The Dispatch Podcast - Will Republicans Stand Against Trump’s Slush Fund?

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, and Mike Warren to discuss Donald Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund and the indictment of former Cuban leader Raúl Castro. The Agenda: ���The slush fund —The impeachment case —Will Congress grow a spine? —Indictment of Raúl Castro —The Venezuela model —NWYT: Discontinued treats Dispatch Recommendations: —A Time for Choosin’, Texas —Will Trump’s Reverse Midas Touch Cost the GOP Texas? —Keeping Antisemites Out of the Tent —Masculinism and Feminism | Interview: Helen Lewis Show notes: —Steve on Schiltz for The Weekly Standard The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including audio versions of all our articles and newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss Donald Trump's $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund in the indictment of Cuban political leader, Raul Castro. And a fun not worth your time today where I lament the end of Schlitzbeer and we discuss some other products that we can't get anymore. I'm joined by my dispatch colleagues, Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson and Mike Warren.

Let's dive in. Mike, we spent some time at the end of Monday's Dispatch podcast, supplanting our light and always fun, not worth your time segment with mini rants about Donald Trump's slush fund, $1.776 billion, anti-weaponization slush fund. The news broke, during the recording on Monday. We've now had several days to read it to try to understand it.

And so I will ask you this morning to get us started by explaining what this is. Were we right to be as cynical earlier this week as we were? I think we were right to be as cynical as we were. We were maybe perhaps not outraged enough by the details. and by the sort of the providence of this fund, because I admit that when the news broke, I didn't quite fully connect all the dots. But in layman's terms, what has happened is there was a lawsuit where Donald Trump at the beginning of January of this year,

believe it was this year, sued the IRS. Now, he's the president of the United States, the top of the executive branch. The IRS is an office within a service within the executive branch. in the executive branch that he runs. So he sues the IRS over the leak of his, and it's not just his, it was many other tax returns that were leaked.

It was about six years ago now. It should be noted that this leak occurred back in 2020 when the president of the United States and the head of the executive branch, which housed the IRS, was Donald Trump as well. But so he sues the IRS over this and is, in some kind of lawsuit, but it's not very clear that the Justice Department is really doing

anything to defend anything. And so as this lawsuit is going on, by the way, it's something for like $10 billion is what Donald Trump is asking for. So at a certain point, the judge in this case is sort of asking, well, like, what's going on here? Is there some kind of collusion happening between the Justice Department, the IRS, and this is all kind of a big setup? The Justice Department, just to explain, because the Justice Department in cases like this would be summoned to defend the IRS against the claims made by the President of the United States. Correct. And the Justice Department, in this case, is not taking any active steps far as we can tell to have done that.

Correct. And again, I think it's maybe obvious, but it is worth underscoring. This is a Justice Department that is controlled by the president of the United States. So his own Justice Department is not defending his own IRS in his lawsuit against his own IRS. This week, the president dropped that lawsuit and there was a settlement. And in that settlement, there was essentially a, I don't know, an order that, I guess, protects Donald Trump from any sort of audits about the taxes that he has paid or any sort of audits or any sort of audits or other action regarding the taxes he has or hasn't paid in perpetuity. And as a part of all of this happening this week, that's where we find out on Monday, while

we're doing this podcast about this anti-weaponization fund that is created in response to this as a way to essentially allow a group of five people that are in the Justice Department, who are, again, appointed by the president of the United States, to distribute, what ended up being sort of a gimmicky $1.776 billion in... No way, ma'am. They counted up the exact number of weaponization cases, and it just happened to come to that number. Right.

And $250, I think, was the actual... The final thing. Now, I don't know about that. And so what ended up being created was this sort of this fund, which this is money that comes from the general fund that is being set up to be distributed to anybody who has a claim

against the Justice Department and the federal government who claims that they were targeted because of their political beliefs by the Justice Department and providing compensation for them. So what do you have? You have a number of January 6th rioters and other people who were prosecuted because of what happened either around January 6

or the efforts to overturn elections after 2020. You have people like Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy who is running for governor of Minnesota right now, a lot of people are putting in their requests, are applying for this anti-weaponization fund, you know, some kind of money from that. And so what it essentially is is what we were sort of outraged about Steve on Monday, which is a slush fund for people who are allies of the president, who have sort of defended the president, and you have people who work for the president, who are appointed by the president, we're going to be making the decisions about how to disperse that money.

And it sounds too crazy to believe. And yet it's basically exactly what it looks and sounds like. And we can talk about sort of the political implications of this. But I think the reaction from the rest of Washington, whether they're Democratic. Some Republicans as well indicates just sort of how beyond the pale this settlement and this slush fund is being perceived. Jonah, you wrote your L.A. Times column. on this earlier this week and argued that this is about as clear cut one could hope to see a case

for impeachment based on what the president has done here. Make that case. Yeah, so I'm not saying that there aren't more obvious or more clear-cut cases that you could have for impeachment, right? I mean, like Trump could like hand the nuclear codes to Vladimir Putin, right? I mean, like, we could come up with hypotheticals that are more obvious, in part because we have this problem in this country of thinking that you can't be impeached unless you've done something illegal. And that was the point I was trying to get at. Not everything illegal is unconstitutional and not everything unconstitutional is illegal. They are just different things.

And obviously there's overlap, but there are different things. And impeachment is about political misdeeds. The founders are clear about it. In fact, I mean, the most on-point thing, which I raised in the column, was that when at the Virginia ratifying convention, there were a bunch of people, including George Mason, who were very worried about the pardon power. They just thought it was too sweeping and too unilateral. And Mason asked, couldn't the president just have people commit crimes on his behalf with the promise that they'll be pardoned? And Madison was like, sure, I mean, theoretically. but obviously he'd be impeached if he did that, you know.

And here you had Donald Trump, who, again, we don't have to get into debate about incitement, right? Like, that's a legal standard from Times v. Sullivan or whatever. He encouraged a mob to storm the Capitol. He encouraged a mob to intimidate, even if the mob never went inside. He encouraged a mob to stand outside the Capitol and intimidate Congress while it was trying to perform its constitution. constitutionally obligatory functions. And then he pardoned them all in the first day of his second term, including the ones who beat the crap out of the cops,

including the ones who committed obvious crimes, including ones who literally took a dump on Congress. And he pardoned all of them without any distinctions. And now he's talking about, who's floating the idea of paying them. And, you know, Madison and all the founders who talked about impeachment, they talked about it as a betrayal of public trust, of putting yourself above the Republican virtue of the common good and all of these kinds of things.

And Trump is obviously doing that. And it's not just on this score. I mean, I can list a whole bunch of others. And the thing I wanted to tie it to is, you know, I'm a Burke guy. And one of Edmund Burke's fundamental, he calls it a fundamental rule of civil society, is that no man can be a judge in his own cause. And the founding fathers believe this. They read Burke.

They quote Burke in the federal newspapers. They quote Burke in the constitutional convention debates. they quote Burke in the ratifying debates on this point. And it is basically the fundamental justification for separation of powers because they do it at scale. And they say presidents can't be trusted to be judge of what the president wants in all of their causes. That's why we need checks and balances and divided government and separation of powers

and all these kinds of things. And Trump has subverted these powers, the division of powers, time and time again on a whole bunch of fronts. And this is just the most egregious case of it. All right. So that's the constitutional part. Just on the politics part, I keep hearing these interviews with Trump where he's talking about how people's lives were ruined and how they need to be compensated. Well, first of all, as far as I am aware, not a single one of the January 6 convicts has been able to appeal their mostly trial by jury convictions.

Not one of them has been able to say that they were excessive. not one of them has been able to get them overturned because they were legitimate. Second, if it is so true that Trump says there are all of these cases of these very sympathetic victims who went broke or had someone commit suicide, like they brought out a door dash delivery woman in a staged photo op to talk about how he was like a hero for no tax on tips. They bring out human meat props at state of the union addresses all the friggin' time. bring out these people. Show us one. Say, this is what this fund is for. They're not doing that for a reason.

First of all, there aren't many who are very sympathetic. I'm sure there are some, but a lot of them are scumbags. A bunch of them have been re-arrested for sex trafficking and pedophilia and rape and all sorts of gnarly things. Because Trump was not sending our best people to Congress on January 6th. And I get very weary of the way both friends and people I disagree with. I'm susceptible to it. We're all susceptible to it is this desire to make what Trump is doing complicated. To come up with a theory, right, of, you know, it's a caram shot, it's 4D chest,

this is what he's really thinking, this is the real strategy. No, the 1776 fund thing, he wants to use it exactly the way he used his personal foundation. It's fungible money, right? He said, oh, I gave all that money, went to charity and all that kind of stuff. He used it to buy art from friends who he's doing business deals with. He used it to buy stuff for Mara Lago. It is just another way of him writing checks off of something that doesn't deplete his own bank account. And it is so flagrantly and obviously a political slush fund, not just to reward constituencies,

but to send the signal that you will be rewarded. Yeah. If you help out. That's what the point of the point of a lot of the pardons was, too. So anyway, I'm just disgusted by it. No, very important point. I want to play a couple clips, Kevin, before I come to you. We have a clip of Donald Trump.

And this, I want to focus a little bit on January 6th here. This is, in many ways, not at all surprising, except for the fact that you can't believe he's actually doing it, right? I mean, there have been rumors, have been reports. Speak for yourself. I can believe it. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's right. it's one of these, for me, it's one of these moments where you're shocked that he actually does it,

but you're not at all surprised because this is what he does and who he is. But we've had reports going back for since the pardons of these January 6th folks that he was going to find a way to compensate them. And it just seemed so over the top and so ridiculous that it was even Donald Trump is going to do that. And the answer, of course, is yes, even Donald Trump is going to do that. I want to play a clip first from Donald Trump in the day. after January 6th. I think this is from about one week after January 6th. Here's what Donald Trump said when he addressed the country about what had happened on that day. Whether you are on the right or on the left, a Democrat or a Republican, there is never a justification for violence. No excuses,

no exceptions. America is a nation of laws. Those who engaged in the attacks last week will be brought to justice. And Kevin, I want you to hear from Vice President J.D. Vance, who had a press briefing at the White House this week and explained this and took some questions about January 6thers. And I find just here on this point, one of the interesting things about the American media is there is a fascination. If you go to any American law school, there are these. you know, prisoner rights clinic. There are people who objectively committed heinous crimes, but the American media and the American Legal Academy has decided that even though they committed bad crimes, their sentence was disproportionate. They were mistreated in some way. You know who

never, ever gets an ounce of sympathy when it comes to that disproportionate sentencing is people who voted for Donald Trump and participated in the January 6th protest. So, Kevin, this is really a media bias problem. per J.D. Vance, and we should be more sympathetic to the people who participated in what he called the January 6th protests. Your reaction to both of those clips? I don't even know why I'm here this morning to talk about this, to be honest.

So Donald Trump sued the Trump administration for wrongdoing by the Trump administration to take out $2 billion, which is about 25 F-35s, by the way, so a couple of small squadrons of F-35s of money that hasn't been appropriated by anyone to give to, well, the QAnon shaman guy with the buffalo horns. He's apparently on the list and George Santos, even though he doesn't seem to have been involved in this.

And the guy in the pink Brooks Brothers shirt down in St. Louis, who was waving the guns at the protesters, apparently is looking for a payout from this. You know, I was reading this Washington Post story about the people who are talking about trying to look for restitution on this, and they're just such a sad bunch of people. And a lot of their stories where, you know, my family has stopped talking to me and I found it difficult to get a job and all this kind of stuff. And that ain't because you got arrested, buddy.

You know, you, that has to do with other things. I mean, you got arrested because of the same underlying psychological problems that led you to be estranged from your family and be unemployable and all the rest of this stuff. You know, I'm not going to react to what Trump and Vance said just because it's not worth it. I mean, you can't. I mean, my dog barks to me sometimes and I don't try to explain Aristotle to the dog. You know, it's just, it's, you just don't do it. You know, Trump is, I don't, Orban didn't do stuff like this, right? You know, Putin is over there going, that's pretty brasty, Don, you know.

Maybe tone that bag just a little bit. And J.D. Vance, of course, is, you know, Renfield, just, you know, coming up out of his little basement, eating his bugs and doing whatever he needs to do to please his master. And they're just, there's no reason to sit here on a podcast and, talk about what a couple of disgusting specimens these two are and how they make me a shame to be a member of the same species? I mean, there's just, why? Let's go on to something else. I don't even do it. So I will push back on that because I think it is worth talking about. I think it's helpful to have people understand, even if I get the level of your disgust. I wouldn't mind talking about Fitzpatrick

and Thune, by the way, in Congress who said that, well, maybe we should do something about this. Yeah, guys, maybe we should. You know, normally it takes kind of two branches of government to do anything. Yes, Congress appropriates money. The President spends it, that sort of thing. Fitzpatrick, I guess, is going to actually try to introduce some legislation to stop this from happening. This is Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, who's a member of the House Republican, from Pennsylvania. Right. And Trump addressed him directly yesterday, taking questions from his now wife, who's Jackie Heinrich from Fox News.

Trump essentially threatened her, him, by saying, Yeah, this guy always takes me on, and we know what happens to people who challenge me, in effect. Yeah. If they don't actually follow through and do something, I think that they should be, we like to use the words held accountable. They should be run out of town on a rail tart and feathered, whatever you can do. But it doesn't really seem like there's a whole lot of energy there. You know, Thune was kind of like, well, maybe this isn't so great, but there wasn't any. And therefore, I'm going to do this, that, or the other thing to follow up afterward.

So, yeah, we have a supine Congress. And I think when Mike was talking earlier, that maybe should be reemphasized is that Trump's tax immunity stuff isn't just for him. It's for him. It's for his family. It's for certain business associates.

And I like that they put the word forever in all caps on the document because that's just a nice tell about who actually wrote the thing, the guy who likes to put all caps in the middle of sentences for no particular reason. You get what you pay for, right?

You know, Americans chose this guy and they knew what he was. They like it, at least enough them do to make him president twice. Republicans are, you know, supine, amoral, depraved, whatever else you want to call them. And that's that.

Merry Christmas. Happy Memorial Day. So I want to put a just quick point on that. I wish you would. Lots of us talk about, you know, it is commonplace on panels and in high-minded conversations to talk about how the family fathers, they imagined the president

being like George Washington, and they wrote an office based upon his character. You know, like the silhouette of his character is like embedded in the text of the Constitution. And that's all well and good. I think that's true. Maybe that was a mistake. But it's what they did. And we also talk about it.

Lord knows people have heard me rant about it about how the founding fathers never anticipated the idea that Congress would cease to be a jealous guardian of its powers and his prerogynes, right? So I made both of those points a zillion times here, there, and everywhere. we very rarely put the two together. And when you put the two together, you have to think about, they also expected that Congress would have representatives in it with a certain kind of character as well. Right. And I'm not saying that they thought they would all be Cicero,

or what they imagined Cicero would be. But they all thought they would be sort of jealous guardians of their personal prerogatives, but also the interests of their state or their district and of their institution, and that they would have a sense of honor about being insulted, denigrated, treated as an afterthought at best. And we all talk about, it's fine to talk about how Trump has no, as poor character.

Trump has very poor character. I've been saying that for a very long time. It is fine and fair. Like, we all here, at least me and Steve and Mike, Kevin's not in Washington, but we all meet members of Congress all the time. And when you talk to them in green rooms, when you talk to them at events, whatever, a lot of the ones, at least the ones willing to talk to me, I like, right? I mean, because the ones who, like, really resent me and hate me don't want to talk to me. And they're kind of decent people. And when they get,

when they're retired, they become really decent people. But the simple fact is that it is now fair at this point to question the character of the individual members of Congress, all of them. You know, like, I'm not trying to do a both sides thing because I'm perfectly happy to beat up on the Democrats. And I questioned their character too. They sat by while Nancy Pelosi destroyed, did an enormous amount of damage to that institution. But Republicans are in charge. They run the show. They're the ones who have spent the last half century talking about how character matters and all of these kinds of things.

They're the ones who talk about the importance of the Constitution. They're the ones who talk about, you know, the wisdom of the founders and all of these sorts of things. And I just don't want to hear it from Mike Johnson or any of these people when they're great. at fundraisers talking about, you know, how God gave us the Constitution and all this kind of nonsense. I don't think that's nonsense. I think it's nonsense coming from him. And they're cowards.

They're just fundamentally cowards, refusing to do what the job required of them is. And some of them are less cowardly than other. I applaud Fitzpatrick for standing up on this, right? I applaud Cassidy now that he's lost his primary for suddenly, you know, getting some stem cell therapy to regrow parts of his anatomy. That's great. But his spine, you mean? There's a list. But my only point is at some point, you judge people not by what they say, but by what they do when it comes at a price. And we've burnt through most members of Congress who are willing to do something when it came at a price in Trump's first term. And most of them now are just basically scalded dogs. And yeah,

every now then you get John Kennedy and a couple other people who say things. but they don't do things. And they're showing us who they are. By the way, I thought that the silhouette of his character is embedded in the Constitution was a very nice turn to phrase. You should write that down. Thank you. Thank you. All right.

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That's V-A-E-R-W watches.com. And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Let's spend a minute on John Thune in his reaction to this. He was asked about this earlier this week on Tuesday, I believe, asked about this fund. And he said, his quote was, yeah, not a big fan. I'm not sure exactly how they intend to use it.

But my understanding is that it was just announced, but yeah, I don't see a purpose for it. So to Jonah's point, on the one hand, he's the Senate majority leader. He could certainly come out more forcefully than that. He could say this is unacceptable, we're going to fight it, this is not going to happen, what have you. On the other hand, you take some risks anytime you speak out against Donald Trump if you're a Republican. We've seen this with Bill Cassidy. You know, John Corny, the president announced his endorsement of Ken Paxton this week, not because John Cornyn hadn't been sufficiently supine this week. I mean, this month, as he's running for reelection,

took pictures of himself holding the art of the deal. Even after Trump endorsed his opponent, he put out a statement saying, I'm with Trump, 99 percent of the election. I'm with Trump, 99 percent of time I've been a good ally with the president on and on and on. And there are some risks associated with speaking out. If you're John Thune and you're trying to keep together a fractious Republican conference in the Senate that includes some super mega types. And also, I think still to the stay, many people who are quietly opposed to Trump, but publicly not opposed to Trump, isn't it something that he just said what he said, that he's, that he registered his opposition? Yeah, I mean, there's something a little odd about the Senate majority leader, the role of it, which is, in a way, it matters maybe a little less, certainly to me, what he or she says as individual senators, because individual senators have so much power.

And in a way, the Senate leader's job is to kind of keep that conference together and weigh all kinds of desires and impulses and contingencies and try to lead a conference of members. in his party. I viewed that comment as a signal, right, to many of those members of his conference, which is that this is not good. This is not something that he wants his members out there are certainly defending, but ultimately what matters more are like the individual senators who come out and really nobody really has besides to Cassidy. I can't remember if Cassidy said something about this, but you know, you can expect this from some of those more independent Republican senators to maybe say a few things. But I don't know.

I look at this. I look at the Fitzpatrick comments about this. He's in a district that is a swing district. He is one of the heads of the Problem Solvers Caucus. He is as middle of the body as you can be as a Republican and is therefore attuned to sort of where swing voters are, where the mood of the country is, maybe a little more than an R plus 19 district representing member of Congress. Congress. And what it all says to me is that there seems to be a sense that the White House and

Republicans in Congress have already written off the House of Representatives. And that there's a feeling of kind of, all right, let's see what papers we can grab before we have to like escape, before we have to get out of here. Because, you know, the way that the polls are showing 39% in the latest Fox News poll is where Donald Trump's approval is all of this redistricting and moving, you know, changing the rules of the game in these southern states at the last minute. It will help Republicans hold on to a few seats, but the signal seemed to be that all of this is about to go away, all of this power that Republicans have. And very well, it could happen in the Senate.

And so I see a lot of this positioning as sort of almost clearing the throats of these guys. as they prepare for a change in government after November. And I think whether it's impeachment or, you know, certainly there will be a ton of investigations, a ton of hearings on Capitol Hill if Democrats are back in power. And I see all of this as both from the White House's perspective and Republicans on Capitol Hill, they kind of view this as maybe even the last gasp

of what Donald Trump is kind of able to do before there is real pushback. That's just an analysis of sort of, where the minds are. I'll leave it to Kevin and Jonah to sort of make the judgments about whether or not that's good for our civic health. Jonah, what of the politics of this? I mean, Donald Trump has said and done several things in the past two weeks that if you're a Democratic ad maker, he's doing your work for you. He's asked about how he regards Americans' finances and concerns about affordability, about gas prices, what have you. And he literally says into the microphone,

this is a paraphrase, not a direct quote. You know, I don't care. I don't think about it. What's important is Iran and their nukes and America's will be fine, in effect. You don't even have to dress that up. That is its own ad, and you would expect that will be played in ads for Democrats across the country. And now this, you know, if you go back and look at what Donald Trump said, the clip that

we played, where he said he was going to bring people who participated in the violence on January 6th to justice, he is now saying, I mean, there's the J.D. Vance clip that we played making an affirmative case to reimburse these folks. Donald Trump himself said this week, this is reimbursing people that were horribly treated. In some cases, they've been in prison wrongly. They've paid legal fees that they didn't have. They've gone bankrupt. Their lives have been destroyed. And I think this is a key sentence. It's not been much discussed elsewhere. And they turned out to be right. I think once again making reference to his view that the 2020 election was don't he is literally in that comment justifying the violence because they turned out to be right.

If you're a Democratic admaker, don't you just play that on a loop? Or if you look back at the 2024 presidential election and the amount of time that Democrats spent campaigning on democracy in peril on January 6th, Democrats themselves are saying, look, that's not really an effective issue for us at this point. People don't really seem to care. It certainly was the case that in 2024, people didn't care enough about January 6th, didn't care as much as I wanted them to care. Is that a loser? Do you use this if you're running a Democratic campaign? I don't think you use it as much as you would like them to use it or that I would like them to use it, but you use it. But I think you fold it in. I mean, like, he will not stop talking about the ballroom.

And he comes home from a China summit saying, Prime Minister Xi agrees that we need a ballroom. I mean, Come on, people act. Let's do this now. He sounds like Lyndon Johnson talking to his tailor. Deep cut. Which is what he asked the tailor for.

Yeah. But I want to sort of add to what Mike was saying about the thinking that Trump has going in here. I think it's not just that they've sort of written off the house. It's that Trump very much would, you know, what is the Milton one, it better to rule in hell than serve in heaven. Yeah.

Trump would rather. be the undisputed singular authority of a rump Republican Party, of a small Republican Party, then the most important leader who has to negotiate with other centers of power in a majority Republican Party. And that's always been the case. And it's just that before it wasn't conceivable, they could pull it off to the extent he has and now that he has. So I think to the keeping mind, before I said, I don't like people trying to overthink what Trump does. But to a certain extent, if they think they're going to lose the House, they think Democrats are going to be in charge, they're definitely going to have a lot of investigations, and they're probably going to, it's probably

going to be an impeachment, and it's probably going to be screwed up by Democrats because they're really good at doing that. And they're going to want to be able to say that it's completely partisan. And so if you either through fear or primaries or bribery or political bribery, right, get it so that the only Republicans left are utterly sycophantic and loyal to you, it's easier to pull off the claim that this is all partisan. If you actually have some Republicans with integrity who kind of like lend aid and comfort to what the Democrats are doing, all of a sudden, that tribal logic completely goes out the window. It's sort of like, it's why Rokana used Tom Massey so much, right, is even Republicans, even this Tea Party guy, right, is doing this.

It's why there's this strange new respect for Marjor Taylor Green, right? And if you all of a sudden have Republicans helping Democrats in these investigations, even rhetorically, it's bad. And so Trump is clearing away anyone he thinks might be a disloyalist or disloyal. Before that becomes a thing. And then I think he thinks he can ride it out in the bunker. Yeah, real quick, I have some doubts about, that politically, just in the sense that, by the way, I think Rump Party was the name

one of those movies, Trump was in the night. I just, if I were the Democrats, I would just put a camera on a gas station and the prices and just leave it there. Like people do it with your mother's window, what, back in the day, John, when you remember that? Or the steady cam on the BP oil spill? Yeah, just do that. Because people have already forgiven this guy for trying to overthrow the government.

They're not going to get too upset over him trying to steal a little money. See, I don't know about that, actually. I think there is a tolerance, perhaps, for stealing a little money or skimming off the top or, you know, sort of these adventures, as long as gas prices aren't where they are now. As long as the price of everything doesn't feel increasingly oppressive. And all of a sudden, once, you know, the mirage of the golden age of America and the economy is actually not improved from where it was, before Trump was elected, like, once that clears the effect of the petty corruption or the high-level corruption or the democracy stealing or whatever, that seems to be a real danger. And that's at least how some of these Republicans are reacting.

Can I just say one last thing about this? This feeling that we're sort of witnessing the run-up to the final helicopter out of Saigon kind of moment for Donald Trump here is, like, this is. If you were to just look at the conditions of where we are right now, it does kind of, it feels like the logical conclusion of a two-term Trump presidency here, right? Like at the, you know, it's not as sort of the resistance liberals used to say, it's not like handmade's tale. You know, there aren't, you know, fascist militias marching through the streets of American cities. It's like payoffs to his buddies and allies and friends and sort of, you know, going hogwild on. tariffs and Hogwild in the, you know, I'll do a Middle East war the right way sort of thing

and sort of sticking it to the Europeans. Like all of this is kind of ending where we actually might have thought and should have assumed the logical conclusion of a Trump presidency and a Donald Trump sort of unfettered by AIDS who are trying to stop him from his worst impulses and all that sort of thing in a Congress that might step up and stand in his way, even from his own party. It's, it just, it gives that feeling that like, this is the end. And it seems like everybody is kind of subtly acknowledging that in their actions. And this is just, hey, we're about to be in trouble. Let's give the store, you know, sell the store. And as that last helicopter takes off and they start saying, there's too much weight, we're going down.

And they start throwing off truckloads of the Book of Virtues. And one of those Book of Virtues books lands on J.D. Vance. And that's how I know God is real. I mean, it's going to be, if you're right that, I mean, I think you're right. I don't disagree. with most of that analysis, it does feel like that. And you can just sense the exasperation from Republicans on Capitol Hill. Again, it's a fair question. Like, are they going to do anything about it? Or are they just going to be quietly exasperated?

And if you're making bets, you bet on quietly exasperated. But it does have that kind of feel. I guess I would say there are elements of both, right? I mean, I think it is appropriate that, you know, we're going to, you know, drift into the end of the second term of Trump's president. We should say it's going to be a long end, right? Two and a half years still. Yes.

So it feels like it's ending, but it's not really ending. You're right. I mean, the sort of obvious grift, obvious open, outfront corruption, the payoff to defenders, to loyalists. But I do think that some of the resistance stuff is true, too. I mean, I think if you look at what you had ICE doing in places like Minnesota and you have Greg Bevino doing the things that he was doing, you know, this is Trump exercising raw power because he can exercise raw. power. And that leads us to our second topic. I want to spend just a few minutes on the developments over the past several days with respect to Cuba. We have heard for a long time there have been open promises, I would say, not really even threats from senior administration officials to the Cuban

regime, some of them in public, many of them in private, that we're coming for you. You're next. We did Venezuela. We're now doing Iran. Cuba's next. And I think we have done. begun to see the beginning of that process. Whatever now form it takes is open to question, but we had the indictment of 94-year-old Raul Castro, former Cuban leader, one-time Secretary of Defense in Cuba for killings of American pilots that he ordered. I don't think there's much dispute of that back in the mid-1990s in violation of this, supposedly in violation of this sort of deal that the Clinton administration had reached with the government of Cuba in the midst of this sort of regular flow of Cubans trying to flee to come to the United States. They struck a

deal. After the deal was struck, American pilots flew in round Cuba, dropping leaflets, trying to encourage people to continue to come. And Castro's government, Fidel Castro's government, with Raul Castro, leading the military, shot down. American pilots. That is the indictment. Kevin, what else should we think about this indictment? I would say just before you answer, the announcement of the indictment was unlike anything I've really seen or heard. It was done at the Freedom Tower in Miami, which was a refugee processing place for Cubans in the past. It's also, by the way, where Marco Rubio announced his 2016 presidential run and you had a Cuban-American administrator of Miami-Dade Community College giving sort of a welcome

to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general. Blanche started the announcement of this and was interrupted many times with lengthy standing ovations from Cuban Americans who were in the room. Marco Rubio released a five-minute video telling Cubans sort of your day is coming. It's a very different kind of indictment. What do you make about all? You never trust people called Todd, for one thing. I have good friends called Todd, who are... What about Todd Rudin? Some of the people I trust more than anyone.

Rubio doing an event at the Freedom Tower there is like, you know, having a Secret Service meeting at Ford's Theater. It just seems like maybe it's just not a great venue for doing that. I hate the Cuban regime and I wish them ill. I don't think this is actually probably the most intelligent way to go about doing it. You know, I admire these Cuban dissidents and the things that they have done to harass and oppose the government there. But when you're flying illegal flights into a country that is an irresponsible dictatorship, it's dangerous and you're apt to get shot in your Cessna, which is what

happened to these guys. And they filed a flight plan that said they were going to the Bahamas, and they end up getting, you know, shot down near Havana, which is in the opposite direction. And they had already been like, you know, buzzing downtown Havana and airplanes and stuff like that and doing various kinds of stunts. And I think it's maybe worth just pointing out because you'll hear this from the Cuban regime and its apologies. that if someone did this to Washington, D.C., we'd chew down that airplane. And we would laugh if you tried to indict someone for murder.

In fact, we might blow up random boats of people full of fishermen out in the Caribbean, and no one gets indicted for murder, but that's a whole different story. I would rather see our campaign against the Cuban government not take on the form of some kind of questionable criminal law proceeding. And the desire to make everything a sort of legal proceeding or some sort of, you know, crypto-quozy legal proceeding

is, I think, it's very very, American thing. We want to treat everything as though it's a matter of litigation or a matter of something to be put to trial. And our dispute with the Cuban government isn't a dispute of that kind. It's a very different kind of dispute. It's a political question. It's about what we think good government looks like and what we think decency looks like. Of course, we're in a great position to be lecturing everyone on good government and decency this leak. So let's go ahead and do that. Yeah, at 94 years old, I suppose we'd go scoop him up and put him on trial somewhere, but I'm not sure I'd vote to convict him. given the specifics of the case.

There's a million other things I would convict him on, and if someone just dragged him out of bed and shot him, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. But if you're going to treat this as an actual, you know, legal criminal proceeding, then it's more complicated. Well, these things are complicated, and we learned this week that the United States

has apparently filed additional charges against Maduro in Venezuela, in part due to concerns that the original case was weak. Jonah, should we really? read this as a sign of things to come. That's certainly how I think the conventional wisdom set in Washington, D.C. is seeing this. Yeah, I mean, this is the most predictable. We saw the body language to tells on this a long time ago.

In fact, one could say that this is just the second shoot-a-drop on the Venezuela operation, at least in Mark Rubio's mind, was that it put the, this cutting off Venezuelan oil is what put to squeeze more than anything else on Cuba. Correct. And that was by design, not like a happy coincidence as far as the administration is concerned. I take Kevin's points sort of where he is on this. My problem with it, where I definitely agree is I find the bullshadiosity of these criminal indictment things as justification for acts of war, which in retrospect, Trump calls wars, right?

And war is how much, Steve, you spent more. time than the rest of us combined in these debates. How much did the right debate this idea pushed by Democrats that we shouldn't think about the war on terror as law enforcement, right? And we shouldn't think about like acts of war as merely criminal acts because the motivations and stuff is different. And if we're kind of flipping that on its head here, I have no love for Maduro. We can go back and check the tapes about what I said about the Maduro stuff. My problem with It was always all that it was so obviously and completely pretextual, right? And they were using this as an excuse to commit an act of war.

And to get around the need of consulting Congress or anything like that, I think the same thing applies here is that they're just replaying the Venezuela model as a sort of legalistic strategy to get the camel's nose under the tent for a regime change thing. And it's so transparently obvious. It's cynical and dishonest. But would I like to see the Cuban regime toppled? Yeah, I'd like to see, but, like, you know, it would be really good. I was talking to Lulu Garcia-Navarro yesterday, who's Cuban and has lots of people in Florida. New York Times. Post a colleague of yours at CNN.

Right. And, you know, we don't see eye to eye on a lot of things, but, you know, one of the points that she makes, she's been to Cuba many times is Cuba is a real hot mess these days. And she's like, I want to know what happens on day two, right? And that's one of the things going to Congress about the Iran War. It's like maybe this administration has a plan for day two. Maybe it had a plan for the Strait of Hormuz. But if you had gone to Congress, Congress would say, hey, what's your plan for the

Strait of Hormuz? And it would focus the mind a little bit to look at it. What is your day two plan for Cuba the same way, right? And I really despise. Again, this is a Burkean point about not being the judge in your own cause. like you're so as Kevin said before you're supposed to have two branches of government to get anything consequential done they're just completely ignoring that on this and again Congress is being supine about it and it's funny I don't mean to keep quoting CNN shows that I was on but on the same

show I was with Patrick McHenry who's former member of Congress I like him a lot and friends with him and he was making a fairly conventional Republican point I don't mean to denigrate it but like this is what Republicans say about Trump it's what Trump says he says he's he's doing, right? He's going around trying to find the most enduring hardest problems and fixing those, right? That's their story they're telling about themselves. And that's why he goes after the Iran nuclear program. That's why he goes after Maduro. That's why he wants to do the Cuba stuff. It fits this narrative about Roe and, you know, a bunch of other things. There are two ways to look at that, right? In some ways, yes, Cuba has been an enduring problem for very long, a naughty, thorny,

difficult problem for us for a very long time. Iran certainly has been. Some problems, the roots go deep and deep over time and they become more difficult. Some problems are more like ripening fruit, right, where they get so ripe that all you got to do is pluck them off of the branch. And Trump's entire political history is, you know, it's like people used to say, only Donald Trump could have stopped Hillary Clinton, right? Only Donald Trump could have gotten to the American voters to turn on Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton was wildly unpopular. People on the right, including yours truly, spent decades loosening that jar of pickles, right? And then he comes in and opens it up and say, only I could have done it.

Only I have the superhuman strength to be able to do this kind of thing, right? Sounds like you in the kitchen with your actual jar of pickles after Jess has opened it, loosened it. You come in and try to play the hero. I don't dispute that. And there's so few opportunities I have with my wife to play the hero. But Cuba is a pushover, right? Cuba, I mean, Rao Castro is 10 years older than Joe Biden, right? And in worse shape, right?

Like, the country is a total basket case. It's very possible instead of, like, this prosperous great thing where all the Cuban emigrants go home. Instead, it becomes Haiti, right? Because it's in that sorry shape. And the idea that, like, Trump is. isn't going to be this great conquering hero for this is what he's going for, but there could be massive unintended consequences yet again in the hemisphere. But at the same time, like, I'm not going to argue for the Cuban regime.

I'm not going to make any of those kinds of arguments. I don't think those arguments can actually be made. I just want to make an argument about what the actual constitutional procedure is supposed to be and make an argument about how since Cuba is not a pressing national security threat, you cannot argue exigent circumstances. You cannot say this is an emergency. They are making that argument. I know.

Well, you cannot make a plausible argument. Correct. You cannot make a non-pretextual, you know, 99 and 44 100th, 100th's bullshitosity kind of nonsense point about this. And so I just, I don't like the being lied to about it. But like if we get memes with Marco Rubio in a Fidel uniform sitting on a cat, finding out that he's going to be the first vice roy of Cuba. Okay. Here we go.

We need to move on because we're running out of time. But I do think there's sort of this sense, I think, from the Trump administration that Venezuela worked. And it's been easy not have these problems. Delioregis is applying United States aid. Well, I should point out, just I meant to say this. I'm sorry. But on the pretextualness of that indictment that we used against Maduro. there were other people in that indictment that we used that are still in power in Venezuela, right?

So it just shows you how it wasn't about law enforcement. No. And by the way, Raul Castro, not in power right now in Cuba. So removing him doesn't change that dynamic. We're going to screw up his weekly dominoes game. But I think to your point, Jonah, I think there's this wishcasting that Venezuela is that that story has been told. that we are now at the end of that story, and it has turned out well for the United States.

I am not at all confident. That is the case. There are, I think, difficult times to come in Venezuela. The people who fought and sacrificed for freedom in Venezuela don't have it. And certainly don't have it the way that they had imagined. They fought for democracy. They don't have that in the way that they had imagined. I don't think that story has been written.

And it's a mistake, I think, to look at the capture of Maduro and the Venezuela model, as we've discussed here before, and think that's the example of sort of how to do this. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at the dispatch.com slash join,

and if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get a month free. And speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away exclusive town halls with the founders and more. Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back.

Let's return to our discussion. We need to get to not worth your time. I do want to ask you all for a very brief recommendation of something that you have read on the dispatch this week that you think our listeners should read. I will start. I have two. I'm going to keep them very brief and not really even describe them. Kevin has a terrific piece about Texas and what's happening there in the Republican Senate primary that I highly recommend.

And there's a second piece from our friend Mike Nelson, keeping our enemies close and our allies guessing, looking at what happened in China with Xi and our allies in Europe, Jonah. For a change of pace, I really liked Mike's piece about the Trump's reverse Midas touch in Texas. but I want to give a shout out to the great Emily Oster who had a really, I think, useful, important piece about maybe we should just let kids sleep a little later before the start of school, and there's a lot of data that suggests that would be really beneficial, and it's worth reading.

Kevin. Jonah, keep the anti-semis out of my tent. I think that's a good one. Mike. I guess we're just going to keep patting the backs of our fellow panelists here. I really enjoyed Jonah's interview with Helen Lewis on The Remnant. it was a great conversation, and it was interesting to hear two people who have different views, kind of find some common ground on those issues involving men and feminism.

She's fun talking to. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. Mike, I will also second the praise of your piece on Trump's reverse Midas touch and what it means for the Republican Party. It's a very useful sort of recollection of these places where Trump has intervened and cost Republicans, caused them problems electorally.

Finally today, and we should probably play a funeral dirge here, very sad news for the Hayes household, and I think for Americans more broadly, was reported this week that Schlitz beer is no longer going to be brewed after 175 years of making some of the very best, very bad beer. And we're not going to spend a ton of time on Schlitz itself.

We've already... Because we've already done that in our personal lives. We have talked about this. I had to sort of collect myself to be able to do the podcast today because of the Paul that has cast over the Hayes household. The truth is I don't drink a lot of beer these days at all. I can't really drink beer anymore. But no, the reason we're not going to spend a lot of time on Schlitz

is because we have already talked about Schlitz. And Pabst did not work with your time like more than a year ago. because I wrote about it for the weekly standard, I wrote about Schlits and Papps and had a very fun time doing it. We'll pop that piece in the show notes. But I'm sad to see Schlitz go. I grew up on Schlitz in so many ways.

But I did want to ask the panel if there was another product that you sort of grew up on that is no longer available to you in the same way that Schlitz will no longer be available to me and the millions, tens of millions of Americans of Americans.

who grew up drinking Schlitz. Mike, do you have a product that you can no longer get, or is just maybe really difficult to get that you used to consume? There was a product that I believe I probably consumed once, maybe twice, but at the grocery store growing up as a kid, the packaging would sort of look out at me and entice me, and I would always beg my mom to get it, and she never would because I don't know,

maybe it was marked up or something. It was a product by planters, the peanut folks, called PB Crisps. And they were essentially these peanut-shaped cookies filled with like a kind of like a peanut butter. Reese's like consistency peanut butter is like a peanut butter cream. And they were the most magical tasting treat. And again, I've only, I only had them like once or twice. You know, it was like somebody, some kid whose mom bought all the cool.

snacks like at their house, like I had some there. But they probably weren't even that good. I don't know. It was just the idea of having them and the denial of them because they were too expensive brand, brand name product. And they disappeared, like almost as soon as they arrived on shelves. And in fact, planters, which of course is still a going concern and they make they make peanuts and mixed nuts and all that has a page on their website. And I'll just read real quickly what it says here. This is on their product, frequently asked questions in big, bold letters. Why can't I find Planners P.B. Crisps anymore? And their responses, Planners P.B. Crisps were discontinued in the 1990s due to low consumer demand. While they developed a loyal fan base over the years,

there are currently no plans to bring them back. We appreciate the enthusiasm and nostalgia surrounding P.B. Crisps and encourage fans to share their feedback with us. Low consumer demand, not among kids of the 1990s. There was high. demand, we just didn't have the purchasing power to make those purchases. Well, and that was part of a trend. I mean, there were other of those kind of snacky type things, little sweet treats that also were no longer available. I remember there were, and I think remain several little Debbie cakes that some of us may have been able to buy in our lunch lines at our local elementary schools or middle schools. There was the brief period of time when

Twinkies went away and then came back quickly. And I think those, I think a lot of people, if Twinkies were no longer available, a lot of people sort of Gen X age would struggle with that. Kevin, do you have a product that you can no longer get? You know, there was briefly a product, I believe it was made by the Coca-Cola company called OK soda. And it was an orange soda. And I don't think it ever actually sort of went into kind of mass distribution, but you

could get it in Austin when I was in college because Austin was one of the text test markets for it. And there was a phone number on the can and you would call it and you would get a recording of like some very Generation X ironic, you know, marketing material. You know, press one to hear about okay soda, press two for three minutes of random bird calls, that sort of thing. I think that actually was one of the options. And it was not bad. I kind of like orange sodas when I was a little kid and let's have no jokes about this next part. but I would go to the barber, and he had the orange crush in the bottles. You know, we'd have to give it back and get like a two-cent deposit back in that sort of thing. I've always sort of liked orange sodas of various kinds, and OK soda was pretty good.

By the way, the last haircut I really ever paid for was from the same guy who gave me my first haircut, that same guy's name was Harold, and he's doing my hair, and he said, you know, we used to have to use the thinning shares on you when you're a little. That's not such a problem anymore, is it? And I said, you used to work for tips, don't you? It's so great that the barber's name is Harold. University of Barbers, Lubbock, Texas. There are other sodas that are no longer available. We were talking a few minutes ago about tab, which I think, Kevin, you said, is technically still available?

I looked it up. It's not 2020. They finally just got to get it. Wow. TAB. Yeah. My mom was a big tab drinker back in the day with some lemon. But do you guys remember jolt?

Oh, yeah. It's sort of like a precursor of the Celsius today. They used to advertise it and say it had all the sugar and twice the caffeine. Yeah. Just totally unapologetic about it. Well, mine, because we're on sodas. Mine is a kind of soda called Ting. And, you know, I didn't drink a lot of soda.

My parents were not big on sodas. They didn't let us have a lot of soda. But every summer for one week, and I think I may have mentioned this. here before. When we went to our family church camp up in Neshkoro, the middle of Wisconsin, there was a local grocery store that served this stuff called Ting, and it had orange soda, Kevin, it had lime soda, it had black cherry soda. And these were spectacular sodas. Now, they may have been especially good to me because I wasn't really able to have soda for the rest of the year, so anything tasted that good, but I remember them as about the best kind of sodas.

And they were little, I think, you know, eight or ten-ounce bottles. We put them. in the fridge in our little cabins, and, you know, we'd probably have five or ten of them a day because they were so good, but no longer available, I believe. Did you all ever have a Shasta? Shasta. Shasta, I remember Chasta. Shasta. Yeah. Does Shasta still? There was like 100 flavors, and it was, I remember it was 19 cents a can when I was little, because it was like some like off-brand sort of thing at Albertsons. Yeah, sure. It was one of the things you could buy if you were, like,

you know, 10 years old and you had two dimes. Yeah. Yeah. Steve, if you got a gym, you can get a Ray and Ting, which is a rum and ting. And it's like a very popular cocktail there. Is it actually Ting soda? Yes, Ting soda and Ray and Nephew Rum, which is a Jamaican rum maker, Ray and Ting. Really? Yep. All right.

Well, maybe that's the old school Ting. I should go to Jamaica. Jonah, do you have one? Yeah, so I actually was looking for lists of things to remind myself about stuff. And part of the problem is I was never a huge candy guy. So, like, a lot of the things that are sort of forgotten that we lost. from the Gen Xers, I didn't really like very much anyway. But I will say what I do miss are a lot of products, not necessarily like sodas or

dessert kind of things. I am not saying that we shouldn't think about safety, but I think we went too far. Like, I miss candy cigarettes just because I thought it was awesome to have a guy around a pack as smokes, you know. But in terms of like physical toys and products that I really miss, realistic Capcom. Oh, yeah. You know, ones that actually look like real guns that you would load with either the plastic ring or the paper strips. The paper strips, yeah, sure.

Those are just, like, gone. Yeah. Metal lunchboxes are pretty much gone. Again, I never really had one. I made I had one or two, but, like, I think they're now just sort of collectibles and I kind of miss them. Another one, which I get, I am not saying we were a better country when these were legal, but I do miss lawn darts. I knew you were going to say long darts. I knew it.

They were completely banned. I missed those like 13 cassettes for a penny Columbia record deal things that, you know, you'd sign up and you get like... Those are terrible. And then they would haunt you for the rest of your life as you had to, like, buy more. You couldn't get off of the list. And then they would send collection agencies after you because you wanted, you know, the latest Asia album or something.

Not that I know personally. Nothing did more damage to the early credit ratings of white. affluent suburbanite kids those record clubs and then finally I think it was really cool that for a long time you could get chemistry sets

that you could do real damage to yourself or others with I had a good one and now they've been completely safe to fight and I get it better smart I don't want people making sulfuric acid and burning their faces off

but at the same time it was kind of cool I mean I can't imagine any kid wanting to do chemistry if you had to do chemistry in school. That was plenty of chemistry for me. I did not want any more chemistry for any reason. Jonah misses happy fun ball, too. Happy fun ball.

Remember spirographs? I love those. Oh, I love spirographs, yes. Spirographs, yeah. Well, that was a nice stroll down memory lane. Thank you all for joining. We needed something a little lighter at the end of this long discussion about the slush fund.

Thanks for joining us, and we will see you next time. Finally, if you like what we're doing, here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And as always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones for people who have never had a jolt soda. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.