The Dispatch Podcast - Trump and The Restrainers | Roundtable

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

Mike Warren is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Sarah Isgur, and Kevin Williamson to react to the latest internal fights within Donald Trump’s White House on Ukraine and explain the logic behind flip-flops on immigration enforcement. The Agenda:—Rogue pause on Ukraine aid—Freelancing at the Pentagon—Trump vs. the restrainers—ICE raids in Los Angeles—Trump’s flip-flop on immigration—The Hispanic vote—UFC on the South Lawn 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

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or go to explorevolvo.com. While other money managers are holding, Dynamic is hunting. Seeing past the horizon, investing beyond the benchmark, because your money can't grow if it doesn't move. Learn more at dynamic.ca.cath. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Mike Warren. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss the resumption of military aid to Ukraine. Has Donald Trump finally soured on Vladimir Putin and who is really in charge at the Pentagon? Then we'll talk about the situation facing illegal immigrants in Southern California. And then, and not worth your time, celebrating America's birthday with cage fights at the White House? I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues, Jonah Goldberg, Sarah Isgher, and Kevin Williamson. Let's dive right in.

Jonah, let's start with you because last week on the Dispatch Roundtable podcast, there was a discussion with our friends and colleagues about the pause on certain military aid to Ukraine. There was certain munitions, some missiles that were going to be paused. and things seem to have been completely reversed since then, all because of Donald Trump. So I want to get into a little bit of what we have learned over the last week or so. This pause at the Pentagon seems to have been reversed because Donald Trump didn't know about it. I mean, that's the reporting that seems to be coming out, not just from. one outlet, but multiple outlets.

This is what the Associated Press had to say. President Donald Trump's decision to send more defensive weapons to Ukraine came after he privately expressed frustration with Pentagon officials for announcing a pause in some deliveries last week, a move that he felt wasn't properly coordinated with the White House. The Pentagon, which announced last week, that it would hold back some air defense missiles, precision-guided artillery, and other weapons pledged to Ukraine. They were concerned about stockpiles. That was the official explanation.

That decision, again, completely reversed. So are the stockpiles not as depleted as they were, as people thought they were? Was Donald Trump really unaware of such a major decision? What do you make about this and what does it say about sort of the status of our relationship with Ukraine and what we're trying to do or not trying to do in its war with Russia. So it's funny, I had talked to a foreign policy muck-y-muck who just sort of off-the-cuff ventured a hypothesis that the leak that Bridge Colby, this defense department planning official who's a big leader of what we call the restrainers, the ones who want to like

more of non-interventionist or pivot to China kind of stuff, didn't want the Iran intervention by us. This Bridge Colby guy, it was reported last week that he was the one who made this call about cutting off not just future aid to Ukraine,

but pausing weapons systems already approved by Congress, already paid for, and already some of them already in theater, right? They were in Poland and saying, oh, you slow your roll, stop it. And this foreign policy mucky-muck who I couldn't name, because I wasn't

talking to him as a reporter or anything, had said, you know, this might be less about Trump's decision because Colby's not the guy who should be making this decision. This may be a leak to hurt Colby. And I just sort of mentioned that's one other theory out there. And it turns out that probably turned out to be correct, which is not to say that Pete Heggseth didn't approve of this or something. I mean, like, I doubt the buck stopped with Bridge Colby because you need someone above Colby to say okay to whatever his recommendation is in this kind of thing, right? And so I don't know, like you say it's, you said in the setup that things seem to be completely reversed. I mean, Seems is doing a lot of work there because if we were talking about

tariff stuff, right, you could say, well, tariffs are off on a Monday and then, no, tariffs are back on on a Wednesday and that kind of thing. I don't know that we can make any straight line projections about what any of this means for our relationship with Ukraine. I think Trump is always one phone call from Putin saying, no, you're the schmupy face from like reigniting the bromance. And so I hope this means that we send more weapons to Ukraine. I hope this means that we honor our existing commitments and actually make new commitments to help Ukraine.

I just don't know that it does. But we heard from President Trump this week. He was in a cabinet meeting on Tuesday. This is what he said, quote, we get a lot of bull thrown at us by Putin if you want to know the truth. He's very nice all of the time, but it turns out to be meaningless. This is, I mean, this is kind of the latest example of Trump expressing, publicly expressing, his frustration with Putin at the negotiating table. You know, I think we all think, oh, yeah, he says this now.

As you point out, Jonah, he'll just, he's just waiting for Putin to call him and whisper sweet. Nothing's in his ear. But Russia is not a non-actor in all of this. The next day, right? This was on Wednesday, big drone attack launched by Russia in Ukraine, something like over 700 drones, 13 missiles, you know, perhaps in response. to what Donald Trump had to say, I don't know, but it's not just words, right? The actions of Vladimir Putin really seem to be frustrating Donald Trump. Kevin, what do you make? I mean, is this, is Donald Trump finally getting wise that Vladimir Putin has no real interest in

negotiating anything but complete and total victory for him and for Russia? You know, I'm often reminded of his, Trump's health care remark after he, you know, failed however many times to produce a health care program that nobody knew health care could be so complicated. And you just wanted to say, yeah, everybody knew but you. And now Trump is expressing surprise that this murderous former KGB boss that runs Russia is the duplicitous son of a bitch. And go figure. No one saw that coming except the whole world except for Donald Trump. It's interesting to me that people within Trump's administration seem to understand that the president can be circumnavigated when he's in the way and that he can be manipulated

from within fairly easily. And I'm not sure that Jonah's actually right about the buck not stopping, as it were, with – I hate the name Bridge, by the way. His actual name is Elbridge Colby, but no one's named Elbridge except villains in Iron Rann novel, so I guess he just goes by bridge. But I wouldn't be surprised if he were just, you know, sort of giving out orders. I mean, that's kind of what happened with some of the Doge stuff, where you had people, you know, being fired and departments being reorganized on orders that wasn't really entirely clear who was coming from and on what authority. Colby, apparently, is also the guy who sandbagged the Japanese with the demand for raising their defense spending as a share of GDP from, I guess, like, 3.5 was their target to, I think he demanded 5% or something like that.

They ended up canceling a summit meeting over that. And, you know, that's a major foreign policy change and blunder that seems to have originated with him and not gone through anybody. I would like, and I know this is a point I refer to fairly often, but I would like someone to ask Trump, you know, Mr. Master Executive, Mr. Master Negotiator, how is it that people within your administration are countermanding your apparently desires and the big decisions are being made without your knowledge or consent? and you're not going and finding out

who's responsible for this in firing them or replacing them with someone who's actually going to do the things that you want to do. He is very much a hostage of his personnel and unfortunately the personnel he's chosen are largely incompetence and media figures and people who are maybe good at one thing in life

but not necessarily good at the thing they've been put in charge of and then, you know, Pete Agstaff and people like that who would just, you know, have no business being anywhere, any sort of serious levers of power. Yeah, so I just worry a quick guy. take your point about maybe Bridge Colby is freelancing this and not to go Carl Schmidt on anybody but like to decide to let Bridge Colby go freelance is a decision right I mean like if you are the defense secretary and you know this guy's

going out there doing his own thing and letting him get away with it that is it the same thing is approving it as far as I'm concerned and on the one last thing on bridge Colby I agree the name is kind of annoying even more annoying is the pretense that he's this edgy outsider, this maverick from the hinterlands who was taking on the establishment, and his grandfather was the head of the CIA. Yeah. So, anyway. It's always who you least expect.

Can I share what I'm offended about with the Elbridge conversation? Go ahead, Sarah. And I want to come back to you for some other insight, but go ahead. Elbridge Gary Erasure. This is a former vice president of the United States. we have gerrymandering named after him where we mispronounce his name every time that we talk about it. And now we can't even remember that his first name was Elbridge. This poor man served his country somewhat honorably. Someone, somewhat honorably. That's the most we can all hope.

Sider of the Declaration of Independence, I believe. I think he was. I think he was. Like, would you, what would you say when you say he served his condition somewhat honorably? If, Someone's tombstone said somewhat honorable husband and public servant. We're all striving to, for perfection. But Sarah, I want to go to you on this because there is something to the idea that whatever has happened in the last week with regard to the pause and then the unpause, that people have something out for, for Bridge Colby here, A number of stories have come out this week. The biggest one, the most sort of intriguing, and for me, jaw-dropping one was from Politico. A lot of people at the Pentagon very frustrated with Bridge Colby and seemed to be using this opportunity to try to get out there the ways in which he does appear to be freelancing.

It's not just the Ukraine decision. Kevin, you mentioned the Japan conversation. It seems that the reporting suggests that 3%, maybe 3.5% goal to try to get the Japanese to pay that amount of their GDP for defense. That bump up to 5% according to these sources was Bridge Colby sort of freelancing again and taking people at the Pentagon by surprise. There was also this review that Colby seems to be spearheading, according to the reporting, of the Ocus Agreement. This is the Australia, UK, U.S., sort of joint agreement. It's a submarine pact to kind of police the Pacific. And frankly, is seen as a big part of what Bridge Colby is supposedly all about, which is a pivot to China.

I mean, again, this is from the political article. He is pissing off just about everyone I know inside the administration by announcing that he was going to issue this review coming out later this summer and had some bizarre conversations with some of the counterparts at one point, reportedly telling the British counterparts, maybe you don't need to have your crafts in this particular part of the Pacific. I'm just wondering, you are someone who has been at the highest levels of power. What can you tell us about the likelihood that somebody like Colby, these other folks are freelancing?

And what would that look like? How would that sort of, how would that happen? How would it not be the case that the Secretary of Defense and ultimately the President of the United States knows about these things or is at least made aware that these sorts of decisions, pretty big decisions are happening. So obviously I was at the Department of Justice and not the Pentagon. Yes. Which may or may not be relevant to any of this because I'm pretty confused how you can freelance to that extent.

You know, everyone who is a presidential appointee and certainly at the senior level that we're talking about has basically certain things below their purview and certain things above their purview that you touch. the things below your purview are the things that are within your discretion to decide one way or the other and the things above your purview are the things that you have

meetings about, endless, endless meetings about. So I'm pretty confused because either the things we're talking about are actually just within his discretion. They seem like pretty big things though to be within a single person's discretion. It seems far more likely that he wouldn't have the authority to make that decision by himself, he would be

an advisor on that decision. Yeah, it's not like you just sort of like wave your hand in the air and declare bankruptcy. Like there's papers that have to be signed and they have to go through like the paper process in the government would stun a team of oxen. And there's a process at least again in the Department of Justice, and I assume the Pentagon, you'd really think the Pentagon about how papers move through the building, who has to sign which types of papers, their entire staff departments responsible for moving the papers. And I do mean physically taking little blue folders and moving them around the building to who they need to go to next. So I say all that kind of minutia and boring stuff to say like, yeah, I don't see how this was freelancing. That's

not how it works. Yeah, it sort of triggered when I was reading these stories, very incredible stories about things that he said. I wanted to clarify one of the things I brought up. This is a meeting in June at the Pentagon with sort of the counterparts in the British military bureaucracy. There was an aircraft carrier to Asia, traveling to Asia, and Elbridge Colby supposedly said, is it too late to call it back because we don't want you there, sort of taking the British team by surprise. It's shocking. It's the kind of thing that makes your jaw drop, but it also makes you think, I mean, there is so much, like you say, bureaucracy, particularly at the Pentagon, where those sorts of decisions, it seems difficult to believe that Colby's on an island

on his own. It doesn't seem so difficult to believe, though, that there are other parts of that massive bureaucracy that don't like what he's doing. They don't like the direction that this is going. There's been reporting, you know, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other sort of groups on the military side of things don't like the way that he is operating. Jonah, maybe we can talk a little bit about sort of the ideological fight that seems to be going on. It seems to me, and I've done a little reporting on

this, there is a whatever you want to call them, the realists, the isolationists. You used a term earlier, I can't call it. Restrainer. That's right. The restrainers. That's right. The restrainers. There does seem to be a small but powerful group of these people who are kind of Bridge Colby enthusiasts,

that he has surrounded himself with and has sort of helped empower at the Pentagon. And that seems to be at odds with where Donald Trump is right now. How much are, how much of this is a fulfillment of Donald Trump's own national security foreign policy? And why are we seeing this kind of divide where the president is calling, is calling some of these decisions back? And does it, I mean, you can start with Iran, you can start with, you can, you can go up through this, uh, decision on the Ukraine munitions. Um, for, for a bunch of mag of folks, they, they don't seem to be fulfilling what the president himself ultimately wants. Yeah. And there's also the wacky Japanese game show that is Marco Rubio versus Rick Grinnell in Venezuela, um, that we have not quite gotten to the bottom of

yet either. Um, so I have a theory about this. Like I was the one who came out of the gate saying, you know, Kevin pushed back on me when I said that I don't think Colby can freelance this as much as it seems. I guarantee you we've all, because we actually have some understanding of how Washington works from different angles, we've all seen movies and complained that that's not how it works in Washington, right? I mean, like, I used to keep track of how many movies where it was a Senate committee chairman ordering military troops to go do stuff. they wish they wish that's particularly egregious but also can we talk about how in the american president she's traveling from the hill to the white house but somehow takes dupont circle to get there oh there's all and then there's no way out with like uh running around through the pentagon city mall and going

underground without ever getting on a subway and coming out in the subway station in georgetown which doesn't have a subway station um or how about or how about or how about a huge chunk of true lies where like cars are zipping around through like Georgetown and going the completely wrong way in order. Well, okay, sorry. We could. Okay. So anyway, yeah. So the geographic stuff is really bad. Or three days of the condor where everyone knows what they're doing. Yes, exactly. That's a huge one. I love three days of the condo. The tango in true lies is the best movie soundtrack song ever. Okay. I challenge ever. That perhaps. Chime into the comments with your favor. All right. Well, I did not.

mean for this to go that far off the rails. All I was going to say is that I don't even think it's the best tango song. In a movie? I'm not saying it's the best tango ever written, but in a movie. Mr. Mrs. Smith, the Joe Strummer's song. Oh, no, I'll fight you. I'm wrong I've lost control of this podcast. True lies wins. Okay. So we've all seen how lots of things go wrong except for tango music in movies. And the Tom Clancy stuff where you have all these guys where at least there's a pretense that people are breaking the rules when they break the rules and all that kind of stuff but i i kind of think that trump's management style and i use that very advisedly is kind of informed by movies right and so he kind of likes doers who just go

and do stuff and um he there are all of these stories about how he would rather the people who work for him, be the bad cop and go too far, and then he have to be like, you know, rain him in a little bit or whatever. And I think the environment is such that a lot of these people think that the way you get ahead is it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission for things. And it's funny, I was saying to my wife the other day watching the Sunday shows that this is the first administration. Look, people, surrogates, cabinet secretaries, when they go on Sunday shows, they always have an eye to like, what's the old, what's the boss going to think of my performance. But this is the first administration, and at least in my life, I think ever, right, because I've been around for most of the TV age, where all of the messaging that comes out of the White House is aimed almost entirely at the president and nobody else. And so you get almost bad political messaging. from surrogates because their key constituent,

their only constituent, their demo, as it were, is Trump himself. And so, like, if you just start counting the number of times, cabinet secretaries say, nobody but Trump, or Trump alone could do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, they're not saying that for public consumption, and they're certainly not saying that with any respect to their eternal soul.

They're saying it solely to curry favor with Trump. And so it's entirely possible that, you know, Kevin's right that it is an administration full of people who just are swinging for the fences for stuff that they think Trump will love. And Trump in some ways encourages that both psychologically, but also because he has a cinematic understanding about how government works in the first place. You know, the team of rivals thing works a lot better when you're the Lincoln administration. You've got, you know, Grant and Seward and people like that. It doesn't work quite as well when you're the Trump administration.

You've got Pete Hegsteth and Pam Bondi and people like that running around. Lincoln had a much higher quality of alcoholic in his administration, I think. That's what America and American government needs. Any final thoughts on the state of the war here? And particularly the state, I mean, we talked about it a little bit, the state of the Trump-Puton relationship. Because you're also seeing, you're seeing sort of how would I, describe it. The hawks within the Republican Party sort of assert themselves in Congress, and there's a new set of sanctions that Republicans in the Senate are pushing against Russia

that Trump seems to be open to. You do have a number of the hawks, whether it's Don Bacon or Brian Fitzpatrick, Republicans, moderate Republicans in the House, who are pushing for answers about this pause and how it was happening. It's kind of interesting, you know, certainly on this podcast, we've talked a lot about Congress really absconding from its role as the primary branch of government. But you're seeing some rumblings on this particular issue, and Trump seems to be, if not responding to them, a little more sympathetico with the Russia Hawks than maybe he was at the beginning of the administration. Anybody have any thoughts on sort of what what this opportunity means for sort of renewing America's support for Ukraine, where there seems to be an appetite, at least in Congress, to do so? I guess I just have like an initial reaction that like, boy, do we seem a long, long way away from that moment in the Oval Office where J.D. Vance dresses down Vlodomor Zelensky. Vib shift. Big vibe shift, which I find just sort of interesting because that was not that long ago.

I mean, someone clock me on how many days it's been. But like, we're certainly talking a few months, not a few years to have that kind of change in attitude. I think there's a few things you can potentially trace it to. One, Trump is just not a very consistent person. You know, he sort of knows where he wants to head, but I think of him as like, you know, sort of one of those, like a kid in an excavator or something. There's all these, like, levers to push. So you just push them all and see what they all do.

And so, like, he was pushing some levers. That wasn't doing what he wanted. And then he moves on to push other levers to see if those will do what he wants. I think that's as good an explanation as any. it also wasn't received I think particularly well even by his friends it seemed um well we all remember it uh cheap crass not effective right not like what the president or vice president of the united states should be aiming for on television um but yeah i mean i i just boy think of where we were and that wasn't like the beginning of the administration we're only a few months in but like

I'd call that the middle of what we've had so far. So to have that kind of vibe shift, I would say, like, we could have another vibe shift. We don't know. Like, Trump does not have a clear vision for the relationship that he wants with either Ukraine or Russia. You know, Sarah, I have literally within the last two hours seen a three-year-old riding around in a toy excavator, pushing every button and pulling every lever. And he was more systematic, I think, than the Trump administration has been in this. not to launch a whole long conversation that I'll have an argument with Jonah about here,

but I know Jonah sometimes complains about the idea of realism in foreign policy, and the sort of the classical version of realism being the countries are driven by these interests that are like sort of faceless Hegelian Marxist historical powers. And I don't really think that's a very good account either, but we do sometimes act as though that were what was driving our foreign policy. And what's interesting to me is that the United States and Ukraine have really very different interests here in this war. on the Ukrainian interest is to end the war with this minimal damage to their country as possible. The real U.S. interest is to see this dragged out as long as possible and let the Russians continue

to bleed themselves and bleed themselves and bleed themselves. I don't think that we are actively pursuing a strategy in which that is our goal, but it's the strategy we've fallen into. And we'll do a little bit for Ukraine, then back off a little bit, and do a little bit more, and then back off a little bit. And it really, if you're looking at it from a sort of clinical outside point of view, and you came to the conclusion that what we were trying to do was extend this quagmire and deepen it for the Russians as much as possible.

We wouldn't do anything much different, I think, if that were an active goal on our part. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's the Biden administration gets credit for not abandoning Ukraine, which was their initial impulse, but it doesn't get a lot of credit for doing what was necessary for Ukraine to win either. It's that they seem to have, and I think Kevin's right, I don't think they had a bleed Russia strategy in mind, but that's sort of where they ended up as a compromised position. It's a little bit like, you know, the reason why WMDs became the primary thing about the Iraq war was, and there's a great interview that Sam Tannenhouse did with Paul Wolfowitz about this 20 years ago now, where Wolfowitz said, look, there were a lot of people who had different reasons for wanting to go into Iraq. The one thing the entire bureaucracy and national security establishment could agree on was the WMD argument. So that's what we went with because that was the one thing that everyone bought into.

But there were other better arguments, you know, and the rest. I think similarly like the Biden people bought into the idea of keeping Keeve free and not much else. And Trump, because he didn't want to help Ukraine and is only coming around to it in part because Putin is kind of making him look bad doesn't have a clear I think Sarah's right doesn't have a clear vision about where this should be going or what our actual interests are and if I were this is a point my friend Francis Durnley from the telegraph has been making um I wish that Europe would just simply decide that America can't be relied upon to help Ukraine rather than like every every couple weeks there's this queue.

maybe they're back on board so maybe we don't have to do anything if europe wants ukraine to win they should act like it needs europe to do it and and step up um and also i think i've mentioned this here before but i listened to this fantastic presentation by general petraeus last week and petraeus was making this amazing amazing description of the transformed nature of war that we are going to be living with for a very long time Basically, no tank that we, all the Abrams tanks that we gave to Ukraine have all been destroyed or disabled. It says that the front line environment is such that it's just too lethal for tanks. Tanks are no longer necessary. It's all drones, improvised drones.

Some drones that have hardwired fiber optic cables trailing behind them so they can't be jammed. Ukraine can launch something like 4,000 drones a day. um with like a million point five a year and petraeus was saying he's not sure that we have three thousand drones ready to be deployed at all in the u.s military and and so there's a real possibility we're going to talk about long-term American interests that if Ukraine survives this it is going to come out of this as a massive military power in a lot of ways with this ability with this infrastructure with this know-how that we're going to want this country as an ally. We're certainly not going to want it as an enemy. And I just

don't think anybody's doing any real thinking about any of that stuff. It's amazing to watch them do it. You know, I was there a couple years ago. And the guys who are actually running these drone programs are like, these guys who are basically the IT guys at their version of Amazon a couple years ago before the war. And they're running these programs out of places that look like the dispatch office. You know, they're in just regular office buildings in basements. They look like college newspapers is what they look like because they're kind of messy. And, you know, the desk all over the place. I was going to say, because the dispatcher office looks awesome and cool and sexy. But anyway, go on. Well, but it's, you know, it's kind of, it doesn't bring to mind James Bond

or, you know, a Tom Clancy novel or something like that. It seems it's a real civilian. Also, can we just, like, take a moment for the, like, I have not heard General Petraeus's name in a long, long time. Yeah, yeah. You know, I saw him do a talk about a year ago at Old Parkland. And he's a tremendously impressive person, I think. And it is a- Made some mistakes.

It's a bit of a loss to the country that he'll never be in a position to make the use of his talents again. Yeah. I mean, he was convicted of sharing classified information. Like, he pled guilty to that. He's a big part of the story about white people don't trust institutions and all that stuff. He made terrible, terrible mistakes. But he knows a lot of stuff about bombing and shooting and tank stuff.

I'm guessing he didn't discuss what the military parades will be like when we're an all-drown military force. It's a little bit like a miniature version of Richard Nixon, actually, who had tremendous insights and useful things to say about foreign policy. But just no one could really very much make use of him after his presidency because of the dumb and terrible things he did. I thought you were saying that the military parades with all drones were going to look like Richard Nixon. and they can be done that would be awesome that can be done we are going to take a break but we'll be back shortly 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

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They discuss his controversial conversation with Peter Thiel. Does Teal hate humanity? What does this say about the new MAGA coalition? Will faith save America? Or will our political disintegration corrupt faith? Search for the Remnant in your podcast app and make sure you hit the follow button. Now let's jump back into our conversation. Kevin, you have a new piece about what is happening in Southern California and specifically Los Angeles with regard to illegal immigrants and the way in which the Trump administration's new enforcement of immigration laws, deportation, these ice raids.

It's changing life and challenging the way in which a lot of illegal immigrants. some of whom came over the border into the United States as children and have since built lives here, how they are navigating this. I don't want to give away the entire piece. Everyone should read it, but can you give us an overview of what you saw in Los Angeles now that we're a few weeks, several weeks now from the sort of initial burst of protests and in, response to these raids, things haven't exactly settled, but a new status quo in Southern California has set in. Tell us what you saw there. Yeah, well, it sort of looks like Stephen Miller is finally getting his way on some things. You know, Miller apparently some time ago, you know, told the immigration people, look, you don't have to do all this complicated

investigatory stuff, just go cruise Home Depot parking lots and round up the people you see and figure out which ones are illegals and will detain them and deport them. which is more or less what's going on. What really reminds me of is an observation that I've made probably too many times, but I'll make it one more time, about the way we handle firearms regulation, where we spend so much of our resources dealing with licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them. And the reason we do that is because that's the easiest place to do enforcement,

because they have office hours and locations and business records, and they're sort of compliance-oriented. So what they're doing in Southern California right now is like arresting people who show up at their hearings, the people who are, you know, trying to do their end of complying with things who are going through, you know, the refugee and asylum process and things related to that. So, yeah, there is a real, real sort of, you know, atmosphere of fear there. People who are afraid to, you know, go out, go to work, they're afraid to take public transportation because there have been arrests at bus stations and things like that

or bus stops. You know, you've got this comical spectacle of ice agents in, you know, plate carriers and stuff running through the onion fields at Oxnard chasing down, you know, a couple of guys in straw hats who look like they might be illegally picking onions. So it's a very dramatic thing, but it's really happening basically at the edges of the problem. And the people you most want to deport and people you most want to detain are people who are involved in organized crime gangs who are serious criminals who have other sorts of reasons for wanting us to prioritize getting them out of the country. But of course, they're the hardest ones to find and the hardest ones to take enforcement actions against because they aren't showing up at hearings.

They aren't going to irregular jobs. They aren't people who are trying in some way to be in compliance. And so it's a little weird for me from a policy point of view because, you know, I'm an enforcement guy on this issue. I think you've got to enforce your immigration laws. You have to have meaningful control over your borders. And that if you are going to have a policy of deporting some non-trivial share of the millions and millions of people who are here illegally, they're not all going to be, you know,

gangsters with face tattoos. Some of they're going to be, you know, people with jobs and people that we otherwise would like and consider, you know, good citizens and good members of the community. There's just no way to have a program like that that's only going to affect unsympathetic people. On the other hand, the way we're doing things, you know, right now, of people being sent into these detention camps where their lawyers can't find them and family members can't find them, people don't know what state they're in, and all that seems to me unnecessarily chaotic and vindictive, but also just really unlikely to help solve the problem in the long term because you're creating really, really powerful disincentives to compliance.

So if the Trump administration were to announce tomorrow, okay, hey, we figured this stuff out, and what we really need is the guest worker program, so everybody show up and register for the guest worker program if you're working in, you know, hotels, meatpacking, or farms. and we'll set that up that way. A lot of people would not show up to do that because they would be pretty sure that they're going to be arrested and put into a camp and then deported

and with or without any sort of meaningful process. So that's, I think, not the best way to go about it. But mainly I just wanted to go out and talk to, you know, people who are illegal workers and the people who work with them, various advocacy kind of roles and stuff, and just kind of get an idea for what life is actually, like for them right now. And it's

about as you would imagine. We heard since you were out there just sort of in the next region over kind of east of L.A. and San Bernardino, also in Southern California, the bishop of the diocese of the Catholic diocese there

exempting members of the dioces from their obligations to attend weekly Mass. If they have a genuine fear, I think the quote is a genuine fear of immigration enforcement actions, just another example of the way in which it really has changed life for illegal immigrants in this region as all, I mean, again, to add to what you describe and you report, those who are attending

weekly mass, who are filling out all the forms trying to do the right things are the most likely to be swept up, but what other choice does a maximum enforcement administration have, but to pull up the illegal immigrants where they can get them? That seems to be the administration's mindset. We spent a big chunk of the first segment of this August podcast discussing whether or not the Trump administration's positions on foreign policy in Ukraine have reliably changed, will change again. I pointed out that you could change the day of the week and change your understanding what Trump's tariff policy is. This week, there's been a kerfuffle among the sort of nativist anti-immigration guys

that Brooke Rollins, the Agriculture Secretary, started talking about how she's going to save the farmers who are losing all of their migrant labor, illegal migrant labor, and Mickey Cowson and some people, I'm not saying, I like Mickey, I'm not saying he's a nativeist, but he's a very hawkish guy on immigration, said, okay, here comes the end. and and then there was pushback and Rollins kind of said no, maybe Medicaid recipients who need to prove that they're working will fill in the slack. Good luck with that. But the point is, is like Trump a week ago said he's going to come to the rescue of farmers and hotel owners by having a different policy for immigration for illegal immigration there. I think we can

speak honestly and clearly and forthrightly about the consistency. of Stephen Miller's position on immigration. I don't know that we can do that about Trump. I mean, he's got, just as he has like a weird coalition represented in his defense establishment, he's a weird coalition in his cabinet. You know, there are the Maha, you know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. people are a weird fringe. And so I just don't know that. And Trump takes pride in the fact that he changes his mind on things.

So I just, it's a pride. problem for people who've chosen the life that we've chosen, that you can't actually, you make sweeping statements about Trump's psychology and his personality. You can't really about the policy stuff because it's so mercurial. Yeah. You know, on that point, a rare point of agreement between Sarah and me is that it's not really the case that Americans won't clean hotel rooms or pick tomatoes. It is the case that Americans won't do that at the wages currently on offer in those places. And if we're going to have a policy of importing low-wage workers to drive down wages in low-level service jobs, we should at least have the decency to say that's our policy. So we don't have enough poor people here. So we're going to import some poor people. So they'll work more cheaply than the poor people we already have because we don't want tomato prices to go up

and the price of a room at a, you know, C-class hotel to increase a little bit. And there are all sorts of economic reasons why that might be a good policy, actually. But I think that if you're not willing to say what your policy actually is and to defend it on its own terms, maybe it shouldn't be your policy. I think this is one of those cases where, well, I'll just say this. I do think I have a little insight into how Trump's flip-flops tend to happen, which is it's sort of, you know, a literal like angel and devil on the shoulder type moment. You have folks within the Trump administration unified about stopping illegal immigration. check. But there is a lot more disagreement on legal immigration. So like when you mentioned the guest worker program, for instance, Kevin, and that what they are doing would make a guest worker

program far less effective. That's a feature, not a bug, for some of these immigration hawks because of exactly what you said. They are not just against illegal immigration. I think the like why you're against illegal immigration should be pretty obvious at this point. I mean, we can go through there's several reasons why one might be against it. Disrespect for the rule of law. Criminals, just unidentified people, national security risks, all of that. Fine. But the legal immigration stuff, I think, is harder for people to understand. But the Stephen Millers of the world absolutely believe that we are importing cheap labor and it is hurting, as you said, Kevin, like the poor people who are already here, that if we didn't have that

labor, you would still have your tomatoes pick. Don't you worry. It would just cost more because that labor wouldn't be exploitative. So they don't want a guest worker program. They want costs to go up because they want wages to go up, which is why I think the caricatures of the immigration debates on every single corner of every single side of this are so out of control at this point where everyone thinks that they are the only moral actor in the debate and everyone else is like the worst possible most evil human being. I wish we would spend more time saying, okay, like, why do they think they're the most moral

actor? Because, you know, the like Stephen Miller as Skeletor stuff gets pretty boring. Like nobody can be that motivated by just like doing bad stuff. So to try to actually understand what Stephen Miller thinks he's doing, you have to understand he thinks it is unacceptable that we have particularly non-white Americans who can't get good wages. because they're getting squeezed down from the top of this college-educated, you know, elite class. And the college education is meaningless at this point. And it's getting, you know, between great inflation and diploma inflation, that's a whole problem. And then they're getting squeezed from the bottom by illegal immigration.

That's Stephen Miller's, like, whole raison d'Entree. God bless you. I've always had the skeletor thing, by the way, was unfair. always kind of preferred Renfield. Great. So I think there's this. I think you have a piece of the Trump administration that absolutely wants the chaos is the point in the sense that it is to disincentivize people from coming in the first place. It is not going to work to have people come and then deport them. That's, you know, bailing out the ship with a bucket. You need to plug the holes. And the way you're going to plug the hole, you know, there's the supply side and the demand side. We've been trying to

change the demand side by fixing their countries. And that turns into a game of whackamol. We go into the, you know, Mexico. We try to help them. Well, then it's the Northern Triangle that has problems. So we go into the Northern Triangle. We pump money into there. Oh, okay, that's looking a little bit better than Venezuela. Like our waves of immigration have not been the same just because they happen to be coming from the South. They have changed dramatically three totally separate waves. So if you're not going to fix, you know, the demand side, if you will, fix the supply side. And so the chaos is to try to just send a global message. Don't come here because there is no way to stay. If you come and commit crimes, we're going to get

you. If you come and show up and do all the things you're supposed to do, we still might get you. If you have a family and have been here for 20 years, we might get you. That's going to stop people from coming in the first place, which, and I know I've said this before, like this is what funds the cartels, this is what fuels the violence. This is what undermines the governments. So everything's a tradeoff. You can really not like this. You can think it's unfair. You can think that the chaos is very unfortunate for the people that it is happening to. All of that can be true. And it can also be a good thing for the people who are at the mercy of these cartels and all of these countries experiencing incredible levels of violence, economic depression, and their government's powerless to do anything about it because the cartels are being funded by, our open border. One of my questions about all of this is, because I can't help my addiction to sort of

just base horse race politics stuff, is how does this all shake out politically? Because I think, Sarah, you're right that that is what, I mean, I've been talking to Stephen Miller off and on for 15 years, and he's been very consistent about exactly what you described is what motivates him on immigration enforcement and deportations. is the economic argument. I don't know that that is a majority viewpoint or that you can build a lasting coalition on that point because driving wages up by driving prices up, I mean, there is the whole thing, there's the whole part about driving prices up that there could be a very big constituency.

We already saw it fail with the tariff argument of like Susie doesn't need 30 dolls. She can just have two dolls. that was not met with a lot of cheers. That, by the way, is all part of the same worldview, the Stephen Miller worldview that, like, yes, we need to have higher prices because we need to stop being addicted to cheap crap from China, which is also exploitative labor. That's what drives down the costs.

So it's all the same thing. And again, you can not like any piece of that policy. But I do think it's important to understand it and not caricature it. And so what's going to happen at the end of this podcast is we're going to get a zillion emails about how Sarah loves Stephen Miller and loves all of his policies.

And I'm going to bash my head against DeWall because literally it's my job to explain it. But so many people don't want it to explain. They just want to say Stephen Miller, crazy, stupid, evil, bad, same as they do with Trump. And that's a really boring conversation for me. So I'm done having it.

Okay. Well, I will delete the email draft that I was going to send you, Sarah. I take Sarah's point entirely. But I want to go back to the horse race politics thing. I think this is getting overblown a bit by some in the media and by Democrats who really want it to be true. But you can only exaggerate the truth, right? Like you only make a caricature of the truth.

If the caricature doesn't look like the real thing, it's not a caricature, it's just a drawing. And if an exaggeration doesn't pertain to the truth in some way, it's just a lie. But I've talked to a political consultant recently who does a lot of work on the Hispanic vote. And it is this weird sort of monkey paw wish moment where the GOP has been trying to get Hispanics to vote for Republicans for a long, long time. And Trump manages to do it to figure it out. And it's showing up in the data that there are a lot of Hispanics who said, well, I was entirely in favor of getting, you know, MS-13 out of here and these rapist scumbags. And I always took offense that people thought that, like, because they're Hispanic, that they think I'm like that.

And, you know, like the identity politics thing was breaking. And now you're starting to see the, I don't have the numbers handy. And this was sort of an off-the-record conversation, but you're starting to see numbers move to say, I didn't think they were going to go after, you know, my cousin or the waiter down at the coffee shop or whatever and the way in which the Trump administration is doing this, which I agree with Sarah, there is a, there's a colorable, plausible defense of some of this because the key is to scare the crap out of illegal immigrants from coming here in the first place and to encourage the ones who are here to self-deport. And that's why the chaos is an advantage.

That's why, you know, talk about sending them to Sudan, which I think would be immoral, is, you know, is all over the place, is they want to create a climate where that is inhospitable. I get it. At the same time that the cruelty is the point messaging can also land on American citizen Hispanic voters who are grossed out by it and for understandable reasons. And I think that is something that's going to play into the politics here as well. you could see it. I'm not saying this will happen. There's not a prediction. I'm saying this is a plausible outcome that Trump's performance with Hispanics in 2024 will become known as a high

watermark of Hispanic support for Republicans for a generation if Stephen Miller has his way. And I think Stephen Miller, Stephen Miller's view on immigration is a lot like what Nancy Pelosi's was on Obamacare. It's worth losing power to get. this done. And that's not Donald Trump's position. And that is not Donald Trump's position and it is not J.D. Vance's position. Yes. And so that's exactly right. So that's why you see the movement back and forth. It's because you have them saying fix the problem. And Stephen Miller's like, great, I'll fix the problem. Right. And then they get a, you know, a pushback. And they're like, up, up, flipping on that, that just that tiny little specific thing, Stephen, don't worry about it.

And then they realize like, no, it's kind of a bundle of sticks. You can't just pick one stick that you like out of Stephen Miller's vision, you're kind of all in or you're not. And so that's why we're moving back and forth. So it's not really Donald Trump flip-flopping. It's Donald Trump looking at this bundle of sticks and trying to take out a stick and then realizing, nope, that stick has to go in there

and back and forth we go. Only there were some political movement symbolized by a bundle of sticks. The politics here, two things just real quick. Go ahead. One is that I think politically, if 20 years ago, Democrats had put forward a serious immigration reform effort. There would be no Donald Trump

presidency. Immigration is the reason that he caught on when he did and was successful in taking over the Republican Party. But I think it's also important to disaggregate the economic and non-economic issues. And I think this is mainly a non-economic issue because all of the best economic analysis we have points to the people who are most affected by wage effects from illegal immigration are themselves recent immigrants who are not very politically active and typically aren't eligible to vote. They're green card holders or people in other sorts of visas. And they're not, you know, up and down the line, very, very active, reliable voters. But the non-economic stuff is really powerful. I remember I was living in, in Norwalk, Connecticut,

in around 2009, Fairfield County, when the first Spanish language billboard went up. And people lost their minds. And nobody apparently, none of these, you know, Anglo people who take the train into Manhattan every day from Norwalk knew that there were tens of thousands of Spanish-speaking people in Fairfield County, Connecticut, doing all sorts of jobs and living their lives, because they were just so separated. And when this stuff starts to sort of get in people's faces, when they see, you know, signs and advertisements in Spanish, when you end up with these large, non-assimilated communities of immigrants, like you have in Northern Virginia, which wasn't the case, say, 30 years ago, when places that aren't a lot like Miami start to look

like Miami and other parts of the country, that's when people get really sort of get their backs up, I think. You know, in Texas or in Southern California, you know, we've had long experience being border areas and having kind of, you know, hybrid Anglo-Litino culture, that's not a big deal for Texas and Arizona, New Mexico, and California in places like that. But when it starts being, you know, the suburbs of Chicago and those places, which it already is now. and has been for a while. When it's Maine in Massachusetts, it's culturally more disruptive, and I think it produces a kind of not very well-focused and slightly maybe emotionally vague political reaction, but that's the thing that we're really dealing with more than wage effects.

Yeah. You know, Sarah said something about everybody in every corner of this debate, believing that they have the sort of the moral authority on these things. And I think that is also true about political authority. Everybody sort of seems to think that actually the majority is with me on this. I think all of this is reflective of the fact that we really aren't clear about where the middle of the country is on these questions because there are so many, as Sarah likes to say, tradeoffs that Americans are sort of haven't fully grappled with and will just have to keep following all this. By the way, I have to just keep recommending Kevin's piece on this from Los Angeles.

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Choose security solutions from tell us for peace of mind at home and online. Visit tell us.com slash total security to learn more. Conditions apply. We're back. You're listening to The Dispatch podcast. Let's jump back in. Here at the dispatch, we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the country with the next 250,

which began last week with a July 4th essay from Jonah on our site. That's how we're doing it here at the dispatch. How does President Trump plan on celebrating next year? the 250th birthday of the country with a UFC fight on the grounds of the White House. And I'm not exaggerating. That is literally what Donald Trump said last week. We're going to have a UFC fight. That's ultimate fighting championship.

A UFC fight on the grounds of the White House, quote, we have a lot of land there. UFC has essentially confirmed that there are talks about having a big, a big fight between these, you know, mixed martial arts, artists, very popular sport in America, I don't know, something like fastest growing sport in America. What do we make of celebrating 250 years of America with a big old fight in the octagon on the White House lawn? Is it going to happen? Is it a good idea?

Kevin, let's start with you. You don't get Caligula without gladiator fights. So is this a good thing or a bad thing? Probably a bad thing. I think that sort of spectacle has its place, but the place maybe isn't the White House lawn. By the way, I was really disappointed. We didn't call Jonas' essay, The American Revolution, not worth your time? I think that would have been a great headline because it kind of was what he wrote about.

It was a really big deal. Isn't it weird that the battle between what the fastest growing sport in the United States is is between UFC and pickleball? that feels like it sums up our political moment right now pretty well. Yeah, there's something to that. Good observation. And pretty much everyone we know is team pickleball, right?

It's like all of us, all of us who feed Metropolitan Elite. Exactly. Exactly. Well, look, if I thought I could be competitive, if I thought it could be as competitive as I am in pickleball, which is not very, but like I can hold my own in MMA, I'd be kind of psyched. But like, my MNMDA days, if they ever exist,

are long behind me. So you won't be lining up for the pro-am UFC fight on the White House lawn next year. Well, I was I only learned the other day from social media that there is now armored MMA, like where you wear like medieval type armor. And I like the commitment to the idea of de-evolution or retrogression or corruption that is involved in that. Um, yeah, to answer your question, I think, I'm not going to get, you know, Kevin, you know, chastised me in a column a couple weeks ago for, uh, getting too exhausted with politics and, and gave me. Justize is a strong word. Remonstrated. Uh, I was, I was, I was encouraging you. Thank you. It was a buck up camper kind of thing. And, um, I get it. And, you know, like if you, if you lose your ability to be appalled,

the people, the appalling people win. Um, so I get that at the same time, like, I'm not going to be the guy who goes way out on a limb saying, we must fight this. Um, I just think it's gaudy and tacky and, and kind of beneath the White House. And, but it's, it's really on point for the Trump administration. Sarah, are you, uh, are you trying to line up your tickets to see the fight, uh, already of you, you're calling all, all your favors in to go see this? I try to avoid any place where there's lots of other people. Here's what I'll say.

You know, we have an epidemic right now of loneliness and isolation in the country, the sort of bowling alone problem come home to roost a thousandfold compared to where it was when Robert Putnam wrote that book. There was a recent study that said that on any given weekend, only one in 25 Americans, families are going to do anything social outside their home, a party, a dinner, like anything. That's really sad. So to the extent that 20,000, 25,000 people are going to gather on the White House lawn and experience a shared moment, some camaraderie over a sport that I don't care about very much, like, yeah, they can't do F1 racing. So sure, this is great.

Why can't they do F1 racing? That would be awesome. Tiny, tiny little circles. His walk off some roads. I mean, that's how they do it in Monaco, right? So there's a story in Don Quixote where there's a scene in Don Quixote where kind of an eccentric dude walks into the center of town and kind of gathers people attention. He's going to put on a show. And he takes out a bellows and he picks up a dog and he puts the bellows in the dog's butt and starts to inflate the dog. Jonah, I'm going to leave this podcast.

This is about animal cruelty. All the cruelty is over, right? And the crowd gathers, what the hell's going on? And he inflates it more. And then he pulls the tube out and the dog puts a dog on the ground and it runs away making a long, sustained farting sound. And he looks at the crowd and he says, you think it's easy to inflate a dog with the bellows? And the point of this is, I usually use this when people tell me how certain kind of artists are really skis. guild, right?

That, you know, like, I don't like, you know, glam rock or a lot of hip hop. And the people say, but you don't understand. It's real artistry there. And say, well, okay, yeah, there's a story in Don Quixote that's like, you know, it's not easy to do that either, right? I mean, it's like, it takes real skill to be a mime, and yet I want to punch every mime in the face. and but it comes to mind here as well because if your defense of a pseudo bloodsport on the White House lawn is that it'll draw a crowd and people are lonely I take your point it's just we could also have public executions right that would get people you know to stop you know

bowling alone it's just look Jonah there's there's a piece in the Washington Post today like this is real. It's not a parody. I just don't know how many ways to say like this actually happened. And the headline is, I am a clown. Donald Trump is not one of us. And like complaining about people using the term clown. And it goes into how clowns are like part of indigenous culture. I mean, it's all the things you think it could be. Like we're sort of past saving society, I guess, is my point. Jonah, let's try to do what we can piece

some things together, you know? Well, I'll give myself the last word on this. The South Lawn of the White House has hosted many sporting and athletic facilities over the years, right? Dwight Eisenhower had a putting green

on the South Lawn. There were, you know, I think Truman played horseshoes. Bill Clinton had a little track that he would run when he was trying to to lose weight early in his presidency. This is just in line with the sport that Donald Trump prefers. And I don't see really what the problem with it is. Teddy Roosevelt wrote around on horseback shooting targets out of trees.

Well, look, there you have it. There you go. So I do think worrying about this is not worth our time. It brings to mind his, you know, probably truly. line. I can either run the country or control Alice. Like, okay, so you had a little bit of extra time then, you know? Like, maybe you could have done a little more controlling of Alice instead of shooting things out of the trees.

I've never heard that before. That's a great line. Oh, there's a great biography of Alice Roosevelt just called Alice that I highly recommend. It's just so entertaining. Now, is she the one or was it like her daughter who said, if you don't have anything nice to say? It's her. Yeah, that's Alice Roosevelt. Yeah.

Yeah, it's by Stacey Quarterie and it's just called Alice. Alice Roosevelt Longworth from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker. I'm not, I mean, there's too many spoilers. Like, I can't, I can't even tell you all of the fun things in the book. But this woman is a B-I-T-C-H in the best way. All right. Well, it sounds like that book is worth our time. A real baddie, as the kids might say.

For all those easily offended people listening to this podcast, you can't bell well i just because it calls the mind a story about my mom that was published in the in people magazine in a profile her that she was fired from the linda johnson white house for telling the joke to the wrong person how do you tell uh lucy uh johnson the dog you know he had two daughters lucy and linda and his how do you tell lucy apart from linda and my mom's answer saying it's the wrong person was Lucy's the tall, ugly one, and Linda's the short, ugly one. Jesus. And so she was let go.

So I think she was let go. Yeah. Her services were no longer required in the Johnson White House. All right. Well, thank you, Jonah, Sarah, and Kevin for joining us on the roundtable. Thank you, listeners, for joining us this week as well. If you have a thought or want to share a comment or question about what? what you heard on this podcast, email us at Roundtable at thedispatch.com. Thanks for joining us.

We'll talk to you next time. Thank you.