The Dispatch Podcast - Trump Can't Bomb That, Can He? | Roundtable

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

Join newly minted Dispatch contributor Megan McArdle as she joins Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French to discuss the Trump administration’s strikes against alleged drug runners in Latin America, the confusing messaging over Russia and Ukraine in the space of one week, and the freak out over the East Wing remodel. The Agenda:—Some good news and bad news—Breaking down Article II—Reading the Trump tea leaves on the Russia-Ukraine conflict—White House East Wing remodel and billionaire pals—Meaty discussion about meat and beyond Show Notes:—War on the Rocks podcast—Ukraine: The Latest podcast from The Telegraph—Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany 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 access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you're with Amex Platinum, you get access to exclusive dining experiences and an annual travel credit. So the best tapas in town might be in a new town altogether. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at Amex.ca. This episode is brought to you by Peloton. A new era of fitness is here.

Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ, built for breakthroughs with personalized workout plans, real-time insights, and endless ways to move. Lift with confidence, while Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects form, and tracks your progress. Let yourself run, lift, flow, and go. Explore the new Peloton cross-training tread plus at OnePeloton.C.A. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's show, we will discuss the Trump administration targeting of boats of alleged drug runners in Latin America. Is it justified? Is it legal? Also, a 360 on Russia and Ukraine in the space of one week. Who's winning the war and whose side is the United States on? And the freak out over the East Wing

remodel, a cause for outrage or much ado about nothing. And finally, and not worth your time, a meaty discussion about meat and beyond. But before we get started today, we have a big announcement. Two big announcements, really. I think of them as a classic good news, bad news scenario. So I'll start with the good news. Megan McArdle is now a dispatch contributor. We know that this will bring joy. Yes.

This has been a long time coming, a long conversation, courtship, we might call it. We know that many of the people listening are going to be overjoyed because you've been sending us messages in the comments. and emails for many, many months asking for exactly this. I should just be clear, I and everyone here can attest to it. I've been standing outside of Megan's Place in Washington, D.C. with a boombox over my head, begging her to join the dispatch for a really long time. And that's why it took so long because she found that super creepy. It was really creepy.

I kept sending her eating. What is this stalker dude doing here? I was playing speeches by Milton Freeman, not in your eyes, but anyway, we are very happy about it. So, Megan will remain full-time with The Washington Post, of course, but she'll be here with us most weeks, and we'll also be contributing some long-form reported pieces to the dispatch. So welcome, Megan. It's been a long time coming, and we are thrilled to have you. Thank you. I am super thrilled, very excited. The dispatch has long been near and dear to my heart. And I'm super excited to join the project and the dispod as a regular. I even got access to Slack, which has been incredibly exciting for me. The perks are endless, honestly. I'm just hoping that the hazing is not too strenuous. I am an elderly lady. Yeah, some discussion of making you.

We're a cheesehead, but that was fake news. We will not make you do anything. Any hazing that we do will take place on the podcast so that our listeners can have the benefit of listening to it. And speaking of hazing in a different spelling, we should probably get to the bad news. The bad news. Yeah. Yeah, the bad news is, well, the most perceptive of our listeners will have noticed probably a while

ago that I'm not Sarah Isker. And as we told you several months ago, after the dispatcher, you. his acquisition of SCOTUS blog, Sarah's spending more of her time on legal coverage in the courts and on some podcast called Advisory Opinions. I think David appears there as a guest on occasion, I'm reliably told. So I've been helping out here doing my best as the guest host of this podcast. And after six years of Jonah whining that I'm not doing enough on the editorial side of the dispatch, I've agreed to step into the host role here permanently, if only just to shut him up about that. I don't think it'll probably work, but we'll try. So I do realize that this news

probably comes as a disappointment to many of the listeners, also at least one of the guests here today. But Sarah will be joining us from time to time as we twist her arm. And as noted, you have Megan to look forward to on the regular, so I hope that more than makes up for my role here in this seat. Time will tell. Yeah, time will tell. I'm sure you're going to take it seriously. It's a lot of burden to put on Megan to compensate for your deficiencies,

but I think she's up to it. You've been badgering me to do something like this for six years, and now that I'm doing it, you're complaining that I'm doing it. I've been badgering you to do something. Sort of perfect. All right. Let's jump into the news this week. A lot of it to get to. David, I want to start with you. You and I have had a couple of conversations about this offline, but very interested to get your thoughts. For several weeks now, we have seen the Trump administration authorizing blowing up boats in Latin America. The allegation is that these are drug running boats, despite the fact that they're not very close to the United States. States to our shores here. And Donald Trump has justified destroying of these boats and the

killing of the people in them by claiming that for every boat that's destroyed, 25,000 lives will be saved here in the United States. That's a dubious claim. It's insane. I wonder what you think more broadly of what the administration is doing here and putting on your lawyer hat, is this legal? Let me put it this way, Steve. I haven't seen anything close to an argument that's remotely persuasive that this is legal. You know, look, the constitutional structure is pretty clear. Congress declares war, the president's commander-in-chief. And over time, though, that constitutional structure, especially in the last, you know, 40 to 50 years, has been mainly observed in the breach. But so the last, you know, major military conflict conducted with congressional

approval was the Iraq invasion in 2003. When Bush's big military operations kicked off both of them, both Afghanistan and Iraq, were authorized by Congress. Since then, we've seen an awful lot of military action, and some of it has been subsumed under the authorizations for use of force, in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are broad. Sometimes that's been stretched to its limits. Sometimes the use of force has been justified under previously. Sometimes use of force has been justified under things like a UN Security Council resolution in the Korean War, a Gulf of Tonkin resolution in the Vietnam War, NATO actions in the Baltics.

I mean, I'm sorry, the Balkans. There's usually been at least some sort of hook where there has been either a congressional approval or the action is related to a congressional approval or treaty obligation or you name it. But in this circumstance, you can't point to anything like that, just nothing. There's no congressional authorization. There's no UN Security Council. There's no treaty obligation. This is just the president saying.

I get to strike. And even the designating the statute that allows the president through the state department to designate terrorist organizations does not include an authorization for use of force if you designate a terrorist organization. The reason for this is pretty obvious, Congress didn't want to delegate all of its war declaring authority to the president through a terrorist designation process. And then people will say, okay, okay, but there's inherent article to self-defense power.

And this is where geography comes into play, Steve. Even if the argument was, well, wait a minute, okay, the president can certainly authorize an interception and interdiction in the sense of stopping the boat, seizing the boat, seizing the people, seizing whatever's on the boat, including perhaps drugs, the article to power is typically, this sort of raw latent article two power is typically related to imminent self-defense is sort of the way to think about that, that, you know, FDR did not have to wait for Congress to defend against the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And if he had seen the Japanese fleet, you know, sailing into launch, it could have done something to preempt that

attack. I mean, but these are speedboats, in some cases, more than a thousand mile. I mean, they can't even, these boats by themselves can't even reach our shore. So there's nothing imminent going on here. So that's a very long way of saying, saying, I can't see a shred of legal justification here. I mean, I, and if you play this out and you say that the president can do this, you start to ask, who can't he kill if he makes these kinds of determinations? Like, where's the line here? Who can't he declare a terrorist and drone or airstrike or you name it?

And so this is, I think this is one of those moments that is not getting sufficient attention because of all of the other moments. but it's very important. Megan, let me turn to you with that question that David asks. Who can't he kill? What's the limiting principle here if the president can do this? I mean, I don't think there is a limiting principle. And I would just, like, step back and point out

that the United States experienced 77,000 fentanyl overdoses in the last year. So if each of these boat explosions is preventing 25,000 deaths, He is taking care of fentanyl for the next year, and he can stop now. But look, this is the administration doing what it is doing on so many fronts, which is testing, testing, testing, kind of daring people to sue them, exploiting loopholes where it is hard to sue because who has standing to sue or who is going to sue, is Congress going to sue him to reassert its authority? I don't think so, at least not until Democrats control it. And that is, there is, like, asking what the Trump administration's legal authority is, is like asking what a toddler's legal authority is. They don't think that way.

You know, the Trump is in many different areas, as Megan suggests, sort of governed by emergency. And that's his case here. But another striking thing about this is that we've seen these attacks. unfold over the past several weeks, the administration has claimed again and again and again that these are drug runners, that they contribute to, you know, that they're poisoning America's youth, that these drugs are destined for the United States. And yet, when reporters have asked them to substantiate that in any way, there's basically just a shrug of the shoulders. They're not really even pretending to offer evidence to back up those claims.

We can debate whether if they offered such evidence, it would even matter, I think, for the reasons that David and Megan suggests. But they haven't even pretended to offer evidence. Shouldn't this be more alarming? I mean, I feel like I ask a question almost every week at this point, but shouldn't this be more alarming? I mean, we should want to see evidence of what they're claiming, no? Of course we should. And just very quickly on the live saved thing that the administration used, remember Pam Bondi, when they had some fentanyl interseptain. said that Donald Trump

had saved the lives of something like 300 million Americans and it's funny it hadn't occurred to me because I mean I've made fun of that a lot but it hadn't occurred to me until I was listening to Megan like if I were with the NRA

I would very quietly start saying hey you may want to stop using this logic because the underlying logic is they take the amount of a deadly dose they take the amount of fentanyl interject captured and they say okay if you if a normal person took this uncut how many people would it kill right which is very different to how it's actually used and deployed yes people over OD from fentanyl all the time but the fact is is that a lot of people have tolerance they cut the fentanyl down they don't deliberately kill themselves taking a poison as it were and if you use the logic that Bondi and this administration use about fentanyl for guns then every single gun you know that every single bullet you intercede stopped a murder and that is not a great argument for the NRA to like for people who support second amendment

rights to think it is ipso facto true that every bullet you stop stops the unjust murder of an innocent person and so in the same way that every packet of every gram of fentany you stop, stop someone from killing themselves. It just doesn't work that way. Anyway, should we be more alarmed? Of course, we should be more alarmed, but, like, you got to get through the day. And I am increasingly, I know I'm back on my hobby horse about this, but like, I think one of the core problems we've got, I wrote about this last week, is we've convinced ourselves

that the Constitution is a legal document. No offense to David, but it is not primarily a legal document. It is a governing document. it is a it obviously lawyers need to pay attention to it particularly because it plays itself out in court and because it mostly plays itself out in court we talk about it as if it's a purely legal document but before it's a legal document it is an architectural document about how our system is designed and organized and the roles that institutions play and it turns out that it's a political document i don't mean like in a partisan way i mean like it's about our politics and if you if you if you we did i don't think we appreciated the degree to which congress is more of a bulwark against constitutional malfeasance infractions overstepping than the supreme court in many ways because we think it's the supreme court's job and that's what the supreme court does is it's it opines on the constitutionality of things but if congress just sits on its hands there's really

nothing there's nothing else in our system that can stop the presidency from taking on unconstitutional powers, illegal, do illegal things, because a lot of these things are not going to be justiciable. It's certainly not on an expedient time frame. And so it turns out the president, if Congress doesn't have a problem with it, and the public doesn't have a problem with it,

which helps Congress not to have a problem with it. But if Congress doesn't object, the president can go around and kill pretty much anybody who wants, for a while at least. And that's sort of where we are. the only place I can try and steal man what the Trump administration is doing is I was reading recently about how the global narcotics trade has really learned from Walmart and it now does a lot of supply chain management in ways that it didn't do before and so basically there are an enormous number of middlemen and there are an enormous number of segments in the global supply chain for narcotics where the people carry it aren't part of the same aren't part of the producers and they're not part of the retail part or they're middlemen and disrupting that there's some logic to it and all that i just don't think

it fits the arguments that they're talking about because all their arguments seem to be pretextual um and to be honest we don't even know if this stuff was coming to america um you know the the biggest most lucrative market right now for cocaine is is europe And the prices for drugs in Hong Kong and Australia are 10 times almost what they are in the United States. So like global supply chains are going to global supply chain. And pretending like this is all from the script from Miami Vice in 1982 just isn't enough. So, Jonah, the Pam Bondi numbers to be precise, because we don't want to exaggerate here, she originally said 119 million people saved by fentanyl.

By one intercession of fentanyl. Yeah. And then a short time later, increased her number to 258 million. So it wasn't the 300 million you're being unfair to her by exaggerating her actual claim. David, back to you, where does this go? We've seen reporting from the New York Times and others over the past week about a presidential finding that the administration may use U.S. troops on land in Venezuela, potentially elsewhere in Latin America. Is this about, should we take the president's claims that this is about

fentanyl and stopping fentanyl or cocaine? I mean, there isn't a lot of fentanyl that comes from Venezuela. It's primarily cocaine. It's different, just sort of mixing the arguments there. How much should we take his claims at face value that this is really about stopping drugs? And how much is this about the possibility of regime change in Venezuela? Well, you know, I don't think we know yet. I mean, the military buildup that exists in the Caribbean is enough to scare Maduro, but not enough remotely to seal off the U.S. southern coasts. I mean, so what are we doing here?

Are you doing sporadic attacks on drug boats that are 1,000, 2,000 miles away from American shores of drugs that we have no idea if they're intended for America to begin with and really don't have necessarily the best intelligence on who's actually on the boat? I mean, this is a, you know, I've actually been involved in approving airstrikes. And if you're ever going to sit there and say, oh, we have absolute, absolute airtight intelligence. Now, on any given single strike, maybe, but as a practice, it's a lot shakier. I mean, this whole thing is a lot shakier, and that's one of the reasons why you go to Congress. Right.

We saw this past week, or I think I guess it was a little bit more than a week ago, the resignation of Southcom commander, Admiral Alman Holsey, who had been in the job. It's typically a three-year job. he'd been in the job for not quite a year. It was an unusual resignation, unusual timing, and it led to speculation that he, I mean, there was reporting from the New York Times and others that he had raised questions and concerns about the authorization of these strikes. I guess if you have any thoughts on his resignation, I'd love to hear him.

But also, is the case that people who are involved in these strikes, either in authorizing them and carrying them out, could face legal jeopardy if, as you said earlier, there isn't justification for doing what they're doing. It's not legal. Yeah, this is a great question. I'm getting asked this question a lot because some people are saying, okay, well, wait a minute,

if this is illegal, are the pilots in legal jeopardy? Yeah. Do the pilots, for example, let's just presume for a moment that these are air strikes, not drone strikes, or drone operators, pilots, are they legally liable? do they have an obligation under the UCMJ to refuse this order? For example, this is something that other people have raised.

Who has, because you're not supposed to follow illegal orders? I mean, this is sort of a top-line legal principle. So let me talk a little bit about how this works in real life. That individual soldiers, individual pilots, drone operators, are not tasked with knowing American constitutional law. So if they receive an order from a commander that at least on its face seems lawful, for example, a commander says, according to a presidential finding, or we are acting under a presidential finding, it is not the obligation of everybody up and down the chain to do their own independent legal review of this. This would be chaotic, right?

So, no, you're entitled to rely to at least some degree or almost entirely on the assessment of your commander. Now, as you go further and further up the chain, then some of these assessments start to change. So, for example, if you are actually, say, Socom commander, you are actually, say, a three-star general, then what if you do have objections, exactly what happened, he did exactly what he should have done, which is resign. And then part two of that should be, if he believes he was given an illegal order, object, resign, and then publicly state why. That I think that that should be the one, two, three.

Which he has not yet done. Not yet done that. He has not yet done that. We should be clear. I want to be very clear about this. He has not said that he resigned because he thought that these orders were illegal or anything, but there has been reporting that he had these concerns, that he raised the concerns inside the Pentagon, and that either the, you know, the fact that he was challenging the White

House, challenging the president. was unappreciated and he was nudged out or gently asked to leave, or he made a determination on his own, I don't want to be a part of this. We don't know. I suspect we'll get more reporting on that in the coming weeks. But if he were to have left, I think it would make sense for him to explain why at some point. Yeah. No, and that's what, you know, again, I'm glad you said that we don't know his reasons. But if the reasons are, as has, you know, some have reported, including the times, then I think that one, two, three, object, resign, state your reasons is the proper course of action. Now, one caveat to what I said about being able to rely sort of on orders as a

default, there are certain lines that are so bright, and this is something that you train soldiers, JAG officers, train soldiers. So let's say you capture a prisoner and you're a corporal and your platoon leader says shoot the prisoner. Well, that would be one where you would have to say no, or torture this prisoner, that would be one where you would have to say no, but it would have to be so far over this very bright line. Otherwise, the military just can't work. I mean, you know, what do you do? Issue an order and a legal brief at the same time to sort of explain. Now, that's what you do at the upper, upper, upper echelons. Orders are accompanied by authorities, legal authorities, granting the, you know, arguing for the right to strike.

But so, yeah, the pilots themselves are not really in legal jeopardy. You know, down the line, down the chain of command, there would be, the higher up you go in the chain of command, the greater there is for need for concern down the line. But I'll tell you one thing I'm worried about, Steve. I'm worried about a use of the pardon power at a scale that will blow our mind. at the end of this administration, just blow our minds to create a scenario where if you were working with Trump, it was a law, a federal law free zone, a completely federal law free zone. And that's one thing that I'm worried about.

And I also think that people are counting on it. Part of the way in which people are conducting themselves, they're counting on it being, you know, pardoned or some degree of legal immunity. Yeah. These conversations have been taking place inside the Pentagon as long as, this has been contemplated, and it's certainly the case that as we've seen more public reporting and more public criticism of what the administration is doing here in suggestions, that it might not be legal, the frequency and intensity of these conversations inside the Pentagon, I think,

has picked up. Megan, I want to end with a question to you, one of the things that, you know, sort of my more libertarian-minded friends liked about Donald Trump, even if they didn't, you know, like all the details or didn't like him on character rounds. they liked that he ran in 2016 saying he was going to end these forever wars. You know, he was going to end the Bush era of military adventurism. He accused Barack Obama of getting us involved in things that we shouldn't have been involved in. We were going to return America's focus inward. And, you know, this was the end of sort of America adventurism abroad.

How does this fit in that? That would certainly seem to contradict the way that he ran in 2016. and the way that he ran again in 2024. And what's your sense of whether that often expressed view of Trump, that he opposes Americans being involved everywhere, has old-school neo-isolationist or non-interventionist views, is an articulation of a principle that he holds? Is that a view that, in your sense, he holds deeply?

Or is this just sort of ad hoc foreign policy? Yeah, I always loved this when I would talk to people about Trump, you know, in the 2016 election. And they'd be like, Trump was against the Iraq war. It's like he wasn't against the Iraq war. He's against losing wars. And like, look, fair also against losing wars. He was also, I mean, just as a factual matter, he was before the Iraq war in favor of the Iraq war. We should be very clear about that.

Yeah, no, he was against it when it turned bad. Exactly. Exactly. You know, and like hindsight, 2020, this is, this is not, this is not a major achievement to have been opposed to a war that did not go well. This is for Trump the perfect sort of action, right? Like, maybe it's illegal, but it's not like he cares about that. And it's very unlikely that a Venezuelan gunboat is going to kick the butt of a, you know, plane or a drone that is dropping munitions. on it. And so in this sense, I think it's like totally consistent with his idea of what

American power is, which is that, you know, we don't have any consistent principle. What we do is just occasionally punch people who are smaller than us and can't punch back. Yeah, Jonah, actual last question on this topic to you. The politics of this, I mean, this is one of those areas where it's just setting aside all of the things that we've been talking about to this point, mostly the legal questions. And thinking about the politics, of this, you know, there's this, I think, oversimplified view of what Trump is doing, but not inaccurate, that sort of people like us, maybe some Democrats, constitutional lawyers, are so focused on these process issues. You know, we're obsessed with process. We care about, you know,

article two. We care about the powers of the presidency, the legality of this stuff. But really, the politics of this work entirely in Trump's favor. Because he's, he's going out. He's telling us that these are bad guys. Americans have a sense that there's a drug problem in the United States. Certainly Trump has done his best to make that argument. And he's going out and solving a problem that's been a long problem that other presidents haven't solved. Does this work to his advantage because that's the sense of sort of the American voter? For now, I think he does. I mean, you know, one of the, we talk about this a bunch of times on here that Americans can be really supportive of a position. And then one,

real event full of symbolism pisses them off and they turn on a dime, you know, like everyone wanted out of the Middle East until ISIS cut the heads off of two Americans. And then they're like, oh no, it's go time. Right. And like, Americans can turn on a dime about this kind of stuff. I would have liked it if Americans got a little more pissed when we blew up a fishing boat, you know, but that doesn't mean that this is permanently sustainable. But I agree with you, the act of the deed, right? The, the, the, the, the, you, Trump forces these things. things where he forces people to say, he makes it easy for Trump and his supporters to say, oh, so you're for crime? Oh, so you're for drug smuggling? Right. Right. And it's very

annoying. And, um, but it's, it's pretty effective, particularly for a lot, big chunk of the country that is, that just wants the broad brushstrokes of this. The more interesting politics to me, we don't have time to weigh too deeply into it, is what Rubio is up to. Because Marco Rubio is, is basically the czar of the Americas, as far as I can tell. And he is trying to figure out how to do regime change in Venezuela, which I think the right generally, I mean, like I find it very ironic. The number of people who told me I was for forever wars for being in favor of regime change,

and then how I was a perfidious bagel-snarfing, war-mongering neocon, because I was in favor of regime change, are now, like, kind of psyched about regime change for Venezuela. But, you know, whether this plays into Rubio's long-term presidential ambitions, which I think we can all agree, when in doubt, assume he still has them, or whether this has to do with his status in Florida politics, which is a big part of his worldview, right? I mean, like, toppling Maduro for Venezuelans and Cubans in Florida is a no-lose proposition. It's awesome. They love that stuff. And the fact that he has been given so much free reign to do this stuff in South America

or central in South America is just very interesting. And I don't think people have focused on it as much as they should have. No, and I'm glad you brought that up. I will share a little bit of reporting, just to shock Jonah, even more. I had done some reporting last summer before summer of 2024 in support of a profile of Marco Rubio when he was one of the three finalists potentially to be Donald Trump's running mate and was talking about sort of how it was that Rubio went from being, you know, a sort of diehard never Trumper who had these, you know, public convulsions of moral. squeamishness about supporting Trump and who Trump was and letting Trump take over the Republican Party to being, you know, an enthusiastic sort of MAGA-style Trump supporter. And one of those moments came in 2016, 2017, when Trump and Rubio met, I believe the meeting took place at the

Republican National Committee. They had a big discussion about issues of importance to each them and Rubio raised sort of central South America as an area that he was particularly interested in. And Trump, in effect, told Rubio back when Rubio was a senator, hey, I'm going to see, if you want to make that policy for me, great, you can have it. You do that policymaking. And Rubio became this huge player as a senator in shaping the Trump administration's first term policy with respect to Latin America. And I think what we're seeing here is more a continuation of Rubio playing that outsized role now as Secretary of State, where he could argue that he should have that role, of what happened in Trump's first term. But it's an important

question. And, you know, Rubio has come to embrace Trump's views of American foreign policy. I mean, he's the Secretary of State more broadly. And he's been an outspoken proponent of, say, Trump's approach to Russia, which we're going to talk about next. But this seems to be be more in line with the Rubio, the pre-2016 Rubio and the Rubio that we saw back then. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. If you're still overpaying for wireless, it's time to say yes to saying no. At Mint Mobile, their favorite word is no, no contracts, no monthly bills, no overages,

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about the reliability of the New Testament, the reality of life after death, and the possibility of reincarnation. Search for the remnant in your podcast app and hit the follow button. Now let's jump back into our conversation. I do want to turn to Russia for our second topic. I will do my best to summarize what we've seen over the past week or 10 days from the administration with respect to Russia's war on Ukraine. There was a much anticipated meeting between Donald Trump and Voldemir Zelensky, scheduled for this time last week. And Zelensky was going to be coming to the White House wearing a suit or something close to a suit to please Donald Trump after the disastrous meeting in February and all of the hubbub about his attire. And he was going to be asking

for tomahawk missiles, which would allow Ukraine to strike deeper inside of Russia. There was some optimism from Europe that Trump was going to green light this. And Trump, as we have discussed here, had done, at least rhetorically, what looked like a pretty significant turn, suggesting that Ukraine could win the war that Russia wasn't doing as well on the ground. and seeming to take Ukraine side and sharing public frustrations with Vladimir Putin. So that all ended the day that Zelensky was scheduled to come to the White House because Putin initiated a call with Trump in which he made his case again. And as a result, Trump turned toward the Putin side of the argument.

Apparently had a very contentious meeting with Zelensky at the White House. And he merged from that denying Zelensky's request for Tom. and suggesting that Russia was going to win the war, and Zelensky didn't have many cards. Then again, over just the last 24-48 hours, we've seen Treasury Secretary Scott Besson announced additional sanctions on Russian oil and Donald Trump's returning, I guess, tiptoeing back to something that could be read as critical comments on Vladimir. Putin. David, I'll start with you. Can you make sense of what we've seen over the past 10 days? Where are we now? Yeah, right before the Trump administration started, right as it was starting,

I talked to somebody who's been, you know, one of the closest analyst observers of the Russia-Ukraine conflict from the beginning. When I say from the beginning, I'm not talking 2022. I'm talking well before that, you know, 2014 and before. And that person said something that had, I've thought about probably once a week since and that is really borne out. And he says that Donald Trump is going to enter office and he's going to be experiencing two things. One is a very different Vladimir Putin than the Vladimir Putin he dealt with between

2017 and 2021. Vladimir Putin, who at the time of the conversation had hundreds of thousands of casualties, I lost thousands of tanks, armored personnel carriers, et cetera. This is a guy who at this point is bathed in blood and utterly committed to this grinding war. And he's going to be interacting with the Ukrainian government that's very used to dealing with authoritarian's. And so this Ukrainian diplomacy directed at – don't be surprised if Ukrainian diplomacy directed at Trump is effective. because they're used to dealing with kind of strong man type figures. And that has really borne out since.

Time and time again, Trump goes to Putin thinking that he's going to do something, that he's got an idea, he's got a deal, he's got something. And time and time again, Putin just slams the door in his face, gives him these interminable lectures about medieval history or whatever Putin does. And so he's just slamming the door in his face. Whereas with Ukraine, yeah, there have been these. really rocky moments, one where, you know, it appeared that J.D. Vance just wanted to blow up a meeting. And Zelensky obviously was caught off guard and a lot of bad things ensued from

that. But as a general matter, the Ukrainians have played this pretty darn well. And so they're in, while they're not in the position they should be with unrestrained American support, unbroken American support, which would put them in a lot better position. They're not in as bad a position. But one thing that I would caution, about don't get fixated on shiny objects like tomahawk missiles okay tomahawk missiles are not going to turn the tie to this war they are not a super weapon and in fact even if you agree to send tomahawks to ukraine there it's very unclear how they're going to launch them i mean these are these are weapons that are usually launched from shipborne platforms from airborne platforms that are

Ukraine doesn't have any of those that can launch it. I mean, this would be a weapon for the next iteration of the war. Just like Zelensky just signed a deal to buy more than 100 sob gripen fighters from Sweden. Wonderful move, amazing move. If he can get 150 gripenes, that would deter the next war. But it's not going to do much for this war right now. And so at this point, we welcome. the Trump pivot away from Putin? The problem is he's been just so erratic. But every time he tries

to turn back to Putin, Putin slams a door in his face again. So how many more times is Trump going to allow Putin to do this before he really settles in and realizes the only way to end this war? The only way to secure the ceasefire that everyone on our side wants here is to make it to where Putin is hitting his head against a brick wall every time he tries an offensive. in Ukraine. And that's going to be the only thing. That's going to be the only thing that gets through to Putin. Yeah, Megan, I think David's point is well taken on the question of Tom Oxen, how much they could actually change the calculus or change the dynamics in the actual fighting of the war. I think European leaders were looking at to this meeting and that request,

specifically almost as more of a sign of whether Trump's turn towards a sort of more Ukraine-friendly the policy position was real or wasn't. And now it seems that they're, they don't know what to believe. The head of NATO sort of scrambled to come to the United States, to meet with Trump, to kind of try to pull him away from this, you know, once again, turn towards Vladimir Putin. Europe has announced additional sanctions sort of on top of the U.S. sanctions on Russian oil. Do you have a sense of where this stands or is this, I mean, maybe are we just over-analyzing this?

And the reality is whoever Donald Trump talks to last is the one who is able to change his mind on this. Yeah, I mean, look, Trump has the attention span of a meth-addled gnat, and that has been true for the entirety of his presidency. Right, I mean, one of my favorite things, although not really one of my favorite things in the sense that I think this was good.

But it was certainly mortently amusing was that in the first Trump administration, his staffers, rather than going to the president and saying, Mr. President, we have an idea. That didn't work. So instead, what they would do is they would go to Fox News and try to get their idea onto Fox and Friends.

And then he could come to them and be like, I saw this thing. And they would be like, that's a great idea, Mr. President. let's do that. I'll get right on that, right? And this is a crazy way to run an administration, but it is just that is who Trump is as a president. And so, like, I think it's bad, right? It's really bad that the United States cannot at this point make credible commitment. Because at any moment, the Trumpian whim might sweep away whatever he said last week, last month,

last year. And I think this is incredibly bad for American foreign policy. It's bad on the domestic side, too. You're seeing this with the tariffs where things keep changing all the time. And on the one hand, you know, GM basically had a stock

bump because they said, well, the tariffs didn't hit us as hard as we thought because they changed a bunch of them. And like, good on you for not having ruinous tariffs or for making them slightly less ruinous. But the policy uncertainty is actually in some ways worse. Like, I've talked to manufacturers who were like, look, all I want to do is know what my costs are.

If you tell me what my costs are going to be, I can plan. If my costs change every two weeks, I can't. I can't make investments. I can't do deals with vendors. I can't give prices to customers because I have no idea. And that aspect of Trump is certainly one of the worst aspects of his presidency. And I think that that is just something that the world is going to have to deal with, because I don't think he's going to change at the age of 80.

Yeah, Jonah, one of our, the podcasts that we both listen to and like quite a bit is the Telegraphs, Ukraine, the latest podcast. If you've been listening to that, I recommend it to anybody who's interested in these issues. If you've been listening to that podcast for as long as we have, you'll know that a constant theme is Trump is unpredictable. We can't rely on Trump. You're a past step up. And there are these sort of plaintive cries by the whole.

hosts, say, come, see, this is yet another example. And if you listen to the podcast over the past few days, they're almost sort of at wits end about this. Are they right? And what would that look like if Europe steps up at this point? Yeah, so it's a good question. Part of the problem is that Europe, Megan's better suited to go into some of the details on this, but Europe's economy is not designed at this point is not prepared to do what europe should be doing it's just they don't have the industrial capacity they don't have the flexibility they don't have the just the basic labor laws that would allow it to do what a what taking all of this seriously would would mean and you know this is this has been a problem for europe forever um where they are the you know they're the

perfect sort of illustration of the if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail if you really don't have the ability to seriously project military force then of course everything's a diplomatic problem because diplomacy is the only tool you've got and and there are an enormous number of European leaders who are really struggling to come to grips with what the full consequences of a more go-it-alone strategy is and then you have the diplomats saying oh you can wait out Trump. Oh, we figured out how to sweet talk him, just flatter him a bunch. We can get him back on side, yada, yada, yada. And that's worked from time to time. The problem is Putin figured that out first. So he can always talk them back onto his side. And I'm really glad, like,

I remember a month ago when we talked, we did a, we did Trump's U-turn on Ukraine. And I was like, well, you know, until this starts sending weapons and stuff, we shouldn't count on any of it. And, you know, I was right. I do think that the, the, I disagree slightly with David about the tomahawks. I agree they're not the silver bullet that would end anything. The Russians are clearly very concerned about giving Ukraine tomahawks. So just merely giving Ukraine tomahawks would send, first of all, a powerful diplomatic and psychological message, even if they couldn't get them online soon.

And second, Putin's whole. strategy. I mean, I know you read the thing in the economist, you know, about how they basically only took for this massive summer offensive that may have cost a quarter million lives and they gained like 0.4% more territory. Like, if your strategy is to wait out Ukraine and do this long game war of attrition and you know that by second quarter, 26, the Ukrainians are going to be able to stand up some tomahawk launchers somewhere like that you know it might cause you to step up your effort but it also might cause you to start looking for the exit ramp and um so i do think diplomatically and and psychologically they're more of a game changer in much the same way that like a lot of critics

probably even us probably even you were saying how if we gave them jets remember when biden was not we're not going to give them jets we're not going to give them jets at the beginning of this thing the technical criticisms about well there's only so much you can do with jets and or jets alone were all absolutely correct but the signal it would send that the west was actually backing Ukraine to the help and doing whatever it takes would have been useful in its own right and so I think it would have been better if Trump had said yes to tomahogs and that's that's the thing that I thought maybe I was wrong about or maybe that maybe the people who thought Trump was never going to

go against Putin we're wrong about was that I thought it's possible at least that he learned the lesson. Remember last week, two weeks ago, David was making this point. I made this point a bunch of times about how you cannot talk about whatever credit you want to give Donald Trump about Israel until you first give credit to the IDF

for actually changing the facts on the ground and winning some monumental frigging military successes, right? Because military success on the ground yields diplomatic opportunities. And I think Trump the way he talks about Israel, the way he talks about the use of Israel forces,

the way he talks about we versus they when he talks about Israel. I thought he can maybe, maybe he's internalized the fact that like shows of strength first, diplomacy second works and that maybe he could make, he could see Ukraine through the same prism

as like Ukraine was like his European Israel, was going to do his bidding to win this war and all this kind of stuff. And it felt like it for about a week like that was the way he was going. And then Putin calls him and says, you're the schmupy face. And he says, no, you're the schmupy face. And everything goes back to the status quo ante.

You know, real fast on the Tomahawk question, I completely want Ukraine to have Tomahawk missiles. I know you do. I know you do. Yeah, the issue is you have two things going at once. If you talk to Ukrainians, they're fighting this war, and they have an eye on the next one. a lot of them think there's going to be three wars of Ukrainian independence. War number one started in 2014, war number two started in 2022.

It's going to end at some point, but Russian ambitions won't end until Ukraine is so strong that Russia realizes it's just futile. And that's where your Gripen purchase comes in. That's where your tomahawks come in. They could be of some limited utility right away. but there is an interesting point. I would encourage, as long as we're throwing out podcast recommendations, I would very much recommend the Russia contingency,

which is Michael Kaufman's podcast, originally from the War on the Rocks crew. And he's just really good because he's a bleak realist. And so when he is saying, okay, I have a glimmer of optimism, you can have a glimmer of optimism. But he's also been very ahead of the curve on predicting a lot of Ukraine's troubles. And one of the things that he said that was very interesting about the Tomahawks, he said, keep in perspective, they're a very powerful weapon. But we fired 60-60 at one single Syrian air base when we went during the first Trump administration

or when Trump was doing the strikes against chemical weapons and did not destroy the airbase. Okay. So these weapons are powerful. They're not as powerful as sort of popular imagination would have them. I know, but they are, they would be very useful. I mean, I think you'd agree. They'd be very useful for disrupting an energy system that is already in such disarray, thanks to what Ukraine's already done, that there are finally gas lines in Moscow.

And gas lines in Moscow is a massive political problem for Putin. And a few more tomahawks could hit some, you know, oil refineries and installations someplace else. Take them offline for a week. that's a big deal when you're talking about working at overcapacity already. But there was another thing here that the Tomahawks imply that not enough people are talking about, which is you don't give Tomahawks without unlocking long-range targeting data. So some of the issue has been that we have not supplied Ukraine with the necessary long-range targeting data because Ukraine doesn't have our long-range targeting capacity.

And so, along with time, if you're going to give somebody a weapon that has any very long range, as the Tomahawks do, they're going to be much less useful unless you're also unlocking a lot of the long-range targeting data, et cetera. They can't just use Google Maps? Yeah. Well, it's certainly to hit a fixed target like a refinery, you know, but there's a lot, a lot of military targets are mobile targets. They're only someplace temporarily, right? And so I think that there is a much larger kind of question lurking behind the scenes, which is this persistent question literally since the beginning of the war, and one of my chief critics of Biden was he kept holding back from Ukraine approvals and capacity to hit deeper and deeper into Russia. And it would only just be gradually meted out. We need total access. We need Ukraine to have access to all of our targeting data. with the exception of stuff that's dangerous to share with anybody. But there's a lot sort of behind the scenes, even beyond the tomahawks that we can be doing, I think, to help Ukraine in this moment.

I mean, one of the things that's been perplexing about Trump's approach to all of this is that we have not, even at those moments over the past 10 months, that Trump has seemed closest to the Putin position is that we have not pulled back or stopped our intelligence sharing. So I think it's fair to assume that if we had provided the Tomahawks, we would maybe share with an eye toward protecting sources and methods, how we obtained the information. We might be willing to share those long-range targeting issues, but Trump seems to, again, with this latest turn, seems to not be eager to do any of that, to do the hardware or the additional intelligence. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. What a run. This champ is picking up speed, but they found a lane. Monumental launch into the air. Absolutely incredible.

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From mental health and suicide prevention to prostate and testicular cancer research and early detection, Movember is tackling the biggest health issues facing men today. Join the movement and donate now at Movember.com. We're back. You're listening to The Dispatch Podcast. Let's jump in. I want to talk quickly about this hubbub about the East Wing and Trump's new ballroom this week, which has burst on the scene. This is something that had been discussed for months and months. Trump had been talking about it for a long time.

and now the demolition has started. And I think if you sort of survey the political landscape, you're seeing lots of hand-wringing, and I would say sort of overwrought reaction from sort of resistance world and lots of Democrats. Talking about this, at least is my impression, in sort of the same way that they talk about the targeting of boats. with the same level of outrage, which just as I read this, seems totally inconsinent to me. This is kind of crazy. You have presidents who make these kinds of changes all the time. Why is this the big deal?

I think the one thing that people have said that I'm a little more sympathetic is Trump had previously said he wasn't going to do this. He wasn't going to demolish the whole thing. He had said, yeah, we're going to make some changes. I'm going to do this ballroom. I'm going to pay for it. It's going to be next to the existing. east wing, but we're not really making fundamental changes. And it turns out like they're tearing

it all down and making fundamental changes. So the outrage, the extent that there is one, is that Trump sort of lied about it misled, and now he's doing all of these changes. But Megan, you've followed this. Am I, should I be more outraged in this case than I am? No. I think this is a classic Trumpian distraction where he does something that causes everyone to lose their minds. And then that has two effects. First of all, it means you're paying less attention to something else. Attention is a limited, is like a limited quantity. And the other thing is that it makes you look like a hysteric. Like you are just reflexively opposed to every single thing Trump does. So start with the fact that, like, it is really less than ideal that America,

the greatest superpower in the world, has to hold state dinners intense on the south lawn because we do not have a ballroom that has the capacity to hold it like more than a couple hundred people. And also the fact that this, he's not demolishing the White House, which is I think what a lot of people who don't know anything about the White House would kind of take from casual inspection of the coverage. He is demolishing the East Wing, which was built in 1942, to cover a presidential bunker. It was not, this is not some priceless historical artifact. that we can never recover, and most people aren't going to see it, right?

It is, like, it's part of the grounds, but it is not what most people think of when they think of the White House. Look, there are all sorts of minor criticisms that you can raise. The private fundraising, what was the quid pro quo there, the fact that, yes, indeed, he said he was not going to demolish it, and then he did. But a lot of the criticisms that are being raised are just silly. like look at these terrible photos like have you seen a renovation project

they don't look good when they're in the middle that's just kind of the nature of the beast and I think that there's this just this feels to me like a very first Trump administration story in the sense that like the resistance just kept hoping

this one was going to be the big one this one was going to be the one that took him down and also the sense that you had to flood the zone by reacting to every single thing he does and I think that's the opposite of true. You need to conserve your fire for things that matter. And fundamentally, look, maybe this thing's going to be ugly.

It would not surprise me. Maybe it's going to be oversized and it's going to look out of scale with the White House. But fundamentally, that just doesn't matter that much compared to all of the other stuff he's doing. And when you freak out about this, you send the message that, like, I am someone who freaks out,

when Trump sits down to breakfast. Because how dare he, Rice Krispies? Oatmeal would be a much healthier choice, right? Do you think Trump has Rice Krispies? I am betting sausage McMuffin with egg, not Rice Krispies. Maybe he seems like he might be a Captain Crunch guy, actually. I don't know why I think that. Because they're terrible?

Fair enough. I actually was not allowed to eat sugar cereal as a child. I had sugar cereal for the first. time when I was in college, and it was disgusting. And I told my mother that. She was like, yes, I won. But I used to look longingly at the boxes of, like, Frankenberry and Captain Crunch at other people's houses.

So I don't actually know from personal experience. I did not like Captain Crunch the one time I tried it. But, like, you have to, like, hold your fire, guys. Like, have a plan. Be strategic. Do not freak out about a ballroom that, like, People in both parties want, to be clear. This is not like the Biden administration did not want somewhere to put people other than, like, these giant tent cities when they had big dinners.

Everyone wants that. The average hotel can accommodate a massive state dinner better than the White House can. And that seems like a fairly reasonable problem to solve. I mean, Jonah Megan, I think, is being extraordinarily generous when she says it might be ugly. I mean, have you seen what Trump has done? I recall those pictures of the penthouse. I think it was the penthouse and Trump Tower, which had like lions and everything was gold.

And, you know, every time I see a picture of the Oval Office, the Gilded, new Gilded Oval Office, I'm reminded of going to post-war rock and walking through Saddam's palaces and seeing golden toilets and just gaudy as all get out, absolutely awful. but not that big of the deal. Yeah, so I'm directionally on Megan's side about this.

I have some, and I agree there are a lot of minor criticism who will make. I also think there's some medium ones. The first one is the lying, right, is saying he's not going to do X and then doing exactly that. Also, I get, there are all sorts of legal and various other sort of bureaucratic things, processes that he ignored, and he's allowed to ignore them, and I understand that, and yada, yada, yeah. But as a matter of historic preservation, I'm okay with tearing down the East Wing and putting in a ballroom. But there's a lot of stuff they're just throwing in dumpsters that should be preserved. That I'm actually kind of shocked Trump isn't auctioning off.

Like, you know, like, you know, mental work from the First Lady's office. You know, there's just like stuff that you could recreate in some libraries that in an order to do this in the most trollish way possible. they're just skipping all of that, which I just think is kind of weird, and if someone had pointed out to them that they could have made a buck off of this, maybe they would have. I also think that the messaging on it

is absolutely terrible. And I say this as a, just as pure punditry. I joked the other day on CNN that it reminded me of the onion headline, world's largest metaphor, hits iceberg. You've got this guy that, the great thing is the subtitle.

on that i called it up it's titanic representation of man's hubris sinks in north atlantic um no but the um the thing is like i i agree with making that this is one of these things where trump is trolling people but there's trolling that is like like okay so he's he posted a thing on social media of him in a fighter jet you know taking a dump on on americans protesting gross whatever but it basically basically stays in the world where people are like super online and all this kind of stuff. There are a lot of normie Americans who don't understand that it's not part of the White House, don't understand it's only from 1942, don't understand that Truman basically gutted the actual White House in its entirety in like 1948.

And all they hear is, all they see is the clips of Trump promising he's not going to do this and then doing it. And I think it is the perfect symbolism of the Bull and the China Shop thing that Trump goes for. and as a purely political matter, does it attract more people than it repels? Like, who is the person on the margins who didn't know a lot about this? And he's like, oh, yeah, tearing down the East Wing.

Now I'm on the Trump train, right? And so I just think they could have messaged this better. He actually has credibility with the American people about how he's a good construction guy. And instead, it's just like government shut down, Trump takes advantage, destroys part of the White House. That is the takeaway for a lot of people. And I don't think that's good politically for him.

And I actually don't think it's necessarily good for the country either. But on the broad brushstroke stuff, he's free to do it. It's fine. There'll be a lot of gold, a lot of gold lame, uncomfortable chairs. We'll have Kevin Williamson do a review. Oh, I can't wait for that one. That, please, please, please do that. David, is this a big deal or not a big deal?

I'm just going to be the process guy here for a second. I have zero objection to the idea of building a ballroom on White House grounds, zero, for all the reasons that Megan outlined. I have a lot of objections to a president just demolishing part of the White House unilaterally, that this is not actually their house. You know, if I live in, I have an apartment that I lease, I cannot go walking, knocking down walls, right? without getting the actual owner's approval.

So I have zero objection to this. What I would like to see is, and I'm going to sound like this is the most broken record thing ever, have it done through Congress. Appropriate the funds, have it done through Congress as a lasting change. There is a result of a deliberative process. It strikes me as untenable that you can have a president,

just walk in and on their own initiative, as long as they have enough billionaire friends, which every president is going to be loaded up with billionaire friends. Just that's part of the perks of the job. You get all the billionaire pals. But they just get to wreck the place, right? So I'm a process person. I have no objection to this.

Just can we actually do it in a deliberative manner in a way that reflects a process that would allow a next president to move in there thinking that they're moving into actually the people's house as opposed to Donald Trump's house? so yeah that's my objection my objection is not to demolishing the east wing it's not to adding a ballroom it is to Donald Trump doing this just completely on his own by himself initiating per you know semi-permanent change uh to the people's house without the people's input so not to get process guy to upend a jerry can of gasoline over himself and set himself

ablaze but there is a weird political serendipity here insofar as this story is kind of breaking through, the images are breaking through. Yeah. At the precise moment, there's this other story about Trump basically being the final say on whether the federal government is going to write him a check for $230 million. Yeah. Which turns out to be the same price tag as this ballroom thing. And I understand completely different tracks, different things.

Oh, the payment thing is much more of an outrage than the ballroom thing. Oh, by miles. but like they're going to be people like they're not messaging this well the association they're just going to hear the numbers and it's um it's not ideal well i did jonah just to give people a little background on that i mean we we contemplated including that i thought this was a rather trump focused set of topics today so i didn't want to add that one but i think we easily could have discussed that he's claiming that he's owed 230 million dollars because he was wrongfully prosecuted and that the just Justice Department owes him sort of back pay, or is that the proper understanding? It's not the right language, David, but that's basically what he's saying. Yeah, essentially what he's trying to do is something like the Stroke and Page lawsuit against the Justice Department, where they sued the Justice Department after, you know, the release of texts and everything like that.

And then the Biden administration entered into a pretty favorable settlement with them. So there was that sort of sue and settle element there into the stroken page. well, this is Trump taking that, not to the next level, but like 15 levels beyond that, sort of saying, I have a claim against the government, and then I'm going to settle my own claim against the government is essentially what he's doing, which again, if he does this, going back to Venezuela, what's to stop presidents in the future from making their claims against the government for personal enrichment? I mean, this is utterly, utterly absurd. But what's even more absurd, Steve, is that Jonah brought up an onion headline without bringing up the greatest onion headline of all time, which everyone knows is, Seagull with diarrhea, barely makes it to crowded beach in time.

There are some good ones. Not as many good onion headlines recently, but there are some absolute classic. That might be a good not worth your time for. sometime down the road. Last point I'll make on the East Wing thing before we move to the actual not worth your time this week. Tamara Keith of NPR pointed out the contradiction between what Trump had said about what he's doing

and what he's doing now and got sort of a recording from the way that Trump described this several months ago. And this is Donald Trump saying this. It won't interfere with the current building. I won't be. It'll be near it but not touching it and pays total respect to the existing building, which I'm the biggest fan of. Not just a fan of.

The biggest, the biggest, of course, right. Contrast that with what Trump said at an event last week to his donors about what was coming. Everything out there is coming down and we're replacing it with one of the most beautiful ballrooms that you've ever seen. So yeah, he very obviously lied about this. And, you know, I certainly don't want to minimize the lie. This is what he does more than just about anything else. So I have a problem with that even if I'm not. I don't share the outrage of some of my more resistancey friends. So for not worth your time this week, there's been a lot of meat in the news this week or meat adjacent news this week. The stock of beyond. meat, which is the meat alternative, had this tremendous run-up at the beginning of the week, rose something like 1,200 percent after a distribution deal with Walmart was announced. There was some speculation earlier, I guess some of these meme stock guys talked about what a value it was, and then it crashed back down to Earth, and it has one of the graphs on it

is like, you know, this straight up sort of mountain and then straight down the next day. And also, in meat-related news, Donald Trump put out a true social post to, I guess, make angry cattle ranchers here in the United States understand why he is importing cattle from Argentina, as I understand it, if I've got my facts right, and told them, in effect, you don't understand the cattle in. industry. I do let me tell you what's happening here. So a lot of meat in the news and I love to talk about meat. So I thought I would use that as an excuse to talk with the panel about meat. We're not going to really get into the stocks or cattle prices. But a couple questions for the panel. And I'll start with, Megan, have you ever tried beyond meat? And if so, what did you think of it? And then if you could either have any meat dish prepared for your dinner tonight or prepare for someone you really want to impress a meat dish,

what would it be? Ooh, I have tried Beyond Meat, also Impossible Burgers, and they're fine. I should disclose that I was a vegan for a while. So I probably have a higher tolerance. But my husband, who is basically an obligate carnivore, also thought that the Beyond Meat and Impossible burgers were fine. What does it taste like?

I mean, is it sort of meaty texture? Yeah, it's really close. It's kind of surprisingly close. It is so close that I know vegans who won't eat it because they're creeped out by it. It's not quite the same. You wouldn't be fooled

if you were looking for it. But if no one told you it was an impossible burger you might not notice. You might be like, hmm, quite right, but I wonder what flavor they put it in here, yeah. So, oh, my favorite meat dishes, I have so many. This is, like, asking me to choose among my children. But actually, so I'll say the thing that I am planning to make this weekend,

which is my ox tail and short rib braise. So here is a fun cooking tip for readers who are, brazers, which for those who are not braziers, means that anything that, like a stew, anything you immerse in liquid and simmer for a long time. What you can do, if you have extra liquid leftover afterwards, as I always do, because as I said, I am married to an obligate carnivore who will just pick all the meat out leaving the delicious sauce. I mean, he eats some of the sauce, but he doesn't, I will eat more of that.

True of soup as well. So anyway, you take, when you're done, you take your liquid, put in a container. and put it in the freezer. And then you use that as the starter for your next braise. I call this the infinity braze. Really, like, over time, you're getting those delicious.

You know how stew is often better on the second day? Yes. You're just kind of kick-starting it. You're already on the second day when you start. And so it is an ox... I use oxdale and short rib.

Red wine, a little soy sauce, some Worcestershire. This is extremely loosely based on a dish I had in run. that was only the oxdale. I added the short rib when I ran short of oxdale once and it turned out we liked it so much

we kept it that way. Extremely loosely based on a dish I had in Rome that was itself based on an ancient Roman recipe, hence the Worcestershire because the Romans used to cook with something called Garum, which is a fermented fish sauce,

the closest you can get other than you can actually order garum now. I've never done it. Is to use Worcestershire. And then, you know, I use little chicken stock, onion, celery, all of those good things.

And then here is the real secret. A big handful of either raisins, or I actually use dried cranberries because raisins are poisonous for dogs and therefore are banned from my house. But adding that little bit of fruit and it gives it like a richness, a sweetness, it's not very sweet.

It's not like you're going to taste the sugar. And then the final thing, most important thing, a packet of unflavored gelatin, which again, jumpstarts you into that delicious collagen-y, thick broth that we all love in our brazes. I didn't even know there was such a thing as unfavored gelatin. Oh, yeah, Knox-unflavored gelatin. You can order it on Amazon or get it in the supermarket. Super useful for a bunch of things, stabilizing your whipped cream, as I know all of you think a lot about.

But adding it into like a soup or a stew that you want to be really thick and delicious and meaty, It actually really helps with the texture getting that delicious, like, you know, the satiny broth that many of you will have found in restaurants or if you make your own stock from bones, but you can take that shortcut and get that effect just without all of the fuss or the expense of a restaurant meal. So I wonder if now that you're a dispatcher contributor, you'd consider having us over to make this for us so that we could try it because it sounds. I would love to have you over it. Not that I'm inviting myself over. I don't, that's so... You're just inviting your colleagues. I would never do that, but just planting this.

We will set a day, and I will feed you Oxdale and Short Rib. I'll bring good wine. My wife made wonderful short ribs this week to celebrate my daughter coming home from college. There's also a great book about the history of short ribs, and I'm now forgetting the name of the author. I'll remember it. New Yorker writer, Bill Sondon. or the book is called The Heat, and it's about how short ribs used to be sort of cast aside, thrown away even, and have become, thanks in part to Mario Batali, the celebrated chef, bringing them back and serving them in his restaurants in New York City, made them sort of the fancy meat that they are today. They're pretty terrific. David, meat. So I'm going to just embarrass myself by confirming everything that Megan just said about the impossible.

Burger. I was at an event. And this was years ago, and someone said, we're going to grill impossible burgers. And the crowd kind of murmured. I had no idea what that meant. Like, I'd never heard of an Impossible Burger. I had no idea what it was. I just thought, it's a burger. And so I ate it, and it tasted like a slightly overdone regular burger. That's the way I would describe it. So I felt like it had been a little bit overcooked, just a little bit. It was a little bit. sort of my feeling, but what was it, the guy who, Roy Rogers, who said I never met a man I didn't like, well, my Roy Rogers corollary, the culinary corollary to Roy Rogers for me is I never met a burger I didn't like. So even a slightly overdone burger, I was like, great, I love this. And I went back

for seconds. And they said, is this the first vegetarian burger you've had? And I said, wait, what? You didn't know when you had it? I did not know. I did not know. I did not know. So I had no idea what an impossible burger was. I thought it was just a new way of cooking a burger. And yeah, so I thought it was, you know, fine, fine. Haven't had one since, but it was fine. As far as, like, what I can do, I'm just very simple. I can grill a great steak.

I mean, you know, that's just, especially when you grew up in the South, you just, you got to learn. You got to learn. You got to grill a great steak because you're going to have the guys over. you're going to grill steak, and they're going to judge you. And so that's just what has to happen, which then raises a whole other question, which could be a whole other not worth your time, actually had an incident where a friend of mine was grilling, and one of the men who came over was watching him grill, got a little bit upset as the way he was grilling grabbed the tongs from my friend and took over the man's grill.

No, no. That's the faux pa. Is that legal? Oh, my God. Is that the most emasculating thing that could ever happen? Fistakuffs. That's like when my wife once told me my coffee was too weak, and I was like, oh, my God, I salt for days. But that's terrible.

Good God. I know. I couldn't believe he allowed it to happen. He did? He was just taken by surprise. He allowed it to happen. I mean, in his defense, I mean, that would be one of the most shocking social faux pas I could possibly imagine that you.

Absolutely. In the moment, how do you respond to it? You know, it's a fight or flight or freeze moment, and I think he froze. Physical violence. I oppose physical violence, but in that case. Also, in the South, you just think he would drive over to the guy's house later that night and shoot him or something. I will challenge him to a duel on the spot, Andrew Jackson, that thing.

Yeah, absolutely. Amazing. Jonah, you love me. I do love me. So the question was, what would I want someone to prepare for me tonight and what was the other one? Or have you ever had impossible, whatever it is, beyond meat? I've not had an impossible burger. I've had other, I don't think I've had beyond meat.

I've had various vegetarian things. Years ago, Rich Lowry made me write a piece for National Review where I went vegan. I vaguely remember this now. Few things in my life have more instantaneously and biochemically filled me with rage. like I just became nasty and short-tempered and how long did you do it he wanted me to do it for 30 days I made it I don't know I thought you were going to say a day no I made it like I don't know a week 10 days or something like I was like screw this noise I can't do this and um and look vegetarian I could do indefinitely like vegetarians cake but like um vegan just no and I started getting misogynistic because people were telling me I was reading all this stuff from pita about how they were referring to the way that honey production is the equivalent to an industrial rape rack. And I was, I started making jokes about how, Peter does not help its own cause.

No, I was like, the bees are asking for it. And I was just like, poor taste jokes. I was just like, it's so pissed. And so no, I, uh, um, I have not had any experience with that. In terms of like, so I like to cook, I'm pretty good with the, with, in the, the, the meat palette. my wife is a better cook and we are big fans of the short ribs big fans of ox tail i think it's funny you talk about short ribs being once discarded almost all of the great pieces of meat in my opinion not all but almost we're the ones that were non-premium cuts at some point in history right um and they're

the ones that hold up best to the kind of cooking that Megan is talking about right you you put a fillet in a stew pot and it's going to be a missed by you know by the next day, arguably my single favorite cut of meat is hanger. And I know how to cook a hangar steak. I have it down to a science. No one's allowed to get it in my way. If someone tried to get in my way on a hanger, they would get one of those two-pronged trident forks in their forehead. But if I was going to have someone cook something for me that was meat tacular, I was thinking Beef Wellington just because it's so frigging hard and my wife only makes it like once every two years um but i'll tell you since the holidays are approaching years ago when my mom was sick

and couldn't cook my mom was a fantastic cook and she used to love doing thanksgiving dinner she couldn't travel down to be with us and she couldn't cook up there so we agreed we would take care of it just found this there's a chinese a high-end gourmet chinese restaurant in new york i think it's called red farm and they would do a special thanksgiving peaking duck-style turkey. Oh, my goodness. That was fantastic with all of, like, the buns and the, the rad-the-scalions and the whole, all the sauces, all the works.

And, like, if you get the signs now, how to, because, like, turkey is so easy to cook dry. It's why Peking Duck works with duck because it's so moist. They figured out a way to keep it moist, and Peking Duck-style Thanksgiving turkey is phenomenal. And I would eat that three days a week if I could. That sounds amazing. There's maybe a mistake to have had this conversation because I'm now so incredibly hungry. All I want to do is eat. I love all meats.

I've never had beyond meat or impossible meat. I don't really have a desire to, although I'm more open to it now, having heard Megan and David on it. More curious, less eager, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, I just try it, I guess. I love to, I'm with David. to grill a good steak. I like to grill a rib eye or a fillet. I am actually having Michael Renaud, dispatch managing editor, over to my house this evening. And we're going to do two different kinds of meat. I'm going to smoke wings on the Traeger, which I love. And I've

started to do probably way too often for my own health. And then we are going to make something called GCB sliders, garlic cheeseburger sliders. Little burgers brush the top of a slider bun with butter, sprinkle garlic salt on top, little cheese. Very good. And a bottle of Pintia, 2015, my favorite Spanish wine. Sort of the perfect night. That's it. Thank you all for joining us. Thanks to you all for sharing your thoughts with us on this episode of the Dispatch podcast. We will be back again next week. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners

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