies and policymaking.

It's important to have the second most powerful Republican in the country signal that he's going to be on the right side of that fight, in my view. and the fact that he was so unsparing in his critique of Donald Trump, McConnell had to know that was going to elicit response. I mean, Mitch McConnell is not dumb. So he knew what he was doing was picking a fight, basically guaranteeing the kind of silly, unhinged response that we got from Donald Trump yesterday.

This process is at sort of the beginning of a sorting period, I think. And people are kind of lining up on, on different teams inside the Republican Party. And McConnell has the potential to bring people along, even if he didn't vote the right way, in my view, on conviction. And just his having given the speech. And now with Trump going after him directly, I think it frames up the coming. fight in a way that's that makes it more of a of a fight david so two things one first jonah we need to give steve some real respect here because he brought up season three of battle star galactica and season three of battle star galactica of course included the trial of the ex-president of the

colonies guys baltar so yeah i'm giving myself up here aren't i so so Steve, you were so right. After Gaius Baltor, of course, had led the colonies into a horror. Well, anyway, we don't need to go down that way. We kind of do, but, you know. So, but number two, I think that one thing that is becoming clear to me is that there are going to be kind of two camps that are going to be dominant camps going forward. One is Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, more Trump, Trump, and I stood with Trump, I stand with Trump, and if Trump runs again, I'll keep standing with Trump.

And then another big faction is going to be, I stood with Trump, and let's not do that again. So sort of it's going to be, yeah, I voted to acquit or, you know, it was interesting to me that Dan Crenshaw in the Daily Wire wrote a piece yesterday, seething with contempt. with all of these fight, fight, fight, conservatives when, you know, they're really doing nothing but, you know, just tweeting away merrily and just seething with contempt for that sort of wing of the party. And yet he also joined with the House Republicans, not who voted to object to the election,

but joined with those who wanted the Supreme Court to hear the Texas case. So you're going to have this faction of Republicans who are going to be able to say, hey, look, when all the bad people, came against Donald Trump. I stood with Donald Trump. And oh, by the way, we just don't need to go down that road again. And that road has all kinds of problems and it's terrible and we lost. And that's not who we are as a party. And that seems to be the way the Civil War is shaping up in my mind, not so much

between the never, this very, very small never Trump faction, which so many people in the GOP just grew to hate and loathe over the last four years. But between the people who were, hey, look, I stood with him, but it didn't work. We got to do something else versus I stood with him and I stand with him. And it seems to me that's going to be the shape of it all going forward. And I'm going to guess that for some of these people as the days and the weeks and the months go go on, and if Trump doesn't really get out there aggressively to be sort of this towering figure and that the I stood with Trump part of it is going to start to recede

and the let's not do that again part is going to magnify. So, David, can I jump in to agree with you? Sure. Yeah, I don't think we're, I don't think we're in different places maybe as much as some listeners might take from your comments.

I think you're right in looking at the bulk of the party as sort of this small group of, I mean, they weren't always never Trumpers. A lot of them became never Trumpers after January 6th or after the election lies. But I agree that it's a relatively small group. I mean, you can count them. Look at the 10 in the House and the seven in the Senate. And then there are the sort of Matt Gates, Jim Jordan types who I think are going to be,

and you have to include Lindsey Graham and probably Ted Cruz and others who are, we would maybe call them super-Trumpers. I do think the battle is going to be for the big group in the middle. And I do think there's a big group in the middle, despite what the numbers would suggest if you're just looking at the impeachment and conviction votes as a proxy. You know, the vote to keep Liz Cheney as number three in the House Republican Conference was 145 to 61 to 1. On the one hand, it's disappointing to me that 61 would have voted.

voted against her keeping her position because she cast a vote of conscience on a particularly significant thing. But I don't think it's a small thing that 145 people swung in behind her. And in conversations that I've had with House members from, you know, backbenchers to folks close to leadership over the past couple weeks, there were, I think there were a lot more fence sitters on the actual impeachment vote in the House than that number, than the number 10 would suggest, you know, maybe a dozen, 18 more. And beyond that, I think there is this massive group that had the impeachment vote itself been a blind vote would have voted to impeach President Trump.

I think more Republicans in a blind vote would have voted to impeach President Trump than would not. Now, that doesn't excuse what they actually did. That's not the point that I'm trying to make. But I think there's a bigger group that doesn't want to be wedded to Donald Trump, but they're terrified of Donald Trump's voters and, you know, the 75% of the Republican base that still wants him to have a leadership role in the party. I think that's that's the big fight. And nothing is more important in that, I think, than allowing those people, the rank and

file voters, to understand the many ways in which they've been misled, particularly as it relates to this post-election period. I mean, you know, I've talked to many, many members of Congress who say, I keep getting these emails from the respected doctor in my district who. says that the My Pillow guy's video is irrefutable. Right. And, you know, on the one hand, you just think, gosh, that's crazy. You know, at the dispatch, we've debunked that video specifically.

We've debunked 10 of the charges in it. It's so obviously manifestly not true. How can people believe it? But people believe it. I think the huge fight in some ways is going to come about, reducing that number that the 70% of Republicans who believe that the election was stolen, that Joe Biden wasn't the, isn't a legitimate president. And I think that there's likely to be a coming fight now over this potential 9-11 style commission to look into these things. And I think

it's really, really important that Republicans get behind that. I think Nancy Pelosi had a bad misstep at the beginning where she announced it unilaterally when there are senior Republicans in leadership who would go along with such a thing. She announced it unilaterally in a letter that she sent only to her Democratic colleagues. And it's like it reminds me of the impeachment stuff that we've seen before where there was opportunity to work with Republicans, make this bipartisan, and have them come together and really make a statement. And my fear is that because she wears partisan blinders, she's going to make that same mistake again. so i just want to make one quick point here the um the the part of the reason why people are so

confused about what Mitch McConnell did is that the the super trump media complex only sees things in a binary either you're never trump or you're or you're all in for trump or your maga or whatever and Mitch McConnell wasn't trying to placate never Trumpers I mean, that's not the constituency he was going for. He's getting a lot of pressure from donors, from the chamber types. He's getting a lot of pressure from, you know, people he needs or thinks he will need to put together campaign committees to get senators, Republican senators, reelected. By definition, you cannot call Mitch McConnell a never-trumper.

The guy is singularly responsible for his greatest, of the four years of his presidency. But there is this whole stabbed in the back, deep state conspiracy mindset among the pro-Trump people. When McConnell comes out and says this stuff, they say, I knew it. He wasn't, you know, he didn't believe in our gospel from the beginning. He was a secret heretic all along, as if that's like some incredibly damning thing to say about the guy who delivered the Trump agenda. and it's a childishness and a sort of superstitiousness about politics that is skewing this debate

in all sorts of weird ways. I mean, no one thought that when Nixon worked with Communist China to open up Communist China, that meant Nixon was in fact a Chinese communist. But for some reason, It's like if you work with Trump, you get no credit for it unless you debase yourself by celebrating how awesome he is. And if you eventually are honest about it, you get vilified as if all the stuff that you did to get Trump elected or give Trump all these wins are meaningless because it's all confessional politics. And I think as long as basically places like Fox and Talk Radio, talk about our political

divides that way, Mitch McConnell's got a huge problem because there's no, it's a shame on all the donor and chamber commerce types who won't say stuff publicly and just say, hey, Mitch, you've got to take one for the team and do this. Because the communication, the message that people get is that Mitch is standing there alone on a suicide mission rather than acting for a crucially important faction of the Republican coalition. With MX Platinum, access to exclusive MX pre-sale ticket can score you a spot track side. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex.

Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca. slash Y Annex. All right. Last topic. If you are familiar with the Myers-Briggs test, you know the eight types that people can fall into.

I'm going to go through them very quickly here. You can be an extrovert or an introvert, a censor or an intuitive, and that's about, let's call it, observant people versus introspective people. Then there's thinkers and feelers, sort of the tough-minded versus the friendly, and then judging versus perceiving sort of people who like schedules and organizations versus people who keep their options open and like to feel their way through a situation. situation. So we had a listener, based on this podcast, take a guess at all of our Myers-Briggs letters. And so I asked you each to take a Myers-Briggs test so that we could test what our podcast personalities are,

perhaps, versus what we think our personalities are based on answering these questions. So, David, our listener thinks you are an ENFJ. So that is an extroverted, intuitive, feeling, judging. What are you, according to your test results? Enfp. Ooh, she was close. Yeah, but I've taken the test a few times in my life, and I've probably been in ENFP five times and an ENFJ three times. That's funny. So in her explanation, she says,

I bet a fair amount of money on the N and the F here, always concerned on both doing what is right and what is best for people, attends to the big picture of the whole community. His courtesy and kindness doesn't just give way to being soft on his positions. I'd also feel safe calling extroversion since he shared his personal struggles over the last few years. But just a blind guess on the J wouldn't be shocked. if he was an E-N-F-P. That's pretty impressive, actually.

That's impressive. Really impressive. Wow. All right. Steve, she is guessing that you are an IST-J, so an introverted, sensing, thinking, judging. That's interesting. In fact, I ended up an INFP. Wow.

Wow. So totally the opposite except the eye. Interesting. Yeah. I'm sort of skeptical of these tests in general because there are, I mean, you take, I don't know how many there were 100 questions. You take the test and there are certain questions that point in a similar direction. I think I got a handful of questions about whether, you know, if there's a crowded place, do I like to, go and have a conversation with somebody or stay in the corner or if there's a proud of public space do I like to be among a lot of people or be it and I'm certain that my answer is because I'm thinking of the actual specific questions in mind contradicted each other and that I'm kind of

all over the map and this is like an ugly spitting out of of that I didn't have any category other than the intuitive, that was more than 60% in one direction or the other. Interesting. All right. Jonah, she guessed extroverted, intuitive thinking, perceiving for you, E-N-T-P. What are you? So you sent us two different websites to take? Yep. And I took them both. and on the Humanetrics Jung typology test from Humanetrics.com

which sounds like the front organization for an evil lair in a bad Marvel movie I, she got me exactly right. I was ENTP on that.

Which she, by the way, says it stands for extroverted nerd that parties. all right well that that hurts a little but also correct also correct um i have a but i have only a according to that one right the one that said en tp i have only a six percent preference for extroversion um and uh so i'm i'm i'm almost at the tipping point because on on extrovert i'm only six percent and thinking I'm only six percent. And then I took the other one, which was from that 16 personalities.com or whatever it was called. Yeah, 16 personalities.com. And I came out

INFP-A. Interesting. So, and I took them within minutes of each other. And I don't know what to say about that, except I kind of feel like the world of fortune cookies has been uploaded onto the interweb, circa 1997. True enough. So she said she was most confident. Or you have dual personalities.

Also possible. Which is possible. She says she was most confident about the N, the intuitive and thinking part, independent, wordsmith, strategic, conceptual, impatient with stupidity. His zinging and zagging in the G-file supports the perceiving. The fact that I know about his family,

with the exception of his prudently protecting some details of his daughter and wife, his cigar shop friends, his injury with the deer encounter, etc., lends me to the extroverted conclusion. So I kind of feel like Bill Murray and Groundhog Day going, me, me, me, I'm really close on this one. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know, I think there's something to these tests because simply by virtue of the fact that you have to make a decision on them, it tells you something about what you're internal state is, but I, I'm with Steve. I am also very skeptical about these guests. So for me, she guessed extroverted, intuitive thinking judging, E.N.T.J. She said she was

totally comfortable with the NT assessment. Loves to debate legal concepts, intellectual brinkmanship, comfortable with conflict. You guys will attest off pod, deeply comfortable with conflict. Her buckets lead me to the J conclusion, wanting to create order. As I mentioned above, I'm less sure about the extroversion, but I'll go with it since she shows her teeth when she smiles on the live podcast. Introverts tend to grin more than a full-blown smile. So the fact that she was like overly like not sure about the introverted versus extroversion is correct. I am an I NTJ. So she had the three right, but I really enjoy my alone time with my cats and reading in bed with like the covers over my head,

both metaphorically and literally. But I thought that was really amazing that she took the time to do that based on the pod and that I thought she, like, did a really good job. Yeah, that was impressive. I agree. I mean, as I mentioned when we talked about this before, one of the problems I have is that I had, as explained to me by somebody who, you know, some census taker who I, who's liver I ate with fava beans, who gave me one of these things before.

I have, according to this long, more drawn-out version of this test that I took, I have a rare personality type that is derived from the fact that I have two parents that stayed married but never really settled on how to raise me with very different personality types. So my mom is super extroverted. My dad was super introverted. And they both imprinted on me, which is why I sometimes wake up in bathtubs covered him.

blood that's not my own. Again, more to dive into there, perhaps, with the Dispatch Live. Thank you all for listening to this week's podcast. We will enthusiastically see you again next week. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place.

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