The Dispatch Podcast - The Tucker Wing Is Winning | Roundtable

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Sarah Isgur, Michael Warren, Jonah Goldberg, and Steve Hayes discuss political capital when it comes to re-election prospects and reversing presidential decisions. Will public perception influence Trump’s next moves? The Agenda: —Flash back to the George W. Bush administration —The Trump show —Stop tariffs via courts? Or let Trump sleep in his own bed? —Congress sucks! —Sarah asks a really good question —Bond market woes —Iran ‘to be great,’ but without nuclear powers —We can’t call war crimes ‘war crimes’ because it will offend Russia —Policies and regime change —Reporter braves flirting assignment Show Notes: —Scott Lincicome on Wall Street and Main Street The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I do want to talk about tariffs, but I kind of don't want to talk about tariffs. Instead, I want to talk about some of the forces and pressures and interests on the right that come out in the form of our current tariff policy. So as you all know, Donald Trump implemented global tariffs at varying but high levels and then backed off that policy and instead implemented 10% tariffs across the board with the exceptions of China, Mexico, and Canada, which had high. higher tariffs, and then implemented exceptions and exclusions to some of those tariffs as well. So, Jonah, I want to start with a very simple question.

What forces leaders to reverse course when they make an unpopular decision? Well, we'll limit ourselves to democracies for the time being, which we are still one. Part of it, obviously, is prospect of re-election, which we're going to work on the assumption at least until I finish the sentence that Donald Trump is not going to be running for a third term and that's more trolling than a real thing. Although as Nick Catoja likes to say, everything's a joke until it isn't with Trump.

But anyway, we'll put that aside for second. So like for second term presidents, it is, I think for the most part, put aside the issue of good governance and like, oh, we made a mistake, let's learn from our mistake and have better policy, which I don't think is an issue here. It is, man, we are burning through political capital,

We may lose the ability to get our agenda through Congress if we stay this course and donors and other outside interests are looking like they might bail on us. So maybe we need to adjust. Other than that, there's really not much. I mean, Richard Neustadt talked about one of the only things that was a real constraint on presidents was one's historical legacy. He didn't really take into account the possibility that one could have such a. boutique and heterodox understanding of what your legacy should be or can be that it leads you to make bad decisions, as I would argue happening now. But there's really not much. I mean, I mean, there's threats of impeachment and that kind of thing, but we know that's sort of a dead

letter these days. It's basically worried that these failures will lead to more failures to get the things that you want. So, Mike, I heard a few answers in there. One, good of the country, right? like the reason you got elected in the first place. You made a decision, you now realize it was a mistake, and you back off for that reason. It's sort of the internal reason, let's say. Two is the political external reason, whether it's re-election, which Donald Trump doesn't face,

or midterm elections, right? This idea that your political party could suffer concrete loss that would result in a loss of power, for instance, losing the Senate or the House after the midterms and therefore not being able to get the rest of your agenda done legacy that you're worried about what people will think about you after you're dead, which is always kind of a iffy proposition. And like the constitutional issue of impeachment, are there any others that were missing

there, Mike? And I don't know, as Jonah kind of alluded to, I don't know that any of those really applied to this situation. And so how exactly do we think about what we saw this week from Donald Trump and what lessons we learned, perhaps, for future potentially catastrophic recession-causing policies. There is one that I think we've left out, and it also does not apply in this situation, which is having people, advisors, aides, trusted people who are even sort of predate your time in the White House, predate your time of politics, who can sort of tell you, tell the president

the ugly truth or voice some kind of dissent from. all of the yes men around that that gather around any president but particularly around this president I think that's a a huge part of what can reign in a president who's made a mistake or who has gone down a path a path and is needs to for the sake of themselves for their legacy for their party needs to reverse and can't because look these are proud men they're all men at this point these are ambitious men and they believe that they know what is best and it's those kind of situations and those kind of people who need somebody to kind of grab them by the ear and say listen you're not seeing this part of the story or you're not seeing it from this perspective

And even if they don't always listen to it, it's nice to have that kind of voice. It's important, I think, to have that kind of voice. I mean, if you want to look at, for instance, the way the Iraq war was going about 2006 and the voices that encouraged President George W. Bush to embrace the surge, both outside the administration and internally, I mean, that's an example where had there not been dissenting voices or voices that said, we should do this differently. We should rethink how we approach this. Things could have gotten, gone from really, really bad to even worse.

Trump just doesn't have any of those forces around him. And to the extent that he does, I don't have any insight or window into say what a Susie Wiles is really saying or what she's able to say at this point in the presidency. That would be the only person I can think of who could. fill that role. Susie Wilde, who was his campaign manager and is now chief of staff. Steve, you covered the Bush administration extensively. I'm reminded of the famous Ashcroft Hospital scene that became lore, not just at the time,

but in the decade plus since, just to set the stage here, this was about a particular part of the War on Terror and Surveillance Program. and Ashcroft had had emergency and potentially life-threatening surgery, I think related to his gallbladder, but don't quote me on that part. The acting Attorney General at that point was the Deputy Attorney General, Jim Comey, a name that becomes more well-known with time. And Jim Comey says no to Alberto Gonzalez, who is the White House counsel. And Alberto Gonzalez makes clear that he's going to go to the hospital

and try to get a different answer from Ashcroft. and remember Ashcroft has, like, he's not the Attorney General right now because he's been under anesthesia and Jim Comey. He's handed over power to the acting attorney general. So now Jim Comey's racing over and having Office of Legal Counsel Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, friend of the pod, rush to the hospital. And they're all, like all these motorcades are careening towards this hospital to get to John Ashcroft's side, who's, you know, groggy and not in great.

and they all sort of get there. I think the Comey team gets there first. The Gonzalez team gets there second. And in this very dramatic scene, John Ashcroft tells Alberto Gonzalez all the reasons that he would say no and then says at the end, but it's not my call to make

because I'm not the attorney general right now. Boom. And so then the Comey Goldsmith team or whatever threatens to resign. and they make a fateful text message over to, I think it's Andy Card gets the message. It turns out the president didn't know about all of this, and the threats to resign change the course of history. And the Saturday night massacre at the Department of Justice doesn't happen.

And just for those listening, like the way that I think we all felt about that story at the time has probably changed in the years since then, and what exactly that moment stands for in our minds. But regardless, Steve, it's a moment about presidential constraint in a lot of ways and the power of advisors and resignations and unpopular decisions and principles. It's just, it's a, there's a reason we sort of obsess over this moment that didn't actually, nothing happened from that moment, right? Because it's so interesting about constraints on presidents.

So as you think back on covering the Bush administration, What are the constraints that were there, perhaps, historically, that aren't there anymore? You famously had Dick Cheney on the other side of that argument, making the case for more robust surveillance. He was on the Alberto Gonzalez side. Correct, right, making those arguments. And arguing sort of broader philosophical arguments about the strength of the executive to make such decisions in that context, in a warfighting context. Yeah, I mean, I think this goes to Mike's point. You know, obviously George W. Bush, you know, in some ways he was, he would make a decision and he would stick with it and follow through in ways that were not particularly popular.

I would actually argue the surge is a good point in support of that. It wasn't a popular thing. You started to have Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell famously and others. balk say, no, now's the time to get out. They were concerned about the upcoming 2006 midterm elections. And you had increasingly Republicans on Capitol speaking out against the surge, speaking out against our involvement in Iraq. And George W. Bush said, we're going to do it.

But Steve, this is a great point. Because on the one hand, we want constraints on presidents to some extent. But you also don't want presidents to be just reacting to the moment something's unpopular. They say, never mind and chuck it, even if it's a good idea. You don't want them just governing by polls or else we wouldn't need a president. Yeah, I mean, I think the ideal thing is to someone who governs by conviction but is attentive to counterarguments and new evidence. The original case for the surge came from some of the outside advisors, Jack King and others, making the case to Dick Cheney's staff, making the case to folks at the Pentagon. But there was a clear split.

They made their case. Both sides were heard. and President Bush ultimately decided to go ahead with the surge. And it helped, I think, at least on a temporary basis. The counter is what I think we're seeing today with Donald Trump. We'll get into some of the splits in Trump world and among the folks who are advising Donald Trump when you talk a little bit about Iran later.

So it's not the case that there aren't differences of opinion where that people don't have different policy recommendations. It's that I don't think Trump himself is exposed to many of those fights, in part because he's not one to sit and listen to a three-hour sort of strategy session about which makes the most sense. I do think, to your earlier point, Sarah, he's very attuned to sort of how is this going to look for my legacy. He cares about that deeply.

I think that had as much to do as anything with his reversal, and I think we should call it a temporary reversal on the retaliatory tariffs, the higher. level of tariffs that he had imposed. I also think in this case, he was, as Jonah has suggested, looking at the stock market, looking at what was happening with bonds. He was listening to outside advisors, people like Jamie Diamond and others who had, you know, offered public, if somewhat qualified support for Trump's tariff agenda and quickly backtracked when they saw what Trump's tariff agenda actually was. So in that case, I think Trump, and he obviously couldn't ignore the fact that the global economy was melting down all around him. I would think that might affect your decision

making in that moment. But in terms of the actual constraints, I think the lessons from Trump's first term, and particularly the post-election period in Trump's first term, is that he's almost immune to these problems. He doesn't need to listen to his. advisors because his advisors have often proved and wrong. So when you had at the end of the first term, Bill Barr go in and sit down and threaten to quit the Trump administration because of all of the post-election nonsense and Trump's continued claims that he was, that he'd won the election when all the evidence had shown that he hadn't. And Barr goes in and sort of famously at the beginning of December confronts Trump about this and says, you know, in effect, Mr. President, I can't make this case

for you. I can't do this. What you're saying isn't true. And Trump gets angry with him in this meeting that they had off on the Oval Office. And Barr offers to resign. Trump initially accepts, according to Barr's book, yells, you know, I accept, I accept. Bar goes out to the car. And Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, runs out to the car after Barr and pounds on the window of the car and says, he doesn't want you to resign. He doesn't want you to resign. But eventually Trump is happy. with him resigning and Barb goes off and Trump trashes him when he leaves. And then Trump survives, right? I mean, then we have January 6th.

Then we have all of this, everything that followed that. Trump doesn't prevail on the stolen election questions. But he survives. And all of the people, including, you know, people like us who said his career was over after January 6th and he couldn't survive the sort of nonsensical arguments he was making in connection with the stolen election stuff. And the people who resigned or he sort of nudged out, none of it really. really mattered. He had his political comeback. He didn't listen to them. He trusted his own

instincts. And I think that's where we are in Trump 2.0 is a president who is largely, doesn't have the guardrails that he had the first time and has confidence because he had served in the administration. He'd served in the presidency before and was right in his mind when many of his advisors were wrong. Yeah. So I just want to make one quick point about that. This has been my argument since 2015 about understanding Donald Trump, right? In social science, there's this thing called winner's bias, right? And there's this great cartoon where this guy is saying, they told me I couldn't do it.

They told me I was wasting my time. They told me I was a fool. But I kept buying those lottery tickets and I won, right? And the person who wins thinks that, like, they had some special insight, some special instinct, that made all of those arguments about the 300 million to one chances of winning look stupid.

Trump in many ways is the millionth monkey banging on a typewriter who actually puts out war in peace. He has done things the wrong way in business, in life, in his personal life, in his professional life, and in his political life. But because of the laws of large numbers,

every now and then, somebody may, you know, there are monkeys who are better stock pickers for one given year than the smartest people on Wall Street, just throwing darts at the darkboard. He's that guy in many respects. And so he's made what I think are objectively bad choices on a whole range of fronts. And in part, because he makes bad choices, because he works on instinct, people compensate for his failures more than they would for somebody who actually was interested in dealing with the facts. And his takeaway from it is perfectly,

rational in a human way. It's perfectly normal in a human way. It's like they keep telling me I'm doing things wrong and it keeps working out for me. And the system just doesn't really have a way of dealing with someone who keeps getting proven by right, getting proven right by the cosmos for doing wrong things. And it's a very difficult thing for reasonable people to talk about. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of

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Dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from winners, I started wondering. Is every fabulous item I see from winners? Like that woman over there with the designer jeans. Are those from winners? Ooh, are those beautiful gold earrings? Did she pay full price? Or that leather tote?

Or that cashmere sweater? Or those knee-high boots? That dress, that jacket, those shoes. Is anyone paying full price for anything? Stop wondering, start winning. Winners, find fabulous for less. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online.

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All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Okay, I have a very practical question for you three. Donald Trump, of course, implements these tariffs using his powers under an act passed by Congress after the Nixon administration that we refer to as AEPA, Emergency Powers Act. And that act never mentions tariffs, but it does mention giving the president in an emergency situation the power to sanction foreign governments, for instance. There's two arguments for why Donald Trump's tariffs are unlawful. One, that Congress didn't give him the power, right? That IEPA just doesn't

allow for a president to impose revenue-based tariffs. Two, that Congress couldn't give him the power, that it's such a core power under Article I of the Constitution and of Congress, which has the power to lay duties on imports that they can't delegate away that power. Those are both pretty killer legal arguments. We don't need to get into the full depth as to why. They're good arguments any time. They're especially good arguments in front of this court

and with the last five or so years of precedent. So California, Governor Newsom has recently filed a lawsuit along these lines against President Trump and these tariffs. And my question to you all is this. which one is better for the country? Having a legal precedent that a president doesn't have the power to do this and stopping all of these tariffs, which I think everyone on this podcast at least thinks are bad for the economy

and maybe catastrophic for the economy over time, or allowing the tariffs to continue and allowing the American people to kind of see the logical conclusion of Donald Trump's policies. Because to me it feels like on the one hand, you're choosing between a potential recession and the further entrenchment of Donald Trumpism within the Republican Party because he'll be able to blame the courts, the left.

If only I had been able to do my tariffs, then the country would be better off with no consequences for what it would have looked like to have those tariffs. That's a big trade-off in my mind. Which one, not that we get to pick, but which one would be better for the country? stopping the tariffs through the courts or allowing Donald Trump

to sort of sleep in his own bed. Yeah, it's such a great question. And I'm going to punt. Well, let me get, no, look, let me give you a nuanced answer. This is the dispatch after all. Look, I think in terms of what's best for the country at this moment

is probably that he's stopped from doing it, that the court says he doesn't have the power to do it, you can't do it because I don't think he has the power to do it and he probably shouldn't stop, regardless of the economic implications. That also has the benefit of potentially saving lots and lots of real pain for Americans beyond just what would happen in a recession.

The tariffs as initially proposed would ruin businesses throughout the country, prevent businesses from planning and adapting because they're so arbitrary and so hard to be with. And the scramble for exemptions and exceptions already had started continuing to this day means that the most connected people can probably succeed and those who run small businesses and not will see their business, their lifestyle will change dramatically, has real effects, which I think sometimes we don't appreciate in Washington. often enough. So that's the answer, I think, in the short term. I do think in the long term,

you know, we've had this sort of ongoing debate here on this podcast and elsewhere, whether we've reached a point where perception matters more than reality. And I think one of the sort of Donald Trump's superpowers is his ability to make in an electoral context perception matter at least as much as reality rather than more than reality. I mean, look at what we were talking about with respect to the 2020 election. He didn't win the election. The reality is he lost. We can show that. We have evidence. There are facts. There were court cases. This was tested. And yet, depending on the poll, some 75% of Republicans believe that Donald Trump lost that election. And that false belief, I think, contributed greatly to his ability to rebound and his

ability to tell the story that he's told about himself as a winner. And it seems that nothing is gripping, has been gripping enough, has sort of forced reality enough to break Trump's ability to make perception matter as much or maybe more than reality. Think about January 6th to go back again, the same same idea. We've seen this stuff on video. We watched In real time, as those attacks unfolded, on video, we have tens of thousands of hours of video, and Trump has succeeded somehow in creating this alternative reality where the attackers are patriots, where they're political prisoners, where they're the victims, despite what we all walk with our own eyes. The terrorists, it seems to me, might present a different outcome because they matter so much.

It's not theoretical to people if your business goes under because of a boneheaded decision by the president of the United States. It's not theoretical to people if, as the Fed chairman suggested on Wednesday, these kind of tariffs would lead to immediately to inflation, the very kind of inflation that Trump city was going to kill, making things, making life harder for American people. At a certain point, those same people who want to believe in Trump, We're open to living his alternative reality won't be able to.

So it's not like January 6th where he can say, where people who watch that trauma far can say, oh, that was a TV show. Just like all of these other episodes of the Trump show, that one had a little more violence than I expected, but it was a TV show. In this case, they'd be losing their businesses. They'd be unable to pay their bills.

They'd go bankrupt. They'd default on mortgages. These are not theoretical things. think if there's ever going to come a moment where parts of the Republican Party finally are broken of the grip that Trump has, it would come as a result of something like that. Yeah, so I think, Steve, you just explained why I asked a good question, but you definitely didn't answer it. Mike, try to answer the question. I know what the question is and I know why it's a good question. Your question, though, put me in the mind of a, of myself.

as a parent to young children and maybe not as young as they used to be children, where this question kind of comes up on a regular basis, right? Do we enforce the rule that we have? Do we let the rule, whatever it is, maybe it's a hard rule, maybe it's a soft rule. Do we let it slide for a little comity, a little piece in the house? We have a rule at my dinner table. We feed everybody the same thing that the grown-ups eat and the kids eat, the same thing. And the rule is you have to have a bite, a try bite, as we say, of everything on

your plate. You don't have to like it. You don't have to eat it all, but you have to have a bite of it. How often does your wife tell you that, Michael? One bite to be polite, Mike. No, no. I throw the plate against the wall. I can stare at me. So, but you know what? Like, life would be a lot easier. Dinner time would be a lot more pleasant if we did not enforce that rule. If the rule were like, yeah, we can do that, but if you really would rather have Cheetos and ice cream for dinner, you can have that. And honestly, just let him have it because it will just make things go easier. And he'll have a stomachache at the end of the night and

maybe he'll learn his lesson. And at the end of the day, we can't do that. Like, we have to enforce the rules no matter how painful it is on us for our own peace and sanity, because something is more important than letting our children have what they deserve, right? If they refuse to do this and only get to eat what they want and they get a stomachache, it's what they deserve and maybe they'll learn a lesson or maybe they'll just have Cheetos and ice cream for dinner for the next several months. Their teeth will fall out and it will all be bad. So I fall on this question on the side of you have to enforce the rules, not just because it's important to enforce the rules it for the short, medium and long term of the country, but because if we keep saying

we're, you know, the rule of law is important in this country, then you've got to walk the walk on that. And even when it's painful, even if it brings about something like, I don't know, like all that talk about civil war, like I don't think we're there yet. But like we, like, you got to stand for something here. And the rule of law needs, um, needs, needs to be applied, and we need to walk the walk. Speaking of kids, by the way, I'm at my parents' house right now, and I know that all of you have experienced this, but I am sitting here, like, really letting it soak in for the first time.

I'm in my, you know, dad's home office where the shelves used to be filled with pictures of me, front and center. There's only two pictures of me left, and they have been moved to the furthest out shells, and they keep moving further and further out. out each time I come home. So, like, I'm not even in the central shelf anymore.

There's not a single picture of me left. And there I am barely holding on out there on a shelf to left. I don't know. Will they even be here the next time I come? But the grandkids are taking center stage, right? It's not like pictures of a boat or something. Hundreds of pictures of these boys. That's as it should be.

I know. But it's weird. That sounds supposed to work. My picture was never on the mantle, so I don't even know what I've lost. I'm an only child, Mike. That better be on, I mean, I better be well represented. You know what I mean? All right, Jonah, what are you going to pick?

The question is, let the tariffs run their course and ruin the economy so people learn their lesson or stop him before he kills again, right? That's the gist of it. Yep. Yeah. I will answer the question directly and then add my caveats after. Stop the tariffs. I think president doesn't have these powers. I'm, as a legal matter, you know, or as a constitutional order matter,

I'm less concerned with the president having some of these authorities than I am with the president being able to unilaterally declare crisis or a warlike situation without buy-in from Congress. Also a great point. If we want the president to have these powers during a crisis, Congress can declare a crisis or Congress cannot declare a crisis. And they're not doing that. We should at some point do an entire episode of this podcast where we take every single public policy problem and political problem in this country, and we explain how each one can be traced

back to the fact that Congress fricking sucks and doesn't do its job. Has that been discussed on this podcast recently? Yeah, I know, but I start, it's now becoming stuff like bike lanes in D.C. I'm like, you know why we got these? Because Congress is not doing his job. But so I think, so I think you need to stop the tariffs. The other caveat I'll have is that it is increasingly the case. You know, we had a good morning dispatch piece here explaining how it's, it wasn't the crashing of the stock markets that Trump was listening to. It was the freaking out of the bond markets that Trump was listening to. Bond markets are more important than the stock market. Explain why.

First of all, all of that stuff about America being a safe haven for, you know, during troubling times and all that kind of stuff isn't because of our stock market. It's because of our bond market. The full faith and credit of the United States is like the cornerstone of the global financial system. And whenever there's turmoil in Asia and Africa and Europe, wherever, and people are like, oh, crap, the world economy can be coming unglued, where do I park my money? You park it and you and U.S. treasuries because they're safe. Everyone trusts that the United States will back it. They also put their money in U.S. dollars because they think the dollar is a stable, safe currency. that's why it's the global reserve currency.

And you want to talk about it how I agree with Scott Linsicum that Wall Street and Main Street is kind of a false distinction, but bond markets and Main Street really aren't because there are the things that determine what your interest rates are, what your credit card rates are, what kind of home mortgage, if you can get a home mortgage, all that kind of stuff. It is the nuts and bolts of the global financial system.

And when that started to go wonky, normally when the stock market goes crazy, money flies into bond market because the bond market is the safe haven. What happened was stock market was going crazy and the bond market were going crazy because what was happening is people are no longer trusting that America was run by adults and was a safe place to park your money. That's my other objection to the question, which I agree is a good question, yada, yada, yada, let's all make nice on Sarah. You could stop the tariff stuff tomorrow and I'm not and I think that would help the stock market a lot. I am not sure it would help the bond market all that much

because a lot of people are freaking out about America, not because of Trump's policies, but they're now freaking out about America because of Trump. The idea that one man who is so unreliable in his judgment and so mercurial and so unpredictable has these tools at his disposal to muck with the global financial system is freaking people out and making them think we're not a safe haven't anymore. and so the courts and Congress could step in and fix this terror stuff tomorrow

and that would stop the stock market and maybe help the bond market a little bit. But Trump is now, there's now, and you know this stuff from the Humphreys executor thing, they got dead eyes on being able to screw with the Federal Reserve and get rid of Jerome Powell. And that will freak out global markets and bond markets in all sorts of ways when, you know, when Trump appoints Art Laffer as the head of the Federal Reserve, which I'm not kidding, I think is a non-trivial possibility here. Or Janine Piro. Or Janine Piro?

Well, that's a little less likely. Jesse Waters? Maybe, maybe. Maybe Cash Patel, now that he doesn't have to do ATF, has time on his hands to do the Fed. My point is that the premise of your question is, if you fix this stuff, we avoid recession and the economy gets better. we are approaching a point where the tariff stuff is a symptom of the larger problem

in the eyes of a lot of global financial decision makers. So maybe I get my cake and eat it too. Great. What a run. This champ is picking up speed. But they found a lane. Phenomenal launches into the air. Absolutely incredible. Air Transad. Fly the seven-time world's best leisure airline champions, Air Transad. this episode is brought to by tron aries for the first time the captivating world of tron breaks out of the grid aries a highly advanced program journeys into our world on a dangerous mission marking humankind's first encounter with ai beings

featuring an electrifying original soundtrack by nine inch nails tron aries is a must-see movie event filmed for iMacs and made for the big screen experience it only in theaters october 10 get tickets now Let's just go to Iran for a moment. Steve, obviously, I'm going to start with you on this. Iran has confirmed that the next round of talks will occur this weekend. Iran's foreign affairs ministry described the first round of talks as being conducted in a, quote, constructive atmosphere and based on mutual respect. Donald Trump, let's just get some quotes out from him.

If it, meaning disarmament, if it requires military, We're going to have military. Israel will obviously be very much involved in that. They'll be the leader of that. But nobody leads us, but we do what we want to do. I want Iran to be great. The only thing that they can't have is a nuclear weapon. They understand that.

And then this is the Iranian president. We, Iran, we are not after a nuclear bomb. You have verified it a hundred times. Do it a thousand times again. Steve, I just want to start. from the very, very basic question. How do these talks differ from the talks that we all said were so wrong and dangerous

during the Obama administration? Well, we'll find out. There are a couple potential differences, but also some similarities. First, there's been all sorts of back and forth about whether there has been direct engagement or indirect engagement. Trump's team has indicated a willingness

to engage directly with the Iranians. I think a lot of people believe that's a mistake given sort of the rogue nature of the Iranian regime and legitimacy that that confers. Further legitimacy that confers upon them, I'm one of those people. I don't think it's a good idea. There's also the question of how we address Iran broadly. Is this fundamentally a discussion about Iran's nuclear program and only Iran's nuclear program? Or is it about Iran's nuclear program and the nature of the regime more broadly?

There were reports early that was going to go beyond the nuclear program. and include Iran's support for various terrorist groups in the region's place as a leader of the axis of resistance, as they call it, and the nature of the regime more broadly. The Obama administration worked hard to decouple the Iranian regime and the nature of the regime from nuclear talks and said this repeatedly in public. Basically, we don't care about all of the other malign activity. We're going to deal with them on nukes, and that's what we're trying to get. There's also the question about whether Iran should be allowed to enrich at all. Well, we don't know. Steve Woodcafu is helping to lead the negotiations for President Trump, a former real estate developer, not an international diplomat,

but who's been handed the most sensitive diplomatic negotiations the Trump administration has engaged in. Initially said that Iran's nuclear enrichment could continue at 3.67 percent, the same limit enshrined in Obama's nuclear deal. But there was all sorts of, he got all sorts of grief for that saying basically critics saying you can't give them that as part of this at the outset. And they shouldn't be able to enrich at all. Enrichment and weaponization is sort of the whole package. So he backtracked. The question I think is, and this goes to what we were talking about earlier with some splits in the administration.

There is a faction in the administration. We'll call it the J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, from neo-isolationist, fact. that either doesn't want to be having to do this at all. It doesn't think we should be involved, really, who cares what Iran is doing? And this isn't really our problem. And by the way, we shouldn't be doing it on behalf of Israel, which I think is a strong sort of undercurrent to a lot of that argument. And then there's a, we might say, more traditional faction smaller.

It seems less powerful, ostensibly led by Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, that says actually Iran having a nuke is bad and they're sort of on the one yard line of a nuclear weapon and we should do everything we can including working with the Israelis to stop them from having it because it would be it would so distort sort of regional dynamics and our approach to Iran that we have to do almost anything you can't there was reporting over the night in the year overnight in the new york times out Thursday morning that uh the Israelis had a plan and to preemptively attack Iran's nuclear facilities. This has been much speculated about, much discussed,

particularly in light of the failures of Iran's proxy groups, Hezbollah Hamas, what it was doing in Syria over the past two, almost two years. Iran is at a point of weakness. Now is the time to take the shot. Donald Trump, according to times, declined their request to have either U.S. approval or U.S. participation in those attacks. There's some longstanding assumption that the Israeli need U.S. military hardware

to do the kind of damage that would need to be done to actually end or go a long way toward ending Iran's nuclear program and Trump has denied this. I don't know where this is going. At some moments, you read some of the reports, it sounds a bit like Barack Obama's nuclear negotiations. And then you have a sort of a record scratch moment where Steve Whitkoff comes and says the opposite of what he had said 24 hours earlier.

It doesn't seem to be that Donald Trump himself is operating from a worldview or sort of, shall we say, deep understanding of the Iranian regime in the history and what it wants. Jonah, there seems to be a philosophical question here, though, which is what do you do with a country? like, let's take Iran out of it for a second and let's pick maybe an easier example for my purposes, North Korea. If you continue to isolate North Korea and, quote, not, you know, it's almost like the not platforming someone you disagree with. Well, on the one hand, if you're a true neo-Nazi white supremacist, kill all the Jews or whatever guy, do we really need to platform you in my classroom, you know, discussion. On the other hand, if I don't, my students don't actually know these people exist and they don't know the best arguments against them. And as the, you know,

platforming argument became smaller and smaller and smaller, you saw the effects of that, which is a whole bunch of people thought they then, quote, weren't platformed and rebelled against that. So with North Korea, for example, do you isolate them and then we're also isolating Iran and and then we're also isolating Russia and China and all, you know, Myanmar. Or do you engage with everyone? Because you never know when there'll be a breakthrough and when you can sort of bring someone back into the fold or at least learn more about what they're doing

and that sort of engagement. Yeah, I mean, I will say that the question does raise some of the problems with anthropomorphizing nation states. Because like take Russia, for example, Russia recently bombed a whole bunch of people on their way back from Palm Sunday services in Ukraine, in Sumi. Like kids, moms pushing strollers died. It was a civilian target and it was a war crime. And the argument coming out of the Trump administration, well, President Trump said,

someone told me it was a mistake. We don't know who that someone is. That is not even the Russian position, which is kind of important, right? And the Russian position is, you're damn right, we ordered the code red. And you're damn right after the ambulances start showing up to cart away, the wounded women and children. We launched another ballistic missile at them to kill the first responders as well. It's not a mistake. And so there are limits to the analogy to platforming people insofar as we're not talking about just bad ideas that get exposed to sunlight.

We're talking about evil things, evil acts, you know, legalize rape and torture and murder by evil regimes that you can't just be like you say tomato we say tomato about. And particularly when those things stop being just about their own people, right? I mean, North Korea is a garrison state. It is actually, it actually has a caste system. they're like 52 different gradations of civilian in North Korea and the lowest ones are cursed to clean out toilets and whatnot for the rest of their lives and can never move above their station. That's bad enough.

But like when they start, when countries start crossing borders and killing people or funding terrorists the way Iran does, you can't just put it down to a difference of perspectives. It's got to start being like there need to be consequences for your actions and by letting them have a seat at the table and doing engagement stuff, that often comes with it moral approval from the United States,

which I don't think we should ever give. I'm so disgusted by the people saying we can't call war crimes war crimes because that'll offend the war criminals. I think it's just a hot garbage position. But that was actually a quote from the senior Trump official. I think it was in a political piece.

They made that argument about Russia. We can't say that this was a roar. crime because we're in the middle of negotiations. Which is just garbage. You know what Iran says to us at every, you know, we're the great freaking Satan. It's not like the people who are saying we should engage or like, whoa, whoa, the first they have to stop calling us Satan, right? During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese had mean words to say about the United States. We still engaged in negotiations. I agree with you. There is that tradeoff. I mean, that's where the analogy works is that engagement can often

lead to regime change. But I think the real trick here is what is the policy that leads to regime change for the least cost and greatest benefit for America and for the citizens of that country. All right, Mike, you can comment on anything that has been said so far. But I also want you to weigh in on the domestic politics of this. And I start with my age old question. Does anyone care? I don't know if anybody cares about the particulars of when I say anybody. I mean, you know, you're run-of-the-mill voter who's thinking about, you know, the potential effect of these tariffs on their business, their bottom line, all the other things that a normal American who votes is worried about, this is probably very low on that list. It doesn't mean it's not important. It just is,

if you're asking specifically about sort of the political valence of this, I don't think that we're at that point yet. But I do think the internal and domestic politics of this are important. And as they relate to the fight that's going on internally in the Trump administration, and I think that ultimately leads to sort of a fight internally within the party about sort of what is the party's views specifically and also in general about foreign policy. and I would just say that I think we should be alarmed that the sort of the guiding light on this question on engagement and negotiation or bringing consequences to Iran that that on the side of engagement or non-engagement I should say non-engagement slash negotiation the leading light on that is Tucker Carlson. I think if you just have to look at the things that he's said over the past weeks and months and, frankly, years, it's conspiratorial garbage. And I just want to quote something that he said, I think this is earlier this month. Let's see.

Anyone advocating for conflict with Iran is not an ally of the United States, but an enemy. So, like, embedded in that is the viewpoint that anybody who, say, believes that Iran should be, you know, brought to heal for funding terrorist organizations that are trying to kill Americans and American allies and have, in fact, done that, that anyone who is advocating for something less than like an Obama-style negotiation on these, on nuclear capabilities. This is advocating for conflict with Iran, as if we're advocating for a full out war with Iran and claiming that anybody who is advocating for that is an enemy of the United States. That viewpoint is like permeates throughout the J.D. Vance, I guess, Steve Whitcuff side of the debate within the administration. and so I just I think we should do more to highlight that fact that the people who are advocating for this position are saying things that are just outright false and crazy and conspiratorial and if they are basically anti-Israel just and I think anti-Semitic if you can read through the lines or not really through the lines of what are Carlson says, it gets right up to the line of that. I think more discussion of that is warranted. Whether or not that matters to Donald Trump, I think, is kind of irrelevant.

Like, I don't think it does matter to Donald Trump. But Donald Trump is not an ideologue on this stuff or much of anything else. And I do think there is a space here for, you can be a hawk, you can be a realist, if you're anywhere on the conservative side of things on foreign policy to sort of acknowledge and highlight that this kind of garbage from the Tucker Carlson wing is garbage. And that could potentially sort of change the calculus and change the balance in the debate.

Maybe I'm just being overly optimistic, but it's just something we can't not talk about enough. Really important footnote on what Mike said. I agree with everything he said until the last sentence that this might change the debate. I don't think it will. And the important, I think, highly relevant point there is to look at what's happened with Laura Lumer over the past two weeks. Another outside voice crazier than Tucker Carlson has become showed up at the White House at a 2 p.m. meeting, sort of skirting what White House had what White House official had thought to, been sort of a rigorous system set up to exclude her and people like her.

Remember, she showed up on Trump's campaign plane, much to the chagrin of Susie Wiles as then campaign managers, current White House Chief of Staff. They set up an apparatus designed to exclude people like Laura Lumer who are just insane. And, you know, conspiracy theorists of the kind that if we went into great detail about what she believes in the things she's argued, probably half of our listeners wouldn't believe us because they're so incredibly nutty. She's so nutty that Marjorie Taylor Green says that she's a crazy conspiracy theorist and a racist. But Laurel Lumer went in, sort of worked away around this apparatus. Some people at the White House believe that she did that because President

Trump himself personally invited her. People at the White House were surprised that she ended up getting time with the president. She meets with the president. She unfolds this broad conspiracy of, you know, sort of she calls them neocons, but they're basically Reaganites who work in the administration at the National Security Council at the National Security Agency and demands that they all be fired. And Trump ends up firing three of them. He ends up the next day,

firing or two days later, firing the leaders of the National Security Agency, which is the agency that is responsible for signaled intelligence, intercepts from our enemies and adversaries. You know, that's all a direct result of Laura Lumer and some internet sleuthing that she did based on, you know, badly mistaken assumptions about who does what

and who met with whom, a really, really frightening moment in the country's history and probably, again, something that should be creating headlines every single day that this person is actually directing the president of the United States to make decisions based on her insanity. All right. A little not worth your time. And we're going to go over to the Atlanta, Braves. So the

sideline reporter was talking with two fans at the rooftop of the Rogers Center in Toronto during the Braves Blue Jays game. He asked if they'd consider rooting for Atlanta before he threw it back to the broadcast team. And at that point, the booth guys say

okay Wiley, you've got five innings, four innings, to get the numbers. Get us some more Braves fans. And he proceeded to tell the women who couldn't hear this, hey, they want me to get your number. There's like some laughter. He gets the numbers and he's like, this might be the new move. And then they talk about how this is a great way to get women's

numbers. You just need to carry a microphone. You don't even need to be on TV, yada, yada. Journalists kind of across the board freak out an unprofessional disgrace from the reporter. It's not fun. It's not cool. It's not harmless. And it's only a standard for harassment. A terrible look all the way around, said one reporter. Feels like there were several moments in which someone could have said this wasn't a good idea. White House correspondent, this is gross. Another, imagine if a female reporter did anything like this career over. Pretty brutal to see it glorified on a broadcast.

I got to say, I think we should be encouraging more men to take the risk and ask for the phone numbers and we need more flirtation and more sort of public, it's okay to be shot down, it's okay to ask. You know, that's not sexual harassment to ask for a girl's phone number? How do you think we make more people? I'm so confused how any of these people think that we do this anymore if you're not on Hinge. How did they think they got here when Hinge didn't exist?

So, I don't know. I'm a woman. Y'all all know my policy of like always say yes to a first date because it's like a pay-it-forward system, not when you're married. Important caveatation. I mean, that's what I'm saying, at least publicly. It's such a 2025 caveat.

Do you guys think this was weird or gross? Or am I the only one like still living in, you know, 1995 where this is actually the only way you could get a date was in public asking for a girl's number? Or is it the power dynamic because he's on TV? I don't see what's gross about this. Mike, you're young. As a suffering Braves fan this season, this is like this little moment on TV from the Rogers Center

was like the highlight for the season so far. So I'm obviously behind it. You know, hey, at least somebody's scoring. Well done, Mike. I don't know. I mean, I find this, I find the freak out about this. so weird, almost like a signal went up to alert everybody in the news media. I also would have been fine, by the way, if she had shot him down on live TV.

If she had been like, I have a boyfriend. For sure, you know, like, that's the game, right? Which, by the way, if I know anything about guys and sports guys, like the guys in the booth hoped that would happen when they, when they sort of put him on the spot. Definitely. to ask those girls for their numbers. I think they were like almost probably disappointed that she seemed to say yes at the end there.

I got definite boyfriend vibe from her. I think she was being polite, by the way. I do not think he was going to see that girl again. I totally agree with you. So I have a friend who's in, who is a prominent sideline reporter for a major league sports team who was actually profiled on all things considered this week.

He's got a following because the players do goofy stuff with him. They put towels on his head while he's doing post-game interviews to kind of mess with him. It's great. It's entertaining. These people are part of the entertainment of watching the game. And I think there's something in this criticism that like, you know, this is something that is a violation of some kind of journalism ethics. I gather this is where a lot of this is coming from from journalists themselves. And I don't mean to denigrate the sideline reporters and anything like that at all. But it's like to claim that this is some great journalism scandal that somehow he's violating some kind of sacred duty that he has to just report the facts that are happening in the stands at the Roger Center during April regular season game is, I don't get.

If it's a sexual harassment thing, this is, I'm sorry, this is just, like, this is not worth our time if that's what we're talking about. All right. Jonah, Steve, any final thoughts on this? I'll go quick because I got nothing really to add. I agree. Again, I have no problem with somebody saying, hey, you know, maybe you don't want to use our airwaves to go pick up girls. Move on, right? But that's it.

But like to turn it, like, so like I can see someone criticizing it saying that, hey, this. This isn't our policy to, like, use your position to, like, scam on girls. Or I can say, oh, that was funny and whatever. Like, I think there are reasonable positions on both sides. I don't think it's worth our time as a source of wither America society if this is happening, right? I just, meh. Dave? Yeah, I think the way you framed it was sort of spoke to how I saw this.

I mean, there was this sort of immediate outrage, mostly from journalists. who saw this is so entirely inappropriate. I actually saw a tweet about it first where there was a brief description of what had happened with a condemnation from, I think it was a Washington Post White House reporter maybe. High Dudge is very upset about this and claiming that this was a double standard.

If a woman had ever done this to two males and asked for a number, I think the argument was it would be career-end, She'd be a hero. I just find that so totally absurd. I would love it. In what world would that be career in me? But I do think, and again, not to make too much of it, but like I couldn't see the problem.

I read the tweet and then I watched the actual exchange, assuming there was something really awful to come. And then it was sort of this kind of playful back and forth, which didn't really go anywhere. And I thought like, okay, what if one of my daughters had been one of... these women, would I, you know, take deep offense at that? And it says, no, of course not. Like, if one of my daughters didn't want this to have happened, I wouldn't think she could say, hey, buzz off, dude, like, you're gross or this isn't appropriate, whatever she wanted to say.

I tend to think that most people would probably just laugh at off and move on with their lives. But it does, you know, the one semi-serious point I will make, to the extent that, you know, the reportorial class shares the views of those who so strongly condemned this. I think it does point to this yawning gap between

the way that reporters look at the world in some ways and the way that the rest of society exists and behaves on a day-to-day basis. All right, guys, go out there and ask for those phone numbers. Get shot down. Live a little! And we'll see you next week on the dispatch. I'm going to be able to be.