The Dispatch Podcast - 'This Ought to Be Alarming' | Roundtable

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Steve, Jonah, and Michael are joined by TMD editor Mary Trimble to discuss Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress and the subsequent protests. They also analyze Kamala Harris’ response, elite wagon-circling, Donald Trump’s scary unification of the Republican Party, and Joe Biden’s withdrawal. The Agenda: —Bipartisan moments: Iran and October 7 —Israel’s place in U.S. politics and its own domestic politics —Pro-Hamas protests —Why isn’t Kamala Harris having her “Sister Souljah moment?” —The mainstream media’s spin on “border czar” —How the assassination attempt changed nothing about Donald Trump —Was Biden’s speech worth our time? Show Notes: —Harris' statement on the D.C. protests, published after recording this episode —Video of the D.C. Palestinian Youth Movement releasing maggots —The Morning Dispatch —Axios article on “border czar” mistake —Montage of news anchors saying “border czar” —GovTrack scrubbing its rating of Kamala Harris as the “most liberal senator” —Politico’s “law and order” quotes from Kamala Harris —G-File on Jonah’s “Sigh of Relief” —Laura Loomer’s loony tweet —Nick Catoggio’s “Wishful Thinking” 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 weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Mike Warren. That's Jonah Goldberg. That's Steve Hayes. That's Mary Trimble. Let's get into it. So, Mary, you were on Capitol Hill on Wednesday for the big address from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There were protests outside on Capitol Hill. Things got a little violent near Union Station in Washington, D.C. There were protests in the Capitol in the House chamber for this joint session. There were people who were conspicuously absent from this address. Tell us what you saw. What did you learn seeing this in person?

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to be covering a speech like that from inside the House chamber because the way that the press gallery is set up, you are on top of whoever is speaking. It's almost as if you're listening to the address on the radio and you're watching a sea of people react to a speech that you can't see being delivered. But it also heightens your awareness of what is going on in front of you. And as you pointed out, it was an interesting crowd in the House chamber yesterday

because it was markedly short on Democrats. There were something like 120 Democrats, Senate in House, who boycotted the speech. There were sort of flavors of reasons for that. Some were concerned about the way that Nanyahu has conducted the war against Tamas. Others said that they were more interested. This was Nancy Pelosi's framing, more interested in talking to hostage families than listening to Netanyahu, and he should be doing that, too. different reasons. There was even one Republican who boycotted

who said that this was a political prop for Netanyahu and that he did not want to be a prop. So indeed, lots of absences from the house, but it was shocking to come into the gallery and sit down and see that, of all people, Rashida Talib was there. So Congresswoman Rashida Talib of Michigan, who has been so vociferous in her criticism of Netanyahu that she was censured by the house. by her colleagues, including several Democrats.

So it was kind of shocking to sit down and see that, oh, she's sitting there. For most of the speech, she had two empty seats on either side of her, which was pretty remarkable because otherwise every single seat in the place was filled. It was standing remotely. They had sort of replaced the missing Democrats with other dignitaries. I saw the Ukrainian ambassador was down there, as well as a lot of Israeli military officials, too. So, Mary, you know, Bibi Netanyahu maybe only surpassed by Donald Trump and being sort of the most divisive figure in American politics, which is interesting because he's not American, but were there any moments that you saw where those 120-something Democrats and the Republicans were sort of unified or heard things that they could all stand up and applaud in this address, what stuck out to you? you as you kind of watched the reaction from members of Congress.

One of the key themes of his speech that really framed the whole address was this idea that it is not, the war against Tamas is not even primarily a war against Tamas. It is much more a war between Israel, the U.S. and the West against Iran. And, you know, even Democrats who seemed reluctant to clap, reluctant to stand, there were several lines related to the Iranian threat, the way that Israel is sort of standing athwart Iran in the Middle East, that drew applause, bipartisan applause, which was really interesting to see. A lot was made of John Fetterman dressing up in a suit. He's famously very against formal business attire. He was in a suit for the address, and he and Joe Manchin were the only two

non-Republicansion, let's say, since Joe Manchin is now an independent, who stay behind to shake Nanyang's hand. So he's a very divisive figure that was on full display during the speech, but the moments where there seemed to be some unity were, of course, the condemnations of the October 7th violence, and this framing in the speech of this conflict with Hamas, but also with Hezbollah and with the Houthis in Yemen and any number of other Iranian proxies in the region as a mutual fight with the U.S. and Israel on the same side against Iran. Yeah, by the way, I believe Fetterman, while he's been very, you know, friendly and pro-Israel, I do believe he was sort of forced to wear a tie and coat by house chamber rules.

He's a, you know, over the Senate, they've changed the rules a little bit and allowed him to dress down. But I believe the House is still pretty, pretty formal. The House of Representatives is a place for dignity. You know, it's, you know, they've got, they got one thing going in that column for dignity. Mary, I want to come back to you in a little bit about what was going on outside on Capitol Hill. But, Steve, can I turn to you and ask sort of your analysis here? what did this address, this visit from Netanyahu accomplish? And where does it place sort of the American foreign policy, the American foreign policy maybe in six, eight, ten months out

with respect to Israel, Hamas, Iran? Did this move the ball anywhere productive? Yeah, it's interesting. I think obviously the proximate, audience for his remarks with the House representatives in America. That's why he delivered it in Washington, D.C. And I do think he delivered a message to the United States and his supporters in the United States. Insofar as he broadened sort of, as Mary said, reframed kind of our understanding that this is not just a war against Hamas in Gaza, that this is a much broader war. And sort of we can choose to see it that way or we can be wrong. I would say is the way he framed it.

I think the primary audience was back in Israel. He is not popular in Israel, approval ratings in the 30s. Depending on the polls, you look at 70 plus percent, don't want him to be prime minister anymore, as others have pointed out. He didn't, on the one hand, you wouldn't expect this. On the one hand, it's sort of an obvious point to make. He didn't acknowledge the fact even that these attacks on October 7th took place while he was prime minister. This is somebody who's built a reputation as being obsessed with

the security of Israel. And these attacks took place under his watch. And he's paying for it politically. So I think what he was trying to do was show people back in Israel that he still has supporters in the United States, that he's in a position to go and make an argument, that he can reframe a debate. And that when they think of Israel, Israel's place in the world, they should think of Benjamin Netanyahu as somebody who exemplifies sort of Israeli's strength. He can go and make the case. But did he accomplish that, Jonah? I mean, there are, yes, obviously, you know, Republicans in Congress are fully behind, except for that one that Mary mentioned, fully behind Netanyahu and defending Israel. But you look at what

happened inside the chamber, outside the chamber. Again, that image of divisive, you know, it goes across the water to Israel. People are watching it there and seeing this reaction to him. What does this do then for BB's standing in Israel, if anything? Yeah, I suspect not too much. I mean, I was stunned. I think I put it in Slack, our internal Slack channel. I happened to catch Ehud Barack, the former prime minister who was unseeded by BB and there's definitely bad blood there. But like our whole, which has always been a little more fanciful on and ideal rather than reality of no politics beyond the water's edge thing, like Israelis will have are having none of that apparently because Barack, I mean, just, I'm sure it was kosher, but he opened a can

of whoopass on BB that I just, I was stunned by it. about, you know, how this is all political, and he's doing this to shore up his support at home. And, you know, he's, it's in his interest to keep the war going. And I was like, yeesh. And so, like, the polarization that we see, it's not the same polarization that you see in Israel, because Israel's politics are wacky Japanese game show kind of crazy

in a way that it's hard to explain to Americans. But I don't, I can't imagine that this speech hurts him in Israel. But, you know, the phrase is all politics. politics is local and all that kind of thing. In Israel, all politics is national right now, which is for all intents and purposes, local for, as we look at it, right, it's about getting hostages out and dealing with war stuff. And I just, I don't think anybody is going to be sort of swayed by theatrics here. As much as I agree with most of the speech, and, you know, and I think a lot of the, I think BB, I hate the derangement syndrome trope, but like BB derangement

syndrome is a thing in America. And let me just say, I mentioned this on CNN this morning, and that's why I'm kind of from free and tired. If you can find, like, throwing the maggots at inside the Watergate Hotel where B.B. was staying to disrupt the conference thing, you know, there's something almost, I don't know, Tom Wolfe poetic literary to the idea that these people have, that someone could say, hey, you know what we need? We need a lot of maggots.

And someone says, I got a guy, right? the idea that, of course, these people know how to get a big bucket of maggots. Yeah. And so, anyway, back to the question of hand. I think that it confirms for a lot of Israelis what they already knew, which is that Bibi has solidified his ties with the Republican Party, but maybe at the expense of our ties with that old bipartisan coalition. By the way, that reference Jonah made to the maggots, this was at the Watergate Hotel,

where the delegation is staying, right? This sort of, I can't remember the name. of the Palestinian group that claimed credit for it or whatever, but throwing crickets and maggots to make some kind of point, seemed to the Palestinian youth movement, Adam says. It seemed to be of a piece of the reaction from the, call them the pro-Hamas protests and demonstrations in Washington during this address. It was pretty, it got pretty violent.

It got pretty radical very quickly. Outside Union Station, the big train station across the street from the Capitol, you had the American flags being lowered from the flagpoles that are standing very high up there and then the Palestinian flag being raised, the American flag being burned. Mary, the chaos outside there, maybe something that's been seen on a, was seen kind of on a daily basis throughout the spring in, say, New York or on college campuses. It was a bit of a shock, I think, to those of us in the D.C. area to see it, you know,

sort of come back with the vengeance. What did you observe there and what can we take away from these protests in Washington on Wednesday? Yeah, so I went from the speech out of the Capitol. They had probably a good three-block perimeter all the way around Capitol Hill. And so you walk out of the Capitol, and you know all this. protest activity is happening, and it's eerily quiet on the streets ringing the Capitol building. But if you walk outside that perimeter, there were very quickly lots of demonstrators who at the time I arrived were sort of being pushed away from Union Station. At that point,

there were some stragglers, but there was almost a march away from Union Station as I got to Union Station. And so I saw the 10-foot-tall paper mache Joe Biden puppet. He had double horns and bloody hands. I saw what looked to me like a Hamas flag, which I, you know, I covered a protest at GW earlier in the spring. And the responses that people gave when they were asked about what they were doing there, the speeches, all of that was a shocking, and I guess a standard level of shocking, sort of within the normal distribution of shocking for what I would expect from these protests. But to see people openly waving a Hamas flag, which I did not see at George Washington University, was stunning. I mean, steps from the U.S. Capitol. So then as I walked

to Columbus Circle at Union Station, right outside the station, there were, I would say probably 100 cops or so, sort of in a phalanx formation. And they were facing down protesters who were no longer really focused on the cops, I would say. There were fewer and fewer. There was a man standing on the statue waving a Palestinian flag. He was up there for probably 30 minutes. When he came down, I talked to him very briefly. And, you know, he, I actually asked him about the Joe Biden of it all and the now new potentially Harris nomination to be the Democratic nominee. His point, which I have heard a lot, was this is about the system. This is not, you know, she's just as bad as all of them, which is interesting because, of course,

she didn't go to the speech yesterday. She, you know, had a previously scheduled engagement, her campaign said. And, you know, he was not interested in any difference we might see in in the foreign policy. of Harris versus her boss, Joe Biden. So that was interesting to me to hear from a protester, I think, because there's a lot made right now of what her foreign policy will look like, whether it will do less to alienate that crowd than Biden's did. And, you know, this is anecdotal,

but it's not clear to me that that will be the case. Mary, thanks so much for joining us, giving us this sort of firsthand account of what you saw on the Capitol for Nanyai's speech. If you're not subscribing to the Morning Dispatch, what's wrong with you? You should be. So go ahead and do that. And, Mary, thanks for joining us. Thanks, guys. 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

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That's E-T-H-O-S dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. So Steve or Jonah, Mary mentioned there at the end about Kamala Harris, the new presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, not being at this address. It's not just that she's the vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee and you can get into this unofficial acting president. I don't know. It's that she's constitutionally, you know, presides over the Senate as the president of the Senate in her capacity as vice president.

So the fact that she was not there, she had a scheduling arrangement seemed to me to speak volumes to sort of how divisive Netanyahu is. What did you guys make of her absence, not just because of the moment with Netanyahu, but because of this moment that she is now in as the leader of her party? I will cut her a little slack on it, insofar as like the belittling of the event that she was doing, which is this national sorority of black women thing, people focused on the word sorority and made it sound like she was just visiting a sorority house or something. So Sorority House on campus to do a kegger and a photo op, the group is a more significant thing than that.

It was a convention of, yeah, and like the, we just look at the politics of like where the enthusiasm, where the sign-ups are volunteers and these Zoom calls and all that kind of stuff, that really is sort of like the shock troops for her campaign. So it's understandable that she would want to honor that commitment. That said, you know, she should have been there, you know. And I suspect that, you know, I haven't, I haven't read a lot of the TikTok reporting on the BB invite and all that, but I suspect that if she had planned on being there, they would have coordinated with the Israelis to find a date where she could be there, you know, and they could have worked some of this stuff out in advance. So she probably never intended to go. Just to brought it and out, I honestly think Harris is missing just an enormous opportunity. here to forget going to the BB thing, not going to the BB thing. Like, as we're recording this, you know, Thursday morning,

the White House put out a statement about the stuff on Capitol Hill here and the protests and the violence and all that. As far as I've seen, Harris has yet to put out a statement. And this idea that the guys with the access to stockpiles of maggots are a core constituency of the Democratic co-executive. coalition is just not factually true, right? Those people are not going to be voting for Harris anyway, not in large numbers, and there aren't large numbers of pro-Hamas people out there to begin with. And so this is like a geopolitical sister-soldier moment that I think Harris could

convey leadership and strength, even to people who don't really care about the Israel issue, per se, and just simply say, because like she needs to reinforce her prosecutor thing, not as an anti-Trump thing, but as a law and order thing. And just using this as an excuse to get like sort of a trifecta of saying, look, we believe in free speech in this country. I'm a big defender of free speech, but you can't tear down flags. You can't write solidarity graffiti on public monuments with Hamas. And you certainly can't beat up cops.

Because if they give away this issue about violence towards cops and stuff, it's going to make it impossible for them to talk about January 6 anymore. And there's just no percentage in Harris not leaning into this and saying she can be momish rather than daddish about it, but she's got to be tough. And I think she's just missing an opportunity here. I thought that one of Biden's problems as a candidate that had to do with his age and sort of his ability to actually campaign was he sort of seemed to have lost the ability to get emotional or to get angry in a righteous way. that that's a part of the sort of stagecraft of politics. But now I'm wondering if this is sort of a problem for the Democratic Party. I mean, she, Kamala Harris is running for president of the United States, you know, that, that country that we all live in that has symbols like the American flag.

It seems like a kind of a no-brainer for her to show a little anger about this while then going into, look, everybody has the right to protest and infest. fact, that's what that flag stands for. But it, you know, I had this sort of idea that if she came, come out and said, I was angry when I saw it. That could have, you know, that is the sister soldier moment, right? That is the moment where you cut against what your tribe is expected to say. And she has this opportunity because there is no primary. It's all general from here. Why can't she do that? Yeah, I mean, beyond the stagecraft and beyond the politics of it, It should just really piss you off when you have objectively pro-terrorist people shouting pro-terrorist slogans, writing pro-terrorist graffiti on, you know, these American symbols.

So whether or not she decides to use it as a sister soldier moment, I mean, I think they're, I think you both made good points there on the politics of it, but it should bother us that she's not bothered by that apparently or that to the extent that she's bothered by that she's allowing concerns about the politics of this to to override her frustration or her anger. Yeah, I mean, on the politics of it, I agree with you both entirely. I mean, this is not really a close call. Like if you would have said to me five years ago or even, you know, certainly 20 years ago, yeah, you know, you're going to have objectively pro-Hamas protests in the United States

celebrating terrorism. That's what they're doing. They're celebrating terrorism. And honestly, please don't give me any shit about other people there, good people marching alongside the pro-Hamas crowds. It was possible to make those distinctions back on the early days of the student protests where I do think, and we did make those. distinctions. I do think you had, you know, some college kids who were just sort of mixed up in the protest at the moment and didn't quite understand what they were doing. It doesn't excuse them, but their ignorance makes them less objectionable, in my view. But at this point, we've had 10 months of pro-Hamas protests. In virtually every one of these major protests, it's been driven

by pro-terrorist sentiment. And if you're there because, you know, you object to Israel going into Rafa the way that Israel went into Rafa or you're concerned about not enough food and you want Israel to be to open humanitarian corridors, you can't be doing that alongside people waving green flags and alongside people chanting effectively death, death of the Jews. Well, it's a spray painting that, you know, that triangle. Hamas is coming. Yes. That is basically like putting a signal saying attack here.

That's the code for it in Hamas symbology. Right, right. Yeah, it's totally outrageous. These are pro-terrorist demonstrations. And the fact that, I mean, we sent in a request for common, I think a couple of us did yesterday afternoon. You know, the fact that more than 12 hours later, Kamala Harris, her campaign, can't be bothered to even give us a pro forma denunciation of terrorism, for God's sake, right?

I mean, put out a statement that says, I don't agree with these people calling for terror or calling for the eradication of Israel. The fact that she can't even do that suggests to me, and again, I'm speculating here, this is not based on reporting, but it's either very bad political skills. I mean, they have rapid response teams. They exist to do stuff like this to put out a statement. They could put out a statement that just echoes the statement that came from the White House if they wanted to be really careful about it.

The fact that she hasn't done that suggests to me the political operation is not clicking. And second, and potentially worse, that she doesn't want to make such a statement, that she's worried. I mean, I think Jonah's right. you're not talking about a huge political constituency here, but I think she's worried about sort of a dampening the enthusiasm of a broader set of people who, by all indications in the early polling, are particularly excited and energized about the Kamala Harris pick.

I mean, she's, there was polling, I think I saw it on CNN yesterday, that she was up, you know, eight. This is among younger voters. She was up 20 over Biden was up Trump in a head-to-head. Biden was up six over Trump in head-to-head in this youth cohort. I think it was 18 to 24. And Kamala Harris is up 20. Maybe she's worried.

Maybe she's thinking about the politics and she doesn't want to dampen that enthusiasm. But if that's the case, that is a really, I mean, offensive. offensive statement about her. You know, I'm thinking that there are going to be, you know, once the semester start up in colleges across the country, there's going to be a lot more of protests. And maybe it won't be as infiltrated or as dominated by actual pro-Hamas protesters. But this seems like an opportunity for her to kind of say what she needs to say, about this, about the pro-terrorist protests and point back to it throughout the fall when

there are tamer but maybe more frequent, more filmed, you know, it's going to be on TV all over the place this fall. So it does seem like a missed opportunity. Let's talk a little more about where we are with, it's hard to believe that the last time we had a dispatch podcast, Joe Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee and what Donald Trump had just accepted the nomination. Now, here we are. Kamala Harris is the presumptive nominee. She has essentially vanquished all real challenges. There's going to be a vote on August 7th.

The virtual convention essentially secure what she already has in, I guess, promises from delegates, enough delegates to get the nomination. And so now we are a general election mode. There's been something we've been talking about internally about this. The way that the press, the political press, has already begun to cover for some of Kamala Harris's vulnerabilities in a general election. And I want to talk about this, borders are thing. because if you had asked your average politically plugged in person, who's the borders are in the Biden administration, you would either get an answer of, I don't know, or Kamala Harris, right?

I mean, maybe she was never given that term in a formal way. There is no formal Biden, you know, borders are, but that's the answer you would get. And yet we saw reporting this week from news outlets with some nuance about this question once Republicans began to criticize Kamala Harris for essentially failing at this job of being the borders are. Axios reporting and eventually, I think, basically retracting the article that she was never really the borders are, that it's a more complex. Steve, what is what is going on with this sort of immediate turn to just cover for Kamala Harris

and introduced this nuance that even these outlets themselves, even Axis themselves, had written an article two years ago referring to Kamala Harris as the Bidensar, as the borders are for Biden. What's going on with this? And is there hope here that the media can sort of get control of themselves in this moment? Yeah, I'm not shocked by much that I see in politics anymore. And I'm certainly not surprised by media.

I mean, it's just a fact of life. We see it all around us. I am stunned at sort of how brazen and kind of unapologetic this is. And the examples that we've seen over the past few days, particularly with respect to this incredible, I mean, it is sort of, you know, people over, use the term Orwellian. It is or well, it is crazy that there is an actual fight. with journalists taking the Kamala Harris side on this question of whether she was the Borders are. I mean, you can go back, somebody put together a lengthy clip of video of news anchors and reporters using the term Borders are to describe Kamala Harris. And if you go back and you

actually look at the announcement the White House made, that's what they were doing. That's what they were saying. You know, it was a detailed assignment. She was, it was certainly the case that a big part of her assignment was to go to countries in Central America and use the diplomatic might of the United States to keep them from sending migrants, which is one of the sort of half defenses you hear of a more nuanced position. But she was the border czar. This was the thing. And at the time, when it was named, when she was named, there was a big discussion. I can't remember if we talked about it here about what a crummy job it was that she was getting because this Joe Biden was struggling. He was, his policy was failing. It was obvious that his policy was failing.

There were serious and legitimate concerns raised by Republicans, but also by border state sheriffs and mayors and others. And Kamala Harris was taking on this job at a time when. people said she was going to be in trouble for having to do it. And the idea that you now have reporters rushing to her defense and saying, no, no, no, really, this was, she wasn't really the borders are. It was this very narrow slice. The Axios story that you reference was written by the same reporter who wrote three years earlier that Kamala Harris had been given the job of running Obama's, I mean, of running Joe Biden's border policy. The headline on her piece, in March 24th, 2021, Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis.

And then the updated piece was she wasn't the borders are. And, you know, recast her role as helping, quote, with a slice of the migration issue. it's just an, it's just an incredible piece of revisionism. And, you know, it doesn't matter. I mean, it's, you know, it's probably two, three day story. I think Kamala Harris is going to end up being known as the person who was running Joe Biden's border policy because she was running Joe Biden's border policy. But the extent to which this, you know, lights fire to the remaining credibility of mainstream journalism and the people in particular who are doing this. I think it can't be overstated. You don't have to be, you know, somebody who pays careful attention or reads every briefing from the Media Research Center about media bias to understand what's going on here. It's very obvious, and it is credibility destroying, I think, for the people who are involved. So I'm going to push back a little bit, partly Devil's Advocate, partly because... Fearish wish?

I think you can't, I think you can overstate it. Like, it's bad. It's a mess. but I went back and looked and I found like pieces in the Washington Post saying that Harris's team explicitly rejected the term Borders R didn't want to be called Borders R, right?

Considered this basically a you know a huge I'm trying to not be scatological a big mess in their lap that Biden had given them, right? Why start now? And you got to start sometime, dude.

I got into a fight about this with Karen Finney on Tapper's show the other day. I think it's fair to say that she was not explicitly named. It's not fair. It's a defensible position to say she was not named Borders'ar. She was named in charge of the crisis,

the immigration problem, which was creating the border crisis, right? And I know it's hair splitting, but I think part of the problem here is that Harris's team was bad at pushing back on the label at the time. It stuck, to her in the press, and they had a serviceable, colorable complaint at the time, and they were

inefficient or unable to make it. And so places like Axios and all those places just use it as a shorthand to describe her. And now, because she's the nominee, their bad work in the past, they're laziness, both the Harris's bad work and the press's laziness, everyone's scrambling to get in good favor with her. And so they're retconning a whole bunch of stuff. I think the more damning thing is, was it government track, whatever that thing is called, that labeled her the most liberal senator in the Senate, is retroactively changing that designation, which is just appalling to me. I mean, and it does go towards, I think the worst, most Orwellian example of all this stuff. I'm just generally against going back and changing things that have been written in the

past. Like, it's just, it's super creepy, and if you're going to do it, you've got to like be wildly transparent with labeling about what you're doing and why you're doing and all that. But the, you guys remember during Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation, she had written some law review articles or decisions or whatever that used the phrase sexual preference. Maisie Hirono, the senator from Hawaii, said that that was a bigoted and offensive term. The Dictionary.com people, Merriam-Webster's, went and rewrote. wrote the definition in real time during the hearing to fit the political agenda of the Democrats during that confirmation hearing. And that kind of elite wagon circling, collusion, conspiring,

whatever word you want to call it, that's what all this stuff basically reminds me of at the 30,000 foot level is like the institutions must get aligned with the new power center. And it's gross. And I would much rather the media just say, the people who made, if they think they made them a just say, we screwed up at the time, but this was the common term in Washington for calling her this. And we were not pressed for a correction at the time. And so, you know, we're standing by. Instead, it's all of this, you know, Jesuitical hair splitting stuff that I just find sort of ridiculous and just proves your larger point, Steve, which is that it makes a lot of the mainstream media look like they want to be servants of the Democratic Party. Yeah, I mean, I, I, you know,

hat tip for for steel manning um i'm unpersuited that's fine the if if you go back and you look at the way not just the way that it was reported but the way that it was briefed by the biden administration right i mean the reporters reporters weren't coming up with this stuff out of nowhere in march of 2021 they weren't saying she's in charge of border policy because you know they were overreading a very narrow, detailed job description. They were saying that because that's what they were briefed on. This is what Biden said. This is what senior administration officials said.

If you look at, there's an NBC, I just pulled up an NBC story on this from March 24, 2021, quotes a senior administration official said Harris's role would focus on two tracks, curbing the flow of migrants and implementing a long-term strategy that addresses the root causes of migration. the lead of that very same piece, Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he had appointed Vice President Kamala Harris to lead efforts to stem migration across the U.S. Mexico border as the administration faces growing political pressure to address a surge in undocumented migrant, et cetera, et cetera. That's what they were doing. And the Harris people protested at the time, I think, because they saw that this was likely to become a political problem. And I think what we've seen recently, this is, and it's a, and I again, I want to,

label that I've done little reporting on this, but not dedicated reporting. So I'm mostly speculating here and I want to label it when I'm speculating. But I think this is what's happened. The Harris team immediately understood, probably before Joe Biden announced that he was going to not run again, that immigration was going to be her biggest political challenge, or maybe defending Joe Biden, defending her role in suggesting that Joe Biden was just fine to continue as president. But immigration is it routinely polls as the top issue or one of the top two issues that Americans are concerned about going into this election year. And she was in charge of a policy that until very recently failed. I mean, I think they can correctly say, things are looking better now.

But the obvious question is, why did it take three years to implement the policies? that have turned things around. And I think what they did was they reached out to reporters who were covering the campaign and covering the White House and said, Republicans are going to say that Kamala was the borders are and she wasn't the borders are.

Here's an example of what she was told to do. And they offer very narrow descriptions of what her original job was. So you had reporters sort of primed when Republicans started saying en masse. She was in charge of the border. And unfortunately, I think, you know, whether it was a lack of skepticism by these reporters or, and this is a real thing, reporters who do reporting and amplify arguments from their principles to ensure good access going between now and election day, I think there was a lot of that. If you're a reporter and you're given this spin on the, on the, um, Kamala wasn't the border.

czar thing. And you write a piece and you say, she wasn't the border czar. Here are all these reasons and Republicans are going to attack. You make yourself look good in the eyes of the people who gave you this information and the Harris campaign. And if your job is to cover the Harris campaign between now and then, there's a certain built-in incentive to try to continue to get access, to continue to get leaks, to continue to get the kinds of things that matter. If your publication or television network emphasizes these micro scoops, little scoops all the time. So I do think that that dynamic partially explains these reporters who wanted to ensure access. There's other terms for it, source greasing where you write something nice about your sources to get,

to continue to get access. I do think that that was not a small dynamic in what we've watched to unfold in this sort of really embarrassing spectacle. couple days. The last thing I think I'll say on this is the practical effect of this kind of airbrushing Trotsky out of the out of the photo effect that that reporters are doing. It actually is a disservice to Kamala Harris because she she needs to actually come up with a, as you kind of laid out a little bit here, Steve, a coherent response to that criticism that she was a big part of the Biden administration's weakness on immigration and border enforcement. She is going to have to be prepared to face tough questions about it.

And by insulating her from that, by giving Harris's campaign a way to say, oh, if you asked me about borders our stuff, that's just Republican talking points and see I can point that to you. I mean, in that way, that hurts her because the problem is, going away, but perhaps she and her campaign are insulated from having to think that it's a problem. So in so many ways, trying to over-engineer these kind of things ends up hurting rather than helping, which I think we can all agree. The media should not be in the business of helping, but if they're going to, they should be doing a better job than they're doing now. So can I just make a broader point on that point, which is I think that it's not just those

borders are controversy. It's, I, I strongly suspect that the Harris team and the Biden team, because she's basically inherited the Biden campaign, right, as far as we can tell. Yes. Have a bubble problem, right? Like, that's just as an example, I know we weren't going to talk about vice presidential stuff, but like, there's chatter about Pete Buttigieg being the VP pick. I think, I think Pete Buttigieg is very smart. He's very glib. He's very facile.

He's very articulate, all of those kinds of things. He would be an absolutely terrible pick, but he is beloved by, like, this slice of MSNBC producers, college administrators, Aspen Ideas Festival, you know, inside the Beltway journalists who love his ability to articulate things in ways that sound. like what he is, which is an Ivy League educated McKinsey consultant. And it's like he is just a sweet spot for this certain slice of a very elite meritocracy crowd, right? He's one of them. Yeah, totally. He's a PowerPoint presentation and TED Talk combined in human form, right? They project upon him this aesthetic thing that they think this is what everybody really likes.

If, in fact, they are taking it seriously that he, it would be preferable to Shapiro or Bashir, or, you know, what's his face from Minnesota or any, like, actual person from the real world who's actually one elective office larger than the fourth largest city in Indiana, which there are like three cities in L.A. County that are bigger than South Bend, where he was mayor. And, like, it's a sign that they are listening to people in a bubble.

And I also think that, like, this, I think it was smart of her and her debut thing to the campaign and to Democrats. talking about she's the prosecutor, Trump's the felon and all that kind of stuff. I actually don't think that's a good campaign framing to talk to fly over America people about. Like the prosecutor thing that she should be emphasizing

is that she's law and order and will prosecute actual, you know, like street crime and people who burn the American flag and graffiti pro-A-M-A stuff, right? Like it is MSNBC greener, I mean, Joy Reid, I'm sure is on cloud nine to hear that she's going to be the prosecutor of Donald Trump. That stuff does not play that well anymore. And we've learned

that for like two years now. That is coded messaging for people who are deeply, deeply sated with blue Kool-Aid. And similarly, like the mispronunciation of her name thing, which I'm constantly hearing on cable news now about how outrageous it is, yes, Trump should pronounce her name correctly. The idea that somehow that is like, I keep hearing it's othering and it's demonizing and it's belittling and it's condescending, and this is what professional women have to deal with all the time. Like, there is so much better material

that actual normal Americans understand than this name that they prop, the mispronouncing this name that they probably mispronounced too is a sign of his sexism and racism. But that stuff plays for, you know, Eddie Glow and people who like watch Morning Joe. It's, and I, if the Harris campaign is going to implode,

it's going to be because they're listening to that kind of crowd and not someone like James Carville who's going to say you got to throw Joe out of the bus and you got to talk about gas prices and you got to talk about fixing the border and maybe you pick the guy

from Mark Kelly from Arizona because people think astronauts are cool and he knows how to talk about immigration. I mean, that's what, I have no confidence that the Harris campaign has that kind of muscle memory to do that kind of thing.

I want to say for the record, I think it's just a good practice to learn how to say someone's name correctly and it's polite. And, you know, it doesn't mean your othering, but it could, it does mean, I mean, I mean, a lot of this sort of, you know, the microaggression stuff, what it boiled down to was all, like, we could just stand to be a little more polite to people. So. For sure. I agree with that entirely. 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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use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And I want to say about this. This is from a political article in June of 2019 as Kamala Harris is getting ready to run for president. She's in South Carolina, and she said this to a group of folks, I believe, in Colombia. Quote, everyone wants the police to respond when their home gets burglarized. Everyone wants accountability when a woman is raped, when a child is molested, and when one human being kills another.

We all want to be safe. What we don't want is excessive force or for being black to be considered probable cause. that seems like the sort of message that this was all pre-George Floyd, pre the sort of peak of Black Lives Matter, but it seems to be if you're a Democrat running as a law and order Democrat, a pretty good message. And that's what Kamala Harris was saying in 2019 might be something to consider, you know, sort of getting out of her bubble and returning to that kind of rhetoric. But we should move on and talk about a different candidate's rhetoric. Donald Trump, you may have heard of him, this guy running for president

again, everything changed after his assassination attempt, the unity talk, the, you know, this was a new Donald Trump. We were told that he was going to be, you know, kinder and gentler, to use a phrase. And I don't know. It's we're now what nearly two weeks after the assassination attempt seems like the same old Trump. If you look at his true social feed, if you look at what he says in rallies, not much difference. How long did that last? Steve, is there any reason to think that the new Trump is ever coming back? Or are we just, you know, we just have the same old Trump that we've always had? I mean, he is who he is. I think it was reasonable for, you know, a short time to

hold open the possibility that having had the close call that he had and it was an extraordinary close call might induce some changes. But I think that the smarter bet was always that it wouldn't

because Donald Trump is who Donald Trump is. I mean, if you watch some of his rally speeches yesterday, I do think the convention speech that we got, was a slightly toned-down version of the loggerie at Donald Trump. It was much less focused on the federal government being illegitimate, Joe Biden weaponizing the DOJ, I mean, the kinds of supercharged rhetoric that you hear

from Donald Trump at virtually every one of these campaign rallies is the kind of thing that I think if most normies, if you made most normies, and I think a lot of Trump supporters sit down and listen to two hours of the kind of unrestrained Trump rhetoric on this stuff, he would lose voters. Like, people would say, this is really, really crazy. This stuff is going way beyond what I believe. and this guy's unhinged and not normal. And I think you would lose voters. In part, I think if you're the Democrats, what you need to do,

and the problem is we're so polarized that the introducing language that Donald Trump uses at as rallies to people who might not hear it, the media, people who are voting for Trump or supporting Trump or sympathetic to Trump are not likely to believe it when it comes from the mainstream media

and they don't, they don't encounter it as often as not, which I think is, that's part of the challenge. I don't think we're going to see a new Donald Trump, and I wouldn't hold my breath that he'll even continue to moderate. He said at his rally on Wednesday, I said I was going to be nice and I'm not, I've done being nice. Is that okay with you? He asked the crowd, you know, he also said in his convention speech that he wasn't, going to talk about the assassination. He told this detailed story, a sort of second by second story about what it was like to have been the victim of an attempted assassination. And I think a lot of people find it very gripping. I didn't. I didn't find it as emotionally compelling as other people

listen to that speech was, but he promised that he was only going to tell it once because he really couldn't do it. It was too emotional. And then he told a part of it the next day at a rally He told it again yesterday at our alley. I think we can expect to continue to hear from. Jonah? Yeah, so I wrote about this last week. I was actually relieved when finished his first 25 minutes and then did his, as he put it, loggerieik stick.

You know, he had a tight 3,000-word speech prepared and he went 12,500 words in that speech. You know, I mean, it's pretty wild. And, you know, what relieved me about it, I don't need to believe it because I've talked about this a bunch already, is that I actually found his prepared speech kind of disturbing because he was basically declaring, if you read it closely, that the memes that say he's, you know, got Jesus guiding his hand at the Resolute Desk

and that he's King Cyrus or King David, that he's anointed by God. Laura Lumer has got a tweet up yesterday. Laura Lomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist, whack job Trump booster. And ran for the house, of course. Yeah, citing some rabbi who clearly thinks that Trump, some crazy rabbi, that Trump is, you know, the second non-Jewish anointed Messiah or something, whatever, and set off an interesting theological debate. And he was basically owning that. He was basically saying, I was saved by God to be elected president and do the things that I need to do for this country.

And it's one thing to have sort of fringy whack jobs and peripatetic, you know, snake oil sale. like Mike Flynn doing, you know, tent revival acts saying that stuff. It's another thing for the actual candidate to seem like he actually believes that. And like, what could go wrong? The world's most famous narcissist now is convinced that he is anointed by God to fulfill some mission on earth. And so when he went on his freelance, you know, 99,000 word, you know, rally schick, I was like, Oh, good. He doesn't actually believe that stuff. He hasn't changed, right? And also, I'm such, it's a sunk, it's an intellectual sunk cost fallacy for me, but I've been writing for eight years about how demography, how, uh, not demography, how, uh, how character is destiny and that therefore Trump can't change. And like, I would look pretty freaking foolish if all of a sudden he changed. Um, then again, I could have said, okay, if fine, if a sniper takes off a piece of his ear at a great distance, um, maybe that would change him. And I think I've been safe. but I hadn't said that. And I've been making jokes about waiting for him to pivot

to being presidential or acting presidentials, like waiting for Godot. And it just turns out that that's the fact of the matter. He spent his entire life refusing to believe that anybody's smarter than him, that his instincts aren't supreme. He is, in terms of luck, he is the millionth monkey

that manages to bang out war and peace on a typewriter because he does all sorts of stupid things, and because it worked out for him, he thinks it was smart. That said, I don't think the convention speech was all that damaging

to him, in part because the part that people are going to see or a part that people saw were the excerpts from the beginning, the sort of, and it was a galvanizing thing for his people.

I think the J.D. Vance thing is going to have, pick is going to have more lasting problems for Trump and for Vance than any of the convention stuff. I don't know. I think, you know,

Trump is going to be Trump for the remainder of this campaign, which signals that Harris does have an opening because Trump unvarnished is unpopular and has been unpopular for a very long time, and that means he is not improving his ceiling. Whether Harris can successfully pick up those three, four points that Trump can never get remains to be seen. But that's what this race looks like, is that Trump will not change. Yeah, another reason, yeah, it's another reason that the Democrats just sort of lazily defaulting to Kamala Harris was, I think, just so stupid. And if she loses, we will look back on that and, and sort of scratch our heads at how foolish that was. You know, I want to spend just another moment on this, on this gap between sort of who Trump is

and how he's being covered and the perceptions of Trump in the voting populace at large. I mean, Jonah, you mentioned Mike Flynn in passing, and, you know, he's been saying crazy things. This is the former brief tenure as Trump's National Security Advisor was the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. If you look back at his history, he was saying at a time when it was popular during the Obama administration to dismiss the ongoing threat of al-Qaeda and ISIS jihadist terror, Mike Flynn was saying, no, no, it's a real threat. and Mike Flynn, I think, was vindicated and was proven right there. But since then, he has been on quite a journey where he's briefly served as Trump's national security advisor, got himself in a bunch of trouble there, and has since become, at the very least, QAnon friendly, we'll say. You know, there are videos of him seeming to take the Q&on pledge, and he engages in sort of,

he's kind of an unapologetic Christian nationalist. So when you think of Mike Flynn, you know, you would think, ah, this is somebody who used to be in Trump's world, but, you know, sort of isn't as much as an, and is on the fringes. I would argue that Mike Flynn is very much still part of Trump's world and part of Trump's, the people who are talking to Trump and helping him build his candidacy and planning for his presidency, Mike Flynn is among them. Trump said at a speech at least, I think it was about a year ago in Florida, Mike Flynn, get ready.

You're coming back into government at a high level. if I'm reelected. And there are others who are like Mike Flynn who Trump relies on regularly. I was telling the story. I can't remember if I've told it here. Maybe it was, maybe it came up when Declan interviewed John Carl, ABC News,

who wrote three books about Trump and Trump's political life. But there was this story about how Trump launched his campaign. You remember, in Waco, Texas, around the 30th anniversary of the Waco siege on the branched Divideans by the FBI. And at the time, reporters said, boy, that's an odd coincidence. Like, why would Trump launch his campaign there? And for Trump world quietly kind of poo-pooed any connection. But, of course, behind the scenes, there was an obvious connection.

They wanted to show that that that was an example of excessive force by law enforcement. and law enforcement is going after Donald Trump. There's an obvious connection there. And in the reporting of the book, John Carl unearthed this phrase that Trump insiders used to describe that speech called the come-retribution speech. Declan, who did some research with John Carl, sort of collaborated on some of this stuff. And the come-retribution was a reference to a plot by. the Confederate Secret Service to capture, to kidnap and kill Abraham Lincoln.

And you would think if the Trump people, the advisors are talking about this speech in Waco that they speak of as the come retribution speech, which is a reference to a Confederate assassination plot, that that ought to be alarming to people. And when John Carl sort of took it back to Steve Bannon and said, for, hey, is this what it is? Bannon in effect said, yeah, that's what, that was why he didn't deny any of the, any of the reporting around it. And I have told this story to people, you know, who aren't, who don't pay day-to-day obsessive attention to politics. And I say, you know, these are the people who are advising Donald Trump. And to some extent, he surrounds himself with, you know, doesn't that alarm you? And people, you know, their initial instinct, I think, when they hear, the details of just that one example are not to believe it. I don't believe. No, no, no, that can't possibly be true. But it is true. And this is, I mean,

they're quoted in John Carl's book. And I think that, you know, what we're watching as we continue to see Trump pull reasonably well is this massive, massive gap between who people think Donald Trump is, even after having lived through four years as presidency. and more importantly, the aftermath of his presidency, the attempts to steal an election, the cashiering of his top law enforcement official, of his top military official, January 6th, the attempts to steal an election,

the attempts to remain in power. We're seeing this gap between the way people perceive him today as this sort of harmless alternative to the Joe Biden, who was showing obvious signs of cognitive deterioration, or Kamala Harris, who's this unbelievably progressive senator from California, and Trump, the, as we knew him before. And, you know, a big part of the job, I think, of Democrats, it's going to be hard for them to do it, is to make people familiar with the kinds of things that Trump says in his rally speeches that don't often get the kind of coverage that I think they are. Yeah, on this point, just as a matter of sort of what

happened to the to the unity rhetoric and all this i i do not think we can discount and steve you were in milwaukee last week and can maybe speak to this or or recognize this as well i don't know if i've ever seen a time when republicans are were were sort of more euphoric yes um this was Milwaukee was this high point that i actually don't think they will ever reach again like Even if Donald Trump wins the election, it will not be as euphoric and as sort of that feeling, that momentous feeling that it was in Milwaukee, right after the assassination attempt, right at the point where Democrats and Joe Biden were sort of at their lowest. And Donald Trump comes strutting in. He's got a new vice presidential pick. The place was ecstatic for all the good fortune they seem to have had. think that rubbed off on Donald Trump in that moment. I think what we are seeing now is a

a reversion to the mean because that moment, that high of the convention has passed, but also the race has now changed. And Joe Biden is no longer the nominee. I do think we don't have time to get into this and I'd like to do some more reporting on it. I do not think that that team Trump actually expected Biden to withdraw from the race, and they've been caught flat-footed ever since. And so what we have seen since then from Trump is not only just the natural way, you know, as Jonah says, it is part of his character to refer to, you know, to do the nicknames and, and all of this. But also, this is muscle memory for him. And when when things changed when that moment where it felt like everything was going Trump's way seems to have

altered. I'm not saying it's not going to still go Trump's way, but the rules have changed. I think he's reverted to that. And look, let's just say, like, that's understandable, right? I mean, the man survived an assassination attempt. I mean, it was horrifying. And I think, you know, to a certain extent, Republicans were unified in that moment, both by their gratitude. that Trump survived this assassination attempt and by their horror at the unbelievable security lapses that led to the assassination attempt in the first place. I mean, it is, the more detail we learn about what actually happened there, the worse it is. It is, I mean, almost literally unbelievable how poorly this was handled, sort of at every level of law enforcement. We saw

finally the Secret Service director resign this week. I think that was way over. do. And I think we'll be talking about the repercussions of that in a long time. So I think the combination of those two things, they were sort of horrified at what they had seen. And some of them, it has to be said, believe the conspiracy theories, right? That the Biden administration either allowed or authorized this to happen. But I think there was just a general sense of relief and euphoria that Trump had survived this. And you know what? I think I can say without fear of contradiction. I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump, but I was relieved that Donald Trump survived this assassination attempt. I mean, I think it would have been horrible on any number of levels had it gone the other way.

So I do think that that contributed tremendously to that environment in Milwaukee. Go ahead, Jonah. We're not going to have necessarily an opportunity to talk about this again. On the assassination attempt thing, there's nothing else we can call it other than an assassination attempt, right? Yes. But it's kind of the wrong term. If you're thinking about it as a security person, right, as a Secret Service person, there is no difference between this dude's failure to kill Trump and success at killing Trump.

Because the bullet missed by millimeters, there's nothing that the Secret Service did that made this guy miss. He just missed, right? But he got the bullets off that, but for a different charge, you know, Trump would have been murdered. And so, like, they can't point to anything that says, oh, these measures mitigated this or whatever, right? It's like literally it was, for all intents and purposes, a successful assassination attempt in terms of the failures that let it be impossible. And I think that gets kind of lost in a lot of the conversation. You know, it's sort of like, you know, Israelis, they don't, when some suicide bomber blows himself up and doesn't kill a bunch of people, they still consider it a failure because, it got to the point where this person got in there, right?

You know, it's like you have to look at it as like the contingency. They still consider it a success because a successful suicide. Yeah, they consider it as successful even though they didn't achieve their objectives, right? And anyway, I just think it's worth thinking about it. I'd also just on a pushback a little bit on the exuberance at the convention. One of the reasons why the convention was so I don't disagree with anything. I was just sort of add there's a real selection bias thing going on. that the people who showed up at the convention

were the ones who survived eight years of purges and exclusions and banishments of normal Republicans. Like, this is something that even during the before times, I would always point out, is that fractious fights within a party are a sign of health in a party, because that means its coalition is so large that it has competing factions. Right.

Minority parties, minority coalitions do not, not have a lot of internal dissent precisely because they're not big enough to have one. FDR is the class example. The FDR coalition had communist Jews, big city blacks, and southern segregationists in it. That's a big coalition. And they're going to be disagreements, you know? And Trump has been clear from the- Especially the Trump Republican Party. Yeah, Trump has been very clear from the beginning. He would rather be king of a Trumpified party than just one center of power and a majority party coalition, and he's been purging and culling non-Trumpists out of the party for a very long time. And it's not like everybody in the party is now Trumpist, but every other than

the party has now gotten that message and is on board with loving Trump, at least public. So I think that's a really good point, especially in this Trumpified Republican Party. You know, the party platform in 2020 was effectively, you know, what that guy says. Having said that, I did talk to a number of skeptical. and even anti-Trump people at the Republican convention who were saying things that were sort of surprising to me in their enthusiasm for Trump. And we saw like Asa Hutchinson, former governor of Arkansas was there. He campaigned against Trump. He said he won't endorse Trump. He's not going to endorse Trump. But he was there. He had some, I think, positive things to say about J.D. Vance and the J.D.

Vance picked Spencer Cox, former governor of Utah, former strong critic of Donald Trump and a opponent of Donald Trump wouldn't endorse him, ended up endorsing him in the days after the Republican Convention. So I do think he brought along some previously Trump skeptical Republicans. I mean, the other obvious reason for enthusiasm in Milwaukee was Milwaukee. There's lots of cheese curds. There's great beer. There's pizza at a place called Zafiro's. I mean, it's really, it is probably America's greatest city. And I think it was, you know, Republicans who were there, this, people understood this. I think we're likely to see, you know, a real estate boom in Milwaukee now, mass migration, put Kamala Harris in charge. She could be the Milwaukee czar,

to keep too many people from moving to Milwaukee. The beer flows from the taps and the streets are paved in cheese curds in Milwaukee. It's a, it's a beautiful place. All right, well, listen, not worth your time. It's surprising, shocking even, that a speech from the sitting president of the United States might actually not be worth our time. But Joe Biden finally addressed from the Oval Office on Wednesday night, his decision to withdraw from the race in a odd, about 11-minute speech in which the volume was turned up. We heard every, you know, every swallow that he made, every sort of. of ambient sound in the Ovaloffice. You could hear the fluorescent lights in the room.

Exactly. It was a bizarre display. Jota, was this speech from Biden worth our time? See, I think it was. I think this is a little, we're being a little puckish here in putting this at the very end. How dare, how dare you accuse me of being puckish? I don't blame you for this editorial decision, by the way, Mike. I take full responsibility.

I think just, first of well, as something of historic consequence, it's worth talking about. I think it's going to see, let me put it in a way that I think Steve will lose at least an iota of confidence in his dismissiveness of the importance of this. I think that speech will loom large in the coming argument about whether or not

he can serve out his term. I agree with that. And that's important, and that's a significant thing. You know, the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, They watched that speech last night, too. That was not, I mean, first of all, I got to say, just like, like, no one's in a, well, I shouldn't say no one. No one outside of this podcast, basically, is in a let's rub in the I Told You So's mood, but I am. And that speech, if nothing else, confirmed how utterly ridiculous the idea was that that guy could campaign full tilt for president of the United States.

It's just, I mean, I was talking to serve another four years. And serve another four years, right? I mean, I was talking to a prominent, you know, democratic sort of activist type recently. And they were making the case about how, like, if you were going to, if you really thought that was even a possibility, they should have been preparing America two years ago to say, hey, look, you're not going to see Biden out there on the stump 10 hours a day running around. You know, he's an older guy. But they didn't do any of that.

They just leaned in his idea that he could run for president. That guy cannot run for president. Never mind, be president for another four and a half years. And I think anybody watching it understands that now. I think, and like, we have, you know, this challenge that under our Constitution, the entire executive branch is one person. That's it. It's just the president.

All power and authority flows from an actual human being, and that human being is impaired. And we can be empathetic and sympathetic. and we can be humane about it. I don't think it's a slam dunk that he has to resign the presidency right now. The American people don't think he does necessarily. But that speech, I think, should cause doubt about if you're confident that he doesn't need to do that.

I also think sort of like I was saying about Trump's convention speech doesn't matter that much because the highlights are all that people are going to really remember or see. I think the highlight stuff, the moving sort of personal stuff, the sound bite stuff, that's what's going to propagate social media

and all that. But the middle of that thing was a terrible speech about it was basically a mini state of the union speech where he's just doing campaign stuff and he's talking, he's basically not letting go of the fact that he deserves another four years and look at all the things I did and how dare you say I wasn't consequential. And we can have some grace and give him space for that precisely because he is bowing out and like, you know, we're basically giving him a gold watch early and, you know, let him. you know, let him get his, you know, the most favorable version of himself out of he feels that's necessary. But that wasn't speaking to history. That was self-indulgent garbage. And the fact that it was so haltingly delivered and painfully delivered, I think is really, it's going to be a major data point in the arguments to come. I hope it is. You know, My big takeaway after watching the speech was that he shouldn't be president.

Now, in fairness, I thought that before. I think he's shown himself to be far too fragile and far too far along in his cognitive decline to be president. I think we've seen that now repeatedly, particularly in the three weeks where he tried to prove himself after the debate. I think, as you said, Jonah, our enemies are watching that speech and they've been watching his performance, and it is not inspiring confidence. I guess, look, I would like to be charitable to Joe Biden, as we've discussed before here.

I know people who have gone through what he's going through, and it's, you have to have some empathy for people in that position, for their family. It's very difficult. It's hard. And I can't imagine what it must be like if you believe with great conviction that Donald Trump should not be the next president of the United States and you're Joe Biden and you have once been the thing that kept Donald Trump from being in the Oval Office to imagine that you can again be the thing that keeps Donald Trump from being the Oval Office. So I appreciate the context and I have empathy for his situation. That said, as Nick argued in his newsletter earlier this week, the Bidens are not the

hero in this story. Joe Biden never, ever should have run for re-election. And the fact that Democrats are running Kamala Harris owes a lot to Biden's decision early to adopt what can only be described as a Trumpian attitude about all of this. which is I alone can fix it. Nobody else. It's just me. And I think what we saw in the three weeks that Biden tried to cling to the nomination that he thought was his was this sort of obsessive selfishness and narcissism. And the only reason he ended up giving up was because he was confronted by Democratic Party elders who showed him polling that showed that he could

not win. So I don't buy the revisionism that this was this incredibly selfless act, that he was like George Washington, willing to give up power for the greater good of the country. Now, it was, he saw polling that showed he wasn't going to win because he's not anything like the man that he was even five years ago and faced with that stark reality and threats from Nancy Pelosi that she had tried the easy way to remove him and was about to try the hard way. That's why he turned and left. Now, I'm grateful that he did it. I suppose it's possible that he could have hung on and it would have been even worse. But I just don't think

that that's worthy of celebration. I think that middle section, Jonah, that you identify in his remarks, that was really why Joe Biden wanted to give the speech, honestly, was this defense of his presidency and a claim that he could have done it. He could have done it. And if it's the case, you had the White House press secretary yesterday saying that Biden didn't leave because of any health reasons, if you stop and think about that, that is a stunning thing to say. You have nine then 10 Democrats in the country who say based on what we've seen, I think say correctly, based on what we've seen, Joe Biden isn't fit to be president. And it's all because of health reasons. If not because of health reasons, I just think it's really a shameful display and I don't

think he deserves a ton of credit for going out the way he's going out. Well, the last thing that we'll say about this is I regret that it's going to be. maybe come off as sort of sour, but the amount of, there was a photo that came out after the speech finished, which was a picture of Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, beginning to embrace in the Oval Office, either right before the speech or right after the speech was delivered. And I don't mean to pick on Bob Costa at CBS News, but he tweeted a powerful photo, the hand toward his father's face, the eyes, put aside politics and everything related for a moment, and viewed simply on a human level, you see two men, father and son still at each other's

side more than a half century since the darkness of December 18, 1972. That's, of course, the terrible tragedy when Joe Biden lost his daughter and his wife in a car accident. And I find the mingling of that personal tragedy and these questions about whether he is fit to be the leader of the country even for the next few months to be to be to use a word jota uses a lot grotesque and um and i think uh so much a part of the problem of Biden's own self-regard um that the the the sort of the countries uh you know he said he said in his speech you know I love this office, but I love the country more, and it seems that he himself has sort of commingled his own sense of importance, you know, world historical importance with, you know,

a lifetime of, I agree, of personal tragedy in a way that's kind of putting the country through things that the country never asked for. And I think it's gross. And it's gross. And it's And it's gross to have members of the press play into that. What I can, I only think of as sort of a delusion about, about where he fits into the, to the, to the country in our history. So if you'll forgive me, just a quick diatribe, a quick unhinged rant, if you will. Please. We can see a lot of that, right?

And it's not just with the Biden, with Biden and his personal story and all that. Like, if you were a Vulcan, right, just a creature. of pure logic. And I said to you, yeah, there's this guy who's completely unfit to be president. But some deranged goober shot at him and almost killed him. So therefore, we have to support him for president. But that does not compute, right? That is crazy. Similarly, the idea that somehow Biden has had this personal suffering in his life and therefore we owe it to him to let him serve out his term or run again or any of that kind of stuff. It's this mingling of illogical, irrational sentiment into very important issues of public concern, of the public interest.

And it's all over the place. And you see it throughout the press, too. Like, I'm sorry. I know we're supposed to say as a way of easing him out of the public scene that he's the greatest president of our lifetime, and he accomplished more in one term than most accomplished and two. He's one of America's best presidents and yada, yada, yada. Americans don't like Joe Biden very much, and the press can't make them like him. And it's amazing. It's like I get all of this strange new respect from the sort of Axelrod and Press in MSM types by pointing out that this wasn't a coup, right? This wasn't the elites forcing Biden out. They were lagging indicators, not leading indicators. The American people have been screaming for two years, get rid of this guy,

he can't do the job, put in somebody else, and then the elites at the last second cave to it when it becomes undeniable and everyone's like, oh, it's a coup, right? You know, and that's what JD, Vance and all these guys want you to believe. That's BS. It was like, finally, the parties are being responsive to what their own members want. Where everybody just sort of looks at me like I'm crazy is when I say, yeah, you know, like not only should you be listening to the public, you know, the public's judgment on whether or not Biden should run. We also might want to sort of check in with the public's attitude about why they think he's a crappy president.

Like, he has the lowest approval rating of any president in the history of modern polling. And yet every single Sunday show type and every single, certainly MSNBC cable host, is just gaslighting the crap out of everybody saying, no, no, no, no, this is the best president we've ever had. No, no, no, this is great. Everybody loves Joe. Everyone thinks he's great. We used to have all the, Dan Dresner used to do this thing about how, you know, we talk

about Trump like he's a toddler, and I think it was spot on. We've been talking about Biden in this country like he's a toddler for weeks. I mean, everyone loves him. He has, he's so great, and he really, really loves ice cream. Enough already. It's just, it's, it's, it's so weird the disconnect between the elites, I hate using the phrase elites, but like the, you know, the mainstream journalists who all in their little bubbles either agree to say this stuff or agree, or think it's impossible to disagree with it. If you watch CNN's coverage last night of Biden's speech, they beat the crap out of Scott Jennings for throwing a little cold water on it. And it's like, how dare you, sir? And I get it. Like, they're all feeling guilty about forcing the guy out.

But like, um, deserves got nothing to do with anything here. It's like we're talking about running a country. A little William money from, uh, Unforgiven there, uh, to close us out. Um, that is Jonah Goldberg. That's Steve Hayes. I, then my fault was nothing much. No, no, that, you know, we We got to end on that unhinged Durant, Jonah. I mean, it's, it's just, it just makes sense. Thanks for listening. Live long and prosper, as Dr. Spock would say, and Mr. Spock will talk to you next time. You know,