The Dispatch Podcast - What Did It All Mean? | Roundtable

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

Sarah Isgur, Steve Hayes, and Chris Stirewalt revisit the election results and what they could mean for the future of American politics before examining the impact of Trump’s most recent cabinet appointments. The Agenda: —Permanent majority? —The Republican mandate —Failing to constrain Trump —Cabinet of allegations —Gaetz, Thune, and McConnell —How the media lost this election —Social media’s role in the election —Rise of misinformation —RFK Jr. and his track record Show Notes: —Sarah’s tweet —Horse in the hospital —Broken News —Georgetown Battleground Civility Poll —RFK Jr. on Joe Rogan The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Sarah Isgir, and we've got Steve Hayes and Chris Steyerwalt in the house. Chris, thanks for being here. Heck yeah. A treat. A treat. Oh, you're welcome, Sarah. I'm happy to be here too. You have to be here. You have to be here. All right. So Stairwalt, let's start with the future. I don't want to do just like a backward looking. What did we learn from the election? What I want to talk about is what we learned about the future. The future meaning 2028, the future meaning the Republican Party. I don't know. What are your thoughts about what happens now? Well, the Republican Party has obviously cemented a permanent majority based on a broadly diverse. base of voters and nothing will ever be this. You know you're triggering me.

Nothing will ever be the same again. I think the important thing to take away from the 2024 election is that the Republican Party has changed completely and nothing will ever be the same again. Probably no black people will vote for Democrats at all in 2028. I think that's the, I think that's your big takeaway. That's what it seems to be, right? If I'm just... Seems to be.

That's what I'm picking up. If I'm sitting on right wing Twitter. Okay, can I tell you my crazy... that I, like, really, really believe right now without knowing anything about the economy, who the candidates would be, anything else, I would feel pretty good betting money that a Democrat wins the presidential election in 2028. And not because Trump's in office, none of that. The entire prediction is based on sort of the rapid back and forth that Americans have experienced, the unhappy with the direction of the country, which has been an international

phenomenon, and that I don't see that ending. And therefore, the likelihood to me seems that we would have another unhappy with the direction of the country change-type election unless the international temperature for Western democracies and liberalism changes. So that would be the first time in American history that the party in power was turned out four times in a row. We, with this election, tied the previous record, which was 1884 to 1892, where we also had the non-consecutive executive. And the similarity between our era and the Gilded Age or late 19th century is rough parity between the parties, right? We don't have a clear majority party. And that puts the map in flux. It puts coalitions in flux. And to your

point in very much the case, dissatisfaction with dysfunctional and corrupt government. The reason that we went Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland to McKinley, the reason that it went down that way was that the people understandably hated the way that the government was working. And they hated the degree of corruption. They hated the degree of self-dealing. The missing story, my favorite what-if in American history is Steve Hayes, you know where the Capitol Grill is in Washington, D.C. I do. You know the fountain that is catty corner in front of the Federal Trade Commission right there? I do, yeah. It was at that place where James A. Garfield was assassinated. And later, it would take a team of doctors to kill him

completely eventually. But Garfield was the reformer that America needed at that point. And had he not have been assassinated, and had he lived and had all of those things happen, there's a big what if about what might have happened. What we got instead was corruption, financial panics, and the seesawing back and forth. Cleveland was a reformer. Cleveland was running. against corruption. And now we have the anti-Cleveland, right? Donald Trump runs on the basis of it's time for our corruption. It's time for our. The other side is corrupt. It's time for our side. He's sort of, Trump is sort of a James G. Blaine kind of figure. It's time for us to take. It's time for us to get our goods because the bad people have been taking their stuff for too long.

I feel like I could end the podcast right there. That was just like there. There's nothing better that's going to happen for the rest of this time than going back to the Gilded Age. I'm so into this. Like, maybe we should have the whole podcast just on the Gilded age. I'm here with all the James Abram Garfield data that you want. Okay. So our era of instability, do you think that Republicans have a mandate then? What do you think that mandate is, if anything. Well, a mandate is the unfortunate thing about our politics in the 21st century, a lot of them are that the mandate is to not be the other person, right?

Stop doing this and do something else. Donald Trump's mandate in 2016 was to not be Hillary Clinton. He nailed it. And then Joe Biden's mandate was to not be Donald Trump. I think Donald Trump can claim a mandate on immigration and on inflation to do things to bad, to try to bring down costs, and certainly on immigration. Of all the people who had a hand in Donald Trump's decisive victory, a seven point shift in the nation as a whole, a three point shift in the swing states, Greg Abbott. Wait, so what's the seven point shift in? And those are in the non-swing states.

So the non-swing states moved seven points blue to red. And that was exacerbated by a 10-point shift in the major metropolitan areas. So Los Angeles, New York, da-da-da-da. Now, 10 points in a place. Yeah, but what's interesting about that is turnout also went down in those places. Right. So, like, there were sort of two different stories. Bigger swing in non-competitive states where turnout went down,

i.e. the people who actually did want to come vote really wanted that change. Then the swing states looked really interesting. Turnout went up. There was still a shift, a pronounced shift, what average of 3.2 points in the swing states. But it was higher turnout. And that sort of accounted for the tighter race, tighter such as it was. When they tell you campaign ads don't work, they work you spend you spend a billion dollars uh each campaign spends a billion dollars in seven states uh it works and i think to that telling people that if the other side wins it will be the last election so you better go vote yeah and also look i want to credit that there's going to be a lot of dunking going on about Kamala harris uh for a while right the she got a she got a a little bit

of a pass from Democrats, and then they will circle back around and feast on her carcass yet again later on. But whatever said, I think the argument, the difference in the size of the swing speaks to an effective campaign, right? They got turnout up. They got their voters out. They got the people who, they succeeded in getting the voters that they were looking for. The people who they were trying to talk to with the Liz Cheney, the Nikki Haley Republicans, the squishy center-right women of the suburban counties around Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, et cetera, I think you can make a pretty good case that they got those voters. But, Sarah, to your point, if your folks stay home, right? If your voters stay home and the other side, their court, if the working class voters who are Republican-leaning turn out and the working-class voters, lower-propensity voters who are Democratic, don't.

turn out, you lose. And that Kamala Harris ran a better campaign than Hillary Clinton, but she ended up with a similar, she ended up with a similar result. And that's the, how much of that is the candidates themselves and how much of that are, is the circumstances will never really, really know, right? How much of that was inflation and immigration? What I was going to say was Greg Abbott deserves a lot of credit or blame, depending on your affiliation, for how the election turned out the way it did, because the decision to send all those migrants to big cities, I think you see in the 10-point swing. And whether that's, which percentage of it is reduced turnout among core Democratic voters, which one of it is

actual shift of Biden-Trump voters, the spreading the pain of that. to these cities, I think was very effect. I think was politically very effective. Okay, I swear Steve is on this podcast, but one more question for you, Steyerwell, before we make this more of a roundtable. Keep going. This is great. I asked you whether Republicans might overread their mandate, whether they had a mandate, all of that. Is it also possible for Democrats to overread their loss? Sure. The anguish. So, well, I didn't really answer your first question, which is, is it possible for Republicans to over interpret their mandate? And they're doing it robustly. right? They're doing the dumbest version possible because there was, there's no mandate for

taking fluoride out of the drinking water and there's no mandate for having Matt Gates at the Department of Justice. This sort of vengeful lunatic stuff, there's no, there's no argument that can be made that this is what people wanted and this is the message that voters were trying to send. So they're wildly overinterpreting their mandate, which in, in a worse way so far than Joe Biden did in 2020, in 2021. Democrats, the James Carville line applies, you're never as far up as you think you are, or you're never as far down as you think you are,

and that has its corollary, which is you're never as far up as you think you are. Democrats right now are doing some good soul searching, and I think Adam Gentleson and a bunch of people are trying to have a thoughtful conversation about how capture by interest groups and activist groups within the Democratic Party handcuffs Democrats from being able to reach for these voters. And I think that's a good and helpful conversation for Democrats to have. But if history is our guide, what do we expect Democrats to do? We expect

them to wait for Donald Trump to screw up and then run as not, to run as brand X in 20, 2022, right? Because that's been the norm in our era of intense negative partisanship is you just wait for the other guy to screw up. You act like you just fell off the back of a turnup trip. I can't believe what's going on here. This is crazy. And it's like, weren't you guys here two years ago? No, no, no. I don't know anything about that. And whoever these guys are, they're terrible. And that they'll wait. And unfortunately, for Democrats, they're going to need Trump to screw up a lot given the Senate map. given the Senate map for them to have a big, a big knock in 26, you know, they've got Susan Collins and Tom Tillis as targets in states where they can, they can credibly say that their swing states or blue states. After that, you know, they're going to be defending in Georgia. They're going to be doing whatever. So their strategy requires or their tactic requires pretty big screw-ups to put places like Georgia in. But Steve, here's the thing that I feel like people don't deal with, grapple with, whatever. Like, four years is an incredibly short period of time.

So think about, you know, Thanksgiving week in 2004, where George W. Bush has demolished John Kerry, who is now viewed, again, in Thanksgiving of 2004, as being a fatally flawed candidate, the windsurfing, the flip-flopping. the effete Massachusetts accent and he's married to the Heinz fortune, you know, how did they possibly think that they could win an election like that? And Republicans are like, aha, permanent majority, everything is ours forever and ever. And Barack Obama is going to come along in short order and completely change the Democratic Party and obviously win two terms. Now, you can argue that some of those changes were then Democrats thinking that everything was permanent and nothing would change. But my point is, in a presidential system, as opposed to a parliamentary

system, the candidate at the top can change everything, including their own party. Look at Donald Trump in 2016. And so it seems really weird to me that I look around and I feel like I'm the one taking crazy pills because everyone talks from both sides. Like, you know, the winning side. did everything right, the losing side did everything wrong, all of this is permanent, you know, lose all hope Democrats and Republicans. Let's go back to doing executive orders and not doing anything through Congress, you know, get rid of the advice and consent process because four years might as well be a million years. Well, on that last point first, I mean, it won't surprise you or anyone listening that our elected officials are short-term thinkers, right?

I mean, they're making decisions based on what's good for them today, what's good for them tomorrow, a month, maybe a year. Too few of them are thinking about sort of the long-term implications. And, you know, you had, I don't like to make reference to Twitter very often these days, Sarah, but you had a tweet where you made this very basic observation. Like, hey, Republicans, if you are pushing through flawed nominees today who can't get a majority of votes among Senate Republicans, you can be sure that Democrats will do the same thing with crazy people in four years the next time they have the White House. And, of course, you know, that's at once an obvious. It was not well received if you're curious.

It's an obvious thing to say, but I mean, I do think, I mean, this goes to to a point that Chris was making, you know, we are in this in this moment of sort of like, and Trump and Republicans, I think, were in some ways sort of shockingly blunt about this, where their argument was in effect, it's our turn. And, you know, Chris says, it's our turn to be corrupt. these people have been corrupt for a long time. Now we get to be corrupt. And, you know, they, they weren't saying it exactly that. And Trump says he still says he's going to drain the swamp despite four years of what we saw the first time around. But basically, this has become

a more open and crass power exchange where there's not really much talk about the long-term things. And we'll see this put to a test, I think, very quickly with these nominations. You know, I think when you think about somebody like John Thune, incoming Senate Majority Leader for the Republicans, he's an institutionalist. He cares about these things. He understands the implications of dramatic changes from sort of to the fundamentals of the system that served us well for 250 years. And I don't think he likes it. I don't think he likes the talk. But Trump, we've seen it in his in his tweets and comments here just over the past few days.

He doesn't care. He's just giving my people. I want my people. That's going to be an issue, I think, pretty soon, pretty quickly. The McConnell approach to dealing with Trump was not to say much, but to do a lot. Democrats who hate Mitch McConnell underappreciate that no one did more to constrain Donald Trump in its first term than Mitch McConnell. And certainly on the second impeachment, you could make a convincing argument that he failed that test. but for most of the four years, who was jamming Donald Trump, it was Mitch McConnell more than, more than any one person.

And what I think we're about to find out is this, if we are just talking about power now, right? If putting the former CEO of the World Wrestling Federation in charge of the Department of Education is a strong cue that policy does not have the whip hand in the, the second Trump administration. And we're just talking about who's got the power. We'll find out soon with Thune. Is Thune following the McConnell, which is to nod and smile while you reach for the stick and say like, oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, everything's on the table. We don't know what's going on here.

Yeah, we're eager to work with the new president and then be ready to say, no, Matt Gates cannot be attorney general. No, Tulsie Gabbard cannot be the ODNI. No, no, no, no, no. and then find the places where you can agree. Does that maybe include Pete Hegseth? Seems like no right now because it seems like the scandal stuff will just become such a distraction

and that it will become too much of a problem. But certainly, you know, does, would you give him Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? What are the wild picks that you let him have and then you shut down the other ones and you grind it out? Isn't the problem that a lot of these guys have scandals? Matt Gates, RFK Jr., Pete Hegg-Seth, Matt Whitaker. Like, there's a lot of stuff there. And of a similar flavor, right?

Of the problem other than the specific allegations is that there's a theme to the pudding, right? You're like, oh, okay, what happened? Why did Donald Trump's nominees get derailed? Well, he nominated a bunch of guys with Me Too problems and weird sex stuff. And then that just is the like, oh, yeah. And I think part of this is a Kavanaugh, the one person Donald Trump fought for at political risk and cost in his first administration that I can think of is Brett Kavanaugh. That became a thing for Trump.

And I think it became a thing for Trump because of the Me Too part, right? I think Trump felt a kindred spirit to Brett Kavanaugh, which probably horrified Brett Kavanaugh. but that here was a guy being, in Trump's mind, railroaded because of these unsubstantiated allegations of sexual misconduct. And I think a lot of this stuff is the same kind of like we're taking that back. And interestingly, don't forget, there's at least some data to support the idea that politically it helped Republicans in 2018 in specific Senate races. Sure.

The Kavanaugh effect. I think the the corruption that this this corruption argument so the breaking the system the sticking it to people to we've had enough right we've had enough is real right and we have to smash a beer bottle in their faces we have to we have to make them hurt so that they understand that's not just Charlie Kirk online, that is a natural pendulum swinging back to the excesses of a moment. The problem is that they're swinging the pendulum too hard. They're swinging it back too hard. It's not a couple of acknowledgments. It's we can do anything now. Now we can do anything because you are illegitimate and your power is illegitimate. We can do anything we want. And that's not, if the expectations, the bar is so low for Donald Trump, no politician has ever had a lower bar.

Barack Obama had a pretty low bar. No politician has ever had a lower bar than Donald Trump because anything that he does that basically works and is okay seems kind of surprising. John Mullaney has the great skit, the great bid about Donald Trump is like a horse in a hospital. and it's alarming and you hear the horse walking around and the horse shouldn't be in here. It feels like it shouldn't be in here. But when the horse can do something, right? When the horse, if the horse suddenly started filling out intake forms, you'd say, wow, that

horse is pretty, that's a good job for that horse. So Trump has this really low bar for how good he has to be, how presidential, how effective he has to be, and they are testing it already. They have already tested that. Okay, Steve, you know Senator and now Majority Leader John Thune and his, his purpose in the Senate is obviously to have a functional body for the world's most deliberative body, as they call it sort of as a joke now. but it's also to protect his members from political liability, taking bad votes, getting themselves in trouble before a midterm election. How's that going to work? I think it's going to be a challenge. You know, I think there are parallels to, as Chris pointed out, to the way that Mitch McConnell

handled Donald Trump in 2017 and had Paul Ryan in the House working alongside him. And I would say, coming from the same perspective. The differences this time, I think, are a few and pretty significant. John Thune does not have such a partner in Mike Johnson. Mike Johnson has become almost sort of a MAGA appendage. He is dedicated to doing what MAGA wants. And Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, I think, could work with one another to say, this seems not to be in the interest of the Republican Party of the United States, of our members, let's find a different way or let's slow this down or let's not do it or let's redirect Donald Trump. But I think to Chris's point, that great success in doing that. I think the job is trickier for Thune for a few reasons. One, he doesn't have that

partner in Mike Johnson. I think Mike Johnson is going to be pretty well devoted to doing what Donald Trump wants Mike Johnson to do. And we've seen this already, I would say, in the Matt Gates. example, right? I mean, it may be just that Mike Johnson is happy to have Matt Gates out of the House of Representatives because makes his job more secure. But he's out there making public arguments in favor of Gates as Attorney General in opposition to releasing the report compiled by the House Ethics Committee, which has lots of details, some of which I think have begun to be public, but many others of which have not begun to be public about Gates's behavior. So I think there's a different dynamic between the Republican leaders in the two houses of the legislature.

But second, there's a difference between Thune and McConnell. McConnell had been more or less in the chair for decades. And many of the people who were in the Republican Senate conference at the time, owed their elections to Mitch McConnell, had deep loyalty to Mitch McConnell, and could be asked politely to do what McConnell wanted them to do, or coerced harshly to get them to do to do what McConnell wanted them to do. I think Thune starts with a bigger challenge because he doesn't have the same levers necessarily. Now, he has, I think he's very good relationships with most of the people in the conference.

I think there's a MAGA wing that probably starts out looking to cause trouble for him. I mean, you've already seen comments from Senator Tommy Tuberville, who's sort of making threats that if John Thune doesn't go along, he's going to be out. There is sort of a, should we call it a Senate Freedom Caucus emerging, which I think could be problematic for Thune. And we'll have new members in Bernie Moreno and others, yeah. Correct. And a great ally in J.D. Vance as vice president of the United States and leader of the Senate. So anyway, this is a long way of describing some of the differences.

I think some of the challenges. McConnell is very close to Thune. I don't think McConnell not having a leadership spot is going to command the attention or be able to direct the members of that conference anywhere near the way that he was before. But he'll be an ally. It's worth knowing. I wrote a profile of John Thune. This is back in 2010. I remember it well.

I remember it well. That was a great piece. It was somebody posted it in the internal dispatch dispatch. dispatch Slack channel the other day, and, you know, it has the time to read statistic. It was 39 minutes was the time to read. But one of the things that happened as I reported that profile, I spent a bunch of time out in South Dakota, spent a lot of time with Thune, with people who had gotten them elected, with his family, with others.

And one of the things that surprised me, this was when Thune was contemplating a run for president in 2012, was when I called Mitch McConnell for comment to ask about the possibility that Thune would run for president. McConnell endorsed Thune, just out of the blue, just said, yeah, I think he's the greatest. There are going to be lots of senators who will look at taking a run for office. And I hope John Thune runs, and I hope he wins. And I did not, nobody had warned me that Mitch McConnell was going to preemptively endorse John Thune, you know, before a Republican primary. This was before the 2010 midterms, but I think it speaks to just how close Thune and McConnell were at the time. Thune has learned sort of at the side of Mitch McConnell for years.

And I think regards the institution of the Senate and the importance of separation of powers in much the same way that Mitch McConnell does. And he's been good in his role. The big advantage that McConnell had other than, as you rightly point out, the power, right, and the ability to strong arm, like you're, you're going to have trouble if you don't do what we're telling you to do. The other thing is he has a talismanic power in the minds of Senate Republicans that they deferred to him because he was effective. And his, after the 2010 midterms and Mitch McConnell said to Republicans, you're idiots. This, this has to,

to stop. We have to get serious. When Stephen Law went over to the Senate leadership fund, or are they Senate Majority Fund, whatever. But when the Super PAC started and they got serious about fighting in primaries, by the time they win in 2014, these Senate Republicans who are individuals and individualistic, very much so. They've got their own races, their own states. They looked at McConnell as somebody who won, right? There's a lucky Jack Aubrey, opponent to McConnell's authority. Thune does not benefit from that. He's raised a ton of money.

He's raised hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars for his fellow senators. And they appreciate that and they like that. But he doesn't have a win yet. He can't say, yep, and I saw us through this wilderness. And now you can have confidence in me. And fortunately or unfortunately for Thune, he's going to get the chance to start putting that to the test immediately, right? Like January 3rd, it begins that he's going to be facing these difficult tests and he's going to look at these Senate Republicans and say, I know you don't want to

do this, but I think it's the smart play. And here's why we, this is why this is the tactical way to deal with Donald Trump. He doesn't have a track record like McConnell did to stand on and he's going to have to build one very quickly. Yeah, I mean, this is not, it's not a new story. I mean, I think the problem I have with so many people who are talking about this right now is they're treating it as as if this were some abrupt change. Oh, my gosh, the mainstream media is suddenly losing credibility. And that's literally been happening for decades. Some people might have even written a book about this phenomenon called Broken News. Very, very good book. Highly recommend it. I've recommended it before. I recommend it even when Chris isn't here. Wow. But if you want

an inside look at sort of some of these changes and how this happened and the history behind it, it really helps lay out the story quite persuasively. We're just living in a different information environment. I would argue that there's not a single thing that's more important to the changes that we're seeing in our politics in the United States, but globally. I mean, one of the reasons that we're able to point to these other countries and say, look at this incumbency anchor, this disadvantage for incumbents, is because information travels as fast as it does, and it's so readily accessible to people everywhere. It's a fuel for populism. And some of it is based on voters, citizens getting good information faster than they would have gotten in the past.

Some of it is based on voters, citizens, getting really bad information and acting on that bad information, but also getting it fast. Yeah. And with with very little corrections. I mean, And, you know, we spend a fair amount of time talking about the rise of sort of conspiracy culture. And I think it's a bigger problem on the right than the left. It's been a bigger problem on the right than the left for a while. And it can shape the way that people think about some of these things. You know, if you think back just to the debate, look at the debate between Trump and Kamala Harris. I just happened to be looking at this and we published a fact check of Bill Act.

the hedge fund billionaire on a different and unrelated issue. But remember, Kamala Harris, I think, was widely regarded as having won that debate with Donald Trump by pretty much everybody other than Donald Trump and some of the people spinning for him at the debate site. And immediately there arose this conspiracy populated and amplified on Twitter and on some talk radio, including talk radio from former colleagues that Chris and I had. that Kamala Harris had been given the answers by ABC in advance, and that there was a whistleblower who was willing to say this and maybe even signed some legal-sounding document.

That's right. There's an affidavit. It can't be a lie. There's an affidavit, testifying, right. My gosh. Testifying to this. Those conspiracy theories circulated for a week and were given, you know, lots of attention from people on the center right.

And it was a week later, the whistleblower never emerged. There was never actually any evidence to support these claims. And some of the people, Bill Ackman among them, who had been pushing this for a week, eventually said, yeah, you know what? It turns out probably this is not true. But of course, a fraction of the people who had been marinating in this for the previous week thinking that, yeah, maybe Kamala Harris bested Donald Trump in this debate, but she did so because the media were providing her with the answers.

came away with the conclusion that that's what happened there, further deteriorating whatever limited faith that they had in the mainstream media, despite the fact the whole thing was made up. So to answer your question directly, Sarah, I think this wasn't a great moment for the media, and a lot of that was self-inflicted. I think there were many times when, and we've talked about some of them on this podcast, when the media sort of failed to hold Joe Biden account

and failed to do the kind of reporting that a skeptical, dogged, curious, independent media should be doing. And some of that, to be sure, involved Joe Biden's deteriorating condition. We don't need to spend a ton of time on that. And it wasn't true of everybody in the media. You know, we had Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns

wrote a book, This Will Not Pass. I believe we had them on this podcast in the spring of 2022, saying sort of five alarm fire among Democrats about just how badly Joe Biden's mental acuity had eroded. And they were raising those questions. Other journalists was a big Wall Street Journal piece that raised these questions, got a lot of grief from Democratic partisans and others in the media. So some people did cover this. but it wasn't covered the way that it would have been recovered, frankly, if it had been a Republican.

And, you know, people look at Kamala Harris, and I think she sort of, she sort of got a pass from the media on the fact that she sat next to Joe Biden for all of this time as he deteriorated. She probably nobody had a better opportunity to witness his deterioration firsthand more than Kamala Harris. and I think that ended up being a big factor in the election, but it wasn't because the media made it a big factor in the election. I think people just understood, oh, this guy is not capable enough to continue running for president and she was his vice president? That's a problem. Yeah, the only gainsay I had on that Wall Street Journal store you talked about was,

it was like, people are saying behind closed doors. It ain't behind closed doors. Right. We can see it, right? There's no people who accused it of cover up. not covered up. Joe Biden, Joe Biden's deterioration, not covered up. I think the, my resolution for 2025 is to stop talking about the media as one thing. Yeah. And, and my, my, my, my, my takeaway from this is it's over, right? Whatever it was and whatever we're, and I'm very guilty of this,

that there's a going back to something, right? That there's a, and then we'll get back to something that's like this. And I do think that there'll be reconsolidation. And I do think that the media business will reconsolate and there will be brands that endure and grow and ones that fade away and all that stuff. But I think what is important now is to be specific. Yeah.

And say, okay, who is the dispatch? who is the Joe Rogan experience, who is the New York Times? Because what is very obvious is that given the atomized marketplace and given how small, relatively speaking, these audiences are for individual outlets, I think it's important for me to stop thinking about that there is such a thing as a mainstream media and that there is such a thing as a power center there. I think it's every man and every woman for themselves. And I think that the New York Times is very powerful.

I think The Washington Post is not that powerful, but it's got some stroke. And NBC Nightly News has some viewers, but it doesn't have that many viewers. And I think we have to sort of have a more specific. I think I have to learn to be more specific when talking about the media because I don't think it's a thing anymore. Okay. Let's talk about some other groups that I think are re-evaluating their roles in this election. So the role of social media of where people are getting their news, the Georgetown Institute of Politics civility poll came out.

And I mean, a few interesting things to come out of that. First of all, the doomsday clock ticked actually down a little bit for the first time in over four years. So when you ask people on a scale of zero, zero being like we're all living in utopia to 100 being we are currently in a civil war, where do you think we are? It was in the 70s just a few months ago. And now in this poll that they were in the field with just after the election, it's now in the 60s. I'm not saying 66 is great, but it's better than 75. And when You asked people whether they felt like they were voting for the lesser of two evils. That number was much lower than I thought it would be.

But when you ask people where they got their news from and what news sources they trusted, I don't think any of this will surprise you, but it maybe doesn't spell great things for the health of the country either. So number one, biggest news source and most trusted news source has remained constant for as long as I've been in this business. It's local news. it's turning on the local news that's the person you trust and of course we see this mirrored in all sorts of other ways people don't trust you know public health science but they trust their doctor people don't like congress but they actually like their congressman um so people say they don't like the media but they actually trust their local news person now the other parts

of this though are like people are getting their news from like everywhere i mean right the second most common is my friends, friends and family. Then you're going to see social media. And so Stairwell, to your point about like, this is every man for himself, but it's also as the consumer, it's every man for yourself. And, you know, as this sort of fractured, we've seen consolidation in other places, maybe kind of sort of, you know, when it comes to streaming services, we're not really getting new streaming services anymore. And I think we'll see an era of consolidation. Are we going to see news consolidation as well? Was this a win for big tech when it comes to news? Was it a loss for big tech when it comes to news? You know, the Trump administration

is obviously talking about various regulatory reforms when it comes to things like section 230 and protections for big tech related to their news disseminating function. I don't know. What's next? Well, Meda decided that it did not want to be in the news business, right? Meta concluded after 2016 and 2020, they want to show people dog videos and they want to be recipes and jokes. And the political content is a loser for sure. Now, Elon Musk went the other way. And he said, we're doing politics. We're going to do all. politics all the time. We're getting into it. And he obviously has some different motives outside from just profit, right? The idea of X seems to be that it can facilitate all of his other things, his other ambitions to be powerful, to be the richest person in the world can be facilitated by having this platform and pumping it, pumping it, pumping it full of hot garbage, right like the the the maximalist place but this is so interesting styro well do you hear this as well

like there are smart thoughtful people who think twitter saved the country that it is now this free speech bastion um that it made a huge difference in the election and all for the good and then there's people who think twitter is a total dumpster fire nobody's on it anymore um and and twitter is basically a non-entity at this point, and Elon Musk bought Twitter to have it not exist. Which one of those realities are true? I think probably the truth is, as usual, somewhere in between those things. I think the enthusiasm among Republicans to punish tech companies should be at least a lot less now that they have their own, right?

that Elon Musk is the mega mega super 10,000 X. The market theoretically worked, and they got one, right? After everybody's saying, we got to break up Google, we got to break up this, we got to do whatever. Republicans look at, I can't remember who wrote the piece, and I'm sorry, I can't remember right now, but it was revealing about how Trump insiders were prepared to pin the loss on Elon Musk. that if he lost, they were going to say it was because of Elon Musk and what did they end up with?

They ended up with a win and whether it is, whether that's true or not true, the received wisdom among Republicans is that Elon Musk did this. The Republican story for how they lost in 2020, when they say that the funny game that Republicans play about what,

there's a semantic game about the word rigged, right? and the election was rigged. You mean they stole votes? No, no, no, no. What I mean is that because they took down the New York Post's tweet about Hunter Biden's laptop, the election was rigged. And you're like, oh, okay, got it.

Literally an entire book written in that vein. And many pieces of commentary, many pieces, whatever. And it was a way to agree with the sort of Qaeda kukes, but with a minimally defensible position. It was rigged because the media is bad. It's rigged because... And local official changing mail-in ballot rules and COVID rules changed, not by the state legislature, but by county voting officials or the courts, etc. And Mark Zuckerberg providing non-profit dollars to help local officials conduct elections. But your point, Stairwalt, is they're not arguing that ballot machines were rigged, votes were changed, ballot boxes were stuffed.

The North Korean Zodiac boats did not deliver the ghost of Hugo Chavez to the coast of Maine. Right. I did love the guy who told me. I have many pleasures in getting to travel this great nation of ours as much as I do. And one thing I should say, speaking of the media, the most common interaction I have with people used to be about Fox. And it is about the dispatch, more than News Nation, more than anything else. because dispatch people are fans. They love it.

They feel community. And they tell me, this is really important. You have to keep doing it. They feel a visceral connection to the dispatch as a sort of an oasis of sanity. And I love that. I think that's essential. But if the received wisdom among right-wingers was that they lost in 2020 because of collusion between big tech and the media and all of that stuff, well,

This time they say, and we took it back, right? We did that. Now, I don't think that has much to do with why working class voters who are definitely not on Twitter or X, who are most assuredly, not heavy duty tweeters, why they, in reaction, under very understandable reaction against inflation and very understandable reaction against mass migration, that those people said, enough with you people, let's try the other people we don't like. Like, enough of these people, we'll go back to the people from before because it was okay. It wasn't as bad as we thought it was. I don't think that had much to do with Twitter. But I do think that for engagement for what, it doesn't matter what happened. It matters what people think happened.

It matters what the parties believe happened. Yes. And what Republicans believe happened is that, or a lot of Republicans. Republicans believe happened, is that Elon Musk shattered the barrier and brought them into power. And what I find interesting about this is a lot of the like Project 2025 stuff and a lot of what they're talking about, you know, we've got to go to war with big tech. And I think, are they even going to feel that way anymore now that they have their own now that Elon Musk was shooting a million dollars a day out of a t-shirt cannon into swing states and doing all this stuff,

maybe they're going to feel differently about it now because they think they won, because they think they've done it. So can I, this is, I need to spend a moment here. I think this is such a profoundly important point, maybe the most important point, although I agree with Jonah's rejection of monocausal explanations. Look, I mean, I think the simplest explanation for why the election turned out the way that it did is the right one. People were frustrated with the status quo.

They didn't like Joe Biden. They didn't think he was an effective president. And for reasons that should seem obvious, they felt the same way about Kamala Harris, especially because she turned down many opportunities to say, I'm different. I would have done things different. I will do things different prospectively. So I think that's the, and inflation, you know, set aside every other economic indicator, inflation mattered most because inflation was in their pocket.

That's what they cared about. So, I think that's the best explanation for what happened. Having said that, and this goes back to your original point, Sarah, you can't understand what happened in this election without understanding the changes in the information environment and the distortion of reality that we've seen over the past five years. I mean, really, this is longer than five years, but particularly over the past five years, and let me cite two examples. The first is still an election. The 2020 election, wasn't stolen. Donald Trump lost, was it 61 out of 62 court cases, some of them on technicalities. In every way that this was tested, the 2020 election wasn't stolen. And yet, depending on the

poll, you had upwards of 70% of Republicans who believed it was stolen. To Chris's point, it doesn't matter what happened. It matters what people think happened. And they think that because they were getting their information from people, whether it be Fox News, whether it be friends and family, whether it be social media, whether it be an Elon supported Twitter that told them that. And they came to believe this. And you couldn't shake them, no matter what evidence you provided, you couldn't shake them of that view that the election was stolen. Remember, this was something that was laughed at by Trump's own people in the White House between Election Day 2020 and January 6th. They almost universally, almost unanimously told Trump he had lost the election.

So virtually nobody believed Donald Trump won the 2020 election, and yet 70% of Republicans came to believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. The second point, closely related, is January 6th. We all watched it live on our televisions in real time as MAGA stormtroopers assaulted the capital, assaulted capital, police officers in the name of protests against this stolen election. That's what happened. From that moment on, and there was nearly universal condemnation among sort of rank and file Republicans, Republican office holders.

From that moment on, there was a project to rewrite that history. And you'll remember in those early hours, there was sort of a desperate grasping from Maga World. How do we spin this? Like, oh, it was Antifa. Antifa was the, they were the, that's the real story. Oh, no, no, it was the federal government. That was the real.

And they floated all of these different possibilities, none of which panned out because they weren't true. And yet, you had with Tucker Carlson's Patriot Purge, a 90-minute documentary claiming, all of these things sort of at once. I mean, it was a mishmash of bad conspiracies, but giving people an answer. And then you had people like Julie Kelly and others on the far right claiming this really was the federal government. And oh, look at this. They said that police officers were killed.

In fact, police officers weren't killed. Therefore, everything you think you know about January 6th is wrong. One after another after another. These stories, again, things we watched live on video, people came to believe that what they had seen with their own eyes wasn't true. true and wasn't the real story. And, you know, I wrote a piece at the end of this election. I know, shocking. That might be the biggest surprise of the election was that I actually finally wrote a piece. Talking about January 6th, because to me, January 6th is a really big deal, should remain a really big deal. But my suspicion was that for most voters, it probably wasn't

a big deal, both because of the immediacy of inflation, but also because there was enough enough confusion about what had happened, sewn by Republicans and amplified by these media outlets, that people weren't going to decide their votes on that. And I think it's hard to overstate the significance that couldn't have happened 30 years ago. And it happened today because of the democratization of information that we're living in and because of the willingness or the eagerness on the demand side of people to believe stuff that they want to believe facts, truth, and reality be damned. All right.

It's fair to say that that kind of contextualization has always taken place and the softening, right? Democrats and the Civil Rights Act, we can think of odiums of the past that were softened, softened, airbrushed out of existence, that eventually the sins of the past get retold. But to your point, and this is. is why we have to get better as consumers and we as journalists have to do such a good job. It happens really quickly now, right? The battle, the information battle space is instantaneous and

it is cruelly regressive, right? It's going to go right down to the absolute pits right away. And there just isn't time for narrative spinning the way that there once was. All right. I want to do a little not worth your time here because it was mentioned earlier in the podcast. And I'm just sort of curious what you guys think. When you talk about Trump's cabinet picks with, let's call them normies out there, by which I mean my friends, there's a lot of like concern over many of them. And then you get to RFK Jr. And it seems like I'm hearing a lot of folks say something like, look, I like the polio vaccine. Hope he doesn't touch like vaccines.

But on a bunch of this other stuff, I guess I am curious and want the government to actually look into some of these health questions. Like you brought up fluoride, Styrewald. And I think that's actually a pretty interesting example because my understanding is that the city of Portland, for instance, never added fluoride to their water. and they're doing just fine. And I remember there was a story from a few years back of a local township maybe in New Hampshire

where the local official just decided to stop putting fluoride in the water without telling anyone. Now, people got really mad about that. Like, they're going to be mad if you don't tell me you are putting fluoride in the water, but they're also mad if you just took away the fluoride. But that basically, when it comes to iodine and salt

or fluoride in water, the argument goes something like, that made tons of sense. It was actually incredibly important to prevent goiter, for instance. That's why we have iodine in our salt. When our nutrition, especially in the Great Lakes area where iodine had basically been ground out of the soil by those glaciers when they retreated, you weren't getting that in your diet because our diets were grain-based crap in the 1950s, largely cereal.

Now people are getting enough iodine, which at too high of levels could be poisonous, is poisonous. And for fluoride, we're getting that in our diets too. We get it far more at the dentist now than we used to. So these are things we just don't need anymore, really. Now, maybe there aren't big side effects, and it's not like actually much of a trade-off. So why would we take it out? But I think a lot of people out there are kind of curious. So set aside the vaccine issue, which I know is a big one to set aside. RFK Jr. at HHS. Are you curious? Is it worth your time? To be a reformer, you have to be good at reforming. One of the reasons that I think so many conservatives were so deeply offended by the Lyndon

McMahon pick is that conservatives have been for decades, decades working on education policy, right? Take us seriously, they said, on education policy. So on the matter of education reform, there are thousands. of people who could serve as Secretary of Education. There are people who, I'm recording this at the American Enterprise Institute, but there are across the breadth and width of this great nation, there are conservative education reformers who would be good at the job.

And they got a, no, it's not for you. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. does not have a track record that says that he is good at executing reforms. Maybe he will be. Maybe the biggest surprise of all of this is that RFK gets through this process somehow and turns out not to be Jim Ignatowski from Taxi, but is actually great at systems and can do things and can bring people together and do all the stuff. Seems unlikely.

But I guess I would just say, if you want to be a reformer, if you want to make something better, who is the most successful reformer of Donald Trump's first administrator? probably a jeet pie at the FCC he didn't he he didn't he didn't make there were not a lot of headlines right about a jeet pie's uh beliefs but when he took out net neutrality when he changed the way that the FCC worked when he did all that stuff it was boring and competent a jeet pie's boring competence didn't get a lot of attention but he was able to reform he he was very effective and there were other people who did it uh at the department of interior uh Bernhardt, others, we could go down the list of people who quietly, effectively got stuff done.

Am I curious to know whether we need fluoride? You know, sure, I guess I'm kind of interested in that as a person who drank well water for a decent part of his growing up. You know, I've never had a cavity. So maybe this is, maybe fluoride's overstated. But I think people want competence. They want quiet competence, does more reforming than beheading whales. All right, Steve. Am I conspiracy theorist?

Yeah, I mean, I hope not. Look, I think the problem, the problem with RFK is not that he's just asking questions, which I think is sort of the underlying assumption of your normie friends, right? Hey, he's just asking reasonable questions, and usually that's followed by some condemnation of what we got from public health officials during COVID, right? They told us these things that ended up not being true, therefore we can't trust them, so we should try something different. There's a logical leap there to be very kind and very charitable that doesn't work for me. And if you pay careful attention to what RFK Jr. has been doing, it's not really that he spent the past 30 years asking questions. It's that he spent the past 30 years maybe asking some reasonable questions about health, about obesity, about some of these issues, but then also advancing his unique answers, which are often evidence-free, unique answers.

And I think in some cases, very damaging. I mean, the vaccine autism thing that he has pushed, tremendously damaging on an individual level, on a family-to-family level, and I think potentially more broadly than that. There's a clip of RFK Jr. appearing on Joe Rogan, and it's an interesting clip. We'll post it in the show notes. They sort of go back and forth with one another, and of course, Rogan loves to entertain conspiracies. Sometimes he likes to embrace these conspiracies. But Rogan sort of asks some basic questions as Kennedy gets spun up. on his own rhetoric about, you know, a variety of different issues. The one that they were focused on that I've paid attention to is cell phones causing cancer. And Kennedy at one point in his, which, by the way, like, go back to the advent of cell phones,

is it reasonable for people to say, like, boy, I wonder if it's bad to put these things up by our head and talk for hours or carry them in my pocket. Yeah. Right? Totally open to it. Or like, you know, as somebody who often sleeps with AirPods in, like, I do stop and think like, maybe that's not the best idea. So I'm open to asking those questions to exploring them, to walking through the scientific method, to coming up with answers as best we know them.

And I'm also sympathetic to arguments that science has really never settled. We should continue to keep asking these questions. That's not what RFK Jr. is doing. So in this case, he makes a series of claims that are sort of like scientific sounding and authoritative sort of meaning, but our total bull is like, the real problem is the breaking of the blood brain barrier. And Rogan is interested in this. And he sort of perks up and says, oh, well, what is the blood brain barrier? And how does that happen? And Kennedy has no idea. No idea. So he just looks and he's like, uh, now, you know, this is over my pay grade. He has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. But he goes on to make the assertion in

this context, I think he literally claims, I should double check this. I don't want to be making claims that I can't back up either. But watch the video, we'll post it. I think he literally claims that there are tens of thousands of studies that prove cell phones cause cancer. If I'm right that that was his claim or something like that, let me just be clear. It is not the case that there are that many studies. So it's not that he's asking questions. it's not that he's a healthy skeptic, it's that he's making assertions that are bullshit and I think dangerous. And if I'm a Republican senator, you know, for me, the biggest three problematic nominations are Tulsi Gabbard, Matt Gates, and RFK Jr., arguably in that order. And if I'm looking

at RFK and potentially putting him in charge of this stuff, you can hope that he might be, I mean, he's not going to be the quiet reformer that Chris talks about. You could hope that he's, you know, sort of a blow-it-up type, I suppose. But in reality, what really has to have you concerned is that he's the guy who's going to blow it up and then try to put it together with his bullshit non-science solutions. That's concerned. The core belief of populism is that there are good and simple things that are available to us, but that they will not let us have them.

Right. We could live. And RFK's pitch is that we could all be healthy. we could all be thin, we could all be fit, we could all be, we could be all of these things if it wasn't for them. And once we defeat them, then all these good things will happen. And it's very appealing when you're out of power. When you're in power, to Steve's point, becomes very unappealing because all of a sudden you're they, you're the them. And you're explaining to people why they, that we're going to change the rules on vaccines and we're going

change this, we're going to do and do these other things. Now you're them. And the problem with living in a populist age is that sooner or later, somebody has to be the establishment. And it's not fun. And that brings me back to why sitting here today, low confidence on this prediction. But my prediction is Democrats would win the presidency in 2028 because of these fundamental tectonic plate issues. If you think of it, sort of like a pyramid of the biggest things at the bottom. This is like my curling analogy, but now I'm going to mix in a pyramid analogy on top of it. These like huge issues that go back to the 2008 financial crisis. Or I was talking to Moe-Lathie from Georgetown Institute of Politics yesterday to Watergate. You know, like that's this bottom

level tectonic plate that moves very slowly underneath us so much so that like our day-to-day news cycle, month to month, even cycle to cycle forgets about it sometimes. And sitting above that are changes to the Democratic Party brought by Barack Obama, the sort of identity politics Democratic Party that then caused the loss of blue-collar voters from the Democratic Party. Sitting above that, you have Joe Biden's presidency. It's lack of competence. It's lack of taking that mandate for normalcy and competency anywhere and getting yanked to the left by his progressive voters. And then sitting on top of that, you have Harris and her weaknesses as a candidate. But frankly, I think if you see the whole pyramid, it's easy to focus on the top

because it's the thing we sort of experience day to day for the last, you know, 100 days. But I would argue it's the least important part of what's going on in our politics right now is that Kamala Harris's 107-day campaign was not flawless. Eh, so what? Anyway, that's all we have time for today. And happy Thanksgiving to everyone. We will not have an episode next week. We're so thankful for all of you guys. As Steyerwalt referred to you as the, did you say they were rabid or just super into it? But our dispatch members are the best. And they are. You know, if you're rabid, we love rabies. That's, that's where we are. Kennedy's taken care of that. Yeah, exactly.

We're taking care of that. Tune in next time for the positive case for rabies. So we hope you have a wonderful time with friends and family for Thanksgiving. try not to talk about politics. Just don't do it. Talk about all the other incredible things, duty to one another, service, purpose. Those are the things that actually bring fulfillment and are wonderful. So happy Thanksgiving. I'm going to be able to be.