The Dispatch Podcast - Trump Davidians

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

Sarah, Steve and Jonah welcome Jamie Weinstein, who'll be taking over the Monday Dispatch Podcast. They discuss: -Pence’s dazzling personality -2024 GOP check-in -Mike Johnson’s speakership win -Dems for Dean? -The death of the social justice movement -Antisemitism on the rise Show Notes: -Sarah and Steve interview Mike Pence Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgar, and I've got Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and Drumroll, please, new host of the Monday Dispatch podcast, our interview podcast, Jamie Weinstein. Jamie, we're thrilled. I'm thrilled as well. It's a real honor to be here and associated with the dispatch. As I mentioned to you when we're offline, that to the extent there is a publication that matches both my temperament and ideological outlook, it is the dispatch. it is truly, truly an honor to finally have an association. And y'all listeners are in for a super treat because Jamie is at his tip-top interviewing people from across the political spectrum. I think you'll really enjoy the interviews with people. He disagrees with the most.

And yeah, these are going to be on the same stream as this podcast. They'll come out on Mondays. But for right now, Jamie's going to, you know, toss it up with us a little here in our little roundtable podcast. So we have plenty to talk about. today. We'll do a little

GOP check-in on the 2024 race. I have some thoughts. I want to bounce off the boys here. And then, of course, the Biden primary challenge from Dean Phillips, as well as those independent candidates, be they Cornell West or RFK Jr.

And finally, are we witnessing the death of the social justice movement on the left as, you know, well, we'll just dive into that. I think you can guess where that's Let's dive right in. Jonah, I want to talk about Mike Pence dropping out of the 2024 GOP primary.

I know I have the side bet with Steve. high stakes. But Pence dropping out, on the one hand, tells you where the Republican is or where the Republican Party, sorry, has been and where it's not anymore that Mike Pence, the guy who sort of has every checkmark, every policy from the Reagan Republican era, got no traction in the 2024 GOP primary. But there's another version where it just says Donald Trump's above 50% and the difference between Mike Pence and even Nikki Haley

or Ron DeSantis or Tim Scott or any of these guys like Mike Pence wasn't that much worse off. It's just that nobody's getting any traction. Our mutual friend Kristen Solter Sanderson makes this point about why political polling is not as reliable as other forms

of sort of survey research because there is just there's too small a data sample right so like there are lots of there are lots of explanations why mike pence dropped out and the people who want to say it's because the old republican party is dead will say it's because the old republican party is dead and it's non-phalsifiable right now um there are other people like me who think that like personality uh is really really important in politics right now more so it's always important um but his personality i mean like i have nothing but i have respect for Mike Pence. I think the way he behaved on January 6th will

color him, will stand him well in history and all of that. I don't necessarily have the same praise for the four years of him being vice president, but that's neither here nor there. He, I think he's a man ultimately of integrity, but I've watched people eat soup and be more exciting than listen to Mike Pence on the campaign trail. And he is just not an energetic, thrilling character, and in a time where politics is so much more about entertainment than it is about substance, I think that could arguably be as big a problem

for him as anything else. And then lastly, none of these candidates are doing, are moving their numbers based on issues. Like, we just, we're going to talk about the speakership race in a second, but like the speakership race, or whatever that was, I think demonstrated more than anything else right now, how the Republican Party is not defined by stances on issues. When all of us were growing, well, maybe not you, Sarah, but like when the rest of us were growing up, the definition of a rhino was somebody who was squishy on an issue, abortion, defense, taxes, something like that. Now the definition of a rhino is just somebody who is insufficiently loyal or praise.

praising of Donald Trump. That's not an issue thing. I mean, you can call Donald Trump an issue if you like, but that's not, you know, it's not a policy issue. And so I just think Pence is dropping out has to do with the fact that Trump beat him up. Anybody that Trump beats up loses popularity. He's not a particularly compelling charismatic character.

And no one cares about issues. So, like, of course he dropped out. But I think the Republican field is a little worse because of it. But, you know, that's about all I got it on. Jamie, is the Republican field actually worse? Or, you know, if everyone tomorrow dropped out except for Nikki Haley, would this race look fundamentally different to you or would it actually look kind of the same to you? I mean, I guess in theory, the argument is the only chance to defeat Trump is to have a limited

primary field. But I agree with Jonah that this is about brand. And how is anyone going to be a brand, which they were calling just. you know, a short time ago, a guy the greatest presidency of all time and now you're going to run against him. Obviously, I don't think that was the case, but it's hard to praise someone as being near godlike and then try to run a primary against him saying, oh, I should be the nominee, not him. New God. So all these candidates have that problem. They're all in tape. I mean, especially Ron DeSantis with that campaign ad when he ran for governor, treating the guy that they

want to displace as, you know, near perfect. But I think the optimistic take from that would be that I don't know if the Republican Party is permanently changed on issues. When Donald Trump leaves the stage, it leaves a void for a new personality to take over and whatever those sets of issues that that personality has may once again change the Republican Party. But I don't see how you displace the Donald Trump brand as long as he's there. So it seemed obvious that Mike Pence would ultimately have to drop out.

And I think the sad part of this, and we might see a lot of it, is Donald Trump likes nothing more than people that bend the knee once, as a lot of people did in 2016. He's going to get a lot of people probably bending the knee twice as all these candidates who ran against them in the primary realized that they can't win and they're going to go on stage and ultimately, I think, endorsed Donald Trump when he is the nominee again. And that's a double humiliation coming. Steve, let's bring Mike Johnson into this conversation. This is the new Speaker of the House for Republicans and how that's been going for him for the last few days. Is he going to be able to keep his coalition of Republicans together when, as Jamie and Jonah seem to agree,

this isn't about policy. It's about vibes. And really more than vibes, it's about Trump vibes. So I think Mike Johnson will have more room to maneuver than certainly than Kevin McCarthy did. He has people in the House Republican Conference who have been part of the small group that was sort of out to remove Kevin McCarthy

who have already said behind the scenes, hey, Speaker Johnson, I will give you my vote on the CR. Whenever we get to this short-term funding thing, I'm not going to oppose you because it's important that Republicans can govern. It's important that we can function. I think insofar as he came to this position without having made many promises and certainly without having broken many promises to his fellow Republicans in the House, that's an advantage

and it's an advantage that Kevin McCarthy, who was basically by the end of his tenure, totally devoid of trust, that's an advantage for Mike Johnson, no doubt. As he gets into the process and people scrutinize what he means when he says, of course, it would be a negative if Russia prevailed in its war with Ukraine and, you know, he gets the J.D. Vance's of the world coming after him just for that basic statement. Then I think things get a lot, a lot trickier pretty quickly for him. Just a quick note on Mike Pence. I mean, Sarah, I think it's interesting when you go back and you look at the course of Mike Pence's campaign the interview that we did with him in the spring.

You know, we had both, we'd read his book. We'd talked to him about what we wanted to discuss. We'd talk to each other about what we wanted to discuss with him. And, you know, came in with a number of questions that I think were thought to both probe his thoughts on the race, its theory of the race, and also sort of how he was going to be handling issues. And I think it's fair to say that we were both surprised at the end of that interview with how sort of forthright and blunt he'd been and how willing he was to say things that were

that no political strategist would have told him to say, you know, I pushed him on entitlements in spending, and he just conceded the point. I mean, I expect, you know, the Trump administration with you as vice president was horrible on spending. We floated Mick Mulvaney's quote that we mentioned here pretty often about Trump having spent more in the first two years than Obama spent in the last. last two years of his administration. And Pence didn't really even push back on it. And I think we saw in that interview what would become sort of the themes of his campaign, where he would speak pretty bluntly about the things that he saw as problems. There were also evolutions from

that early interview. Remember, in the early interview, we pushed him on how he fits in because he was more of a Reagan conservative. And he said, I don't really see the gap that you're describing between the Reagan conservative and the populists. And by the end of the campaign, he was making arguments that this kind of Trumpian populism is totally at odds with Reagan conservatism. So I think we, that was sort of the Mike Pence campaign in a nutshell. I do think, I just have to say, plenty of criticisms, what Mike Pence did as vice president, as Jonah said, certainly think he deserves credit for what he did on January 6th. I do think in this moment of extreme cynicism, he did make good arguments on important issues.

And he did it in a way that was unlikely to win him political support. And full stop, I think he deserves credit for that. I would have would have had him criticize Donald Trump differently. I would have had him make different arguments that he ended up making. But he deserves credit for doing that. And I'm glad he was in the race. I think it will be interesting to see if anyone picks up on some of those arguments. I suspect not because they're trying to win.

And two, where does Mike Pence end up? He left open the possibility, as Jamie, I think alluded to, that he could once again support Donald Trump in a head-to-head race with Joe Biden. But his arguments, particularly over the last several weeks of the campaign about Trump and about populism seemed to suggest that that I mean it would be awkward to square those arguments

with what he said about Donald Trump saying that Donald Trump asked him to act in an unconstitutional way that Donald Trump's populism is direct contradiction with the way the framers thought of the American experiment. I mean, these are pretty heavy arguments.

It'd be interesting to see if he ends up in Trump's camp once again. I want to touch on just a couple other things around here. One, I know you guys aren't the biggest fans of Donald Trump. That's an understatement. But I do want you to take off your, you know, feelings hat and just put on your political prognosticator hat. Because one of the arguments six months ago that we were talking about

that a Nikki Haley or a Ron DeSantis should be making that they really weren't was that electability argument. And it was a much easier argument to make a year ago than it is today. You have Donald Trump and Joe Biden tied in a lot of polls. You have Donald Trump ahead in a lot of polls. You know, polling it this far out, I don't think actually tests a lot of what we would see on Election Day exactly. But it's telling you something. Donald Trump, for instance, isn't so toxic a brand that he's 20 points down,

something that you might have suspected three years ago, you know, on January 7th, 2021. one or something. So my question is this. Who actually fares better against Joe Biden today? Is it Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis? I'll let you pick which one. Or is it Donald Trump? Jamie?

My view had always been that from the moment he left office, even after January 6th, Donald Trump was at worst, the second most likely person to be president in 2025. And I never thought that he didn't have a chance to be Joe Biden. And I never thought really any of the primary contenders had a chance to beat him in the primary.

But if you were saying, you know, if you could have anybody in the general election who has the best shot of beating Joe Biden, I think that a younger, more kind of enthusiastic, Nikki Haley, or even a Ron DeSantis, when you have that contrast with Joe Biden, kind of someone at the end of his career, I do think that would be more exciting to independence, and they would have a very good chance

of winning the presidency. But I don't think you're going to get that. And I do think Donald Trump has a very, very good chance himself of being Joe Biden. And I think it might depend on whether we ever get that recession. People have been predicting forever. Maybe it's just delayed till the summer. And if you go into the election day and there is a recession, you know, a lot of voters could just vote out the current, the current occupant of the White House, pick the guy who's running against, which probably will be Donald Trump. Jonah, any disagreement there? Not any profound disagreement.

I just frame it a little differently. I think that, first of all, I can give you a really seriously cogent, long answer about why Donald Trump can't win. But then I can also give you a really seriously long cogent answer about why Joe Biden can lose. And that's the weird thing about this moment, right? is that, and I think I agree with you, national polls are just really dumb to look at for all sorts of reasons. But we all know that this election is going to boil down to basically five, at most seven states.

And the idea that Donald Trump can't put together Michigan, Wisconsin, you know, Arizona, whatever, I don't know, you know, which ones he needs to do it. But when you look at the margin of popular votes by which Joe Biden won the Electoral College in 2020, and the margin by which Donald Trump did in 2016, it is obvious that either of these people could be the next president if they're the nominees. On the question of who would be better in the better Republican candidate, I think the part of the problem with the question is, is it presupposes that if Donald Trump isn't the nominee,

he doesn't throw gasoline on everything and try to take his ball and go home. and he could very easily, in fact, I would say it's likely that if he's not the nominee, for whatever reason, he's thrown in jail, he's, certainly if he loses fair and square in the primaries, he will say it was stolen, it was rigged, he will tell people that you can't trust anything, he will do, he will say things that whether intentional or not will encourage violence, and he will have a profound, he would have a profound impact on turnout. if he didn't do that stuff, right? Which I think is a very difficult, it's a very big if. I think Ron DeSantis has a much better chance of uniting the current coalitions that make up the Republican Party. He is the second choice for a lot of Trump voters. A lot of his voters second choice is Donald Trump. He checks a lot more boxes in the existing coalition.

I think Nikki is the more likely, would be better place to, Nikki Ely would be a better candidate in the general election because she's not scary, as my friend Charlie Cook likes to put it. She's closer to what we call just simply a generic Republican

and generic Republicans are actually the best candidates, presidential candidates in history. The problem is that most Republican candidates actually have personalities or lack personalities that make them deviate

from what actual the generic Republican sport would be. She also being a minority, and a woman. She's less scary than Ron DeSantis. She's less scary than Donald Trump. And so for a lot of moderates, independence, swing voters, Biden protest voters and the like, I think that she could expand the presidential coalition for the Republican Party outside of people with ours after their names and ways that DeSantis cannot. But all of this is academic, because again, I think that Trump has a nihilist's sort of attitude about that.

this stuff and if it's if the election isn't about a referendum on him then he doesn't he would prefer to see republicans lose not long ago i saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind the truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious that kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a

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Learn more at dynamic.ca slash active. Steve, there was this New York Times story that in the next Trump administration, Trump's allies want him to hire a different kind of lawyer. And this made me think about the Johnson, you know, Speaker Johnson stuff a little bit because part of what that speaker race, and I'm going to use that term kind of loosely, really showed was this problem of elevating victimhood, like losing proves your purity, being in the minority on some issue elevates your cause. We're seeing it across the board. It's not just on the right, obviously,

as some people will get to later. But the point of this article was that the lawyers in the first Trump administration were too, quote, weak, according to his allies now, they weren't sufficiently sort of purer of heart or something. I'm just left laughing because I was a lawyer in the Trump administration, obviously. First of all, to call them weak, that wasn't actually their complaint at the time. Their complaint at the time was that the lawyers were too strong in pushing back. Bill Barr wasn't too weak after the 2020 election. They were annoyed that he was too strong. strong, but maybe more to the point, these were lawyers telling them how to legally do the things that they wanted. And they want to make sure that doesn't happen next time. They want lawyers

just to say yes to whatever they want to do and then lose in court because that's how they'll prove that they're the ones that are pure and that it's in fact, you know, the Federalist Society are the bad guys now. In the story, it's one of Trump's allies says the federal society He doesn't even know what time it is anymore. And so this is great, right? You have these ideas. They're not remotely plausible. They won't pass muster in any court of law.

And then when that's proven true and judges strike it down, it just proves how great you were in the first place or something. The logic's a little twisted, but like it's there. So I guess my question, Steve, is, is this the whole Republican Party now? Before Steve answers, can I just get a legal clarification for me? you saying that the purity of what's in someone's heart doesn't settle legal questions? Well, take, for instance, the quote-unquote travel ban, you know, this gets into the weeds a little bit,

but the first travel ban was almost certainly not going to pass legal muster. And it was a coalition of lawyers both in the White House and in the Department of Justice that convinced the Stephen Millers, the Donald Trumps, etc., to change the travel ban. ban so that it could be legal. So then the Supreme Court upholds the travel ban. And I think what they're trying to say is, aha, but see, this proved that you were compromising in your values and that you wouldn't fight for the original, you know, strongest version. It's like, yeah, but you would have lost at the Supreme Court on that one, but I think they

wanted to lose in part, because then it's not about governing, it's about who has the most again, like pure ideas, whatever you want to call it, Steve? I think that piece and that argument makes this broader point that I've been to steal a Jonah as I'm pounding the table about for months now. Like, it's fine to ask whether, you know, Rhonda says this will be better than Nikki Haley as, you know, as a Trump stand in or has a better chance against Joe Biden. the questions that we've entertained here. But it strikes me as so unlikely that that's what the reality that we'll be dealing with. There's almost no scenario, at least in my mind,

where this is a traditional presidential election, where we just end up having this kind of contest between Joe Biden and whether it's Trump or DeSantis or Nikki Haley. Some of for the reasons that Jonas suggests. I mean, Donald Trump, if you were to lose, if you were not to prevail, either in a Republican primary or in a general election, he's not going quietly. He clearly demonstrably, provably lost the 2020 election and look where we are. Look at what happened in the interim. And I think the arguments that you're seeing from Trump supporters, and these are the people,

we should be very clear about this, these are the people who are going to be staffing the highest levels of the Trump administration, if there were to be another one. They are running a project designed to do that. So these are the people who are going to be running the government under Donald Trump in a second Trump administration. And they are saying things in public a year out from the election that are just straight up authoritarian. It's not like we're running a traditional Republican campaign.

And Trump occasionally says something that. crosses over some, you know, imaginary line of what's normal or acceptable in our politics. Trump is living on the other side of that line. His entire campaign is pushing what I would call authoritarian promises. They're quite open about this. They're talking about it regularly. And I think that the sort of the main dynamic in the race one year out is that the Republican Party, sort of the rank and file Republican Party,

don't get that that's what's happening. The regular primary voters, they sort of are long for the ride. They think back to the Trump era, and they think, ah, the economy was better. You know, we weren't faced with the stuff that we're faced in Israel. Iran seemed to be bottled up a little bit more. Things, my life just seemed to be better.

And we're not paying careful attention to the kind, to the way that Donald Trump is running for president this time around. And I think it's going to matter. Can I jump in on the why I think he wants more aggressive lawyers? I don't doubt, and that might be part of it, what you said, Sarah. But when I hear that the Trump administration wants more aggressive lawyers, I hear he wants people more like Roy Cohn was for him, someone who pushes the line of legality and will go over.

He doesn't necessarily want to argue these cases in front of court. He wanted Bill Barr to give legal justification, for sending people in to seethe voting machines. He wants not have to go to Zelensky to ask him to do a case against Joe Biden's son. He wants Bill Barr to organically launch an investigation on Joe Biden's son, whether that investigation goes anywhere or not. Or has merit or not, honestly. Yeah, or merit or not.

He wants people to do not necessarily court cases, kind of legal lawfare things that he does with defamation suits. He has that one lawyer who sends letters out suing people for saying things about Melania or he wants someone just to be his personal hatchet legal man, almost like Michael Cohn was, but who wasn't nearly as good as Roy Cohn at it. I think that's what he says when he wants aggressive lawyers. I think that's a good point. I mean, it's sort of like with his thing with Zelensky, just wanted him to say there was corruption and then he would do the rest. Or he told Bill Barr say there was fraud and then we'll handle it. He wants someone to give a top line for a press release. And supposedly, supposedly he asked Bill Barr, if I believe, if I remember the coverage right, to do that first before he went to Zelensky.

He asked the Justice Department to do that and they weren't doing it. So then, you know, he brought it up to Zelensky. But I think Sarah's, I'm with, I'm on team Sarah on this and that I think the people around Trump, their thinking is more of this culture of losing. we will prove our purity if we lose in courts kind of thing. Because that's that's the mind virus that's going around on the hill too. And just to correct Steve on one thing, he said that it was a Jonahism to say pound the table. That's a cruise chivism. The Jonahism is pound my spoon on my high chair.

That's right. I'm glad you reduced yourself to toddler status. Look, I think it's not, it isn't just that Trump wants the press release. I think that's true, and I think Trump would take the press release. He said that basically at one point in the Zelensky scandal that led to his first impeachment. I think it's that Trump wants this stuff done. He doesn't care about the legal niceties of this. So he wants lawyers who just cut through the shit, right?

It's like he doesn't want to get bogged down with procedures and going to trial and taking depositions and all. He just wants it done. So he wants people who will come in and bang heads until they get it done, which again, I think is, these are his authoritarian tendencies, and he's being pretty open about it. I'll tell you what's keeping me up at night right now, and this will, by the time this airs, the collision will be out. My newsletter with Mike Warren, this week, state courts in Colorado and Minnesota are starting their hearings on whether Donald Trump can be barred from appearing on the ballot because he's disqualified from serving his president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. And again, I won't dive into all of the legal arguments around that. We've had lots of conversations about it on the flagship podcast, advisory opinions. But look, from a political standpoint, it almost doesn't matter because let's just take the Minnesota one because it's going to move the fastest. In Minnesota law, this goes directly to the Minnesota Supreme Court. So they are the ones hearing this case this week. That can then get appealed directly to the U.S. Supreme Court. Let's assume, which I think is the more likely, outcome that the Minnesota Supreme Court says, yes, you know, in short, January 6 was an insurrection

and Donald Trump gave aid and comfort to enemies of the United States on that day. Therefore, he's ineligible to serve as president and can't be on the ballot. And that gets appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court then basically in the earliest part of the year, we're talking maybe January or February, is going to have to decide, what, do you keep Donald Trump off the ballot, a guy who's supported by tens of millions of Americans who people will have already voted for at that point in their primaries or do you keep him on the ballot,

which will, you know, in a potentially a 6-3 decision, that'll be so much more cataclysmic for the Supreme Court than Bush v. Gore ever was. It'll make Bush v. Gore look like a little, you know, sparkler compared to the nuclear reactor that will be this case. Either way, I think no one's preparing for what the rocking that is coming here in short order. And not just on that. I would say, I mean, this is, this is sort of my, my big picture look at 2024.

The things, the things that now seem small or obscure or unlikely, I think are a lot more likely to matter in determining who the next president is than, And the things that have traditionally mattered, like who's having a three-point bump in Iowa in early Republican polling because he or she had a great event in Davenport. I just think those things are just less likely to matter given this constellation. And it's important to remember, too, there's a new book out by our friend Jonathan Carl excerpt out this morning. we're recording Thursday morning in the Atlantic. And there's this scene. Our own Declan Garvey helped research the book for John with John. But there's a scene where John Carl is talking to Steve Bannon,

who was and remains one of Trump's top advisors. And Bannon is describing a speech that Trump gave at CPAC and labels it as his come-retribution speech. And come-retribution speech is actually come-retribution, the phrase is a sort of a code word for the assassination, the Confederate Secret Services plot to take hostage and eventually assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. This is in the Atlantic excerpt of John Carl's book.

And when John Carl went and asked Steve Bannon about this, said sort of like, hey, do you know what come retribution means? And asked him about a book where that's described. Bannon said, yeah, that's it. At another point in the conversation, he calls Trump supporters, the sort of leaders of the Trump supporters, Trump davidians in an explanation as to why Donald Trump held his first rally in Waco, Texas. Steve Bannon has a, his podcast has a huge following. He's got people who are, I think, prepared to act on some of this. And a lot of this is just happening outside of the rather polite conversation that we're having about things taking place in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina. And I think, again, that stuff is likely to matter more than many people are believing at this point.

All right. Talking about things that matter, Jamie. Dean Phillips is officially on the New Hampshire ballot, and Joe Biden is officially not on the New Hampshire ballot. I don't want to spend too much time on the intricacies of this. You know, Dean Phillips will not be on the Nevada ballot, not the Florida ballot. Like, there's a chance this guy's really not on many primary ballots at all at this point. And there's a chance he's going to win New Hampshire because Joe Biden, as I said, isn't on the ballot in New Hampshire. there's going to be a write-in campaign for Joe Biden in New Hampshire. Okay, I'm a little bit shrug on all of that.

You have Cornell West as an independent in the race. You have RFK Jr. as an independent in the race. And you have a primary challenge of sorts to Joe Biden. This actually seems like people on the center and the left are more dissatisfied with their choice than people on the right. I don't see any Republicans or former Republicans running as independents.

You know, John Kasick isn't, you know, throwing his hat in the ring or Huntsman or, I don't know, fill in any of the Johns you want. That seems odd

if you were to explain to the aliens who Donald Trump is and who Joe Biden is and be like, yeah, and people are real up in arms about that Joe Biden guy

being the Democratic nominee. It is interesting. I mean, there's no one, I would say serious in the Democratic Party running against Joe Biden. So you have all these figures. I mean, raise your handy, have you ever heard of Dean Phillips before he decided that he wanted to run for president? Maybe you guys had I had never, never heard of him.

And so, I mean, I can't imagine that matters very much. You could argue that the one person who, you know, is running against Trump in a certain way, is RFK Jr. now as an independent. There's an argument that he's taking more from Donald Trump. and there was this poll recently, which actually shocked me, where it was a three-way race, and he was in the 20s at that point. Biden won, I think, like with 39, Trump with 36, and the remainder to RFK Jr. If that holds up, that will be very interesting to see RFK Jr. on the debate stage with Trump and Biden. Yeah, I mean, you're not seeing any serious primary challenges,

I think, emerge on other side. I mean, I guess in the fact you have the, the report, Republican primary, those would be the equivalence of the Dean Phillips and the Cornell West's running against Biden. But I don't think any of them really are going to displays who are the likely nominees and the likely next presidents, which would either be Donald Trump or Joe Biden unless, you know, there's an illness. I mean, I think that's the greatest threat to one of those people being present is that they're very old. And, you know, anything can happen when you're old. That'll be the tagline of this podcast. Jonah, speaking of coming to you now.

But like, I've been the one poo-pooing third parties. But it does feel like if there were ever going to be a successful third-party candidacy, it should be now, you know, in the Romney book, the McKay Coppins wrote, talks about running with Oprah Winfrey or, I don't know, some other dream ticket.

Is this the most we're going to see of third parties? Because like Jamie said, I mean, Dean Phillips isn't beating Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination. Cornell West, RFK Jr. Maybe they'll take more from one side of the other, whatever else. But we're not even talking Ross Perrault level at this point. So why aren't we seeing then someone, you know, Matthew McConaughey, want to throw his hat in the ring in a serious way?

So I think we talked about this before. I think the best explanation, the two biggest stomach, The two biggest bulwarks against Joe Biden not being the Democratic nominee are Camilla Harris being vice president and everyone thinking that she could lose 40 states. And two, while a lot of Democrats would happily stab Biden in the back if they thought they could be the next president, none of them want to be held responsible for getting Donald Trump elected. like the party can forgive you for ambition. The party cannot forgive you for getting Donald Trump reelected. And so I think the Dean Phillips thing is actually really interesting because it is kind of an unprecedented primary challenge in American history.

Primary challenges are almost always about issues of one kind or another, right? No, like Pap Buchanan going after the globalist, you know, New World Order, Bush administration, or Ross Perrault on trade and the deficit, that kind of thing. As far as I understand, Dean Phillips has no ideological objections whatsoever to Joe Biden's presidency. He just says he should be ordering a second round of jello at the home, and that's it, right? It's just an age argument. And to me, the weird thing about that is that is both a weak argument and, you know, a weak argument and a strong argument

because it is a way to argue that we don't actually want to change the course we just want a different captain at the helm and that could be reassuring to people. That said, I don't think it's going to go anywhere. I do think, though, that we're conflating primaries and third party stuff and they're kind of different things

and I also think there's a, I don't know what we would call it, but there's a third, as you would say, bucket here. apparently I heard Scarborough this morning saying that and I tried to find a news article about it and couldn't that no labels is now saying openly what they used to say in private this is Scarborough's account that they want to put up favorite son candidates in various states to steal 2% 1%, 5% maybe

of the vote from Trump in various battleground states you know, put Paul Ryan up as a nominal guy on the ballot in Wisconsin. Paul Ryan would lose in a landslide against Donald Trump in Wisconsin. But would he lose by 51 to zero? Probably not, right? And so two, three points there could help. And so I also think that Cornell West, Kenna has no chance of winning. You know who really has no chance of being the nominee or being the president is

Chank Unger, or whatever, how you pronounce his name, a guy who admits that he is ineligible to be president of the United States because he was not born here, but says, I'm doing it anyway. But I do think, like, the Israel stuff in particular now gives a potential, gives a lot of, maybe not in strong numerical terms, but in terms of motivating passion for, like, the college students who typically hand out flyers and knock on doors and do a lot of, like, the street camps and stuff, some of those guys are going to now go to Cornell West because

Cornel West is going to say, I don't know what, I don't in fact know what he's saying about Israel right now, but I know he says very stupid things about Ukraine. So I'm assuming he will say stupid things about Israel as well. And, and so you could see, it's kind of feeling like in a weird way we might have a replay of 48 without the additional parties in the same way. You know, 48 was a four-way race and it was really hard to game out. It just kind of feels like there are going to be enough reasons for various candidates not to get a majority or win states that they otherwise would win because of people pecking at their heels. So I just, it's very hard for me to figure out.

But I think Dean Phillips could have an impact. I do want to say that I'm enjoying to no end as someone who has been very critical of Steve Schmidt, the campaign, the guru behind the Dean Phillips thing. well, I have very strong opinions about. I am really enjoying watching his MSNBC sort of fan base eat him alive for daring to try and destroy Joe Biden. And I plan on having further comments at a later time about all of that. Can I make just a tangential point here? We love tangential points, Jamie.

Welcome to the podcast. This actually is the real name of this podcast is the tangent. Yeah, there's the remnant, but there's now the tangent. Jonah made, you know, an interesting point about the Israel stuff and how, especially you're reading a lot of articles in the Arab American community in Michigan where, you know, Joe Biden might lose support there, and that's obviously a swing state. I wonder if it's less, you know, them going to Cornell West as Donald Trump, who likes to try to get on all sides of an issue, how he tries.

to play that, to try to win that vote in that important swing state, where he plays both, you know, the pro-Israel side and then the pro-Av side, he tries to kind of, you know, get both of those sides through some, you know, elliptical language. I would almost certainly believe that he's going to try to figure out a way to profit off of a loss in the Arab American support in Michigan to try to take those voters on his side to win that swing state. I don't know how he's going to pull it off. But if anybody can get on every side of an issue and keep both sides of voters, I think it will be Donald Trump. Muslim banners for Gaza is going to be a really interesting slogan.

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plan to combat Islamophobia. And it seemed really tone deaf. Now, the actual explanation is that they released their national plan to combat anti-Semitism several months ago, and they've in fact been working on the Islamophobia plan just for months later, if anything, it's late. But nevertheless, releasing it this week, in the same week that they arrested a student at Cornell for making, you know, wild threats to, you know, exterminate all the Jews on campus, causing absolute terror on that campus. And lesser versions of that we've seen in a bunch of other elite institutions, threats against

Jewish students, physical assaults against Jewish students, etc. Are they just barreling ahead because they don't think any of this matters 13 months from now? Are they just trying to do the thing, put one foot in front of another? They needed a plan on this. They think it's serious and like the timing just wasn't really a factor. How is this current moment working in the Biden administration when you have different parts of their constituencies now at odds with each other within the progressive movement. Yeah, it's a hard thing to game out. Also, I'm going to be weirdly defensive of the Biden administration here. I believe also that November is like on the calendar, maybe not my calendar,

but it's on the calendar as Islamophobia awareness month. So, like, you might have had in the pipeline a plan to unveil something like that because of the normal BS identity politics stuff that, you know, at the beginning of Hispanic Awareness Month, you would have some stuff for Hispanic stuff. Anyway, the larger point is, you know, I had Frank Fower who wrote the profile of the Biden White House for the first two years on the remnant this week. on the the real flag chip

and he's making the case I think he's probably right that Biden is actually a sincere Zionist in the sense that he is pro-Israel he's much more from that first of all you can look it up

he's old and so he the memory of Israel's founding which I think it's the same year he was born and the story of the Holocaust and all of that. He just comes from a tradition of Democrats or in the Truman vein that feel this way.

And I think that's probably right. I think the problem for Biden is that I don't know if there's anybody else in the administration who actually feels the same way, right? I mean, it's one of the things I think that people don't appreciate about how Washington works is how much the social milieu that you're steeped in, that you live in, affects how you approach stuff. And all the young staffers in the White House, I'm not saying that they're all anti-Israel or pro Hamas or anything

like that, but they just come from a different sort of democratic party, a different sort of approach to these things, the people that they go to, you know, social events with, kids' birth, party, soccer games, that kind of stuff, they're going to hear a lot more from people criticizing Israel than they're going to hear from people praising Israel. And I could definitely see Biden being undermined. I mean, I think we've seen it already.

The push is for, you know, delays in the ground thing and all the rest. I think, I mean, I wrote about this in the G file yesterday, I think the larger problem facing the Democratic Party and the left generally is that this is just simply not the kind of issue

that you can finesse. At the level of meta-narrative, at the national level, at the global level, either you think that Hamas is responsible for the people that they butcher, Hamas, which says they will do October 7th again and again and again and again, but we deserve a ceasefire,

that, that butchering babies, that killing children, in front of their parents and parents in front of their children leaves Israel no choice to do but what it must do. And on the other side of that is, and that harassing Jews on campuses is fair game and that condemning it is asking people to condemn it is too much. All that, it's very much like a slavery issue in that, you know,

which killed the wigs because you just couldn't, you can't have a party that is on two sides of these kinds of questions. And maybe this war ends sooner than we think, and they can sort of say, we'll just agree not to talk about this for a while. But the longer this goes on, the more I think you could see sort of the equivalent of like

the neo-conservative types who left the Democratic Party in the 60s and 70s, the Reagan Democratic types who left the Democratic Party in the 80s, there are, I can just tell you from friends, family, relatives, friends of friends and all that in the sort of basic Jewish community.

There are a lot of liberal Jews who are just like, what the hell? Like, why is this so complicated for you people? Why does it take, why do you have to end every sentence that with but when talking about butchering babies, you know, and, and they're just a whole bunch of people who are really trying to work through what they think of the people that they thought they were on the same page with. And I don't think it's just Jews.

I think it's also people who just see this issue this way. And so I think this is a huge. long-term threat to the cohesiveness of the progressive coalition, as it were. I mean, Janie, this has been much, much weirder than I thought it would be on the left. I sort of thought what we saw in the first couple days were going to be the, you know, really loud voices, but very few of the loud voices trying to make this okay somehow. But it's not a few. They are very loud.

but you have the sort of top law firms in the country feeling the need to put out a letter that to summarize basically says if you want graduates to get good jobs in our law firms stop producing anti-Semites and this is controversial um you have the region at california one of the elected um it's an elected job in california to be a regent over the universities um so So they put out a statement calling the attack terrorism. They got a letter from the ethnic studies, blah, blah, blah thing with 300 faculty members from across the state saying, how dare you call it terrorism? And so this regent then publishes a letter that's like, I am sickened that you don't want to call this terrorism. And I'm sickened that you're teaching our next generation.

at the same time you have, you know, 50, over 50% of Gen Z getting their news from TikTok, which I talk about beating your high chair. I mean, I'm just going to talk about this all I can. It's owned by China. It's run by China. And if I get one more email saying, no, it's not run by China. It's actually run by a company called ByteDance. I'm going to lose my mind.

Yeah. Yeah. And do you know, like, check, try posting something. something about the Uyghurs in your so-called bite-dance run company. No, I reject that entirely. So we have a foreign entity basically teaching our young people to hate the Jews. China's made very clear that they're anti-Israel in all things. But what a great moment to be anti-Israel and to try to fix, you know, to use classical

liberalism against the United States in this moment. Is this going to be politically relevant in a year? still. On October 8th, I would have said no, but here in November, it's feeling more relevant than I thought it'd be. I think it depends on how long the war goes on. And to Jonah's point, I think part of the Democratic strategy, if it doesn't go on too long, they'll stop talking about it for a while and hope everyone, you know, mesh is back together. But I like to say that, you know, October 7th to me was the most obvious moral question of our time. And because so many failed the test. It's become the most clarifying moral moment of our time. And you're seeing

that, you know, I think all over the place. And I think the long-lasting potential impact of it, Sarah, to answer your question is I do think that, I mean, I don't know if it killed the woke moment, but I think a lot of people are now saying like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what is being taught at our school? How are there pro-Humaz rallies, which I think a lot of these things effectively are. You know, what are the professors teaching? What are these statements after seeing on October 7 with, you know, images that they were projecting to the world? I mean, they weren't trying to hide what occurred on October 7, Hamas. They were, you know, as you mentioned, putting them on social media.

And when you see that so clearly and then students on campus either try to contextualize it or rationalize it or in many cases, what we saw, you know, little images of parachutes as their advertisement for their parade. coming in celebrated. I do think it made a lot of people that were a little bit silent with a lot of these these these woke questions for lack of a better term on on college campuses say hold on a moment. What is being taught on college campuses? What are being taught in schools? What is being pushed? Let's let's take a step back here and and reevaluate what has happened that we got to this moment where something like October 7th could happen, and we have, you know, parades and protests celebrating it or celebrating the people that committed it. So I do think, I think, at least maybe I'm optimistic, that at least there's going to begin to re-evaluate, you know, how far maybe

we've gone, I don't want to say culturally, but how far we have allowed the campuses in other places, elite institutions to delve into insanity. I mean, Steve, let's, let me give you the generic version of this. A lot of women come out publicly and say they were brutally raped. And one side of the political spectrum says, we don't believe you. Which side would it be if we took out that the women were Jewish or Israeli? You know, a minority, a two-party. minority in the country, which has the highest number of hate crimes per year in the

country, is being attacked by one side of the political spectrum. Again, take out the fact that it's Jews and, like, you'd be shocked to find out that it's the left. There's a group of people who make being homosexual illegal, want to purge all homosexuals from their rank, potentially kill them and then one side of the political spectrum is going to be their champion. Which side is it more likely? I mean, is this the end

of social justice in the United States which would sort of be a shame on its own, frankly? I mean, I'd put social justice in quotes. And I'm not sure. I mean, social justice, the way that it was described by the left and practiced by the left, I'm not sure it would be that bad to have the end of that. I mean, the way that they were talking about it on

colleges campuses over the past couple decades has been an abomination and it's been filled with exactly these kinds of contradictions it's just that i think what we've seen taking place on the ground in israel and what we've heard taking place in the discussions here has i think forced some on the left to confront these contradictions right i mean this is it's not the contradictions haven't been there the whole time it's that they're finally being asked to to confront them Yeah, I mean, watching the scenes unfold, particularly on college campuses, and we should point out not all college campuses, but many college campuses and certainly on elite college campuses. You know, on the one hand, it's, I think you said last week, Sarah, it's both not surprising and shocking because we've seen sort of lesser versions of this or less offensive versions of this for years. I mean, this is sort of the way that elite college campuses have handled big, complicated debates.

They simplify these things. There's, I think, peer pressure among students to join sort of the lefty side of these things. And the debates aren't terribly sophisticated. There's a lot of peer pressure and a lot of sort of group thing. What I guess makes it different is that it's happening against the, backdrop of what we saw on October 7th, and there's just no, certainly there's an attempt on the left to erase what happened then or replace what happened then, pretending that these things that happened didn't happen. And we saw this very early where you had pro-Hamas commentators in the

West saying, no, this didn't happen. The babies weren't beheaded. There weren't raped. There weren't rapes was a concerted effort to say that this didn't happen because I think it made the subsequent part of the debate that much more difficult on the left. You know, I think this could very well be part of a broader realignment. I mean, I think there's been, you know, sort of in elite circles on the center left, a growing frustration with the wokeness, the sort of mind, mind-numbing wokeness from the left, the knee-jerk weakness from the left, and people have moved against that. You know, will Republicans or people on the right, and I'm thinking of this now in political terms, be smart enough to take advantage of it? I share the skepticism that Donald Trump will be

able to do that in a place like Michigan. But even if you look at what Republicans are doing in Congress, you know, for the first time conditioning Israel aid on a cut to, you know, a cut to, the funding of the IRS. You know, I'm for, I'm skeptical of increased funding for the IRS. I didn't like what Democrats did when they added that to the big bill, it was it a year ago. But I'm not sure this would be the right time to have that argument. Just fund Israel aid.

This should be a simple thing, regardless of the politics. I mean, there's an obvious moral case. but if you're thinking of it in terms of politics there's a pretty simple political case too yeah i just want to have one thing is like i i am normally not a i've written hundreds of time or dozens of times about how i have problems with what aboutism so i'm not but what aboutism is a very effective form of political argumentation and rhetoric which is one of the reasons i keep having to write about it and i do think on those terms alone an incredibly damaging blow has been struck to the campus ideologue hr-d-e-I commissars who insist with straight faces for years now

that you know you can't um you know that that kids wearing sombreros on Cinco de Mayo is an act of violence against people who take offense at it right that like as I wrote in the G-Fio there are people who legit argue that you can't say a master bedroom anymore because master or have a master hard drive, right, or a slaved hard drive, right? Like there are efforts to purge these kinds of things from the language. And they treat it as if it is obvious and true and that you're on the side of hurting people if you disagree.

You're on the side of creating an unsafe environment if you disagree. but when people bring around posters celebrating paragliders who rape and murder Jews or when people chant things like glory to the martyrs or gas the Jews or whatever, well, that's complicated.

You really have to have, you know, this is worthy of a conversation, you know, and like the idea of making Jews feel unsafe, not in some snowflake way, but like literally calling their parents and saying, I may need to leave school because I think I might get beaten up or kill, Or they're being told, I mean, at Cooper Union, they literally told Jewish kids

who are hiding from a mob, we can hide you in the attic, right? I mean, that is so friggin' on the nose, it is mind-boggling. And people say that's complicated, and you have to hear both sides. But how dare you, sir, say that we shouldn't get rid of the word master bedroom? You know, I mean, like, the what about isn't potential on that front is so friggin' enormous that has been very difficult for a lot of administrators to do that. defend themselves. A lot of people who push that garbage to defend themselves. And it's one of the only silver linings in this entire crappy moment is that they've dealt an enormous self-inflicted wound

to that project. Let me sad. I mean, I agree with what you said entirely, Jonah. And I don't necessarily have a point, but I think it's worth it. I don't necessarily have a point, but bear with me. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. But how odd it is that when Israel is engaged in some type of foreign a policy event that Jews are, even if they have no connection to Israel, felt unsafe, made to be unsafe on campus. I mean, China had a million Uyghurs in concentration camps. I've never heard anywhere in the world, much less a college campus, nor should they, by the way, a Chinese student or Chinese immigrant, you know, being confronted by a mob

and, you know, told to account for the Chinese government, which, by the way, was legitimately doing something horrendous as opposed to the Israeli government. which is trying to defend itself. It really happens in no other situation. The Syrian government was engaged in all sorts of crimes for over a decade, still is. Never heard of, you know, Syrian nationals and anywhere in the world being made to be felt unsafe or uncomfortable. It's only when Israel justly fights back after the greatest murder of Jews since the Holocaust, do Jews around the world now themselves have to feel unsafe.

I don't, I don't, you know, I think the point maybe stands for itself. I don't have any summation of that, but I think it is worth noting. But Steve, we just will have a ceasefire so that Hamas can continue doing this. I mean, you know who made that point was Hillary Clinton? Yeah. I mean, the ceasefire talk, I think, is, is irresponsible at this point. We have heard from senior Hamas leaders, I think you referenced it earlier, Sarah, who have said October 7th is just the beginning. We intend to do this again and again and again and again.

And it's not just Hamas. I mean, you've heard this from Iranian regime leaders, the biggest supporters of this kind of terror for years. There will be no effective ceasefire. Israel has no choice but to eliminate Hamas. I think we all would want Israel to do what it can do to avoid civilian casualties. I would hope that goes without saying. Maybe it needs to be said. But the talk of ceasefire, I think, comes in some cases from people who don't want Israel to prevail in this fight.

And that's a strong accusation to make. But go and look at the people who are making the arguments in many cases. And I think it holds. right, we're going to move on to not worth your time. And boy, I've got a question. All right, so, Jonah, I just assume you have an opinion about this, but I don't actually know, and I didn't tell you about it ahead of time. So the Federal Reserve is in charge of raising or lowering interest rates, and this can have a huge effect on the economy, but also on how people perceive the economy. And so what we've done is insulate the Fed from immediately.

political control by the executive. They're an independent agency, so to speak, because presumably if you were appointed by the president to the Fed, then right before every election, the Fed would drop interest rates, you know, goosing the economy, basically. And we'd have these real like boom and bus cycles based solely on election results, which we don't want. But instead, we have an independent Fed, which has all sorts of constitutional concerns for me. And maybe even more than that, they still can goose the economy whenever they want, knowing that it will affect the political environment of an election. It's just that they may or may not like the current president or who's running or whatever else.

So, Jonah, is fixing the Fed worth my time? Should I be noodling? What's a better way to do this? Because it does seem odd as we contemplate, interest rates every quarter from the Fed. There's just these people out there and we talk about polling and Israel and Gaza and all the political effects.

We don't really talk about the Fed's political effect. Is there something specific in the news that I have missed in my travels that has prompted this? Or is it just the... No. Okay. I didn't know if there was some touchstone here that I was missing. No, they just decided not to do anything, you know, whatever.

The Fed was like in the news as they are every quarter about interest rates. So, like, you know how there are some legal issues that, like, normal people never talk about, but, like, because you grew up in federal society land, you know people who can, like, you don't lack for people in your life talking about the unitary executive or something, right? Because you know those people, right? having grown up in like national review land with a heavy emphasis on the sort of libertoid von Mises's adjacent world and stuff, I have not

lacked for people talking to me about the Fed in my life. That's why I came to you. But is it actually worth our time? I don't know. Is there a fix to this little problem that I see out there in the world? Well, I mean, first we have to get to work on the demonetization of the penny,

which is the real priority. No, look, I honestly... You know I wrote a college paper on that. Did you? I really did. Send it my way. No, but... It wasn't very good.

I'm troubled by the Fed. In the sense that I think there's a good constitutional question about, you know, it's legitimacy and all that. I don't like the dual mandate. But I have, for the most part, practiced a, and I've mentioned this many times on my podcast, monetary policy itself is one of these things I very rarely talk about

because there are people whose opinions I respect enormously on both sides of it, and since it involves math, I cannot myself get too deeply involved in it because I was told there would be no math in my career. So I don't, I honestly don't know. I think the feds is politically insulated as you're going to get an institution that has to be appointed by politicians. And for the most part, I think that the reputational professional concerns of the people who are appointed to the Fed tend to trump partisan political things for the most part. You know, these people really want to be remembered as sort of Nobel-worthy economist types and not political hacks.

And I think that that is probably a better protection, insulation from political manipulation than anything else. But I don't know. I mean, we should worry about interest rates, but I don't have a good answer for you. I'm sorry. You blindsided me. Can I add, I mean, to the extent that, I mean, I don't think any way. one would suggest that the Fed is probably pro Donald Trump, even though he had pointed Jerome Powell, I doubt that as a mass they are. To the extent they're acting politically, if they were,

there's very little time for them to cut rates significantly that it would matter in juicing the economy before the election, considering the lags. So, I mean, they're not going to do at any of the meetings at the rest of the year or the beginning of the year. So that to the extent that what their moves are are helping anyone politically, it would be potentially Donald Trump if these lags kick in and the economy does turn

south. So I don't think they're acting politically and I don't think they have time to act politically or at least very much time to act politically before the next election. But I'm just sort of counting on them. Like there's this might just be the

you know, what is it? They're your Deos X. McKina to save us from oblivion or something? The democracy is the worst form of government except all the others. Maybe the Fed is the worst form of monetary policy except all the others. I don't know. I'm hanging a lot on people

caring about their own reputations. That turned out to not be the best bet in other parts of my life. I mean, do you want to outsource it to AI or something? I mean, like, what's your solution? No, this is my problem. I don't have a solution. That's why I came to you, Jonah. I come to you for solutions.

You both know that's not true. Well, not like hair solutions. No, you come to me to lay down little tiger traps and get me in trouble. But I'm sure we're going to get comments on in the in the in the comment section about how what you can't talk about the Fed. It's like talking about chem trails without eliciting crazy stuff. I mean, this is my life. I know. I know.

Talk about next week. Let's talk about the gold standard. maybe we will and with that thank you steve thank you jona thank you jamie and thank you to all you commenters who are about to hop in the comments uh you too can hop in the comments and tell us about kim trails the gold standard and your solution for the fed for i think just ten dollars a month still wildly cheap and yeah we do actually read the comments so hop on in and otherwise we'll see you next week and be sure to tune in for jamie's interview podcast on monday on this channel. They're going to be great. Bye.

You know,