The Dispatch Podcast - The Reality of a U.S.-Iran 'Deal'

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and David French to discuss the potential ceasefire extension with Iran and the Democratic Party's autopsy of its 2024 presidential election loss. The Agenda: —The Iran deal —Domestic consequences —Division on the right —Ceasefires aren't deals —The DNC autopsy —Party constituencies shift —NWYT: Long school years Show notes: —Jonah's "anti-manifesto" on the Iran war The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including audio versions of all our articles and newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss the troubling news around an emerging deal with Iran and the growing divide on the right about the U.S. war there. Then the Democrats. The DNC's mishandling of the autopsy of Kamala Harris's 2024 loss and a party that can't seem to get out of its own way. And finally, not worth your time? What's with summer break starting in the second half of June? We're giving kids two months off? It feels like a never-earned. ending school year. I'll ask the panel of Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and dispatch contributor, David French. Let's dive right in. David, I want to start with you much in the news over this past weekend about what seems to be potentially an imminent deal with Iran. You had the President of the United States post a long social media post touting sort of the outlines of a deal without getting into too many specifics, as he's want to do, and figures close to the White House sort of floating this emerging deal. There was very quick backlash to the deal from Hawks, including people like Mike Pompeo, who served as Secretary of State and First Trump administration, CIA director,

very, very tough words about the deal. Can you just give us a sense of what the latest news is to the extent that you understand it? And I understand that's a difficult question. because there's not a lot out there. Yeah. You know, I think the way to think about this is that right now we're watching in real time, both sides pitching a particular kind of deal to their domestic and international audiences without it being the deal because we don't have a deal. So, you know, time and time again, we have seen something along the lines of Iran has agreed

to A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. Iran sort of saying, no, we have not. And then Iran floating that they have agreed to A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. And we're saying, no, we have not. And at the bottom line, it appears to be what we're reaching towards at the moment is an agreement just to do this, open the straight of Hormuz and lift the American blockade on Iran, with everything else TBD, is the best sort of way to describe the current understanding. But again, what is so did. difficult about this moment, and I've used this analogy before because it fits, is we've got a kind of a Baghdad Bob administration here. They will tout things that they have not accomplished. They will tout victories that they have not won so that it is very difficult to know the American side of the story in any way that's true. And then at the same time, Iran is just as dishonest, if not more. It's the first time in my lifetime. We've seen the United States in a conflict.

I'll never say that we've always been truthful. There is abundant evidence that the United States military, the United States government has misled to public in prior administrations. But we've never seen anything this comprehensively dishonest so that we just don't really know the state of play right now, but it appears to be moving towards no blockade, reopen the strait,

everything else to be negotiated. And that, I'm sorry to say, would put Iran in the driver's seat. Would Trump be willing to restart hostilities before the midterms? Doubtful. He's an ample opportunity to restart hostilities in a sort of a more full-spectrum way. He's declined it. So reaching yet another agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, because remember, we thought we had one already. We thought we had one months ago. So we'd have another agreement. that would maybe in the American blockade, kick everything down the road, my goodness, that is light years away from unconditional surrender. I mean, you can't even see unconditional surrender with the most powerful telescope if that's what the deal is at the moment. And to the extent that

there are incentives for the United States to want this deal, there have been reports of the United States providing sanctions relief, additional sanctions relief for Iran. There have been, I guess, vague suggestions that Iran would agree in principle to end its nuclear weapons program, which is something that our administration, our intelligence community at least, hasn't concluded firmly that they have a nuclear weapons program. I think they do. I think all public evidence suggests that they do. But there isn't much, if you're for this, and we have a lot of friends who, you know, wanted the regime gone, wanted to take on Iran. What are you hanging your hat on here?

What's the good news? I mean, the good news, Steve, that's a great question. Because everything you just said is part of the TBD kicking the can down the road, because we're talking about stuff that's not really been formally announced, that it's just a lot of rumor swirling in the air, that you're not getting affirmation from the Iranians on. So what have you accomplished? I think at the end of the day, you've essentially accomplished

whatever the military damage you've inflicted. That's the accomplishment, that you've sunk a bunch of the Navy, you've destroyed X percentage of their ballistic missiles, maybe 30%, depending on what the intelligence is saying, and you've set back their nuclear program. What was left of it after the first obliteration, because remember we're now in obliteration 2.0 of the nuclear program, you're left with it being in whatever conditions it's in. And one of the things that I have not seen, Steve, in all of this speculation is verification. So, for example, if you remember the Obama agreement, one of the big issues with the Obama agreement was how can we trust these guys?

How are we going to know that they're going to comply with this agreement? And I'm just seeing a lot of vagueness and not a lot of precision and not much discussion about verification. Because remember, all the way going back to the Cold War, Ronald Reagan, trust but verify. Are there going to be inspectors? Is there going to be an inspection regime? Are we going to have something like that? It really, it just feels to me like, and I could be completely wrong, this could age very poorly, very quickly, that we're trying to just kick the can down the road a little bit more to relieve the economic pain a little bit more and take the eyes off all this thing because Trump doesn't want it to continue to be hanging around his neck.

Yeah, Kevin, David mentioned the Obama administration. Obviously, Barack Obama struck this run. nuclear deal, his top advisor, Ben Rhodes, said that this was the sort of signature of President Obama's second term conservatives have been uniformly skeptical of that deal, pushed Donald Trump in his first term to get out of the deal. The Mike Pompeo tweet that I mentioned earlier, I just want to read it to you. He writes, The deal being floated with Iran seems straight out of the Wendy Sherman Robert Malley Ben Rhodes'

playbook. Those were Obama negotiators on the deal. Pay the IRGC, Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, to build a WMD program and terrorize the world. Not remotely America first. It's straightforward. Open up the dam straight.

Deny Iran access to money. Take out enough Iranian capabilities so it cannot threaten our allies in the region. Overdue. Let's go. I have to say, coming from Mike Pompeo, I think, has gone, you know, certainly what he was working for Donald Trump, but even in the time afterwards,

he typically goes out of his way to give the president every benefit of the doubt on these policies and others. And this reads like somebody who has just had it, like is done with this, is sick of it, thinks that this is farcical. Has noticed that the president's approval numbers are down to the 30s. There's maybe a little less political risk. Well, I have two main thoughts here. One is that years ago I was in San Pedro at the Port of Los Angeles writing about international shipping and container shipping, which is a really interesting business. And there was a guy standing there on the pier with the pair of binoculars, and he was peering out at the horizon day and night, day and night.

And he was always there, never off the job. And so finally I went and asked him, I said, what are you doing? And he said, well, like anyone in the world, I'm keeping an eye out for the Iranian Navy. No, that didn't actually happen. And we're bragging about having got rid of the Iranian Navy. With anyone in the world really worried about the Iranian Navy? And by the way, it seems like they can shut down the Strait of Hormuz with no Navy and no Air Force. So what did they need one for in the first place?

The second thing that's really on my mind right now is professional envy, I have to tell you, because two of my colleagues here on the panel are big-time TV guys, one has a New York Times column. And you're all so much better than I am at talking about the news when there's a big-time TV guys. There's no news to talk about. Nothing happened. Hey, wait. Now, wait a second. I have to, in our defense, Kevin, you know, last week when I asked you about Donald Trump and the slush fund, you said, I have nothing to say because there's nothing to say.

And then the very next day, you wrote a column about it. I know. So you had more to say, and I was thrilled that you wrote, I was very happy that you were provoked into writing that column about. Man's got to eat. I had to pay the mortgage. You know, Trump likes to go out there and say, we're very, very close to a deal. And it's going to be great. It's going to be the best deal ever.

And so far, what we know about it is that it's, in very Trumpian fashion, a plan to have a plan. So, we opened the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war, and extend the ceasefire indefinitely. And then at some point, we're going to have a very stern conversation with the Iranians about forswearing a nuclear program, which the Iranians are never going to forswear. I mean, they're never going to honor that. Do you know why? Because if they had nuclear weapon, no one would ever be able to do to them

what we've just done to them, which is just coming there and kick the crap out of them for whatever political reasons we need for domestic things at home and whatever our legitimate interests are there too. I mean, it's a bad regime and they're an American enemy

and all the rest of it, but that's been true for a long time and that's not why we're there right now or are there right now for political reasons mainly. But, you know, no one does that to Pakistan because Pakistan has however many three or four nuclear weapons sitting around. You only really need one to be a deterrent. Yeah, there's a reason Russia gets taken seriously as a country.

Russia is this backward third-rate country that can't even, you know, pull off of its own idiotic. North Korea is the one you're searching for. Well, North Korea, sure, yeah, there's that. And North Korea is just so comical, though. I mean, I just can't talk about North Korea without laughing. I mean, people there aren't laughing about it, but it is a really funny kind of country in a lot of ways. So, you know, it's a non-deal. And even once it's an official deal, it still looks like it's going to be sort of an official non-deal.

You know, it's a plan to have a plan as we're going to talk about this. And I'm not the first person to point this out, but it looks very likely that what we're going to have accomplished is to have killed a bunch of people and expended a lot of munitions for something that's an inferior version of the JCPOA. With no particular, you know, teeth or anything in it. And the part that I keep coming back to that really irritates me especially, essentially giving U.S. blessing to, Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz and ceasing to treat it as a truly international waterway and treating it as an Iranian property.

And so Iran will be the first country in a long time to lose a war this badly and have effectively expanded its territory at the end of it. So, Jonah, let me ask you to take a look inward at our domestic political fights about Iran and in particular on

the right. I would say going back and taking a survey of the things that the four of us have said and written since the beginning of this operation. Fair to characterize everybody here as skeptical. Is that anybody reject that? Skeptical or opposed? Kevin says it's illegal David raised legal problems who argued against it. You had your long. At the beginning, I forget what headline we gave your G-file, but it was basically like, here are my thoughts and vibes on the war, which I thought was very interesting. And I want you to return to now.

It's been, as we've seen, you know, as Kevin points out, as David pointed out, we can't say that we've seen details of the plan emerge. But as it becomes clearer that the administration is at least leaning in a direction toward what might be called partial capitulation here, it's been interesting to watch those on the right who were enthusiastic about this, try to understand what this is, and try to figure out where they want to be. I mean, Lindsey Graham, not that he's somebody we should spend a lot of time talking about, but he came out with a tweet on social media when these details first started, or non-detailed details, first started emerging, and had a very forceful statement, a warning to President Trump. This could be really bad, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then 24 hours later, he is touting, you know, what little good we've seen so far. And he ends by saying something like, you know, and again, of course, Donald Trump is brilliant.

I think that's almost exactly what he tweeted. But we've seen more serious people, you know, hawks who have argued for decades that the Iranian regime should go and sort of put their faith in Donald Trump, even if they might have had misgivings about Donald Trump, the man, to be the guy who did it. Where are those people right now?

And can you revisit that piece that you wrote at the beginning and explain why you were skeptical the way you were skeptical? Let's name some names. I mean, I can, I tell you, I don't, suckers and patsies. I don't want to know. I'm not calling anybody suckers and a patsy. Well, if I call them one, I'll be explicit about it.

But Lindsey Graham is a sucker. Yeah, for sure. And a patsy. A bunch of, you know, look, I mean, some colleagues of mine in the American Enterprise Institute, the folks around commentary magazine, many of whom are very dear friends of mine. Noah Rothman and a bunch of people over at N.R., though not everybody at N.R., the Iran War has really had caused

interesting schisms, my old stomping around, David, and David and Kevin's stomping around as well. And I think, so my skepticism going into it was, you know, there were people, I don't think anyone on this podcast, but there are people out there who would say my skepticism was caused by my Trump derangement syndrome. And I would phrase it as my skepticism was drawn from the fact that I've been paying attention to Donald Trump for a decade.

And one of the cardinal rules about Donald Trump is, whoever embraces Donald Trump gets screwed by him eventually. And I've been texting and talking to a lot of my friends who are very upbeat about the war at the beginning because this is something they wanted. There's something I wanted, right? Regime change is a perfectly legitimate thing to want about Iran, right? To getting rid of its nuclear program is a perfectly legitimate thing. But the way Trump did it, which was clearly as a vanity project, it was a follow-on to the Venezuela thing,

which I have been saying from the beginning, did not bode well for his stick-to-itiveness if it got difficult. And there are people out there who, it's funny, I've had such, I think everybody here knows what I'm talking about. Most of the people on the right, the sort of intellectual right, the serious right, the national security right,

have always sort of rolled their eyes at the war powers resolution, right? And the attempt to sort of curtail presidents in, you know, or trying to do stuff on the national security front. And part of the reason for that. It was that there was always a sort of a minimal level of deference and trust in who the commander-in-chief was. Like, even the ones you didn't like, like Barack Obama, you didn't worry too much about them getting outside the guardrails because they hated international confrontation,

want to treat everything like a crime anyway, want to do everything like a law enforcement operation. So you never worried about them going too rogue. And on the Republican side, you never really thought that they were ever going to, like, abuse their power that much. Donald Trump breaks that mold. And I just don't, I simply don't trust him. And if you can declare a war and he lied his way into the Venezuela War, lied about what he was doing, it was all pretextual, and then after we took over the regime, not changed the regime, just took over the regime. He said, oh, it's all about getting the oil. And then you very clearly wanted to do it again with Iran. And that goal is inconsistent with regime change, helping the liberating the Iranian people, getting rid of the nuclear program.

the idea you're going to find a Delci Rodriguez to work with in Iran was just stupid. And so I was just, I just don't trust him. I don't trust his foresight. I don't trust his stick-to-itiveness. I don't trust his ability to do the due diligence involved. And I was right. I mean, I'll just say it. I was right.

And yeah. And I don't think, I mean, I'm not alone in this, but look, I mean, I tried to make a list the other day when this news started to break about the pros and cons. Because you'll hear often from people who are serious people, smart people. friends who will say don't believe the media coverage about that we didn't really do much damage to Iran. Of course we did a lot of damage to Iran. These are selectively. I believe all that. So I'm willing to stipulate that we did real damage their missile program and their drone program and command and control stuff and yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. And we definitely killed a bunch of senior

people in Iran. But it turns out that if you don't actually finish the job, if you don't take Vienna, right? Yeah. It turns out that. Islamic fundamentalist fanatics and corrupt IRGC goons are basically a fungible commodity as human beings. And you get rid of the top layer of them and then the layer below becomes the 1%. And so we've come out of this in a place. I mean, I agree with Kevin, but I think the analytical problem is Trump keeps saying we're close to a deal. What they're really talking about is how much longer they're going to extend to ceasefire. And ceasefires aren't deals, right?

And ceasefires don't end wars. As long as we're blockading Iran, we are still in a war with Iran, right? You can have the Christmas armisticev in World War I that didn't end World War I. It said time out while we go get some stuff, right? Have a good time. In the case of this war, a ceasefire doesn't even mean that you cease firing. That's right. Right.

Yeah. So, I mean, it's all optics. It's all the headline rather than the substance. It's all the sizzle, not the stake. And I promise you this. You can hear it now is because when Rubio says repeats something that Trump says so readily, you can tell this is the line coming. Trump keeps telling people, don't worry about it.

I'm not going to make a bad deal. I don't make bad deals. And this is the tautology we're going to be stuck with for the next three weeks of someone says it's a bad deal. And his defenders will say it's not a bad deal. Well, it is a bad deal. It says it can't be a bad deal because Donald Trump doesn't make bad. deals, right? And that's the stupid argument that we're going to get. But meanwhile, the people

who are in favor of this war, the people who care about it, you know, Israel's worse off because of this war. Yeah. Are, you know, magazine depth, which is huge. Iler Lake has got a good column on this today. It's been talked about by a lot of people over the last couple of weeks. I don't know that the damage that we did to Iran is strategically greater, is as a net benefit to us, given how much of our important stuff, we've burned down. We basically burned down like seven years worth of production of Tomahawks in three weeks. Like replacing that when you're talking about when the whole thing was supposed to be a pivot to China and like possible confrontation in Taiwan straight. I don't know that like we didn't do more damage to ourselves punching Iran than we did to Iran being punched.

And time will tell. There's now all this like hand-waving about the Abraham Accords being extended to these other countries. If that's true, that would be probably good. And it would be a fig leave for Trump to say how brilliant Trump is. Can I real quickly just put an exclamation point on something that Jonah said? Because this has really been bothering me. Look, I've always been, I would always characterize myself as an Iran hawk. I have hatred for this regime.

as I've said a million times I've served with people who were killed by Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. I have personal loathing for this regime. But I would tell you this, if you don't follow constitutional processes, and if you put incompetent people in charge of even policies you like,

you will wreck the policy. And this is something that I think people forget, they will say to never Trumpers or whatever if we still use that term, but what about the policy? And the response is if you put an incompetent and corrupt man in charge of your movement and your policy, he will discredit your movement and your policy. And so you had a lot of these people who are Iranhawks saying, where are all my Iranhawk brothers and sisters backing Trump on this? While some of us were going, you don't put an incompetent corrupt man in charge of this operation.

And if that's all we've got, then don't do the operation because of its confidence in his corruption are going to wreck this. And I feel for these folks, because they were taken for a ride in the first few weeks of the war. Because remember, Hegset is out there. It is one of the biggest routes in the history of warfare. We are wiping the floor with these guys. Meanwhile, American bases were getting pounded to a degree that we did not realize. And so we have damage to American military infrastructure in the Persian Gulf far greater than we knew in real time. While everyone was chest bumping about how great we were doing, a lot of our bases were on fire.

then the straight of foremost, without a Navy, without Iran having a Navy, is effectively closed. And we burn through our missile stocks to the point where, yeah, Iran's got a lot fewer missiles, but guess who else has a lot fewer missiles? We do. We have a lot fewer. And so the military outcome, absolutely, you give our military a job and you say, bomb this facility, sink this ship. We can absolutely get that done. Our military is extraordinarily tactically proficient. But if you have no strategic vision or you've had a deeply flawed strategic vision accompanied by dishonesty and corruption, he's going to wreck it all. He's going to wreck it all. I mean, this is kind of like a foreign policy version of what he's done to like the pro-life movement here at home. Put him in charge of this

incredibly important movement, allow him to shape it strategically and morally, and look what you got. Or the immigration control movement. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more. from the Dispatch podcast. There's something satisfying about a well-made object. Not a gadget that gets replaced every two years, but the kind of thing you could hand down to your kid. Seems like that's getting a lot harder to find.

Today's sponsor is one of the exceptions. VAR, that's V-A-E-R, is a Los Angeles watch company whose goal is pretty straightforward. Bring American watchmaking back. And these aren't fashion accessories, their proper tool watches, sapphire crystals, premium materials, and full waterproof warranties, meaning you can actually swim or dive with them on. Let me be honest, I've gone many, many years, not really being a watch guy, decades even.

But beginning a few weeks ago, I started wearing a Vair watch, and I love it. It's smart and sophisticated and, this is really important to me, understated. It's the kind of watch that seems designed to last for dead. decades, go to VAR watches, that's V-A-E-R-Watches.com. And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. This is sort of exactly what I wanted to get at, because the people that we're talking about, again, set Lindsay Graham aside, you know, many of them are sensible. A lot of them have been skeptical or even critical, outwardly openly critical of the other things that Donald Trump has

done and said over the past decade. And yet, this, so many of them kind of went all in. Like, hey, I am for this. I support the president. I'm glad that, you know, it takes Donald Trump to do this kind of thing. And I guess I just wonder what your sense, and Kevin, I'll go to you on this. What drove them to that position? Was it just the sort of, whether it's the moral justification of bringing down the Iranian regime because of what the regime has done to its own people, as recently as earlier this year? Is it the 30, 40 plus year? threat that the Iranian regime has presented to the United States and its interests, is it something softer, which is I've been critical or skeptical of Donald Trump for a decade, and this feels

like the kind of thing that I'd like to be on board on because I care about it, and I've made this argument for a long time. Do you have any sense of what drove that? I was surprised, and I'll shut up after I give you this context. I would just say I was surprised at the beginning of this, that there were so many people who were as enthusiastic as they were. And I say that again, as somebody who is an Iranhawk, who thinks that there is a compelling reason for regime changing around. What drove this split on the right? You know, cops have a thing they talk about where they talk about public service homicides, where, you know, someone has been murdered, but he's an awful person.

He's usually some kind of criminal or gang leader or something. And a public service homicide is something you can look at and be kind of happy about the outcome in some way, but in your role as a cop or a judge or a prosecutor or something like that, you still have to treat the crime as a crime, even if you didn't. entirely, just to prove the outcome as a human being. I think that the Iran war represents a project that was very, very important to a number of people for a very, very long time. And when they saw a little bit of daylight, they saw the opportunity to get there, they can forget what their role is in other aspects of life. And that we need to treat this

in a sober, judicious, enlightened way that keeps in mind what Jonah was talking about, which is the fact that we've got a lot of experience watching Donald Trump do things like this. And we know how Donald Trump does things and it's going to turn out badly because he's an incompetent and every other thing that you want to say about him. So I think particularly if you're, you know, if you're someone who's kind of made your career about one or two issues and these are your really, really important things, then it's easy to sort of jump out ahead of yourself a little bit. It's like, you know, the people who work for the immigration control groups, which I was just thinking about earlier, their whole job in life is to care about dealing with not only with illegal immigration, but also. to reduce legal immigration. Those folks are really over their skis in their support for Trump in a lot of times because he's the guy who brought their issue to the forefront and is doing something about it,

even if he's doing things about it in ways that are going to ultimately undercut their standing and public support for that. You know, it used to be that immigration control was a less divisive and more generally supported policy than it is now. And the reason for that is because people saw Minneapolis and things like that. and they've come to be skeptical of the people in charge of the policy and the ways in which the policies are carried up. And I suspect you'll see some of that with what's going on in Iran in the same way that the Iraq War and its problems brought out the dubbishness and a lot of

people on the right afterward because the thing did not go as well as they had hoped it would. And of course, George W. Bush is a very different figure from Donald Trump, to say the least. But the outcomes in some ways are similar. So I think the people just, when their thing hits the headlines, it's easy to just get overly excited about it and to not. think, oh crap, well, Donald Trump's the guy in charge of this. It's surely going to go badly. Because you're so sure of the rightness of your policy that you lose the ability to forget how it could go badly. You know, this is something I've been sort of revisiting from a, you know, libertarian point of view with some of the bad outcomes from, you know, drug liberalization and things like that that have been a lot worse than we expected. And when you're really, really dedicated to a particular policy and you're dedicated to it for a long time, you're so used to talking about it in terms of the benefits are really, really, really big.

the potential deficiencies and setbacks and tradeoffs are really, really low, because you're used to being argumentative about it that it's hard to be analytic about it. And it's difficult to change between modes. I think that's actually an excellent point about the psychological drift because you can see it on a whole bunch of issues

where, take the around, like, I'm just picking out John Bolton. It's not necessarily about Israel, right? But for a lot of people, Israel's an important part of it. But for John Bolton, who is not technically speaking, a neocon, and he's not Jewish, right? he just is a serious hawk like Andy McCarthy, our former colleague at National Review.

Serious hawk think seriously about hawkishness and stuff. I'm not trying to characterize his actual position, but people of that school have been arguing about taking on Iran for decades. And their arguments by their own lights, and for the most part, by my lights, have been better than their interlocutors. But when you've heard every conceivable argument against doing something for years, and you have these responses,

over time it starts to be like, not only am I right, but it would be so easy, right? And it's like the people who are obsessed with the gold standard, they've so convinced themselves that... The Jones Act!

Yeah, no, oh, hey, don't call out. Linsicum's going to come to you. But like they feel like they've anticipated every conceivable counter argument. And if you do that long enough, no longer do you think you're right. You think you're so unbelievably right that everything's just going to fall into place perfectly.

And there are a lot of people who felt that way because they were right on the big picture thing about how Iran needs to be dealt with. And that Iran is an existential threat to Israel. And it is a major threat to the United States. And the people of Iran have wanted to be free for a very, very long time and all of these things. And they thought it was going to be just much easier. All it was lacking was a president with the green lantern-like will. to do it. And if we could, that was the last ingredient

of the formula. And it turns out that, as David and I have been pounding our spoons on our high chairs about for a while now, like, there's a reason why you're supposed to go to Congress for this stuff. There's a reason why you're supposed to have a public debate

because maybe it turns out that some partisan jackass might actually have a good question in a hearing, and because they're a partisan jackass, they are on the outside of your bubble. And they can ask a question that you haven't thought of because they don't have the same confirmation bias that you do. And like everybody I've talked to around the administration says, they of course knew that

the Strait of Hormuz thing could be an issue, but Trump just dismissed it. Well, okay, you can go and do a hearing like that. Have Rubio, have Heggseth, go to a hearing, and say, we don't think they're going to do this thing with the Strait of Hormuz. Well, first of all, by having that debate, the Iranians are more likely to do something with the Strait of Hormuz, but you're also more likely to have contingencies to deal with it. Not necessarily because you think it's necessary, but it's necessary to placate Congress. Yes, you've interrogated the issue.

I think this is so important for people to understand. Donald Trump walks into this, and we need to say it again and again and again, thinking Venezuela 2.0. That's what he walked in thinking. This explains a lot why they didn't even think to go to Congress. It's not just his hubris and megalomania. It's also they thought this thing would be done in 48 hours. And you're not, David, just to point out, you're not speculating here. Donald Trump himself has said this.

He said this. He said this. He said this. He said they're surprised that they put up as much as thing. He has said they're surprised by everything he should not have been surprised about. I mean, none of this is. None of this. Not one thing that Iran did remotely surprised any of us.

Nothing about any of this that has unfolded as surprised any of us. But he's sitting there surprised. So he walks in with a plan A, which is we're going to decapitate this regime. We've got this great intelligence. They're gone. They're done. It's over. The Iranian people, now your time is at hand.

Well, the Iranian people are battered. They just lost, what, 20, 30,000? Right after you've lost 20 or 30,000 protesters is probably the last moment you're ready to go back into the streets. Like, there wasn't much left of the Chinese pro-democracy movement after Tianmin Square. And so he's coming in after the protest movement has been Tianmin Square. and then taking out their leaders and saying, now's your time.

When we all also knew that when you're dealing with a jihadist regime, it's not like dealing with a South American strong man who's motivated by money and profit and power. You're talking about people with apocalyptic worldviews here. So we've cleaned out the clerics. They've been replaced by the IRGC essentially. And that is no better. That is no better.

And so, yeah, it's extraordinary. just extraordinary the lack of planning. And because he thought 48 hours, there's no effort done to prepare the American people so that the moderate economic hardship of higher gas prices lands on us like a ton of bricks because nobody's been expecting this. And so that gives Iran outsized leverage. I mean, it's just cascade mistake after mistake after mistake. I read a report over the weekend that the sort of short term, the rosiest scenario for some kind of economic recovery or return of the oil markets to pre-war levels is four to six months, best case scenario. So this is here with us for a long time. I want to spend a few minutes

before we turn to not worth your time on the other political party in the United States, the Democrats. There has been a lot of news over the past week, a lot of it sort of insider DC news about the Democratic National Committee and Democratic National Chairman Ken Martin and this autopsy that the Democrats performed on themselves. And then we're going to release and then decided not to release and we're going to release again. I want to read a sort of a summary of the timeline from John Favro, who's over at Crooked Media, was a speechwriter for Barack Obama. And, you know, as a proud, strong, partisan Democrat. And this is what he said about his own party. in this moment. He said, one, promise to release autopsy. Two, put incompetent friend in charge.

Three, incompetent friend produces incoherent product. Four, announce you're not releasing the autopsy. Five, lie about why. Six, gaslight people who ask, saying they're the problem. Seven, face internal revolt. Eight, release autopsy. So that is a tough criticism of the process. And then if you look at what the autopsy, the substance of the autopsy itself, looking back at the 2024 election, there's so many things that didn't cover, so many things it didn't get into. So many people, it apparently didn't interview to get their perspectives on why the Democrats were in such a bad position then. And I want to sort of both discuss that and then talk briefly about why they're in such a difficult position now. Joe, have you followed the autopsy story? What do you make of it? Is it a reflection? Is this

sort of chaos around the DNC chairman reflective of a deeper chaos or lack of leadership in the party itself. I have followed it and I've actually talked to a bunch of Democratic insiders about it because Reporting? Were you doing reporting? What you call reporting, I call green room schmoozing. Chats. Chats in the green room. I love it. Jonah going to Georgetown cocktail parties. No, but like on a story like this when you ask like Democratic muck and mucks, What the F were they thinking? It's actually what they say when the cameras are off is often much more interesting than the one.

Look, I think it was a colossal screw-up that was done stupidly from every angle, right? I mean, except for the idea of having an autopsy, which I think is a good idea, though fraught, to basically hire a buddy to do it pro bono in part-time, and then say you've accepted the actual autopsy when in fact, it's like literally incomplete.

Like, it's just, it's like, if you look at a conclusion. Yeah, well, actually. There's no executive summary, right? There's like, it's just stupid on so many levels. Like, it's 200 pages of incompleteness. And I think the lack of executive summary is why it's gotten such negative coverage because journalists are just so pissed at the lack of executive summary. I love the phrase, by the way, I love the phrase, 200 pages of incompleteness.

Yeah. Sort of captures it in all of its glory. Well, like my, like our friend Ramesh Pannuru pointed out, in the Washington Post, that, you know, because there are all these things that people that thought were in it and, like, they thought,

oh, this was, you know, like, going to be damning, because he was going to talk about the role of Gaza or Biden's age. And, like, all of the thing, all of, like,

the middle brown, normal human being political assumptions about why the Democrats lost, basically aren't discussed in it. But then Rej noticed that the word inflation was mentioned 18 times.

Oh, okay. But it turns out all 18 mentions of inflation are about the increase in unaffordability of political ad campaign airtime. So like literally the only problem with inflation is how much more expensive it makes political ads, right? Perfect.

So the, I know we don't have a lot of time. I think I'm going to write about this in my column, but I've had this thesis about Democrats for a very, very long time. And I think that in part, this is evidence of it or this is a further example of it. Democrats were the majority party in this country for literally almost all the 20th century, except for briefly in the early 1990s. And it really wasn't until the 2010s that Republicans and Democrats reached parity, but that's misleading because independence have exploded because people don't like either party,

right? But the mindset of Democrats, particularly the mindset of the left, is that they have a monopoly on political virtue. They have the people, the real people, right? This is like, you can tell one of the core assumptions of both parties is that if everybody voted, Democrats would always win, which turns out is flatly untrue and has never been true. But Democrats believe it and Republicans believe it. So Republicans wanted to like make it more difficult to vote. Democrats want to make it easier to vote because they're sharing the same false assumption.

And so this is always bred a certain kind of, I mean, there are other reasons for it, but there's brought a certain kind of arrogance in the. conventional left-wing approach that assumes if Republicans are winning, it must be because of some material advantage, not because they got a better argument. And so when Fox News started taking off, all sorts of progressives said, okay, we need our own cable networks, as if they didn't have their own television channels, right? When think tanks were important on the right, all of a sudden the left said, okay, we have to have our own think tanks to compete. When talk radio was seen as the reason why Republicans were winning, they threw money into talk about it. It's always this argument about material apparatus, about systems. And you can see it in the autopsy, too,

about how, like, Turning Point USA is a year-round apparatus that we don't have something like this, right? The whole debate about, like, we need our own podcast bros, which ignores the fact that they had a lot of the podcast pros and lost them because their arguments sucked. And so I think that the larger problem, the assumption going into the autopsy was that there must be some material, physical lack of resources argument that explains why we lost. It can't be because our arguments are bad. It can't be that because our positions are too far left. It has to be some external factor to us. And there's a lot of that in the autopsy. And I think that reflects, and I suspect that was the mission for the autopsy's author, is to go find evidence of that. And to the extent

to you provided any evidence, it was evidence of that. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at the dispatch.com slash join, and if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get a month for free. Speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, including one coming up soon, and much, much more. Okay, we'll be right back.

Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. David, it feels like the Democratic Party is in this sort of, is having this identity crisis, right? I mean, we can put them into different groups or different categories or, as Sarah would say, different buckets. But, you know, you have these progressives, progressive populists, you have the would-be centrist, you have the old-school establishment. And it's like the party itself. and maybe this just happens when you get to a presidential cycle and, you know, the party sort of adopts the personality and the ideology of its leader. But right now, it's hard to describe what the Democratic Party represents.

Is the Democratic Party, for instance, still a working class party in your view? No. I mean, it's in many ways the constituencies have flipped. I mean, Jonah is very right that feels like both. parties are playing by 20-year-old playbooks or 10 to 15-year-old playbooks and sort of their own view of their own constituency when those constituencies have changed. And when I was growing up, you know, the Republicans were the college-educated party. Democrats had that book-end constituency. They had the grad students. They had the grad school grads and they had working class folks. And America had, I mean, the Republican Party had that kind of American college-educated American middle class. I'm over there. I'm over there. simplifying, but there was this college gap that Republicans enjoyed. That's flipped all the way around. The Democrats now have that college gap. And it's very interesting, going back to the voting example, the whole debate over the SAVE Act was fascinating to me, because what the SAVE Act was going to do was make it a lot harder to register to vote. And then with the ID requirements of the polls,

you know, incremental. I've never been a person who bought the idea that voter ID was vote suppression. But proof of citizenship, that is something that a lot of working class Americans have trouble coming up with right immediately. It's just true. The percentage of working class Americans who have a passport is much lower than the percentage of college educated Americans. The percentage of working class Americans who have ready access to their birth certificate is a lot lower than with college educated Americans. And so I felt like I was taking crazy pills with Republicans pushing something that would actually, you know, kind of help the Democrats, and the Democrats furiously resisting something that might actually help them with everyone

operating under this outdated concept of their own constituencies. But I was talking to somebody the other day, and he said, what is your diagnosis of the maladies of the Democrats? And I said, everybody knows it. It's the most boring discussion because it's so freaking obvious. Is it that you had a party that became more ideologically extreme, extraordinarily intolerant, at the same time that it was also becoming more incompetent. And some of this actually makes a lot of sense because if you look at core democratic constituencies, where they get their votes are in these sclerotic one-party jurisdictions. You know, you have your Manhattan, your Chicago, you have your San Francisco, you have L.A., just mass concentrations of people in this environment that

really is one-party rule. And one-party rule is bad for everyone in the one-party rule jurisdiction. It is also bad for the one-party. And so again and again, you have Democrats like Kamala Harris coming up in jurisdictions where they never have to make a pitch to anyone beyond their very narrow ideological bubble. And so there was an interesting chart that I saw of the 2024 election. And it showed that the Republicans actually had the much-bron. broader ideological coalition than the Democrats. The Democrats went into 2024, much smaller ideological coalition. Republicans, you could be vax, pro-vax, or anti-vax. You could be pro-Ukraine, pro-Iran war, anti-Aran war, as long as you put on the red hat. But by golly, try being

pro-life and agree with Democrats, let's imagine you're pro-life and you agree with Democrats on everything else, but you're pro-life. Good luck. Good luck feeling like you, fit in in any way, shape, or form in that part. You will be scorned, mocked, attacked, vilified. And that's the way the Democratic base has treated any ideological heterodoxy. And now finally some of them are waking up. But you had this against an anti-incumbent mood with high inflation. I know it's lower than much of the rest of the world, but high inflation here. And then to go ahead and all they did was sort of gesture at idealization. And diversity. We're just going to talk, we're not going to talk about defund the police anymore.

You know, that's not reform. And so to me, it's so, you look at that party, that level of intolerance, a few public figures out there saying we need to change, is it going to fix that? That level of incompetence where we just saw, I mean, it was so perfect. This autopsy was the problem. It was the evidence of the, the incompetence of it was evidence of the problem. It was, inadvertently very revealing. And so it's one of these things that's so frustrating about this moment is that not even the threat of Donald Trump can really, truly get the groups and the base

to sort of to do anything more than like pay lip service to ending this overwhelming amount of ideological intolerance and puritanism that Jonah referred to. Kevin, the Democratic Party right now, you listen to smart Democrats talk to them in green rooms and elsewhere. How about the makeup of their world? party and you're looking forward to 2028 and one of the first things they'll say you know somebody like a candidate like josh supero comes up governor of pennsylvania reasonably popular has been reasonably

centrist and there's immediately a question will democrats nominate someone who's jewish because the party is to david's point down the line now i would say anti they would say anti nettingahu i would say in many ways anti-israel pro-gaza could that happen? Could they nominate a Josh Shapiro on that specific question? And are we overstating it by saying, by pointing to one issue like that? Or is David fundamentally right? Well, for a little context here. So the American left's last big idea was socialism, right? This is kind of their big thing. I don't use the term socialism pejoratively. That was just kind of their mode of thinking in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. And we had great society programs, things like that based on kind of democratic socialist. thinking. And that didn't really pan out the way people thought it would. And so you ended up with this contest between people who were essentially economically minded, you know, statists and people who embrace this kind of identitarian politics. You know, everything's about your identity, not about the means

of production. And these two people have been kind of fighting, these groups have been kind of fighting it out for a while, too bad sets of ideologies, neither than one of them is going to provide a good set of principles for the Democratic Party, which is why they keep reducing these bad, bad policy ideas. Well, we should try some Democratic socialist stuff, which everyone knows isn't going to work. the natural ideology that fits with their actual constituencies is liberalism, because they're now the party of upper middle class educated professionals, as David alludes to. The problem with people like Shapiro and other Jewish candidates is that the fact that they are Jewish pushes the identitarian buttons for a very small number of Democrats who care deeply about Middle Eastern issues or who have an investment in their Muslim constituencies in places like Dearborn. And so they push back really hard against this sort of thing. but it's really part of a very small competition between two groups of mostly irrelevant ideologues,

one group of whom cares a lot about economic stuff, the other group of whom cares a lot about authoritarian stuff, neither of whom is going to produce a set of policy proposals that's going to be useful to the Democratic Party with the actual voters it has and given the actual constituencies at the Republican Party, which is why you've got Bernie Sanders out there tweeting about, well, here's what we need to do, and there are a bunch of really bad, old-fashioned ideas. We need to double down on Medicaid, this 1960s idiotic failed program, and we need to tell people who disagree with us politically that they don't have free speech anymore and get rid of their spending on political ads and these things. We need to tell people that can't invest in data centers and businesses like that unless they agree with us politically unless we think they're on board. These are not a good set of policy proposals, and the Democrats have essentially a policy problem.

Their policy problems related to their intellectual problem, but until they figure out what they actually believe, what their principles are, what their real values are, and how do you use those to serve the constitutional. they actually have available to them, they're not going to figure this stuff out, and the Republicans are the luckiest bunch of SOBs in the world because any other normal political party would kick the crap out of the current Republicans who are just useless as tits on a hog. Yes.

Well, tits on a hog is a good way to end that discussion. With the five minutes we've got left, I want to ask a question about schools and school calendar, and this stems from my own frustration, looking at, we're trying to do some Hayes family summer, planning and looking at the days that we have available to us. And it occurs to me, as I'm looking at the calendar, that our kids in public school are going to get out in the third week of June and will return to school in the third week of August, which means basically their summer

vacation is down to two months. That strikes me as absurd. I think back to my own schooling, and I think we were out either before Memorial Day and started after Labor Day or maybe we went into the first week of June, but we had a good three months. David, I'll start with you. What's the right amount of time for summer vacation for kids under 18? You know, I don't know the answer to that. I mean, my general life was somewhere around Labor Day at school. that went from somewhere around Labor Day, just somewhere around Memorial Day, just roughly in that. So you had a good three months. I like that nine months, three months. I don't have anything magic

about it, but I also am not necessarily believing that this sort of 10-month school year, a whole lot of extra learning is going on. Not so sure about that. Right. And this has been going on for a while. The earliest my kids started school was one year, they actually had their first sort of like half day in July. In July. What on earth. That's crazy. So I feel like a longer school year is kind of a cheap and easy way to do a quote unquote education reform. Hey, look at all the more instruction days that we're having. But those summertime are important times. I mean, I love it when kids can be kids. I like for people to be able to play. I also like for people when they get older to be able to have a substantial summer job, something where they can dig in for a while and actually do some real work.

And when you have a two-month summer, it's almost not worth it to hire somebody for just that quick of a blip. Well, it makes it hard to get the job. I mean, again, with kids of employment age, it's hard when you go into a prospective employer and you say, I can give you two months or I can give you two months, but I'm spending this one week on my family vacation, so I can give you six weeks, six and a half weeks. It's not great. Jonah, you know, when I talk to some parents around here, some parents are happy that their kids are in school for longer, parents who, you know, if you have both parents working, you know, it takes care of the kids and somebody having to watch the kids during the summertime. Some parents just don't want to spend that much more time with their kids. That's not me.

Do you have a golden number for the right amount of time for kids to have off in the summer? No, but I've been saying for a long time, I think that one of them were underappreciated things about school that parents don't want to admit is the prison effect. Is this basic idea that you don't have to think about the kid for this defined period of time because they're locked up someplace. Look, I don't know. I agree. I have all sorts of nostalgia about summer vacations and summer jobs and all of that. And I agree with all the problems. I think we need such an unbelievably bottom-up rethink about education.

this country. You know, we had a good piece. It was actually my dispatch recommended piece last week. Emily Oster had a thing about starting school later in the day. I would be in favor of some giant, you know, treaty of Westphalia-like renegotiation of K-12 education where maybe the day starts later, ends later. So you get a lot of benefits for working parents in that. Kids get to sleep a little later, have longer instruction time, more free play. And, and, and, you exchange for making it an eight-hour school day or something like that, you keep something like the three-month vacation. Although I don't think that needs to be sacrosanct, honestly. I think, certainly I think different states can experiment with it. You guys are all originally from like

agriculture states and all that kind of thing, you know, like I'm from, you know, the cosmopolis of New York City, you know, we don't, no one needed their kids home to bring in the crops or do, you know, the plantings. And I just think that between nostalgia and teachers unions, we are so calcified in how we think about this stuff. That I just, it's one of the reasons. It's like I have more mixed feelings about school choice than some of my friends do, including my wife, so I got to be careful how I talk about it. It's the only constituency I pander to.

But at least school choice allows for real experimentation and different models. Yeah. And the idea that every kid in the country should have the same three months of summer vacation model, I don't think necessarily tracks. Let different communities, different school districts experiment. I agree. Let some of them have six months. Yeah, fine.

That'd be perfect. And the other six months, it's like 12-hour days. That's fine. Well, Jonah kind of stole my thunder there with no longer needing summers off for agricultural reasons. And I also agree that different families and different kinds of communities should probably have different schedules. You know, Jonah earlier in the conversation, used one of my favorite Jonahisms, which is talking

about banging his spoon on his high chair, which I've been listening to him, say, for years and years and years until this became a very literal part of my life of a lot of spoons banging on high chairs. And I understand the desire that people have to essentially use school as daycare to get a break from their kids, although I don't think that's the right way to think about education or your kids, for that matter. Okay, two things. I went to a weird high school where we only went to school four days a week, but we had a really, really long school day where we're in school before 8 o'clock and in school till 4.

And then we didn't have school on Fridays, which resulted in every teenage pregnancy in Lubbock, Texas, being conceived on a Friday, I'm pretty sure because we were set free with no parental supervision. I'm also looking forward to telling my kids about how I went to school in Texas on a building built in 1900 that had no air conditioning in it, which is now illegal for prisoners in Texas. We're not allowed to house them in places with no air conditioning. If I could design a public school schedule for my family,

it would be three months on, one month off, year-round. You could do those nice long vacations during the months off, You get some break time in the winter, you get some break time in the spring, you get some break time in the summer or the fall, however it shakes out in those things. Or maybe do a quarterly system with, you know, three weeks off or two weeks off at the end of each quarter or something like that. Having everything invested in the summer, I think, is not great, especially if you're the sort of family whose vacations might include some skiing and want to travel for that, which I just say for reasons of complete narrow self-interest.

I don't think there is a single right schedule, of course. and I think mainly kids should probably be educated at home, but that's just my view. This has been endlessly frustrating for me. I'm with Jonah on the experimentation front. When we spent a year in Spain with our kids, the three school-age kids went to a private Catholic school in Spain. And the school day was a little bit longer, but it included all of their extracurriculars. So the kids went at eight, we dropped them off at the bus. They went and they came back at 5.30 or something like that.

but baked into the school day, they had a bunch of clubs and their sports and everything. And then when we got them at 530, they were ours for the night, which I loved because the sports and all the extracurriculars now don't really allow that. But I just think at a certain point, if you are giving people two months in the summer to spend time with their family, to pack in all the family vacations, as David said, to try to, you know, get the older kids' meaningful work, it's not enough. and I guess I'm a little skeptical of the great returns from the extra time that the kids are spending in the classroom,

particularly when you hear, you know, when you get to the end of the year, I don't know if you all get the same reports. We get reports of a lot of movie days. You know, there's not a lot happening. Teachers know that they're not educating the students. They do lose a lot intellectually when you take them out of school for three months.

I mean, learning loss in the summaries is a real thing. So having, you know, maybe an equivalent amount of time, but spread out a little more through the year would be good. Jobs, I like the idea of kids working, but, you know, my school jobs when I was in high school were working at Burger King in 7-Eleven, which were not like the most enriching experiences in life. I mean, they were fine, but not the worst jobs I ever had.

No, I mean, but those are meaningful. That's meaningful experience. I mean, it might not have been taxing work, but, like, working at Burger King, you're going to learn a lot about life working at Burger King, I would imagine. You know, what I'm really thinking, though, is like I moved to Spain to send my kids

to some strict Catholic school. sounds like you're a refugee national review editor in the 1970s. Like got sort of disreputable opinions about Franco. Well, Franco's gone, although now they have Pedro Sanchez, who's a hard left socialist, not much better. Yes. Thank you all for indulging me on that not worth your time. I just am frustrated with this moment.

Thanks for the bigger conversation, too. I found both of the Iran and the Democratic discussions interesting and important in their own way. Until next time. Finally, if you like what we're doing here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And as always, if you've got questions, comments,

concerns, or corrections, you can email us at roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from people who think kids should be in school year round. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and a thank you to the folks behind the scenes

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