The Dispatch Podcast - Why Kamala Harris Lost

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

This week, American voters delivered Donald Trump the White House and the Republican Party sweeping victories across the country. Sarah, Jonah, and Steve try to figure out what went wrong with Kamala Harris’ campaign. The Agenda: —What decided this election? —“She’s for they/them.” —The education and Latino realignment —A second Trump term —Political vibe merchant —Worth our time: The future of The Dispatch 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 Isker. That's Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. I'm not going to make some joke about how we don't have any topics today. Look, the election just happened. And I kind of want to divide this conversation into two pieces. One. what we learned, and two, where we're headed. So let's just start with what we learn. Can each of you give me your lightning round answer of what decided this election, Steve? Sure. I mean, I think the first and most important thing to say is Joe Biden. I blame Joe Biden before I blame anybody else.

I think it was Joe Biden's supreme selfishness and self-regard that led him to Stick around as long as he stuck around because he wanted to be president. He's always wanted to be president. He didn't want to give it up when he got it. And it, I think, ended up being a fatal mistake. The second thing, it's closely related to that, was that Kamala Harris from June 27th, through, which was the night of the debate, when Joe Biden had his meltdown, through July 21st, 25 days Kamala Harris and the Democratic establishment

and lots of people in the media, told the country that they hadn't seen what they just saw with Joe Biden. They watched him meltdown. It was obvious he couldn't be president. And everybody drew the same conclusion. Now, in fairness, most people had drawn that conclusion before. Remember, you had 75% of Democratic voters saying before the debate that they didn't think Joe Biden was capable of completing a second term.

But in the aftermath of that debate, you had basically all of these institutions including an especially democratic leadership, tell the country that they hadn't seen what they just saw. And when you have a country that already has lost faith in virtually every institution, and you can point to things like COVID, you can point you, you know, the list sort of is endless. There are reasons that people are as skeptical of what they're being told by experts in institutions as they are.

And then you watch them do it in slow motion. Your only question can be, how stupid do they think I have? am. And I think that's where a lot of people came. So when Kamala Harris later became the candidate and gave people her assurances, no, no, no, I will listen to you. I will be a president for all Americans. Those things you heard me say in 2019, I didn't really mean them. Trust me now. Ignore what I said then. People didn't believe her. And they were right not to believe her. There's so much to dig into there. And I'm going to come back to a lot of it. But Jonah, I want your answer first. Yeah. So I don't disagree with anything that's

says, I just think he started the story too late. It's sort of a pyramid of reasons, right? And the broad-based reasons are what, you know, we would typically call the fundamentals. One of the great thing, I keep saying this, so I apologize to people who heard me say it elsewhere. One of the great things about the last four years is the idea that inflation is no longer a problem and that we can dismiss the threat of inflation and we can do modern monetary theory and we can print a trillion coin and we only owe the money to ourselves so we can print as much as we like and all that kind of stuff. That crap is dead. You know, you had, you had a prominent historian arguing that he's concluded, this is like five, six years ago, he concluded that concerns about inflation

in the 1970s were actually metaphorical because it was really about the rise in women's liberation and the sense that society was getting out of hand and had nothing to do with like having to wait six freaking hours to buy gasoline that you couldn't afford. And that stuff was getting traction back then. It's done. And it's because inflation, it doesn't matter what the other economic indicators are. Inflation is like friggin bone cancer for people. And it makes people literally poorer. And so that's part of the fundamentals. Part of the fundamentals is just 70% wrong track. Now, I think Trump contributed to the sense that the country was on the wrong track for a lot of people. But regardless, you know, that's terrible. And then there's like

this thing, which everyone's calling a realignment, which is problematic. I've written about this recently. Realignments in political science usually mean when one party becomes a majority party. And that's not really what we've been seeing for the last 20 years. What we've been seeing is two tied parties that are realigning their coalitions. But the Republican Party is taking, has been eating off of the plate of the Democratic coalition, the FDR coalition for a long. time now, and it's taken so many of the white working class, so many, and this election staggeringly, amazingly, the Hispanic working class, that the muscle memory of the Democrats about how they run for office in the last 20 years as being rendered obsolete by the new

fundamentals. And we can talk about more about that in a second. And then you get all the stuff Steve says about Biden, which I agree with entirely. And then you get the fact that that given the fundamentals, Harris, it turns out, is like arguably one of the worst possible candidates to deal with the headwinds that she inherited. I think she ran an okay campaign given her assumptions of things, but like she sounds like she is running to be the chairman of the Faculty Senate DEI Committee. It appeals to whine-track Democrats and a bunch of people in the, in the, in the, in the, in the MSNBC green rooms and almost nobody else.

And she does not know how to talk Bubba. She does not have how to talk working class. She does not know how to talk in ways that don't make her eminently untrustable on any politics issues to people who don't like identity politics stuff. And no one explained to her sufficiently how to campaign outside of an electorate that looks like California. And then there's Trump, and then, of course, there's all the nostalgia for the Trump economy, which I think is kind of semi-bogous, but I get it.

It's psychologically very difficult to vanquish the comeback. Well, we know what the first Trump administration would be like because we lived in it, and that was a good economy, and that's what I want. And I think that's what drove a lot of Hispanic stuff. That's what drove a lot of the, that's kept the marriage, the gender gap down, and that's why we can't have nice things. I want to raise one issue that you guys didn't mention before I go back to Steve, because, again, lots of, lot to dive into

and what both of you just said there. So I got a message from someone, and he said, I voted for Biden in 2020, hoping for some middle ground. But all the extreme policies and talking points left me and a lot of others totally alienated. As a lifelong Republican has never voted for Trump until now, it felt like there was no other choice left.

Jonah, I agree with your pyramid. I might describe it differently. There's 50 years when we look back on the election. What will the tectonic plates be? and then you get to, like, smaller and smaller timeframes. I just wanted to mention one of the smallest time frame issues, which was the they-them ad. This was the Trump's for you, she's for they-them.

And it was so fascinating to me because it was a microcosm of the entire election in some ways. Republicans obviously came up with this ad. It was a, they ran a ton of money behind it. I thought it was probably the most effective ad of the cycle in terms of moving people. Obviously, the economic stuff, I think, is more important. But that was baked in of people's real lives. And when they went to the grocery store, you didn't really need an ad on it. The they-them ad, I thought, was effective in driving home a very specific message. Here's what's

funny about it. Democrats, and a lot of people in the media, decried the ad as transphobic. They thought the ad was about trans people because it said she's for they-them. But I think they missed the point of the ad and how the ad landed entirely. That was an ad about language. It was an ad about running for the, you know, president of the faculty Senate room. It was about having signature blocks in your email with your preferred pronouns.

And that if you don't keep up with their language that's decided in this elite, condescending, arrogant set of people that somehow you're going to be canceled. You're going to lose your job. You're not allowed in polite society. And this increasingly small, out of touch group of people gets to decide it.

So that's what the they, them ad, was driving home for a lot of people. And the fact that democratic strategists and media thought that it was about trans people instead of the language problem tells you everything you need to know about their language problem. So it was this perfect encapsulation of the asymmetry, I guess, between the two campaigns in a lot of ways. But, Steve, can you make one quick point on that? I think you're right. I think it's a very good point. I will say the brilliance of the ad is that it's both.

It's not just the language thing for the base. A lot of them do think it's about transgender stuff. And that's a base mobilization thing. But for the people on the middle, the people, there are people who don't like to be lectured to, don't like to be condescended to, don't want to feel required to buy into the shibbolists of the sort of progressive elite crowd,

it is a language thing. And that's kind of, I mean, it's a great point. I agree with you that for some people, it was about transgender issues. But even that, I would argue, is not actually that much about, it's not like there's trans people marching the streets. It's about this idea that you're so out of touch

that you think men should be in women's sports, that you think taxpayers should pay for surgeries for inmates that are immigrants that are going to be deported that weren't supposed to be in the country in the first place type thing. So yes, that is trans issues, but it's still, I think about this totally out of touchness and not specifically about trans people. The way that, for instance, I think Republicans in 2004 were running against gay marriage, that was about gay people. That was about gay marriage. This is slightly different to me. It's more cultural than it is it's different than 2004, Steve?

Yeah, so I have a complicated answer about 2004. I mean, George W. Bush said shortly before the 2004 election, he sort of said several things publicly that contradicted the message on gay marriage, which complicated everything. I think that's complicated, but I agree with, I agree entirely with your other point. And the key here seems to me, that was an ad designed at the very people who were most likely to be put off by the excesses of Donald Trump. I mean, that was an ad with a target on suburban moms, on quote-unquote normies, on people who- And to make them feel like this guy who wrote to me that they have no choice.

Correct. Donald Trump may suck. You may hate him. Yes, exactly. But you've got no choice. This is, yeah, the message to them was, if you want to keep going down this road that these people are taking us on, you're going to, you know, that's what it means if you vote for Kamala Harris or if you oppose Donald Trump. And, you know, for people who were concerned, you know, had legacy concerns about January 6th and Trump lying and the stolen election and all of the things he said that are insulting to people, they saw this and looked at that as their alternative and said, I'm not going to do it. All right. So, Steve, I want to push back on something that you said in your answer because I agree, or I've been saying versions of this, that this thing, as it turned out, I'm not saying everything that we're saying here, dear listener.

is because we now know the results of the election. Like, we know that. We know the parts of this we weren't saying during the campaign. You learn a lot when you see how people vote, who voted which ways, all of that. So knowing what we know now, I think she had no chance to win. There was nothing she could do in three months in a campaign

that could have won this election. And that Joe Biden, by refusing to not run again, in January of 2020, baked this thing. And that if they had had a primary at that point, the Democrats would not have chosen Harris. They would have chosen a Democrat who could move away quickly and Heisman-like from the Biden administration. But here's my question to you, Steve.

I'm not convinced that a Democrat could win this election. I'm not convinced that any Democrat could Heisman themselves away from a sitting Democratic president and win the Democratic primary and be able to run a campaign in this media environment and everything else. But on the other hand, this was still a close race. Electoral college-wise, it wasn't. But it was a close race. So maybe someone else could have. I can't really think of who that person was. So my question to you, Steve, is you're talking about how this really is it Biden's feet. And this isn't to say Harris didn't do things wrong. Of course she did. She did all sorts of

things wrong. But so did Trump, right? The winning campaign didn't do everything right. The losing campaign didn't do everything wrong. I don't think she had a shot, knowing what we know now. Did anyone? It's a good question. And the obvious answer is I don't know. But I'll make the sort of counter hypothetical. I think it's possible, going back to your point about inflation or Jonah's point about inflation, but I think is absolutely right. I mean, you said to give a lightning answer. So I left out like 50 other things that I would have said. Inflation would have been the very next thing I would have said. It wasn't just inflation. It was that the Biden administration took concerns about the exacerbation of existing inflation and mocked them and mocked them repeatedly

and mocked them from Democrats, mock them from Republicans, mock them from governors who wanted to work with them, like Larry Hogan. They didn't listen. They said, we know better. We're going to make this better. And then when people had those problems, their spin was things aren't as bad as you're telling us they are. I mean, can you imagine a more condescending argument? It was definitely true that lots of other economic indicators were pointing in another direction, signaling a strengthening economy. But you can't tell people that they're not paying more for their ground beef or that if they are paying more for their ground beef, it shouldn't matter to them. It does matter to them. And I think That was just another example of, you know, people's sense that folks in Washington just don't get it.

So it would have been difficult, I think, for any Democratic politician to sort of work out from under that. The problem for Harris in particular, though, is that she was a part of all those decisions, right? She was a part of the Afghanistan withdrawal. And if you go back and you look at when Biden's approval rating tanked, look at the chart, it is directly traceable. He never recovers from the Afghanistan withdrawal. all. And I remember when we said that at the time, and there were a lot of people who said, nobody cares about foreign policy. That's crazy. You guys are nuts. You're obsessed with Afghanistan. Now, it was a huge problem. It signaled incompetence. And he never recovered from it.

She owned that. She was part of the decision. She backed him up. She owned the inflation stuff. She was for the Recovery Act. She was for everything that he did. And so I think it would have been disingenuous for her once she was the candidate to have said, yeah, look, I, I, I was for all these things, but not really. I would have done things differently if I had been in charge. It just creates all of these problems. I mean, I think, you know, I was talking about this with somebody smart as a democratic strategist the other day and, you know, wondering like when she faced that question from Brett Baer, when she faced the question on the view, I think Hallie Jackson, my NBC colleague, asked her a version of the question sort of what would you do differently? She had a lot of chances.

is she she botched it every time but the the the the sort of secondary question is if she had said yes and offered an example of something she would have done differently would then the campaign have been reduced to Kamala Harris articulating every single thing she would have done differently from Joe Biden now I can make an argument that would have been good you know the wrong track of the country is 25 percent you know his approval is in the tank so maybe it would have been better than what she did. I mean, by definition, it would have been better than what she did because she didn't win. But I think your question is a good one. Could somebody, could a governor of a state, a moderate Democrat in a state, have sort of run against Biden and against

Trump as a new alternative? You remember, there was a time at which you asked people about Trump and Biden, and the biggest group in the electorate were these double haters. Could somebody at that time have kind of driven through the middle and said, look at what Biden's done. He promised to be the normal guy and he's calling his opponent's Jim Crow 2.0. Look at what Trump has done. The guy lost an election and he instigated violence to try to stay in power. Like, the country's better than this. I mean, it's easy to imagine how somebody could have run that way.

It's hard to know whether that would have been successful. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design. that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, lease a 2026 X-E-90 plug-in hybrid from $599 bi-weekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer

or go to explorevolvo.com. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polyvall. professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also

tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns, to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated.

Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a 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. All right, let's tick through some other stuff that we learned. The Latino vote, Jonah, that you mentioned, looks like it shifted pretty dramatically toward Trump. Is that, A, because waves of Latino immigration are assimilated and they don't look that different than white voters at this point. And so they vote on the economy and normal stuff like that, the identity politics era has reached. reached its logical conclusion and failure.

Okay, B, she was a female candidate. She was a female black candidate. And at least some of what we saw was racism and sexism that nobody wants to talk about. C, immigration. I'm curious how you think immigration and abortion played any role in that voting block. Go.

Sure. So I know you guys have no experience with this kind of thing, but this is the time of year. where you end up repeating things you've said elsewhere quite a bit because you have whether it's at the supermarket or on TV or on radio or whatever and it's kind of like having to clear out all of your old Halloween candy um because it's going to get it's not going to it's losing its utility really quickly um so i've been making the supermarket sweep analogy for a while right that's the game show where you have to fill up the the shopping cart

and if you can't go over $300 or whatever, right? You have to want to get just, it's like prices right, just under. Now, you can argue that the last thing you put in the card is the thing that put you over. Or you could argue that the first thing that you put in the card put you over, right? A lot of the things that we're talking about, there are a lot of, failure has a lot of fathers, right? And so emphasizing one thing doesn't mean another thing isn't also correct. So that said, first of all, I guess I would say, start with the fundamentals argument again. The United States is a nation of immigrants that always

want, where the immigrants always want to pull the gangplank up behind them. And that was true with Italians and Poles and Jews and right. I mean, maybe not in every regard and all that kind of stuff, but like the idea that people who have an immigrant story, which is like nearly all Americans, except for Native Americans, right, and to a certain extent African Americans, doesn't necessarily mean that they want an endless supply of more immigrants. The nature of the Hispanic demographic is so wildly incoate and diverse that it's always been kind of stupid to talk about Latinos as a single group. You know, Mexican Americans in California are very different in a lot of ways than Mexican

Americans in Texas. Just look at the tacos. And I actually am being pretty serious about that. Tacos are night and day different. in Mexican takerias in California versus Texas. Like you wouldn't think they're the same food group. Right. Well, so Tom Sol has always made this point about it's good and important to look at where

immigrants come from if you want to understand their story and stuff. You also have to look about, look at when they came. And immigrants, you know, there are Mexican-American families in New Mexico that have been there for centuries. Well, don't forget the Mexican-American immigrants in Texas where actually they've been there the whole time. We're the ones who came. and then just redrew the border at the Rio Grande.

That's right. And then there are like Mexican Americans in Union City, New Jersey. They've been there for five minutes, right? And they're just, they're different people that came, they left different, their ancestors, you know, they came from different countries in a lot of respects, right? And so, and then you get into the fact that, like, we, immigration used to be code for Mexican Americans. It's not anymore.

It's, you got, you know, you got people from Ecuador and Venezuela and Cuba and yada, yada, and it's just all very different. treating them as a member as just a they're part of the non-white voting group was always really friggin' stupid. And I think that that finally caught up to Democrats in a big way here. I think it's, I'm not happy that Donald Trump is going to be the next president, but I think this is a very good thing for American politics that had happened. But I think that, you know, the problem that some of our friends who are, let's just say, more passionate in their anti, in their opposition to Donald Trump are making is they're assuming

that a Hispanic auto mechanic in Union City, New Jersey, who voted for Trump sees the same Donald Trump that a overeducated journalist living in the Washington suburb sees. And they

don't, right? They don't care about the political incorrectness stuff the way that some people do. They don't think he's Hitler, right? They didn't think they're voting for Hitler. And so I think the freak out about a lot of this stuff on the left is wrong, or the anti-Trump side is wrong.

But it's really important to point out the celebration on the pro-Trump side is wrong, too. These people are not necessarily a hardcore MAGA. They're pissed off about inflation. They don't like Kamala Harris because, again, she talks like someone they don't understand, right? She talks like she didn't, she smartly didn't use Latin X, but she's the kind of person who uses Latin X. And they remember, they don't pay very much attention to politics, right? These are some of the last people who got in the supermarket suite shopping cart. And one of the reasons they got in last is they don't pay much attention to politics.

They don't care about politics. But when their businesses are doing bad, when their pocketbooks are hurting, you press them with a choice of do you want to live like it was 2018 or do you want to live like it was, you know, right now or 22? They're like, eh, I remember 2018 was much better for me. And that doesn't make them super maga. It doesn't mean they're all going to be super psyched when if Trump tries to send a bunch a dudes with guns to drag people out of their homes and throw them in detention centers,

which is what you would need for real mass deportation. And so this is one of the really stupid times in American politics. And it happens after every election. The winners think that their electorate is locked in, and they're going to support whatever the next president does no matter what. And the other side thinks their electorate is locked in two, and that they are all completely on board with what the new president is going to do. And it's just not the case.

Politics is going to come back and it's going to look very different than any straight line projection from this moment. Obviously, she basically lost ground with every group. She even either maintained ground with female voters or maybe even lost a little bit. Maybe she gained a little bit. We'll have to see when those exit polls sort of become better. It's too close right now. They revise them going forward.

They continue to check them. And we get the end, the final ones like at the end of the month, I think, right? Yeah. But for right now, she could have done worse with women, actually. But otherwise, the youth vote, Gen X vote, Latino vote, people who care about abortion, who want abortion to be legal vote. He drew that to a tie, it looks like. How much of this is permanent, to Jonah's point, right?

Is the education realignment permanent? I don't mean permanent forever, obviously, you know that. But I mean, will this hold between the two parties, or is this Trump only? is this 2024 only. So you mean temporarily permanent? Temporarily permanent. That's right. Indefinitely permanent?

Because I said before the election, for instance, that I thought the education realignment probably was an actual realignment between the two parties where I thought the gender realignment might not be, that that might just be a Trump special. And I stand by that.

I think there's nothing to disprove that thesis yet. On the identity politics issue, though, it's sort of interesting. Are Democrats willing to abandon their entire theory of the electorate, basically. And as I've spoken to Democratic strategist in the last few days, it's been sort of interesting. I can't tell whether they're just not willing to tell me, if you know what I mean, that they're rethinking this, or if genuinely they just don't see the problem.

Like a common refrain is something like, we're the party that's for all of these people because of who they are and they just didn't see it. So it's a messaging problem. Or this was just the economy and so as soon as the economy's better we can go back to identity politics because it will work.

It's just the economy tide was too high and it swept all the boats. What do you think, Steve? Are we moving to the end of identity politics is Ruy Tashara just going to throw a little party for himself? It's done now?

Yeah, so a lot to respond to there as well. First, I, Nothing is, I think nothing is permanent. All of these things are, they have their moment. Some will last longer than others, but nothing is permanent. The things that people were saying were permanent in the early Bush years were definitely not permanent. So I don't think we're talking about anything permanent.

Two, I agree with you. I continue to agree with you. I agreed with you at the time. I continue to agree with you that the education shifts are likely to last longer than the gender shifts and some of the other things that we're seeing. Three, I think it's so deeply ironic that the primary reason when you talked to Democrats, democratic strategists, people around for Biden world, when Joe Biden finally decided he was not going to continue the race, there was a discussion, brief one, should it be Kamala?

Or should there be some crazy chaotic process by which Democrats can entertain other people? The reasons, the reason that you were given, when you asked that question, it wasn't really primarily that the process would be messy, that it would take too long, whatever, anything else. You can't not choose Kamala because she would be the first Asian American nominee. She would be the first black nominee. She would be the, not Asian American. She, you know, she would be all of these boxes that she would check, you know, female. And you couldn't do that because you would piss every person. off in the identity groups.

And then you look at the results of the election, and certainly one of the results is, as you all were just talking about in the context of Latino voters, you can't just project on these identity groups a set of views, as I think Democrats have wanted to do for so long and have done erroneously for so long. so I do think that that shift is real and it's overdue and I think that's one of the I don't think there are a lot of silver linings here but I think that's one of them but Jonah what Steve is talking about is a little bit different than what I want doesn't mean he's wrong story of my life but Steve you're talking about sort of the painting a broad brush you know Latinos want acts black Americans

want acts, stitching together a coalition. Jonah, what I want is the end of minorities are victims, and as a victim, you should join us against the oppressors. I want the end of racial victimhood, because what it has led to is everyone wanting to play victim Olympics, and now there's white victimhood and everything else, which was an inevitable consequence of identity politics. if power is determined by oppression status,

then everyone's going to fight for who's more oppressed. Yes. So I'm going to tell a quick story because I think it's on point. I thought it was kind of a fascinating little moment. Ashley Allison is one of my CNN colleagues. Very smart, very impressive, lovely lady. I really am glad I've gotten to know her. I think she's wonderful.

The African-American woman, I think she's at Institute of Politics these days at Harvard. she's a democratic operative Biden Harris universe all that we were talking about some of this Latino stuff on CNN yesterday I was making this point about how Latino voting block is much more like what I was saying here is so much more diverse than the boilerplate term Latino can really capture and getting into all of it and she was nodding along and then she said I agree a lot with what Jonah's saying but I just want to be clear like I do not like talking about groups when one of them is not represented in the conversation. And on the one hand, I get it entirely, right?

There's a certain amount of good manners to it. There's a certain amount of PC whatever. It's like that's a core belief of the identity politics kind of left, even when they're agreeing with my larger point. But on the other hand, the idea that somehow, if you had the designated representative of the Latinos on the panel, they would have authority to speak for Latinos is the problem, right? Because invariably those people come from, I mean, they're conservative versions of

them to be sure, but like the people who are professional representatives of ethnic groups have a business model that requires the perpetuation of this kind of categorical thinking. And it's that kind of categorical thinking that gets the Democrats, into trouble in the first place, right? Or it's finally getting the Democrats into trouble in this election. So your question, yeah, look, I agree. I've been on this René Girard kick. He's a philosopher.

The fact that he's like Peter Thiel's favorite philosopher should not dissuade you from being interested in him. He makes a big point about what he calls victimism, what sometimes we call maybe victimology, which is probably a little different, is a big source of moral authority, spiritual authority, galvanizing power in politics and religion, going back centuries. You decide who, what group or individuals or categories of people are the victims, and then

you get power by claiming to be their spokesman for them, to be their leader, to be their avenger, right? Identity politics works on that pure and simple. And one of the things I've always hated about it is that you need a constituency to buy in. of the idea that it's true, that you're all victims, right? But we should be fair. This is a very human thing. The South, the white southern sort of Jim Crow South has been operating on a philosophy of victimism, lost cause, right, since Reconstruction. Not all of them, obviously, but that, you know, I had Chris Cox on to talk about his Woodrow Wilson book. And the stuff about reconstruction really hammers that home. It's like Woodrow Wilson came to Washington with this massive

chip on his shoulder about how the South was treated unfairly by being forced to get rid of their slaves and being forced to lose a war. And that kind of the problem with victimology in our politics is is that it leads to demagoguery, right? It leads to us versus them kind of stuff. But it also leads to the constituencies that are supposed to be the victims, the useful victims, believing it. And that's one of the things I really like about him. And I agree with Steve about this being a silver lining is it makes my heart leap that large numbers of Hispanics are just like, yeah, that's all eggheady BS. Yes, you know, I want to be like a normal, quote unquote, American, and I have normal American concerns, and of course I like my culture, but that doesn't mean that somehow they're going to

buy into these sometimes very arcane reasons for why they should be offended and that they should vote against their economic interests because of some cultural offense they're being told They're unsophisticated if they don't buy into. Steve, I want to give you the last word on our backward-looking part of our conversation here. How do you think this election will change the two parties, if at all? So I guess it's the forward part of the backward part of the conversation. Yeah, I mean, I think you're going to see this really, really bloody fight on the Democrat side, right? I mean, I think Republicans are poised to, going back to what Jonah mentioned earlier, overreed the results of this election.

election, which is typical when you win a big election, you tend to think that everything you did was right and everything, every conclusion you reached flows naturally from the results of the election and that you made all the right decisions all along. And that's why you are where you are. And that's why the voters were with you. Right. Like, which is a little bit nuanced. Like it's not just that you did everything right, but that also they knew you did everything right? Right. Exactly. Exactly. So I think, you know, we're in the, in the middle of that, and you can see that with some of the huffing and puffing you're getting from the super mega rate, which is to say, I should say, that's not to take anything away from the campaign that Chris LaSavita and

Susie Wiles ran. I mean, I think they ran a really smart campaign. And they did do a lot of things right. And they deserve just on a purely political level, we'll set aside from moral concerns. But like on a political level, like the ad that they ran that we were talking about earlier, the trans ad, and there was a home run. They spent five times more on that ad than they spent on ads about the economy. There are strategic decisions, tactical decisions that they made. And they made a lot of good ones. So credit to them in that sense.

I don't mean when I'm saying that there's an overreading taking place. I don't mean to say that they don't deserve credit for the good decisions they did make. They won. They won big. What you're seeing on the Democratic side is the opposite. And it's, you know, it's the finger pointing. It's the circular firing squad. You know, use whatever descriptor you want. But it's happening now.

And I think there are so many assumptions. I would say chiefly the identity politics discussion that we just had that they're going to work through now that will have them, you know, really revisiting and rethinking some of the things that are at the core of the Democratic Party and have been for literally decades. And they're going to have to work through that. And I think it's going to be ugly. I think it's going to be really ugly. You can already see them. And you have, people are dividing into camps. You know, progressives are saying, do you believe that Kamala Harris ended her campaign talking about campaigning with Liz Cheney and talking about January 6th? And you're seeing the moderates.

say, yeah, she was campaigning with Liz Cheney, but she didn't make any policy concessions to Republicans. She would stand next to Liz Cheney, and then she would go on and on and talk about abortion the way that she talked about abortion. And there were no policy concessions. So, of course, she wasn't going to be able to reach these people. So you're seeing these debates unfold in public. I think it's going to be really messy and really ugly. And, you know, they're going to have a lot of figuring out to do. Now, there's a midterm in two years. the map looks pretty good for Democrats. I think they're likely to get their stuff together sooner rather than later.

And if we're right about the kinds of things that we said as we worried about a second Trump term, I think Donald Trump is going to overreach in a bunch of ways. I think he's going to do a bunch of the things that I've spent the past three years warning about, concerned about. I think he's going to do a lot of them. I think it's going to be bad. And tariffs are going to be bad. I think the economy's going to hurt if he doesn't.

So that will help the Democrats, I think, push through their argument because they're looking at Trump and his policy. So, Jonan, let's use that to transition softly to looking forward. Historically, political philosophy-wise, it seems like quick back and forth between two political parties when the country is sort of where it is now, which is tied, so that you have Republicans winning in 16, Democrats winning in 20, Republicans. winning in 24. If Democrats were to win in 28, to Steve's point, Trump overplays his hand and it just shifts back. What does that look like for a country? What does that mean? Because we've also had periods, you know, FDR, Reagan, I think, is a good example where you have Reagan, obviously, then Bush, but even Clinton, right, his third way was almost a conservative version of the Democratic Party, you had long stretches of agreement on the direction of the country,

even if they switched parties. Here, in this era that we seem to be in, I don't think we're agreeing on directions of the country. And we just keep flipping back and forth because these elections are so close. What am I supposed to make of that looking forward? The party that I've been pounding my spoon on the high chair for a long time out of this is very Yuval-Liven stuff. But like the party that decides it wants to be a majority party and start doing the things that majority parties do, which is adding to its coalition by, in part, figuring out what is the bare minimum, the base of the party will tolerate, giving them that and no more and then reaching out towards the center.

I mean, this is one of the very interesting things I think about Trump campaign. and I agree with Steve, it deserves more credit than a lot of us were giving them at the time insofar as the Trump campaign, Trump basically, I've had this conversation about just with Chris Starwell, the base of the Republican Party are not the MAGA people. The base of the Republican Party as the way we used to understand what a base does are actually the fairly normy Republicans who say, I'm going to vote for the nominee no matter who he is. Because that is what gives Trump the ability to say, as long as that's your position, I can expand my coalition with people who love schlong jokes and don't mind me

talking about the vermin within and all of that kind of stuff. I can go get the bro Rogan crowd because the normies have told me that their support for me is non-negotiable as long as I'm the nominee. And so he's built a different coalition. And the only thing that Not the only thing, but the thing that really bothers me about this is that when I say to the people who channel the Wall Street Journal editorial page as their position, yeah, he's bad, but it's going to be okay, he'll be kept in check, institutions will hold, but you got to support the Republicans, you got to vote for a Republican nominee, no matter what, and you can't vote for Harris, and you can't do this, and you can't do that, you know, just, you know, grit and bear it, hold your nose, blah, blah, blah, blah. like they that's what they tell themselves to tell themselves they're not the base but they're the friggin base the whack jobs who will not vote for Trump unless he says round up the Jews right those are the getable voters for Trump those are the majority makers for Trump and it's not just the Nick Fuentes freaks right who didn't endorse Trump because Trump would not in fact

promised to round up the Jews um but the the sort of swinging, moderate, low information, low propensity people, those are the majority makers from now, for him now, not the sort of the way we used to talk about how the center, you know, independent-minded, moderate people were the majority makers. And anyway, so getting beyond that, I think, what was your original question? Well, what does it mean policy-wise or anything else when a party keeps flipping back and forth between two very different visions for the country, even when, as I said before, their actual policy proposals are pretty similar, and I would argue their rhetorical choices are similar. I think both ran on fear.

You saw, of course, both campaigns saying this would be the last election ever if the other side won. So rhetorically, they look similar. Policy-wise, they looked incredibly similar, which nobody seems to believe if you have partisan brain. But we can have that whole footnotice. No, I agree. Like on protectionism, I mean, Biden kept all of Trump's tariffs. and um you know it's not like to the middle on abortion she moves to the middle on immigration yada yada yada so rhetorically policy wise and yet vision for the country they do seem

worlds apart and yet we keep flipping back and forth yeah and so and i think the problem of that is that i mean i know steve does wants me to put a dollar in the jar every time i say vibes part of it is when you're running politics like you're a vibe merch. and it is, you're selling one of two different lifestyle brands, policy is really secondary. And I think that this, this gets at this, you know, like the new idea of the moment that everyone is sort of like, this is the thing we need to talk about now, is this diploma divide, the education divide. Not saying it's not real. It's obviously real. But it's one of these ideas that all of a sudden, aha, this will solve it, right? Dealing with this problem. And maybe,

it would. But like, it's just, it's getting a lot of attention. And, and, and I'm always skeptical when there's like this rush to the new monocausal explanation for things. But so be it. The education divide stuff is in many ways a way of talking about the lifestyle brand divide, right? Are you a college town type? Are you a big city liberal who has your NPR or New York Times tote bag? Or do you have a pickup truck, right? Even if it's a pickup truck that costs $125,000, right? Are you what Kevin Williamson would call the blue collar rich, right? You're in your Trump parade and you're talking about those terrible rich elites who make a tenth of what you make because they're assistant professors of lesbian poetry studies at a public school, but they're the enemy, right?

So, like, the class distinction stuff doesn't really work on economics. Trump and Harris, I think, split people who make less than $100,000 a year pretty evenly. It's like, what lifestyle brand do you want to glom on to? And the elite universities incubate one vision of a lifestyle brand. So that's why it tracks so closely with the diploma stuff. and until one or both of the parties learns to speak in a language outside of its coalition that doesn't lose it important parts of its coalition, we're going to keep trading power

because what ends up happening is you think the only people who matter are your base. You pander like hell to them, which causes the people in the middle to say, this is not what I voted for. So they joined the other coalition for another election. And then that party, terrified it's going to be swept out of power, shoots the moon and goes for broke and does all of these ambitious things to pander to its base to lock in its winds

and that process scares away the people in the middle like the letter you read from the beginning and the other side comes in and then rinse and repeat on and on and on and it's no friggin way to run a railroad. This episode is brought to by Tron Aries for the first time the captivating world

of Tron breaks out of the grid. Aries, a highly advanced program. journeys into our world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind's first encounter with AI beings. Featuring an electrifying original soundtrack by 9-inch nails. Tron Aries is a must-see movie event, filmed for IMAX and made for the big screen. Experience it only in theaters, October 10.

Get tickets now. Okay, I want to move to Not Worth Your Time, question mark, and Steve talk about kind of the future of the dispatch, I guess. but really how the remnant, the folks who did not like their two choices in this campaign should think about a Trump administration moving forward. And I talk about the dispatch because, A, I saw a lot of these questions online of like, okay, what happens to the dispatch now if you were, your reason for existence was to reject Trump republicanism and to sort of maintain conservative.

in the face of a political party leaving that station. We got a lot of grief during the election for not endorsing Kamala Harris and yet still being against Trump. So Steve, where does this leave us? Yeah, Steve. Can I, can I just make sure, I just want to make sure I understand your framing. So this is not worth your time and it's about the future of the dispatch? Okay.

Just wanted to be clear. Do you have an announcement you're going to make? Are you going somewhere, Sarah? Appreciate that. That's great. It's always a question. Maybe it's really worth my time. Yeah.

I don't think, I mean, you know, at the risk of oversimplifying, I don't think it's a complicated answer from an editorial perspective. And I think, let me start by correcting one of the misimpression that it sounds like some folks that you've been reading or listening to on the comments side have. We were not founded as an anti-Trump entity. And we've said this before, I'll say it again, just for clarity's sake, but we weren't founded as an anti-Trump entity. And I've said this before, I'll say it again.

When Joan and I first took this out to try to raise money to launch the thing in the spring of 2019, we had a 15, 20-minute PowerPoint. It must be said it was a PowerPoint that neither of us knew enough to put together if we had to get somebody else to put the PowerPoint together. But it didn't mention Trump. So we talked for 15 minutes about it. Trump was president at the time. And we talked about a post-Trump era and building a media institution based on intellectual honesty and pursuit of truth and facts and kind of marrying old school journalism with conservative principles. limited government principles.

So that's how we started. That's what we think we're doing. And I, you know, I'm not objective about it, obviously, but I think we're doing it pretty well. That's what we intend to do. The main error, it should be pointed out, was that we were looking at a post-Trump world. Like, obviously we're not.

So I think the question narrowed a bit is sort of what do we do in this post-Trump, I mean, in this non-post-Trump. world in this intra-Trump world. Yeah. And my very simple answer is we keep doing what we've been doing and we do more it and we do it better. We are reporters. We provide fact-based reporting and commentary. This is what we said we were going to do from the beginning. And I think it's arguably needed now more than it's ever been needed. I think it's really important. One of the things that you saw over the course of the last election, and this is particularly true of, I would say, newer media outlets

is, you know, either individual journalists or media types, not only aligning themselves or endorsing, which we didn't do, as you point out, Sarah, but endorsing and campaigning for candidates. And this happens sort of on all sides. Obviously, the bulwark, have friends of the work, but they were very much in the Kamala camp. They had a, you know, a super PAC that ran ads, Republican voters against Trump, I think it was called. Some of those ads I found very effective, but they were involved in the game. That's what they were doing. And on the other side, you saw people like Megan Kelly give a speech at a Trump rally the night before the election, Ben Shapiro and others in that fight. And

basically blending activism and journalism. Now, of course, their opinion journalism, but, and you see this, of course, on the left. I mean, the model for this, very successful model for this is Cricket Media, right? And those guys have been, these are the Obama bros who built a media company. They've had tremendous success. And they have, for years, blended their analysis and commentary with activism. They have money fundraising drives. They recruit door knockers.

They do all that. So that's not the business we're in that business. We've never been in that business. We don't want to be in that business. It's different. We think that our credibility to a certain extent depends on our not being in that business. Nobody has to worry that, you know, we are carrying water for Kamala Harris or carrying water for Donald Trump or the Republican because we're not active in the campaign sense. We're going to say to people what we believe and we're going to do our reporting. So maybe, Jonah, I'll turn this on you then. I think that a lot of people would have a question of whether we can be fair covering a Trump administration when we've said we don't like Donald Trump. And so I want to give two examples. So one, for instance, Schedule F was this thing that was mentioned in the Project 2025, which was like a Halloween ghoul that kept being trotted out. my favorite question to ask people who just would cite Project 2025 is to name something in Project 2025 that was not in the Republican platform in 2012, pretty hard to do. But Schedule F is actually

one of those things. And it was the idea, is the idea, that there are basically too many positions that have civil service protection, but are actually policymaking positions. And that if you're in a policymaking position, you should be a political appointee. And so instead of 4,000 political appointees across the entire executive branch. It should be something more like, and I'll get this number very wrong, 10,000, let's say. I think there's something deeply conservative about that idea, and I think it would be an idea floated by a brave Republican administration of any kind, you know, again, back in 2012 era, let's say. Tariffs, on the other hand, would not be floated by a 2012 Republican administration. They're not a conservative idea in

are, you know, Berkian conservative sense. Do you think that you, we, are going to be able to differentiate between things that the Trump administration does that are good conservative policy, even if it's rhetoric we don't like or comes with scary project 2025 language, et cetera, versus the stuff that actually is not conservative? Or I just feel like for a lot of people, there's this concept of Trump derangement syndrome, and it's on both sides, I will tell you, that like if Trump's names attached to it, you can't be for it. Like, buying Greenland, I think you were for ahead of time. But now Trump's for it. Are you still for it? Yada, yada. Go. Yeah. So I've written quite a bit

about, in fact, the Greenland thing. I still think it's a great idea. I lament the fact that because of this Trump derangement stuff, the second Trump says it's a good idea, everyone thinks it must be crazy. And I think, you know, the Greenland thing is kind of an outlier because it is kind of an outlier idea. But there are plenty of things. I'm with you on Project 2025. You've not heard me or read me going nuts on Project 2025 because a lot of it I basically agree with. I mean, the political handling of it was ridiculous and embarrassing. particularly for the Heritage Foundation. But a lot of the ideas in it,

I have no profound objection to. I mean, you have to be specific. You know, people point out this thing or that thing. And they're like, okay, well, that's different than this thing. You know, whatever, that's fine. There's actually a lot of free market stuff in the literature surrounding project 2025.

I agree with that, right? On the issues, I think I have been fairly, consistent and honest about that like there are things Trump did in the first term. Abraham Accords and go down a long list of things that I think we're net good. And I think just to be clear, some of the stuff you're talking about is, you know, things that, you know, Kevin will handle one, Kevin Williamson will handle one way, I'll handle another way. Nick Catojo will handle a third way. That's all fine because we're on the opinion side, right?

But, you know, Scott Linsicum, when he talks about trade stuff, it is not. not like all of that of a cheerleader for Joe Biden on any of these kinds of things, right? And on the actual reporting side, you know, David Drucker is a great reporter. He gets along great with a lot of people in Trump world. I think he plays it straight. Mike Warren plays it straight. I think it's, you know, we might run into problems with sourcing, right? People willing to talk to us because of, you know, my profile or Steve's profile, or dispatches profile, or your profile or whatever. But that's why, you know, we pay, you know, drugger and those guys lavish salaries is to get around those problems.

Steve, can I just tell you, I'm, and to Jonah, I'm really excited to not be talking about a campaign anymore. I'm looking forward to talking about policies and whether they're good or bad or how they could be better or worse, whether they're being well executed or poorly executed and not talking about thing that was said that some people found offensive, like the sugar high stuff that I've mentioned before that I think is really corrosive for journalism because it's easy to write about because everyone can have an opinion about, you know, whether that Puerto Rico garbage joke was whatever. Like, I want to dig into real stuff because I think that's our competitive advantage.

So I agree with that. And before Stevie answer that, I just want to make. one quick point about this, because like about the dispatch per se, I agree with Steve on the editorial side. The business side is a slightly different thing because of the environment that we're going into. There are going to be people who, because vibes are going to feel like they don't want to get, you know, like Jeff Bezos, I didn't think he needed to pull the editorial, the endorsement, but the fact that he thought he needed to pull the endorsement tells you something about the business climate out there. But in terms of our audience, right, and our

editorial positioning, whether it's the bulwark or it's MSNBC News or a bunch of other places, right, their audiences have a very high expectation that whatever they get from those platforms, they're going to agree with. I think there's a lot of that going on with other outlets that we're sort of peer competitors with in one way or the other. But I think we've educated our consumers to a certain degree, our readers, our members, right, that about 20 to 30% of the time they're going to be pissed off with something that someone says around here or the way we report things. And that's proof. Wait, that's my percentage. Surely everyone else's is higher. Yeah. And so like the, I mean, this is, this gets at this sort of meta thing that I've been

ranting about for a while. The number of people on the pro-Trump side, anti-Trump side, left wing, wing who think we're all selling out and taking the easy route are insane. Like, we piss off everybody. Like, I mean, like, no one is happy with where we are because we are not willing to buy into the dominant narratives of either side. And the people who get what we're doing appreciate it. And if you're one of those people and you're not yet a subscriber, please become a subscriber. if you're a business that wants to reach out to the persuadable middle in this country.

And remember, the presidable middle doesn't mean it's 50% left wing and 50% right wing. There are some issues where the right is 100% correct and the left is 100% wrong. And there are some issues where Democrats or the left are going to be closer to 100% correct and the right is going to be 100% wrong. The persuadable middle is willing to sort of say, you know, housing policies that keep young people from getting in, that our teachers' union directed policies are 100% bad, even if Democrats like them. And people are willing to say that, you know, right-wing policies on, you know, these days call it protectionism, since that's where we are, are 100% wrong. And I think the business climate, which cares a lot about not pissing off politicians, get stuck in this.

weird place of being scared off from working with people, but like, we hope that that's a space for us. And if you're just a normal reader and subscriber that you get what I'm talking about, try to convince somebody else to subscribe. Because I think editorially, there's really not a lot we need to change in the Trump era. The business-wise, it's going to be an adventure. And, you know, if people want to help us out in one way or the other, we'd love to have that conversation. Yeah, and I think, look, maybe, you know, I mean, obviously there are people who don't think that actively participating in political campaigns and doing journalism is problematic.

I mean, we're seeing more of it. That's a growth industry right now, for sure. We take a different view. So what we're trying to do is be as intellectually honest as possible at all times. And I think that's something that people can have come to account on us for and will continue to count on us for. It is in, you know, we published this post the first day. We call it the manifesto internally.

We literally included in the manifesto a section about challenging our own assumptions and challenging the assumptions of our readers because we thought that too many places were leaning into partisan politics and polarization for sort of giving into audience capture, trying to please their audience, providing affirmation more than information. That's not the business we want to be in. So, you know, if you're listening to us, you've probably heard something here today that you don't like, that you disagree with. We think that's a plus. We're just going to tell you what we think.

To go back to your original point, though, Sarah, I'm not sure that you're going to get the relief that you want now. And again, just being totally transparent and honest, I think one of the biggest challenges in covering the first Trump administration, first when I was at the Weekly Standard and later at the dispatch, is that you go in, why? to cover these meaty policy debates. And then you learn that policy is made because Donald Trump read an article that John Bolton wrote in the Hill that Steve Bannon handed to him, or that, you know, somebody handed to him to contradict Steve Bannon and Trump made the decision on that. That was an actual thing. I'm not making that up.

And or, you know, or Trump talked to, I think in this case it'll be Trump talked to Joe Rogan or Trump talked to Tucker Carlson. And I don't think we're likely to get back to the kinds of policy debates that you're describing. The only other thing I would say about that is the challenge, I think, for a place like us, and we're going to cover the White House. We're going to have somebody who's covering the White House pretty intently and nearly full time.

The challenge, I think, for us is if policy is made in that way, we're going to be. if personalities really matter, you can't really afford to not cover the personality conflicts. And that was a balance that I found hard to strike, again, at the weekly standard and here at the dispatch. Because if it's the case that policy is made by sort of whimsy or the last conversation that Donald Trump had with a podcaster, how do you capture that? And it makes the sort of palace intrigue side of things, the kind of gossip mongering side of things that I don't like to cover and have rejected in the past in favor of the kinds of meaty policy coverage that you're talking about, Sarah. But it makes that important. There was the analogy I've used before, and I'll shut up about it, was, you know, when I first read what I saw at the Revolution, the Peggy Noon book about the Reagan administration, she was a speechwriter. and she, it was so eye-opening, such a fantastic book about how politics works and how the various

constituencies inside the administration lobbied to get their policy priorities in the speeches so that when they came out of the president's mouth, they were policy. And I think what's happened in the Trump era, this was certainly true in the first Trump administration. I expect it will be in the second is that the process. there is flipped. So there's much less scrambling on the front end. I mean, the policy people do with the policy people do. The cabinet agencies do what the cabinet agencies do. But it's much more ad hoc. And what happens is Trump will say something in a meeting or in a tweet or what have you. And then there's a scramble after the fact to assign meaning to that in policy terms. And the people

who are successful are the people who are fastest and most persuasive to explain what the president must have meant in his conversations. And covering that and covering it well, I think, will be really important to helping people understand the dynamics of this new Trump administration. I thought it would be a funny joke last night to send a text to the person who I understand is handling the Department of Justice transition team and said, hey, I heard you're the guy to talk to if I want to come back in and hear the jobs I'm thinking of. Don't worry. He's a really good friend.

He got the joke. So, but, you know, people come to this for, like, you're penetrating insights about all these things. Who do you think is going to be AG? So I've said this all along, right? There's this spectrum. What I find really interesting right now is how many people think they're the ones in charge of various parts of the transition and that so-and-so is a lock for this job when in fact

I've heard five other people say that another person's a lock for this job. This isn't that different from what happened in 2016 except for one big difference. In 2016, nobody had been on Trump's team and it was such a shock when he won that it was a total free for all and everyone was just sort of giddy and happy. with their friends, and it was, um, yeah, happier. This time, you see something that I saw, by the way, in 2012, in the last few weeks of the Romney campaign, everyone's knifing each other. When you think you're going to win and there's different factions and there's power on the line

and this much power on the line, everyone's just trying to talk about how so-and-so wasn't actually loyal and they shouldn't be in charge. And within Trump world in particular, that gets magnified times a thousand. So you ask me who I think is going to be AG, I think there's totally different versions of it. And remember, also in Trump world, whoever gets to the top of the pile first doesn't stay there long. Because once that group is seen as having the power in the ear, then everyone comes after them. And they're toppled pretty quickly. So, you know, I think Ken Paxton and Mike Lee would both be pretty high on those lists.

But what if they scramble to the top of the pile in early November? And then by Thanksgiving, someone's already taken them down. Crabs in a bucket kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. So it's funny you say this because I just did, you know, I love this. The Telegraph of London has this Ukraine podcast, Ukraine-Laylorist, and they had me on to talk about the election stuff. and they were particularly concerned with national security appointments.

And so I had to do something, you know, as you guys know, I tried not to do, which is actual reporting. But I called around some people and just to get there to lay there. And I got the exact same responses. Like everyone thinks they're on the inside track. Everyone, you know, and like the way I put it is there's a bell curve distribution of both terms of outcomes of the whole administration, but also the appointments. And some are really, really bad. And some could be really, really good. And those two, the policy and the personnel are related.

But nobody friggin knows. Anyone who thinks right now they know who's going to get any of these jobs? I mean, I'll even take the microcosm of who will be acting attorney general. Because remember, before someone is nominated and confirmed, to be an acting attorney general, you have to either be Senate confirmed or a GS-15 or higher, meaning a senior civil servant. now that leads a list and by the way I gave a quote that I thought was on the record but ended up being on background in this story where I walked through each of the people who fit that category within the Department of Justice right now and gave my thoughts on them which again I thought was on the record and my name would be attached but my favorite was Prim Escalona is currently the U.S. Attorney in one of the districts in Alabama and I said I wouldn't pick Prim if you want to do shenanigans and like Literally, everyone knew that was me because it sounds exactly like me. So I got a whole bunch of texts that were like, Sarah, that's obviously you.

And I was like, yeah, yeah, no, I meant to have my name on it. But, you know, you've got Curtis Gannon, who's in the Solicitor General's office right now, who's probably the most senior person in Maine Justice, who used to be a Trump appointee during the first administration. But then you've got these interesting questions of whether you can have a Senate-confirmed person in one of the independent agencies. So for instance, Andrew Ferguson, who's over at the FTC, was a Trump appointee, but he's in an independent agency. Does that actually count under the Vacancies Reform Act as someone who can be put into an acting position, for instance, acting attorney general? So, like, we can't even, like the list is actually contained for something like acting attorney general.

And that's not even totally clear right now. So for more of that, by the way, tune into this flagship podcast called Advisory Opinions as Dave and I will be talking more about that. So I have a theory I've had the theory for years if Trump won again that if you wanted to confirm an AG with

like 98% of the vote, the person you would name that would be fairly reliable to operate on the president's agenda Ted Cruz because like Teddy Roosevelt being made vice president,

the Senate would love to confirm him and get him out of there. I have often mentioned Ted Cruz on that list. I think that's totally on the spectrum. It's on the super normie side of the spectrum. You also have to remember he just won a very expensive Senate race in Texas and to have to do that again, I think probably makes a lot of people a little nauseous. But sure.

And I could name a whole bunch of other options. that are on the other end of the not normie list, for instance. I think that the Ken Paxton, Mike Lee model is sort of in the center. It's neither on the Normie side nor the totally whackadoo side. You think Paxton can be confirmed? In the Senate that he now has? Yes, I do. Because you no longer need Collins and Murkowski, who would sort of have been the,

had their foot on the break votes. So, but you know what, guys? there is going to be so many episodes to talk about all this stuff on. So we've done our campaign election episode and we can't stop. So there'll be more of this. Thought it was a fun convo to kick off a new era for the dispatch. Thank you, listeners. And we will see you next week as I'm sure we will have so much more information and more things to talk about next week.

Thank you.