The Dispatch Podcast - Vengeance Agenda | Roundtable

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Jonah Goldberg and David French join Sarah Isgur to discuss the emerging concept of “abundance” among Democrats while the current administration torpedoes the economy with tariffs. The Agenda:���Three bodies and two dolls—Abundance Democrats and no progress—No one’s talking about DOGE anymore—Big beautiful bills—ICE raids in D.C.—Oh no for au pairs—Ross, Marc, and super-woke employees—NWYT: Alcatraz? The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠⁠⁠⁠The Dispatch⁠⁠⁠⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—⁠⁠⁠⁠click here.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello. I want to start with the economy. I think it's fair to say. Jonah, you had a piece of. about Trump's belief in money. Yeah. And this starts with the answer he gave on Meet the Press about how instead of having 30 dolls,

maybe the little girl only has two dolls. And I think the first thing that has to start with is, wait, what about the girl who only has one doll? Does she get no dolls? Does she get one 15th of a doll? And now let's do food. So just the logic behind that statement, there's like the substantive economic logic problem.

And then there's the political logic problem as well. And they're both a little bit baffling. Yeah. I mean, I think it's worth, I can kind of set up the political thing pretty quickly, too, because the reason why he's making very bad economic arguments is that they're the only arguments left to justify the reality that he has created, right? Like, he did not campaign on an extended, quote, unquote, transition where little girls can't get the dolls they want and school kids can't get their pencils and wait for it. Families can't get their pharmaceuticals because that's coming and all sorts of other things of actual necessities beyond dolls, pencils, you know.

And so, but the thing is, is that he thought that we announced the tariffs, it was going to be this huge. windfall, this huge success. When he campaigned, he never suggested that it would be anything but that first, that actual Mardi Gras-like celebration on Liberation Day at the White House, none of those people were expecting or acting like they were expecting the massive tribulations that we've seen in the world markets and in the stock market and everything else. And so it leaves them, now that it's a reality, that it's a fact that when you shut down global trade, it creates shortages. They have to defend shortages as good for you. They have to

embrace the austerity argument. They have to sound like left-wing degrowthers, right? They have to sound like Bernie Sanders saying there's no reason America needs 31 different kinds of deodorant and no one needs as many sneakers as they have, not when people are going hungry, right? This is a very old left-wing form of argumentation, but it's the only one left to them. And so when Trump says the doll stuff, he is not saying things that, you know, people like to say, well, people voted for this. This is not what they voted for. And then he said, I think the more significant thing that he had said in that interview was after he was explaining the doll thing, he told Kristen Welker, look, we're no longer trading with China. China was ripping us off by $5 billion a day,

which is just a made-up bogus number. And it's a made-up bogus number to defend a bogus bizarre way of thinking about economics. But basically, he thinks a trade deficit is a loss of $5 billion a day. And so he says, therefore, we're not losing that money, so we're making, we're saving huge amounts of money. And that's the thing that sort of hit me about that was that say you're like a dragon in Lord of the Rings that just loves your drag. I'm saying this for David's benefit. Thank you, Jonah. I'm following. I'm tracking with you right now. You're a gold hoard, right? And like, you can say to the dragon, you know, you could trade some of that gold for better indoor plumbing or heating or whatever. No, no, no, I can't lose a single doubloon because I have to have the biggest

hoard in the world. I think that's how Trump thinks about money. He thinks that money that goes out the door is money you don't have, and it doesn't matter what you get in return. So the fact that all of us have trade deficits with the grocery store means nothing to him other than the fact that the grocery store is ripping us off. And it's his understanding of money that I think infects his understanding of trade. And it's why increasingly we're going to have to tell little girls they can't have nice things. So this made sense to me when you put it in the context of him really caring who's on the richest person in the country or world list or whatever. Right. Right. Because while that's not a pure hoarding list by any means,

they do count other assets. It's not like your, you know, liquidity or whatever. whatever. Nevertheless, there is something to the dragons sitting on the Dubloons aspect to that. And yeah, that sort of landed at home for me of like, oh, right, because if you bought your family a once-in-a-lifetime trip around the world for six weeks, and it cost you, you know, my God, hundreds of thousands of dollars to do that. And now you have no money and you're poor, except you're rich in your heart because you've had this once-in-a-lifetime trip with your family, Trump would think you're a total idiot. Right.

Because now your bank account is less. Right. Or if you buy, I mean, like, I mean, this is basically what half the wealth of nations by Adam Smith is about is an argument against mercantilism, which said, mercantilism says if you just bring in as much gold as possible, you're making your nation rich. And Smith's point is, no, the gold or the money or the silver or whatever, the medium of exchange is only valuable for what it buys. So the more stuff you can buy with, good, services, homes, plumbing, whatever, that's what

makes you rich. And I think Trump is just blind to it. Right. Money, literally cash, like the paper bills we have, I think everyone knows that has no intrinsic value. That's like really obvious. But the gold has no intrinsic value. It's just the value we place on it due to scarcity and other things. There's some more notional value to it in that way. But it is still only the value we place on it. There's lots of things that are scarce in the world. Except for its utility and electrical wiring. But yeah. Fair. Well, you've just made sense of him. his fascination with gold fixtures and gold toilets. He's sitting on his horde.

That's his horde. It's just right there. So, David, I want to now talk about how this relates to the democratic idea in Ezra Klein's new book, Abundance. And we've talked about Abundance Democrats in the past. And look, I will admit my bias here to me, abundance Democrats sounds a little like the Paul Ryan crew in the Republican Party circa

you know 2010, 2011 the young guns the young guns right and it's this idea that you have some really smart people within a political party

who have a great idea but they're not political operatives and they don't really speak base you know what I mean but anyway I do think the abundance agenda is really interesting and this is the idea that Democrats have turned into the party

of sort of shrillness, no, putting up endless barriers to getting things done in the sake of the groups, right? Like, to build that house, you have to deal with the unions

and the environmentalists and the wocus. And, like, in the end, the house never gets built. Yeah. And as Jonah has pointed out, if you're a conservative,

you're still not on board with the abundance agenda. Because at the end of the day, it's make government great at doing things. Not, for instance, have the private sector do things more efficiently. Right.

So it's not that they have stumbled upon conservatism at all, but they have stumbled upon competence, and that seems to not be in any party's agenda right now. So taking Trump's, and I'll just read the two-dall quote, so everyone's caught up, but maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30, and maybe the two-dalls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.

And he's talking about the Chinese ships loaded with, stuff, much of which, not all of it, but much of which we don't need. And then later on, he says, they don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five. And so this piece by Matthew Hennessy in the Wall Street Journal, which I did love was called Donald Trump's two-dall problem, like the three-body problem. Yes, the three-body problem, yes. Yeah, really good. He said contrast Mr. Trump's austerity with the abundance agenda that left journalist, lefty journalist Ezra Klein is peddling to Democrats. There may not be much substance to it, but it's a smart approach. For 25 years, liberals have worked hard to convince Americans that we are too rich, too fat, too selfish, and too insular to be virtuous.

Mr. Klein is offering Democrats a way out. They'd be stupid not to take it. Soon, Democrats will be running around shouting, abundance, and Republicans will be hectoring you to take your economic medicine. Quite the switcheroo. What do you make of this comparison? I think that's a good comparison. I mean, you know, on the abundance agenda, I think what you're talking about there is really the Democratic Party talking to its, I mean, this is, you know, these are people who are talking to each other about why, for example, have we spent $100 billion plus dollars, or however much the money, the amount is, which is an obscene amount, and don't have a single mile of workable track in the high speed rail in California. Or why is it? the horizon. Just not on the horizon. They just unveiled a big with much fanfare plan and it was like, we're going to have a mile working in, you know, I don't know, 200 years. I don't know. Or this idea that you have some of the most prosperous areas of the country. And so you would expect in an area

that is prosperous that's beautiful like Northern California that prices would be a little bit higher there, just law of supply and demand, right? But not where they are now. Not where it's just virtually impossible for somebody who works in the service industry to live in the community where they work any longer. I mean, it's just kind of an absurd level of expense, an absurd level of difficulty in building houses. Some of the stories out of these blue states just blow your mind about, here's our affordable housing plan, 50 million dollars later, no housing is built. You know, this is the pattern you just see all the time. And so I think Ezra's message is just absolutely indispensable back to blue states that are sitting there wondering why, why did we have virtually

every one of our precincts become more red this year in 2024? And I think he's got an answer for them that they really, really need to think about. With the Trump situation, we have this dynamic. I don't think for a minute that Donald Trump is thinking along the lines of some of these kind of post-liberal mercantilist economist types that you see on Twitter, who are putting in, you know, pictures and memes of look what they took from us about some sort of 1950s, Leave It to Beaver kind of family, and about high GDP is no replacement for solid, thick family ties, and all of this stuff that you see in sort of the post-liberal nationalist economic circles.

I don't think he's an economist, I don't think he has an economic worldview like that. I think he genuinely thinks that tariffs just bring great prosperity and wealth. But what's happened in this area and in many other areas is that unlike his first term, when he comes in with a bunch of establishment Republicans, he's coming in with the best way to describe it is just the whole Moss Isley canteena of cranks. And he created this new kind of coalition, unlike anything I've ever seen, which essentially was the only requirement to be a part of this coalition is, will you put on the red hat? Any other, no other, there's no other test here. I mean, you can believe in, you can believe in

traditional Republican economics. You can be an economic nationalist. You can believe in the COVID vaccine. You can think it's from the devil. You can, you name it, but he has this coalition around him of cranks and extremists, and they're capitalizing on his inattention. They're are very well aware of many of his impulses and instincts. And they capitalize on that. And they're just creating this edifice of quackery in this second Trump administration. And this is just another part of it. So let's bring in Doge into this analysis, this world we're building, comparing the abundance Democrats and what they're responding to, which is sort of decades of saying you're doing stuff

and then eventually people realizing the stuff never gets done though there's a lot of saying it there's a lot of like paying off the different groups along the way but then the thing never happens there's something about Doge which is a little reminiscent about that right

there's a lot of saying you're doing the thing and a lot of the chaos and a lot of the partisan fighting that everyone really seems to enjoy and the polarization aspect to it check, check. But the actual thing, the making government smaller, getting rid of waste fraud and abuse, feels like no one's even talking about Doge anymore, like we gave up on that. So the actual thing didn't ever happen. And am I crazy, Jonah, that like I see some comparison between this and

what the abundance Democrats are responding to within the Democratic Party as well. There's like a little bit of a horseshoe aspect to the, well, still current Democratic parties not getting things done in the name of ideology to the Republican parties now, not getting things done in the name of ideology. Yeah, I mean, I think the comparison with the abundance of Democrat stuff, I have to think about for a second, but like, it is it is abundantly clear. I mean, you guys on A.O. have been doing this for a while now about how Trump likes executive orders, even though executive orders are the Potemkin village of

policymaking, right? I mean, they're just two-dimensional facades that look like a real thing, but blow over and can be, you know, dismantled overnight. And sort of like the fake rock ridge they built in blazing saddles. But that's all Trump cares about, is he cares about the headline,

right? I mean, and you know, he told Bill Barr, you know, get me, just say you're investigating, you know, the election, and I'll handle the rest. He told the Ukrainians, in the first term, just say

there was something corrupt going on, we'll handle the rest. He wants the sizzle. He gets really bored with the stake, which is one of the reasons why he's not putting any pressure on Congress to do anything. And so I think

with Trump, it's really just sort of the reality show producer aspect to him that explains a lot of this stuff, the performative aspect of it. with the Democrats for a very long time, I mean, I think this is one of the things that undid Biden is they confused spending money on a problem with fixing a problem.

And they're just really different things. And so they would have the ribbon covenings, and they would announce, okay, we're going to do this stuff. We're going to have, you know, multiplier, Keynesian multipliers for our investments, and we're going to take the lead and all this technology. And, you know, I mean, there's no better example of this now that I think about it than the frickin' inflation reduction act,

which had nothing to do with reducing inflation, something to do with increasing it, and huge chunks of it were just on things like building charging stations, paying for charging stations, but not actually seeing that they get built. And that's where the abundance Democrat guys are valuable, I think. They're identifying the problem that for years Democrats have confused issues, a press release and authorizing huge spending as the same thing as doing government work,

right? You know, we'll give a huge pile of money to teachers unions and we'll say we're fixing education. That's not fixing education. That's just rewarding some member of your coalition. And the abundance guys who I still think violate the Hayekian thing about, like, they're still not better economic planners than, uh, uh, uh, the market, but they at least realize that the red tape stopping them from doing stuff

has exposed that a huge chunk of democratic policymaking for the last 50 years has been about, or 30 years, has been about the headline and the press release and not actually about the policy. And that's good. I mean, that realization is good. As Carly Fiorena would say, activity is not accomplishment. I think about that all the time. How much which is what I'm doing, activity and not accomplishment. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place.

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free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So, David, let's bring in now the big, beautiful bill into this formula in world that we're building. This was an op-ed in the New York Times by Brendan Buck, who I used to work with back in the day as well. So after more than 100 days of President Trump marked by overreach and economic self-immolation. Congressional Republicans need a reset to save their political fortunes. Representative Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, is banking on a spending and tax cut package to provide that jolt,

and numerous House committees are now working quickly to stitch together a bill he has pledged to deliver to Mr. Trump before Independence Day. This one big, beautiful bill, as Mr. Trump has called it, contains most of the president's legislative agenda. Indeed, the strategy is making the bill too big to fail, betting that wavering members will not be willing to vote against it and deliver the leader of their own party, such a stinging defeat. But what if it does pass and voters barely take notice? So, Brendan, for what it's worth, used to work for Paul Ryan and John Boehner.

And his point is that this big, beautiful bill is going to have basically continue the tax cuts from Trump's first term and some of those other economic spending policies. therefore, by virtue of continuing them, no one's going to notice because they never went away. So to Jonah's point, there's no sizzle and, like, you already ate the steak. It would really just be,

if you don't pass it, you're taking away a stake. Not the best metaphor. But David, you know, you and I have harped on, like, Congress, do your job. Where's the congressional action? Why isn't Trump going to Congress?

And here, it looks like he's going to Congress. It's going to be kind of a political in? Yeah, that, That part, the part of the analysis that really stuck with me was reminding us all that when you're talking about the big, beautiful bill, bringing tax cuts is just talking about extending the status quo. It is not talking about a new thing that we will experience as a change. And so it very much reminds me of things like the Democrats and the inflation reduction act where you pass it and you have the moment, look at what we did, we passed this

big thing. But then either the effects don't ripple through society because of government inefficiency, which brings us back to the abundance Democrats saying, get working, get moving, or the effects filter through and they're so diffuse and tough to discern that they don't really bring the political benefit, much less the economic benefit that is promised. I think that's what you're looking at with the big beautiful bill. And the other thing that you're also, when you're talking about this big beautiful bill, one thing that you're not talking about is legislation that is discreetly designed to deal with the series of problems that Trump actually got elected to address. So rather imagine an alternative world where rather than sort of walking in writing a bunch of poorly drafted executive orders, many of which are immediately struck down, you walk in with an actual legislative program, like say the FDR 100 days, where you say here is the we didn't like the immigration bill before. Here's our new immigration bill, this new immigration bill which

will fix the broken asylum system, which will establish greater border security, or we're very upset with the way universities have mishandled federal funds and been homes of censorship. Here's our new higher education free speech bill that now ties federal funding, say, to free speech protections. You could see where you could actually have real reform in the real world that is lasting that's not vaporware like executive orders where you could have maybe a win after a win after a win and build some real momentum. But that's just not what's happening here. It's the big beautiful bill and there will be things in it reminding me very much of sort of the giveaways to the groups in democratic bills. There will be things in it that will be giveaways to some mega causes.

But the bottom line, the big beautiful bill is going to be a signing ceremony. and then just disappear completely into the political ether, especially if the trade war continues and you began to hit the shortages that many people are expecting. I don't think a big, beautiful bill signing will make up for actual economic pain felt in the real world. Yeah, so I agree with everything David says about this. And I think another point that Brendan makes, which is just depressing as hell, is I don't like legislation. that is too big to fail. But, like, literally, if they don't do the big, beautiful bill, they've done nothing.

So, like, have to get it done. And I also think this underscores, going back to the point David made earlier, it underscores that the people responsible for the good economy in the first Trump administration was not Trump, Mitch McConnell, it's Paul Ryan, it was, you know, Gary Cohn, those kinds of people, and Trump took credit for it. And Trump spent four years. stewing at Moralago, thinking all these people undermine me, this time I'm just going to get loyalists and I'm going to do what I want because I'm smarter than everybody. And it turns out

when you give the baby's bottle, he gets his tariffs and they're not good. And he doesn't like that. But I will say, I think there's another point to be made about this sort of wanting the headline or the controversy or the sizzle rather than the substance. I know a lot. I spent 20 years at National Review. I know a lot of people who are very, very serious about like immigration reform. and deportation and all these kinds of things. And there's serious people who like Trump when he's right about this stuff, but they're not necessarily all in on the Trump agenda when it comes to immigration because they think he's blowing it.

Among the serious immigration hawks, the thing they want almost more than anything else is e-verify, right? It's this thing that basically makes it almost impossible for employers to hire illegal immigrants. Trump won't do it. because it'll piss off a lot of people. It's complicated. It's difficult. It's a heavy list politically. And in fact, forget to you verify it, he hasn't done mass deportations, right? Like if you're going to get rid of 20 million people, the self-deportation part is part of it.

But he hasn't done job site raids. He hasn't done, you know, the big things that would rack up big numbers. Instead, he picks symbolic things, like sending a few gang members to El Salvador. And so he can talk about this kind of stuff. It is not, it is the equivalent of a light breeze rattling your windows in terms of like the amount of change it's reeking on the immigration problem as they define it. But symbolically, it lets Steve Miller talk about you're either with the terrorists or you're with the president who wants to save America from an invasion, even though he could win every single one of these court fights right now. and it would not yield a reduction in illegal immigrant numbers in the United States past 0.0001%. Well, except, and this is where I think they've actually mistaken something.

In immigration, it actually could because there are people who respond to incentives. So if your incentive beforehand... I agree. The self-deportation thing is real, yeah. Right? Like you come to the United States illegally under Joe Biden, and if you get caught and you get deported one time, and then you come back and you get in again, then you might spend a year in jail, then you can get out and get deported, and then come back again, and the jail time goes up eventually, and, you know, it's just sort of like a slow boiling water situation. Versus now the risk that if you get caught, you get sent for life to a horrible prison in El Salvador,

it really does change the incentives. And so I think that while you're exactly right, that it, in terms of the number of people getting put on planes, the number might actually end up being lower for the Trump administration. But what they're affecting are the number of people coming in. I'm not sure they're going to affect self-deportation numbers. They might. They might a little bit on the margin. People who are here already who are like,

I don't want to take the risk and I leave. But I think it absolutely will affect the choice of people to come in the first place, which actually does fix a lot of the problem with immigration. The difference is on the tariffs and the economy, that same headline grabbing this doesn't actually do anything

because trade isn't a person countries aren't people as has been pointed out before as well but this brings me the combination of trade and immigration changes in policy in the United States

to the second topic which is are we as Americans at risk of losing just to give one example our research and development hegemony when it comes to tech or medicine

or you name it because of the combination of the immigration and trade policies. So rather than come to an American university as a foreign PhD student or a foreign professor potentially, you just go to a European university, for instance. Or, you know, if American goods are going to be so expensive to buy and your kid can only get two dolls instead of 30 dolls and they can't get the 250 pencils, yep, I'll start my business somewhere else because part of the reason to start it in America was the low trade barriers, for instance,

and the stability over time so that you could actually make long-term investments in your widget planning. How much of that do you think is true? How much of that do you think is, you know, we're at step one of a marathon, and there's a whole lot more to go, and people are making a lot of guesses on what happens

in the rest of those 26 miles. David? I mean, we are making guesses. I mean, there's just no question about it because we're 100 days into an enterprise, unlike anything that we've seen. But I would say it is very logical and reasonable, and I would say probable that if you create an environment

where the smartest people in the world no longer want to come here and study and stay and live, that you're going to begin to create competitive disadvantages. That's not a bold argument. to make. And the one thing also I did say is if you step back five seconds and you look at this from a sort of a bigger perspective, how sad is it? How sad is it that you have an administration that is in the process of transforming a country from a place that is a magnet for people all over the world who want to come to this country for opportunity, for research, for hope, and turn it

into a place that people are afraid to come to, to a place that is sort of radiating malice and fear. That is a big change in American life and American culture. And I don't, I think Americans wanted to get the border under control, but it's very interesting to me that you're seeing this interesting divergence in public opinion where there's disapproval on immigration, but approval on the border. And that kind of tracks. People were wanting the border to be under control. They weren't necessarily wanting to turn America into place that people are afraid to come to, where one's wrong move and you can be detained indefinitely or for an extended period of time when, say, you're just wanting to backpack through the country. I mean, the transformation here is

remarkable. And the idea that, you know, look, nature abhors a vacuum. And if our universities are no longer permitted to be hospitable to the smartest minds in the world, other universities will. They will do this. And our advantages in research and development, I believe it's very reasonable to say that those will fall away. Our university system, as much as the Trump administration has maligned it and as much as I have had problems with it, these are still the best universities in the world for now. And I think this is where the two elements of crankery in MAGA really kind of have this dark synergy. So one part of crankery of MAGA is that the borders out of control, all immigration should stop, that we should become a place that people don't want to go to. There is that element

in MAGA. And then there's this other element of MAGA that loaths the scientific establishment, thinks the whole thing is corrupt and the whole thing is just garbage. And so they don't care at all that foreign scientists are coming. They don't care at all that billions of dollars are being yanked from, say, robotics research or pediatric cancer research, et cetera, because they think all that stuff is bogus anyway. And so these two kind of dark corners of MAGA have this dark synergy with each other. And they're fine with America having less scientific research because they don't believe in scientific research. And they're fine with America having many fewer immigrants because they don't want them to begin with at all

anyway. And so this transformation really is, I think, this transfer. information is really favorable to these crank elements of MAGA, but we as a country are going to lament this if it continues. Jonah, to give an example from D.C. this week, I think of how this sort of balloons. So on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security did checks or raids, depending on how you want to think about it, at a bunch of local D.C. restaurants. Millie, Chef Jeffs, like, popular places, not super high end, but not low end either. These were. were like, you know, sit down paper napkin restaurants, if that makes sense. Full disclosure, all in my neighborhood, right? Like, I'm, you're just listening restaurants I

could walk to in my fairly suburban neighborhood. But go on. Yes, yes. And it was a little odd because in both the case of Millies and Chef Jeffs, they're owned by companies that own several restaurants in town. And so, like, they didn't go to the corporate headquarters for those restaurants. They went like to the restaurants and then demanded to see the I-9s to the employees and the restaurant managers were like, we don't keep I-9s at the random restaurants. We keep them at corporate headquarters. Here's the address. Feel free to go visit it. You know, all the I-9s are there. And as the restaurants at least told the reporters afterwards, like, of course we have I-9s for everyone. You know, we were expecting these sort of visits at some point. It's just weird

that they wanted to come and like disrupt our business. and scare our employees when, like, if they actually wanted to enforce the law, they knew where to go, and they didn't do that. Okay. So, yeah, it's weird, but as we said, some of immigration is actually changing incentives and getting the press release actually does matter in the immigration world.

But there's knock-on effects to that. So then that was Tuesday. On Wednesday, there becomes a panic running through D.C. mom world that they're now doing raids at playgrounds. One of the most intimidating worlds in the known universe is D.C. Mom world. I just want to clear. Dare right. Yeah. It's scary.

Oh, man. If you've ever been in the Arlington Mom Facebook group. But, like, the parents are freaking out because while, you know, your nanny may be totally, you know, here legally. They may be a new American citizen. They may be an opair. But, like, they don't carry their paperwork with them to the playground with your child. Right. And, like, what's going to happen to the child if they detain the nanny?

And, you know, as I said, panic runs through DC Mom World. So, as it turns out, it was actually the U.S. Marshall's making an arrest at a playground, which is totally fine and has happened for all time, right? Like, they make arrests where they can make a rest where it looks the safest and they think they can get their guy. That panic, like that story doesn't make it all the way through DC Mom World. lots of people still think it was an immigration raid and again even if your nanny is totally legal it just changes this dynamic of well now she needs to carry all these paperwork or maybe it's harder to get a nanny um and so david to your point we not only discouraged illegal immigration

we actually discouraged legal immigration because it seems like it's a bad thing to come here you may end up in a police station even if you've done nothing wrong oh look they're saying they don't even want due process. So if someone says you're here legally, we don't even give you a hearing. We just like ship you off, even though it turns out you were here on an O'Pair visa the whole time. And for me, Jonah, this was like a larger metaphor for what's going on, potentially at universities and research and development stuff. And in the meantime, you have France announce a program. They have promised universities and research institutions in France, up to 50% of the funding needed to lure international researchers, including those working in areas under pressure

from the Trump administration like climate studies and low carbon energy. The president of the European Commission announced an investment of 500 million euros at the conference to make Europe a magnet for researchers over the next two years. I mean, the press releases don't happen in a vacuum, I guess is my point. You send a press release, and yes, you get some of the effect that you wanted. And there's all sorts of other effects as well, because everyone reads the press releases. Yeah, no, I agree with you entirely about the, um, the climate that they're going for, right? It's a, it's a, I remember I did a piece for National Review after 9-11 where I just, I literally spent two days flying from airport to airport, just screwing with people, um, about, you know,

like, I would go to the, the check-in desk and the lady would be like, has your bag been under your control the entire time? It's like, well, actually, I left it at a restaurant for a couple hours, what do you want me to do? And she would look at the line going back, 700 people, and she would roll her eyes. She didn't say it, but the gist was, why can't you just lie to me like everybody else? And just say it's been under your control. Why would you do that, Jonah? Well, I was writing this piece about, like, what chaos the airports were in, and I needed some color. I was young. I was impressionable. Anyway, so, but one of the conclusions I drew from that with all these different rules where one airport you could carry tweezers through in another

airport you couldn't is that was it's partly by design is like if terrorists and we thought they were really all over the place back then just didn't know what the rules about what you can get on a plane were that is good right and so that kind of roused mentality has an effect and i think we're seeing it all over the place i mean it it's it's a there's a weird parallel right it's like fox and trump would shine a really bright light on some heinous crimes committed by illegal immigrants. And they were absolutely heinous. And the people who committed those crimes, those murders, those rapes should totally go to prison and as a way station to hell.

Totally fine with all that. But then they would make this argument that there's a transitive property that if one illegal immigrant is a murderous rapist, that reflects on all illegal immigrants, right? They become a category, an abstract category of people, which I think is really gross and belies the statistics that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born people and all that kind of stuff. But that atmosphere was politically beneficial. You have a sort of similar version of that when you arrest and detain a researcher in New Orleans, you know, in a grad school playing with their visas, right? and saying you, you can't be here, we're going to deport you or whatever, or just making life uncomfortable for one of them, that radiates outward. And people everywhere all of a sudden

who have immigration status, even though they're legal, like, is it really worth being here if I don't know how this is going to play out? And I think that's part of the self-deportation strategy. It's even for legal immigrants, right? People with legal status. I think the Trump administration is fine with it. What I don't get, going back to the original premise of the question, though, I truly don't get is, yes, David's right. Like, there are MAGA people, like, Lord knows Benny Johnson does not care about scientific research, right? Yeah. Lord knows Jesse Waters thinks that wearing a lab coat makes you a woman. Fine. I get all that. The Silicon Valley bros, they get the importance of science, right?

I mean, like, you had Elon Musk stand up and defend H-1B visas for high-tech workers. I remember listening to Mark and Driesen talk at length about how these guys really get the importance of science and technology and innovation, and that's what they're going to bring to government and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. doge was a nearly complete bust as far as we can tell and they've in the process they have done lasting damage to the scientific establishment that i don't think europe can just like it's not like you get this weird opportunity to get the best players from some basketball team and all of a sudden overnight you transform things these are deep institutions with deep cultures and it's really really hard to replicate overnight but that gets to the point is like it's it's this

massive Chesterton's fence, right? We have since the end of World War II decided as a country to invest, I think literally trillions upon trillions of dollars in the idea that our universities, our big research universities, public and private, are going to do the stuff that we need to do and that a Bell Labs couldn't. The time horizon for a Bell Labs to do basic scientific research is still too short. You really just need to put it in universities and then train up cadres of new skilled people and all that. Silicon Valley guys get that. And yet they seem utterly, you know, disinterested or uninterested in the fact that

we've completely monkey wrenched the NIH. We've canceled all sorts of longitudinal studies into important things. Ted Cruz has been a vandal as far as I can tell about a lot of this stuff because he created a lot of this list. and it's not owning the libs, it's punching ourselves in the groin. And I just don't, I don't get it that there is no pushback from that crowd that actually understands this stuff. Well, Jonah, they hate the left more than they care about anything you just described.

I mean, like, if you listen to, say, I would really encourage people to listen to Ross, my colleague, Ross Douthis, interview with Mark Andreessen. And he's talking about his migration from like an MSNBC liberal to Max. and so much of it is rooted in he couldn't handle his young woke employees like he he encountered these young 20-something hyper-woke employees in Silicon Valley really didn't like what they were doing and it starts to alter and adjust his whole worldview to where he just becomes in this this anti-woke anti-left mindset to such an extent that in there's later reporting that you know he forms these like private groups these private chat groups

and things like that. And one of them, he like ends and shuts down because one member of the private Jack group was supporting free speech enough to write an op-ed to the times against these anti-CRT bills. So anti-left that he can't even handle a free speech argument. I mean, and so this is what's happening to a lot of these MAGA tech dudes is they're actually getting pulled in by the anti-left element. They're actually getting pulled in by the own-the-libs element. That's what's really pulling them in. That's the beating heart of the whole thing. And so the economic parts, which some others may have actually had some belief in, like Vivek, Ramoswamy, where is he?

He's out, because one of the things that he did was actually genuinely defend the need for more international visas for top talent. Well, he's gone. He's out. And so the beating heart of MAGA really is the anti-left stuff. and then they just pull in other elements. Oh, well, yeah, he'll also be better for research and development in Silicon Valley. No, he won't.

Oh, he'll also be better in X or Y or Z. No, he won't. The real issue here is that vengeance agenda and a lot of the sort of new recruits to MAGA, if you look at the through line for a ton of these new recruits, the through line is they encountered wokeness or brushed up against intolerance on the left in some way in their lives and in their careers

and swung hard in the other direction and decided those people who were intolerant to them, they have to lose, period. And so it's become this kind of mono-e-mono war of each against all, zero-sum, and things like economic efficiency, good policy, all of that is just secondary to this war of vengeance in the culture. All right. Let's do a little not worth your time. In this case, the question is whether a small island with the oldest operating lighthouse on the west coast of the United States is worth our time. Now, this lighthouse and this island, which was discovered back in 1775, goes back hundreds of years, but really the island is known for something that really only happened for 30 years during that long. history, from 1934 to 1963, this island operated as a federal prison. That's right. We're talking

about Alcatraz. Jonah, this feels a little like your Greenland thing. The president wants to turn it back into a prison. Now, it is still owned by the federal government. While there are some things preventing that from happening, they're mostly logistical, like turning it back into a federal prison, like in the working sense. But there's not a whole lot of legal barriers to this, really. So, Jonah, is this like a really bad idea? Is it just something that everyone freaks out about because they've seen the movie The Rock? And it's just like another thing that when Trump says, it can sound outrageous.

And so you sound cool saying like, oh my God, no, that's insane. Just for the record, because there's been a lot of talk about the role of movies, escape from Alcatraz, Birdman of Alcatraz, The Rock. The best portrayal of Alcatraz is actually from the movie So I Married an Axe Murderer. And we don't need to get into it, but Phil Hartman should have gotten an Oscar for his role as the prison guard tour guide. All right. So that said, I want to be very kind and fair to this idea. It's not nearly as dumb as the terror of foreign movies thing, which is a true smorgasbord of stupidity.

There is no, there's no, there's not a single warming or cooling dish on that entire table that isn't stupid in terms of the movie thing. This, there's a point to it, right? It's sort of like what we, it's kind of like the theme of this podcast this week. Symbolism matters, right? Vibes matter. And like Trump likes the idea. There's some talk that he would seem escape from Alcatraz because it was aired a couple hours before he first brought this up. in South Florida. He likes that it portrays strength. He says so, right? And, like, he talks this way

about a lot of iconic things. I remember him saying that he's going to create the Fort Knox of crypto, which I love. What is that? Like a super thick hard drive? I mean, like, what does that look like? I mean, but, and he, and that's why they talk about Guantanamo, right? They talk about these symbols here. There's actually, what they actually, some people call the, the Alcatraz of the Rockies is this ADX thing in Florence, Colorado that's really badass and really depressingly, you know, oppressive that no one's escaped from, but also no one's ever heard of. So he can't talk about that. So I think the compromise here is simply to say, to say, Mr. Mr. President, this is a great idea, but we would have to tear down the whole thing. It's a historic

landmark. There's no, there's no water pipe to that island, right? I mean, it's like there's no infrastructure to it. I've been to Alcatraz. It's really cool. It would be a complete and total tear down, which I think would be a shame. And but I, so I think the smart way to play it is simply say, we can't do it for all these reasons, not cost effective. But there is this incredibly brutal and cruel prison in Colorado, really sell the cruel part of it. And we're going to rename it new Alcatraz. He gets what he wants, which is the name, right? It's the headline. It's the PR, it's the sizz, and it's already, the thing already exists. I will say, though, and no one else has mentioned this, and, because I've listened to a lot of people talk about

this incredibly stupid topic. There's a lot of talk about how, well, it's a landmark, and we don't want to tear it down, and we should preserve it, and there's also talk about how, well, if we build a new prison, prisons are ugly, and blah, blah, all that's fun. If you guys have never been to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, there's the Portsmouth Naval Prison. It is glorious. It is riddled with bad concrete and asbestos, but that's Trump's issue to figure out. They could take that over and make it into a new Alcatraz as well. I don't think it's cost-effective or a smart idea, but it is a really impressive. It kind of looks like it should be City Hall in Gotham.

That's so funny, Jonah. I just looked at the picture. I have driven by that so many times and not known what that building is. Yeah. The first time I saw it, he's like, I've got to look this thing up. You can't even go inside. It's so dangerous because of like the falling concrete. They mix the concrete wrong using like seawater or something like that.

And so it's like literally falling apart inside. But from the outside, it looks like one of the most imposing things I've ever seen. So anyway, I'm done. I got nothing. David Alcatraz for it. Again, I don't hate it. I don't hate it. I kind of have this like a little bit of element in me of,

I like cool things, too. Island prisons. I even have a soft spot for a military parade. Can I say that out loud? Like, overfly. I love a good overflight at a football game, for example. Sharks with lasers, love sharks with lasers. Even if they're just laser pointers, just the image of the shark with the laser is great.

Yeah. I mean, so I hesitate to say this out loud, but there is something I have in common with Donald Trump is I like cool things, like big trucks, right? the island prisons like oh those things seem are they're cool but come on i mean the amount of money that it would take to really refurbish that totally not cost effective you can only put a few people there it's it's better as a museum it's cool as a museum and i isn't there now though interestingly to as a sort of a data point against the fact that it's you just can't escape from Don't they now have like an Alcatraz swim every year? Yeah.

If Michael Phelps commits a crime, I guess don't put him there, you know? Don't put him there. Don't put him there. Yeah. Let me put it this way. And my list of concern, the fate of Alcatraz is so far down. It is truly not worth your time. But I will say, you know, island prisons can be cool, especially if you make them kind of gothic and put them in a place that's constantly stormy.

Yeah. Okay. A little return of the native almost going. going on there? Sure. The Moors. Okay. Before we end, though, and along these lines, I would like to hear from you guys what from Trump's first hundred days you have liked the most.

Okay. Does it have to be important? Or can it just be things? Because like, there's some... No, there's no limitations on my question. Okay, so in terms of significant things that I've liked, I like some of the executive orders on the DEI, stuff, in part because it's going to be, I take all of your points and agree with them and repeat them often, giving you credit and all that about how temporary executive orders are. There's a lot of

things that the next Democrat is going to have to campaign on. They are going to repeal that Trump is done, because reporters are going to ask, are you going to get rid of this executive order? Are you going to get rid of that executive order? The good thing about some of these executive orders, even some of the bad executive orders, is they're putting these issues back into the political debate. And I think that there's an upside to that. There's the downsides too, but like, so the DEI stuff and some of that I think is

valuable. The thing I have just unalloyed support for is the lifting of the, I'll put it this way. The paper, straw and shower water pressure reforms, I'm 100% behind

and I think he's right. And I I have no problem saying so And then bombing Houthis It's always good to bomb Houthis You know, so I'm there too You know what's so funny about the DEI stuff Which again, like I know, I know I'm beating this horse

Do you know how easy that would be to get through Congress at this point? Yeah Some of it at least, right? Oh, I know. And then it could be done and we could just be- Make it an intelligent bill, it'd be cake Yeah, you can't discriminate on the basis of race Even if you think you're the good guy

Like it's a pretty easy bill All right, David, what's your favorite thing? So if this is real, if there is an actual agreement with the Houthis that to, in exchange for a ceasefire, that they are allowing shipping back through the Red Sea, that's a really good thing. I mean, that the inability to deal with the Houthis was a black mark on Joe Biden. No question about that. Now, I don't know if it's a real thing or not. It's there's a lot of mystery around a lot of these deals. But if that is real, that is a very good thing. I was going to say the decrease. flow of illegal immigrants across the border, but I don't, I want a decreased flow of illegal immigrants across the border. I don't want it to be because people are afraid they're going to spend life in prison in hell. That is horrible. That is evil. And so if we're controlling the border by becoming evil, then I'm not for that. But I would say the Houthis, and then I'm with Jonah on the shower and the plastic straw. That is a 95-5 issue.

that is a 95-5 issue you've missed one there actually has been a judicial nomination our first one of the trump administration whitney hermendorfer um to the sixth circuit uh david i think you agree like this is a great pick so there's been a lot of concern that trump would pick you know stephen miller for judge uh still concerned but with one of one to go on this is a very traditional republic pick. Whitney has an incredible resume. She's actually clerked for Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. What? The trifecta. Yeah, like one third of the court. I think there's actually about five picks now, including district court, and I think they're all solid. I could be, I'm relying on voices I trust, so who've said they're all solid. Are they in the room with you now, David? Do we need to get you some medication? They're in my head. Jonah. They're my, there are special people in my head. All right. With that, thank you for joining us. We'll see you next week on the dispatch podcast.

Thank you.