The Ricochet Podcast - Broken Justice

Episode Date: June 7, 2024

Business may be booming these days for the great Andy McCarthy, but the judicial corruption and cockamamie prosecutions are all a bit wearying. Nonetheless, he has time to join his Ricochet Podcast buddies to discuss the lawfare against the former president, the ever-waning confidence in an impartial justice system, and the political consequences that will result.James, Rob, and Charlie Cooke also argue about the slump of the entertainment industry.

They ask me every year to go out and remind them that it's okay for different parts of the country to be different. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman. I was going to put him in a... It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Charles C.W. Cook sitting in for Peter Robinson. I'm James Lylex. Today we talk to our old friend Andy McCarthy about, you know what, the law.

So let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast number 695. I'm James Lylex in a beautiful, sunny summer day in Minneapolis. Rob Long is in New York, and we're joined by Charles C.W. Cook in Florida. God's country. The place where freedom still claims high every day. Well, so we're here, so we understand.

Charles, welcome. Is there some recent development of DeSantis versus Disney? Because I'm absolutely fascinated in the way that Disney has morphed its public image, at least amongst the people who you'd think would be most inclined to love it because it's, you know, it's Americana, it's the rest of it. But now it's just sort of one of those things that I hear Disney and I actually recoil a little because I don't know what they've done next. How long have you got? Well, we have about six hours here before my meter runs out,

so I'll just lean back and let you go. Well, this is an interesting topic, and I have a much more nuanced view of it than I'm accused of having, in that I did not like what was clearly a retaliatory move by DeSantis, and was sold as a retaliatory move unless it was being defended. But I also thought that DeSantis was going to win, which he has. I thought he was going to win which he has i thought he was going to win a pr battle which he has i thought he was going to win the election which he did and i thought he was going to beat disney which has come to fruition in concert with that disney's decisions as a

company in recent years have been utterly baffling and it's not just some of the more obvious woke stuff it's the total lack of creativity in their movies and i am a big disney fan i grew up in the golden age of disney i live two hours from disney world and we take the kids there a lot and that's the one part of their offering that is still magnificent people like to pretend it's gone downhill hasn't really but we were this sort of family that would say if there's a new disney movie we'll take the kids you wouldn't even watch the trailer you wouldn't read reviews you would just go to it and we've stopped doing it because they're just producing garbage so yeah it's an odd thing that's happened where they have immolated creatively they have taken on the governor of florida on an issue that they were likely to lose i mean desantis was right on the merits the the

so-called don't say gay bill is a good law it's not about that it doesn't prevent people from saying gay it's not how it's been described well you've just said it and you're in florida so no one is we don't hear the jack boots at your door yet no um but and they decided to take him on i thought and i continue to believe that the move was targeted and retaliatory and i just don't want governments to do that i don't think that it is illegal in this case because it was a special dispensation but i don't like it and i wrote that and I continue to believe that but look he won this he was always going to win this because Disney got special treatment they took him on on an issue where he was right politically and popular politically and the behavior that they then

engaged in which was they tried to you know sneak in all these bizarre provisions in the law without Florida seeing it and it was just never going to work so i i'm i'm nuanced i'm i'm i think desantis's behavior was retaliated in a way i don't like but i think disney's conduct has just been inexplicable rob you're in the entertainment industry um before we get to the yes issues of the day um are we right charles and i in talking about the diminution of disney status as a cultural force or is this just echo chamber bubble think nonsense and they're really actually incredibly powerful still are driving the culture well no i mean i don't think that's true here's my beef with conservatives they they tend to reason from a bad uh quarter say, see, it's all dying.

You're going to pay. You're going to go down. I mean, when the Tucker Carlson fans found that Tucker had been canceled, they were convinced that Fox News would collapse. And, of course, it didn't. Disney actually had a pretty good quarter this year, I mean, compared to its competitors in the entertainment business. The stupid fight they got into with the governor of Florida about who was going to run the county, that they kind of had this strange medieval kind of feudal control over, was, you know, they call it an own goal.

It's the dumbest thing ever, right? I mean, they should have been tiptoeing around every Florida state bureaucrat and elected official for the past 50 years because, you know, when anybody opened up the books there, they thought, wait a minute, is there another part of America where a company that isn't even resident there

controls so much? And um and you know this stuff hadn't happened since uh well actually since florida in the 20s probably since tampa um so uh those are two different things the creative trough yeah probably but i think um i think that happens at disney all the time cycles and um that that is the truth for any creative enterprise there is absolutely no way to go from strength to strength to strength in a creative enterprise without running out of gas well before we move to the important issues of the day i will disagree with you on that one because i think if it was just disney going through some troughs yes you have those periods where your old animators go out the new batch

hasn't got their feet yet and you have a couple of bad products. But we have a very large organization here that consists of Disney, Disney Animation, Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm. And in every single one of these that they've gathered into their arms, they have ruined. They've ruined them and the people who just used to lap up their products and love them well you can't you can't you no no that's wrong that's incorrect you can't say that somehow bob eiger and bob chapik decided to ruin marvel marvel was a basically independently run company creatively for you marvel i'm not arguing that marvel is garbage but of course it is now but it might come back it's same thing with disney look everybody hated disney in the 70s disney was

almost sold for like a hundred dollars in the 70s and it came back creatively but the biggest mistake they made in pixar was they fired um uh elastor because he he hugged too many people but um and they're going to pay the price for that but creative enterprises are cyclical and if you if you if you create a kind of a straw man corporate argument i think you're just you're you're just not accurately describing the situation. Well, I may be inaccurately describing what is a coincidence that the nadir of these cycles all appear in the time that they've been under Disney. Well, they got bigger. But is it anything worse than Jar Jar Binks?

Disney had nothing to do with Jar Jar Binks. But, Rob, I think the argument is slightly different than that. And I obviously defer to your greater knowledge. But I don't think the argument is slightly different than that and i obviously defer to your greater knowledge but i don't think the argument is that bob eiger and bob chapert came in and from the top down they said we are now woke and all of our properties will be ruined i think that the argument is that disney like a lot of institutions at the moment has proven itself incapable of getting out of the pit that it's dug because it has far too many people working at it who have bizarre views about the world that do not map properly onto the consumer base and like at say the new york times where all of the older editors who are more small

liberal in their thinking are terrified of all of the 20 and 30 year olds on slack so in the creative departments of the various companies that make up the disney corporation you have people who have an agenda that is not the agenda that disney had in the 1990s which was make great movies and they have not yet proven capable of getting out of that in in you know and in that way it's it's analogous to some of these investment companies that are actually making less money and making bad decisions because for a while they were seduced by this esg stuff but they would say well that coal mine is actually very profitable that gun company is very profitable but we will not invest in them because we think

that it's morally wrong that's starting to turn turn around, but until it does, you end up losing. Right. I just want to say this because I'm responding to Rob. Was Jar Jar Binks great? No, it wasn't. Were the prequels that fantastic? No. Lucasfilms of course made mistakes. What I'm talking about is this explosion of slop

that's come out of the Star Wars world in the last couple of years or so, where it's one show after the other. hit and miss stuff the new acolyte show was absolutely dreadful and saturated with identity politics but if you liked but did you like mandalorian yeah i like some of mandalorian okay so look i'm just telling you that you're you are reasoning making a giant which i probably agree with by the way but but based on the current creative drought that every studio is feeling, including Warner Brothers. And here's what I would argue. The employee base of the Disney Corporation is no more woke now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Trust me, I was there.

The difference is it's huge now. All of these companies are too big. You cannot manage nimbly a creative enterprise when it's this large. You end up just being an HR company. And that is ultimately where Disney failed because they, and to its credit, Netflix did not, because they found themselves having to do all sorts of corporate things, not for their customer, but for for their employees because they have tens of thousands of them now they just fired about 8 000 of them so there's a smaller company now and all of these companies like what's going to happen to paramount is going to happen at disney uh paramount's about to be busted up disney's not going to be busted up by a by a purchaser but it's going to start shedding assets and when it does

magically because these are how this is how this stuff works the creative will get better and it but it's going to start shedding assets. And when it does magically, because these are how this is how this stuff works, the creative will get better. And it won't be because they got more conservative. It just because they started thinking about the customer more, which happens when you have fewer employees to worry about. But I got, I got news for you.

Everybody in the entertainment industry, all the creatives are weirdos and they are all weirdo lefty kind of crazies. And that is what you want when you have a creative company you just don't want them to be in charge of no no no no no no you don't no you don't no you don't you don't you don't necessarily need and require weird lefto crazies in your artistic department uh disney was able to put together a uh you know a zeitgeist in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s, which reflected the America

of the times. It was not the product of people who were quasi-Marxist, urging and dreaming of the overflow of America. But they were libertines at the time, even then. But there were stories of what those animators would get up to at night. My office was in the old animation building. Trust me, there were old people there who could tell you stories that would curl your hair. But that's fine. I don't doubt doubt that but they didn't put it into the work

it was not something that it was not something that was necessarily part of the culture in the i mean yes you had to hide it that was the whole thing about the time is that you had to hide your liberty and repressive things and have your firehouse five gigs where everybody did the square dance and then went off the corner and you know did benzedrine and screwed i get that but that doesn't manifest itself in the work but so i have i have a question about this role because i find the argument that you just made pretty persuasive but the one thing that i wonder is this i'm not and i'll be very clear about this saying disney needs to be more conservative so if the argument that we're supposedly making here is Disney is too left-wing, that's not what I'm saying.

The stultifying HR-style corporate environment that you just described is bad for weirdos on the left, too. Agreed. The sort of creative people who end up creating the Ford Motor Company or Tesla and SpaceX or the early Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons and all of that, they might be left-wing, they disproportionately are. But the thing that defines them is that they're weird. And so their politics are all over the place and their personal habits are all over the place. And one of the things that worries me about our cultural moment is that those people irrespective of whether they're left or right wing are sort of

unwelcome i mean that that's the hr is in the modern era designed to destroy and remove those people and i and perhaps i'm wrong but i have a suspicion that there are far too many people at disney who are hr compliant and therefore a lot less creative than they need to be absolutely true 100 true i would say that uh the hrification of the the national business just whatever name anything has been a destructive force but especially the creative business and i would say this even and i know i mean i would get in massive trouble if um if anybody who's liberal ever listened to this um in show business which of course they would never do because they might encounter different ideas um there is almost no way i would say there's no way to run a vibrant successful creative innovative enterprise

in a an hr compliant slash woke slash new age employment practice way exactly john lassiter was a big lefty is a big lefty kind of a crackpot lefty if i recall correctly made great great movies some of the best movies really ever made came from pixar i really do believe that um the toy story the toy story trilogy is actually a masterpiece an american masterpiece of of of everything and the first i mean everybody says the first 11 minutes of up are more powerful than half the movies made that year um so he he's responsible a lot of great things but he's nuts and his politics wouldn't fit on this podcast by any means um but i don't know how you run a company that's supposed to be creative and um enforce these things and i think people are discovering that now. I hope they're discovering

that now. Well, ideological and worldview conformity leads to a decreased metabolic rate and the creativity of any organization because there's no friction and there's no effort. There's no work. Everybody knows what everybody believes, so the metabolism doesn't have to spin up and consume. And speaking of that, your own personal metabolism is something you ought to be thinking about. I think about my metabolism a lot, frankly. I've always had a pretty good one. Frankly, you know, like a hummingbird. But as you age,

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to get $100 off your Lumen. That's L-U-M-E-N dot M-E and use the code Ricochet at your checkout for $100 off. We thank Lumen for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast our old friend Andy McCarthy. Can't have him on here enough.

Senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor there as well as with Fox News. What's so funny? We just can't. I mean, you know, in an ideal world, we'd never have to have Andy because there wouldn't be weird trials that make us upset or questions of Islamic terrorism that need your expertise from the days. But here we are. Here we are again. All right. So you wrote a piece earlier this week. It's the charge, not the charges. And you said a couple of things. One, the New York jury ultimately found Trump guilty for stealing the 2016 election. I guess he did that with the 2017 actions. And and two you predict that they're likely to give them time in the gray bar hotel because of the severity of what they

erroneously you say found him guilty for all right explain you think he's going to jail no i think he's going to be sentenced to jail i don't think he's going to jail but i but i do think james that the fact uh if it is a fact uh that he won't be put in custody right away increases judge merchant's incentive to impose a prison term because it's how is it it's no loss to him he's not actually going to interfere anymore than he already has in the election, because I think Trump will stay on his present release conditions pending appeal, which will take probably close to a year to play out. as a hero for all the people who he seems to want to please by imposing a prison sentence. It's not like he's going to, it's not like the result of it is that, you know, someone's going to slap cuffs on Trump and he'll be led away to Attica or Rikers. Andy, first of all, congratulations. Have you ever had this much juicy material in your entire career as a writer, a journalist?

Have you ever really, I mean, wake up every day. You must wake up every day and just think, oh, my God, I just got to dig in. This is going to be great. I'm actually a little weary at this point. You know, look, I thought I wrote a book about Russiagate when I had more energy because that was kind of an embarrassment of riches, too. And it let me do what I used to like to do as a prosecutor, which was kind of build the case and try to figure out sort of, I mean, your biggest, everybody has to figure out what they're good at um and what i thought i did well as a prosecutor was take stuff that was sometimes unwieldy and complicated and try to boil it down to something that you could explain to 12 people in a way they could hang their right uh hat on so i enjoyed

doing that and um but there is you know i I was laughing when James introduced me because even my mom recognizes that if I'm getting a lot of airtime, that means it's really bad for the country. You know, and that you're a reverse indicator. I have a reverse indicator. That's precisely right. So that, you know, I think that, look, it should weigh on all of us what's happening here, because, and I must say, it was poignant at the end of the trial last week, because I got to spend time with a lot of people who had similar experience to me, including people who had grown up in the justice system years ago. And I think we all had a kind of a like, they know not what they do kind of feeling about it, which has nothing to do with Trump. It's just I think people don't appreciate how

much the loss of this system as what it was is going to cost the society. And we're really only in the early rounds of it. So yes, I get up every day and think, you know, there's interesting, challenging, juicy legal issues to deal with, but I'm also chagrined by what it all means and the way it's all being applied. So I got a couple of questions and then a thought experiment. And so if anybody wants to jump in

before my thought experiment, feel free. before my quick question is how much trouble is merchant going to be during the appeals process for his jury instructions well i mean it's a very political system i mean politics is kind of baked in the cake of the system i come from an appointed system you know the federal system all of the judges are appointed all the u. I come from an appointed system. You know, the federal system, all of the judges are appointed, all of the U.S. attorneys are appointed. And at least in theory, they have to go through a Senate vetting process where they have to at least pay lip service to the idea that you're not going to use your authority against your political enemies or politicize it in any way. And they may not be honest about it, but the fact that they have to take that position at least says something.

Whereas New York is an elective system, even at the judicial level, most of the trial judges are elected. And I don't think, you know, this is, this, Rob, is much more of a cultural issue, I think, than a legal issue. But when I was a young prosecutor, and Bob Morgenthau was the elected district attorney of Manhattan for like quarter of a century, in those days, if you took the position that elect me as the state prosecutor, and I will use the power of the office against our political enemies, that would have been seen as disqualifying. Now they take that position and they win in a

landslide, which to me is not a legal problem. That's more of a cultural thing, right? So this is a long-winded way of getting around to your question. But the thing is, I don't think Merchan will be in trouble with the appellate court, like in terms of his career. Will he get reversed? You know, I think it's judges, the judging in the trial level of the New York courts can be appallingly bad, and it's not unusual for those guys to get reversed. In fact, I think Judge Engeron has already been reversed a few times in the civil fraud case. So I expect he'll eventually be reversed. But I think career-wise, it's not going to hurt him all that much. In fact, when I was a kid, they had a judge in the Bronx whose name was Bruce Wright. And in the New York Post, he would be featured on the front page occasionally

as Turn-Em-Loose Bruce. He was like the only judge that anybody knew the name of in New York, but he got elected every time he was up because people knew his name. So I don't know how much it's going to hurt him. how irritated angry or indifferent do you think jack smith and even fannie willis are right now they there are pending cases against trump and i know that they should be all be looked at separately but you know in my i mean i a child, but I, they all kind of the same thing in my head. And I can't believe that I'm that different from most Americans and think, you know, it really made me think about it. I think actually the Georgia stuff does, I am actually concerned as an American citizen about a president who lost an election, who was working the levers to try to stay in power right i am actually concerned in general about the sloppiness that we treat and the incredible laxity we treat foreign uh former presidents with whether they're stealing documents right biden or trump so these are issues i think need to be adjudicated i don't think they're gonna be because i think this stupid at manhattan da messed it up for these other two guys and um i may be

wrong what do you think i think uh smith and willis have themselves to blame as much as they can blame now let's remember in terms of whatever indictment in the uh colloquial sense that you want to lay on Alvin Bragg, who I am no fan of, he was willing to step aside for the federal authorities. The only reason that that case, which was originally scheduled for March 25th, Bragg said that he would step aside to let Smith go if Smith was going to go on March 4th, which is what they were hoping in Washington. And the only reason that the Bragg case got tried first is because the Smith case got derailed. And I think Smith was foolish if he thought that he was going to be able to push a case against the former president who has constitutional status and rights and privileges, if he thought he was just going to be able to bang that thing to trial and it was not going the need to lard 36 classified information counts in an indictment that already had eight obstruction counts.

Because the eight obstruction counts give him 50 years or more of prison exposure. So it's not like they're not representative of the seriousness of the offense. But the good thing about them is it's a very easy case for most people. Most people can understand that anybody who lied to a grand jury would be prosecuted. And this is the most important thing. You wouldn't have to have all this litigation under the Classified Information Procedures Act, which is very complicated, because in the obstruction case, the only issue is, do the documents bear physical classification markings, not what they substantially say. Whereas, if you prosecute them for classified information violations, then the defendant gets to play the game that everybody plays in classified information

litigation, where they come in and say, well, I can't get a fair trial unless I can put this classified information in that's helpful to me, and then you have to litigate all that stuff prior to trial. So I think if he had done that case, and I think Bill Barr has said this too, and I think he's right about this, if he had done just like a kind of a fast and nasty obstruction obstruction case rather than this elaborate classified information thing he could have gotten a trial already and the other thing is well it's a i think it's a pretty slam dunk case they got a they got a grand jury subpoena they represented that they were turning over all the documents and they didn't you know that's all she wrote right um on the doc on the january 6th case i still think i'm not in the uh large category of people who think that there's no way that case gets to trial now

prior to the election because it seemed to me watching the oral argument that trump's lawyers gave a lot of ground in terms of stuff that's charged in the indictment that can't conceivably be covered by immunity. And if Smith is willing to do something he has up till now shown no inclination to do, which is to if the Supreme Court sends the case back with some guidelines saying, here's how you figure out what's immune and what's not. If if Smith goes to Judge Chuck, it says, you know what, forget that. We're willing to go to trial just on the stuff that they said was not covered by immunity, and I'll leave the rest of my case on the cutting room floor. I think you could get to trial, because you'd be talking about the false electors scheme and the i think the false statement that they made or allegedly made in the uh in the atlanta case you know they they filed something in court that had false information in it that they have texts that show they know it was false information about voting data um you know

for smith that's a home game you know in washington Judge Chuck in, even if it's on a slimmed down case. And he only wants to get the guy convicted, right? I mean, it shouldn't matter to him that, you know, whether he gets to present his whole war and peace of the case, or if he just gets to, you know, have two or three felonies that he can, even if it's slimmed down, he can get to trial and get Trump convicted on. That's exactly what he's looking to do. So I'm not satisfied that that won't happen. As for the Fannie thing, that was just a foolishly charged case. That's not a RICO. It's moronic.

There was significant misbehavior there. But to do it as a RICO, but it wasn't a RICO, and then have the clown show down there with the affair with the other prosecutor and end up in the court of appeals, which is where they are now, which means the trial court can't act on it. I don't see how that case can get to trial, but I still think Smith could. So I know you guys want to jump in. So it's not really on the case that Trump is so smart.

It's just that everyone else is so dumb. Well, you know, there's, there's there's no heroes here and it's not a it's not a it's not a mensa meeting on on either side okay there you go there you go decline of empire so let's assume that there are no other trials before Donald Trump would be sworn in as president. If he wins the election in November and becomes president for a second time on January 20th of next year, can he essentially delay, at least until the end of his presidency,

all the prosecutions? Because two of them are federal, and he would be the head of the federal executive branch, and one of them is state, but there have become real problems about the prospect of certainly punishing a president. I was told by Dan Mclaughlin that in the early republic north carolina imprisoned a supreme court justice on a state charge i think it was 1791 but that was

the last time that happened that's really not any precedent so is it the case as many people say that if trump does win and of course if the Bragg debacle helps him, this will be deeply ironic, that Trump gets away with it. Charlie, I would just say that during, as I understand it, during the War of 1812, when Jackson had martial law in, I think it was New Orleans, a judge tried to issue a writ of habeas corpus to him, and Jackson had four soldiers march the judge out of the city's limits. So we do have this wonderful tradition. For Andrew Jackson. But, you know, look, I think the other thing that we have to factor into this, I think on the state stuff, it's easy because what the Trump

Justice Department would do would be go into the courts of New York, probably the federal courts, and try to make an argument that based on the supremacy clause, the execution of his sentence has to be postponed until after his term. And I think he'd have a good chance of winning on that. The federal stuff is the wild card because first of all, I think in the next January 6th, if we assume that Trump wins, the Supreme Court case on the insurrection clause only said that the states can't invoke. It didn't say Congress can't. So you're going to get Democrats in Congress who are going to try to not seek Trump on January 6th because he's an insurrectionist to start with. And then assuming you get by that,

as I understand the way the map works, the Democrats have a very good chance of taking back the House. And no matter what happens in the Senate, it'll be close. So if Trump dismisses the cases against himself or orders the Justice Department to dismiss the cases, I think the House would impeach him the first week over doing that. And there might not be the votes to remove him. On the other hand, don't think that this is not crossing Trump's mind as he thinks about who to pick as vice president, because I think he worries that if he picked somebody that we all liked as vice president, the Senate might have less enthusiasm for defending him when he gets impeached. There'd be at least one of the four people on the national ballot would be somebody that

the majority of Americans could live with. All right, that'd be good. But so, and the other wild card here is, and I wonder what you guys think of this, it seems to me that Democrats, especially in the Senate Judiciary Committee, would make it a condition of confirming a Trump attorney general, or at least try to, that he not or she not dismiss the indictments against him. And I don't know how that'd play out. I mean, Trump could still order them to be dismissed, but he

might have to do it himself. I don't know even the mechanics of how you would do that. He would try, I think, right after he got elected and right after he took office to have the Justice Department fire Jack Smith and dismiss the cases. But I don't know how easy that's going to be between the Democratic agitation in the House, the difficulty of getting an Attorney General confirmed. And the other thing I think we should bear in mind is the flynn precedent remember uh the justice department tried to dismiss the case against general flynn and judge sullivan wouldn't do it now i think judge sullivan was totally lawless but he managed to get away with what

he was doing this should be by the way this is a unilateral executive branch call whether to whether to go ahead with the prosecution or not right but the way the statute's written the court can't interfere with it judge sullivan certainly did that in the flynn case he got away with it because trump was up against the time for leaving office so he basically had to the only way he could guarantee that flynn wouldn't get prosecuted was to pardon him so in the game of chicken in the end, he pardoned him. But I could easily see Judge Chutkin doing what Judge Sullivan did and say, you know, I'm not dismissing the indictment. You know, you haven't shown good cause to dismiss it. And the Trump Justice Department would go in and say, that's not your call.

That's not our call. You can't force us to dismiss a case. But that ended up in a lot the country sitting down, our leaders, our elected leaders, sitting down to discuss the nation's problems of debt, of military reinforcement, of border security, instead of doing that, the Democrats might actually engage in a series of constitutional crises and laws and impeachments and the rest of it to get rid of Donald Trump. Is that what we're looking at i mean i'm stunned that they would do that um but perhaps they're doing that so that we can clear trump from the table and forge a new america with president tom cotton yeah um or are you saying that is that that they're

the number of arrows they have in their quiver are going to be infinite and going to be drawn every single day the moment trump is back in office. Yeah, I mean, you guys are as good or better than I am of reading this stuff. I just think the Democrats are so in the thrall of this fringy base, which punches way, way above its weight. I think most people in the country are stunned at how much influence these clowns have. But, you know know they say jump and these guys say how high i haven't seen any of and the thing that animates them the most is trump so i don't i don't see that going away anytime so andy um i'm gonna ask you some political stuff

put on your you know political hat looks like um trends and polls and certainly swing states like virginia seem like um they're trending towards trump so you're you're in the biden white house and um you know the 25 or 30 minutes where he's you know fully there why wouldn't he just figure out a way to pardon trump say look people are going to have their chance to speak in november let's let it let's let them decide let's just end all this nonsense now and have an actual campaign and then cross his fingers and hope that his son hunter actually does time. Because then he can say, all you guys complaining about how the system's rigged, my son is in prison. My opponent is here on the stage with me.

I mean, am I just... I mean, would I be fired? I think I'd be fired if I gave that advice to the sitting president right now, political advice. But would it work? Well, yeah, I would already have been fired because i i made exactly this suggestion including specifically i think it would serve biden well to pardon trump at least on the classified information counts in florida because you know

if the if the difference between the two cases is one guy obstructed right the other guy didn't then try him for obstruction you know but i don't think i think for the same reason that we just discussed um that is a non-starter in democratic politics i just don't think they can do it and the other thing is i think i think charlie and i are in the same place on this in terms of the assessment of the election i've always been i'm not saying charlie's been a trump can't win guy i i've been a trump can't win guy from the start charlie he may give him like a little bit more chance of winning than i do but um i don't i wouldn't i think i was wrong i i mean like all of us who

said that with such certainty that everybody going forward should know that we thought that and that we're probably wrong. I still think that. So I think phase two has started. And what I always saw, and I've been saying this for a couple of years now, so this is not like new, but I've always thought that it was going to be in their interest to make him look like a winner for a certain period of time, which is what helped him get the nomination. The fact of the charges galvanized the base. And part of that is he has to look like a winner. So he was always going to enjoy some good polling. But there was a certain point in time when the switch was going to be thrown. These cases were going to come up in court. There were going to

be convictions. And there's going to be goo gobs of political money behind messaging that not only focuses on the stuff that he's on trial for and again and again and again on the January 6th stuff, which actually does, no matter what the MAGA people think, the January 6th stuff is very upsetting to people in the country and our friend jim garrity has pointed out a number of times trump says some crazy ass stuff on on that uh social that the country hasn't heard yet but i mean you could you know rob the ads write themselves right about what you know the crazy stuff that this guy is yeah but i guess i guess here's my here's my um my calculation is that um usually in a traditional campaign at this point is that 11 12 13 15 undecided in the middle and they just haven't made up their mind and there we call them low information voters we either we either insult them or sometimes we tell them say the low information they're just out of it or we say no these are great good amer, and they're just not paying attention to this nonsense circus until after Labor Day.

All that stuff has been true in the past. But it feels to me that the 14, 15% in the middle, maybe it's more now, actually probably closer to 20, hate both of these guys with an incandescent biblical rage. And so the, the election is really going to be about giving you one extra reason to maybe told your nose and vote for the guy that you hate a little less. Um, and to me, it feels like I, I mean, I'm just,

maybe I'm just, I'm using this as your mind, not my therapist, but I feel like Trump has been mistreated by a system, and it's not okay for me. And it's more not okay for me than all the other horrible, impotent, irrelevant, mentally, emotionally unfit things there are about Trump. And I don't think that I'm alone. How much of that, Rob, though is because the brad case went first would you have felt different maybe if the florida yeah but on the politics of it andy that's an interesting irony because as you've pointed out

the fact that this case went first does taint the others and in my view does mean that if trump were to win and then to shut down the two federal cases he would probably get away with it politically now constitutionally in my estimation he absolutely should so-called get away with it because he's head of the executive branch and if the president can't decide what the executive branch does then we don't have a democratically elected president the idea that the department of justice and the fbi and so on are these free floating fourth branches of government is absurd but politically there, there'd be a cost. And the ultimate cost of that would be, as you say, that he were impeached. But if I were guessing, and I'm of the view, as you said, that Trump can't win. So I'm not downplaying the damage that this stuff

does to him. But if I were guessing, given that the process of prosecuting Donald Trump has now been tainted in the way that it has by Alvin Bragg, I could absolutely see a scenario in which Trump wins, comes in and then says, well, obviously I'm shutting down Joe Biden's investigations into me. I'm shutting down the one where I am accused of hoarding classified documents because he did it and so did Hillary. That would be his argument. It's not entirely true. There's an obstruction side of it, but that would be his argument.

Most people don't know that. And I'm shutting down the January 6th stuff because the Democrats also have spent a lot of time denying elections, including the 2016 election. And I was targeted for Russiagate and all of that. Now, I'm not saying that would be honest. I'm not saying that the Brad case and these cases are equivalent. I don't think they are. But I actually suspect that if he'd won, he might get away with that. Yeah, no, I think that's right. And the other thing that I think, just to add on to that, that I think if I was wrong about something in assessing this whole thing, the most wrong I've been has been about how terrible Biden is.

I mean, I just think you can't like you watch the clips of what of his performance in France yesterday. And it seems like I certainly didn't anticipate I anticipated that he would be a terrible president and have terrible policies that would hurt the country. But you can't help but notice, no matter what you think of Trump, that he's operating in terms of functionality at a much higher level than Biden is. And that's on display every day. I don't know what the effect of that is going to be on people. Raw animal spirits, yes compared to and maybe crazy and wild and saying strange things but compared to biden we have a day where we try to figure out whether or not he was trying to sit down or whether actually he was voiding his bowel and that's a completely reasonable thing to perhaps wonder but you know you're absolutely right be fair i have

that problem too no i don't what you're saying is correct and what you're absolutely right. To be fair, I have that problem, too. No, I don't. What John is saying is correct. And what you're saying is correct about people hating January 6th. I hated January 6th. I wanted everybody who went in there and did something on a desk or stole something or walked around, you know, to face the logical consequence, the legal consequences of what they did. But on the other hand, what you have is a government that seems to be intent on taking this grandma here, walk through there, charging her with parading and putting her in the can. And at the same time, these are the intangibles. At the same time, the government, and again, I'm talking about different branches, localities, whatever, will take somebody who blocks an abortion clinic and put them in jail for two years. But the people who block the streets or the highways protesting oil or Palestine or this or that or crashing into a building and occupying it get nothing, nothing whatsoever.

Now, it's more complex than that, but that's the feeling that people take away from this. Just as we're told every single day that inflation is not a problem, groceries actually aren't more expensive, the economy is doing great, you're not paying more when people know and feel that that's just simply not the case. So when you sense these two tiers of what we're being told for our own good, which goes against the evidence of our lying eyes, that's where the particulars don't matter. People don't want to be, people even forget what Trump did in the last year of COVID completely, because this set of stuff we got now isn't working and it's lying to us. This seemingly more compass mentis guy with more energy is probably on our side and says the right things about this, that, and the other. And, you know, if you want to drill down to what people feel about particular issues and say, yeah, but I think at the end it comes down to that same sort

of vague, I'm throwing my lot in with this guy because he's not that guy and there's something we can get out of this i mean it's same thing we engage in every four years i suppose but that's that's my take and i'm sticking to it yeah look i i think it's hard for us to um get in the shoes of the of the voter that we're talking about because we're immersed in this stuff all the time, and we're trying to gauge what's the likely behavior of people who tune into politics shortly before elections, if at all. But I guess in the end, it's going to be what animates them most. And Trump's best shot is that the couple of years right before COVID, when the economy was doing much better, and when people's day-to-day lives and budgets went much further, given what they were taking home, that period of time is not ancient history.

It's fresh enough that people remember it. And I guess the question is, is there something about Trump, who is the most recognizable person in the world and whose people's attitudes about him that's so detestable that it outweighs the the economic factor for those people who really don't tune in until prior to the election i don't know you know um part of the by part of my problem with both these guys is they seem really small they seem much smaller than the job. And the world seems much more big and complicated than either of these two men can wrap around their head for whatever reason.

One is addled and the other is preoccupied with his own weird neuroses. Have we ever been in this position? I mean, in your life, have we ever been in this position i mean in your life have we ever been in a position where we're that we're i mean i know people have always said listen i would vote for a you know a rock over the other guy but have we ever really been in a position where there's that much consensus among the voter it seems like polls definitely say that um and that little consensus in our national sort of media organs i mean we all know who everybody in fox news is going to vote for we all know everybody msnbc is going to vote for we all know who everybody in the new york times is going to vote for but there are a bunch of people in in in

pennsylvania and wisconsin and georgia and virginia and arizona and nevada uh who hate both these guys well this seems almost worse if you want some numbers i have some numbers yeah so this is the first time in the history of polling that both candidates have been disliked by the public that both candidates have elicited the response i wish that guy weren't running that's one number second number 78 to 85 percent of americans think joe biden's too old to be president so for reference rob the approval rating of social security the most popular program in america is 76 percent so the contention third rail of american politics by the way right so the contention that joe biden is too old to be president is agreed upon

by more people than favor Social Security. If you go back in time, the last presidential candidate who even registered on the scale in that way was Bob Dole in 1996. And the number of Americans who thought he was too old to be president was 25%. Right. Before that, the last time anyone worried about it was franklin roosevelt 1944 now this is a bit difficult to pause because we didn't have polling in quite the same way also the press covered up a lot of it and we're in the middle of world war ii and so people were reluctant to say it out loud but there was it seems some worry about his being too old although

not enough to kick him out of the white house right is extraordinary and then with trump you've got all the new bits i mean he is a convicted felon i think he was railroaded in that case but he is one that's never happened before but trump is in an unusual position in that he's actually now fondly remembered by about 55 56 percent of the country they like it they don't like him but they liked it when he was president they want to go back yeah well they think that america and i'll say the america that coincided with his being president it's important to say that because presidents aren't avatars or kings or popes but the america that coincided with his being president they seem to have forgotten that covid was part of that uh was good we were at peace and we were prosperous and one and a half

percent inflation um and so on these are all really unusual things and then the final point is we've actually not since the late 19th century ever had a president who won then lost and then ran again so the whole thing as you say is just absolutely bizarre but to me the number that just blows my mind is that biden is too old and if you push people on it a majority of them think he'll die in a second term yeah i mean that's right it's not it's not just that they think that he's too old that's a super majority right up in the 70s but a majority think that he'll die or have to step down because he's infirm right no one has ever thought that of a president in the modern era except perhaps fdr and very weird circumstances no one has ever thought that before and we just don't know what

they're going to do when they do think it so so andy here's my question and i know you got to run but i i gotta so um in times like political volatility we've been living through a very volatile period of about 30 years, right? House changes hands all the time. Didn't do it for 50 years, and then suddenly it did it every two, practically. And that's okay, right? We're America. We're used to kind of crazy, you know, smash-mouth politics, too. Like, everybody says, you know, Trump's outrageous.

But, like, I don't know. Those 19th century pamphlets were pretty mean too okay but we always had a judiciary that was kind of the backstop it's like well you know you know most americans think okay yeah i know they're unelected nine uh judges and black negligees and that's kind of weird but but I'm glad they're there. Like, that's our house of lords in a way, right? What happens to us when we don't have that faith? Brings us back to the beginning of the conversation and why people were so despondent last week. I think, Rob, that the judiciary hasn't changed so much as prosecutorial discretion and the old ground rules about,

like, don't do to the other side what you don't want to have done to you have changed. I mean, yes, there is more of a sense because of the way the law schools have been for the last century that the law is a tool for implementing, you know, progressive social change, and judges are more apt to push that. Although the Supreme Court, the post-Scalia Supreme Court has imposed a discipline on the judiciary that didn't exist in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and that's been a really good thing. But I think in the legal culture, the terrible thing that's happened is, you know, this wasn't stuff that was written down, but there were norms about who you charged and under what circumstances. You know, Bill Barr

talks about, you know, how no one's above the law, but if you're going to prosecute a president, it's got to be what he calls a meat and potatoes crime, right? One that everybody can understand, they can wrap their brain around, and importantly, they can understand that if I did this, I would be prosecuted for this. And whatever a meat and potatoes crime is, this thing that happened in Manhattan last week is the opposite of that. It was like something that was um bespoke for for trump um well it was an impossible burger it was lab growing you could say yeah but i i don't i would just say i don't think it's um i don't think that it's so much that the judiciary is slipping because there's still decent checks on the judiciary what there's not checks on because Congress can't rein this in anymore, and the administrative state, I think, causes Congress's

muscles to atrophy for what we need it there for, which is to rein in executive excess. And therefore, you now have rampant executive excess. And Charlie and I talked about this yesterday, but I think the other thing we need to come to grips with is philosophically, progressives simply think it's legitimate and fine to use the powers at their disposal to push the ball up the field for their cause, including to punish their political enemies. And that's a, again, that's a cultural thing more than a legal thing. Well, what's going to happen is they'll probably say we need a Supreme Court justice from every state in the union. And the same people who want to abolish the Senate because it puts New York at the same level as North Dakota will be perfectly fine with this idea. And we'll have 50 Supreme Court justices voting on whether or not something is or is not constitutional. Can't wait. Anyway, can't wait till we have you on next time, Andy, although i'm sure it'll be after a slew of bad news but uh you know maybe one of the days something something that will happen which is legally good happens and marvelous and we'll

have you on and we'll just all be happy and yeah holding hands and singing tunes like the rabbits in a disney cartoon from 1934 so thanks for joining us, Andy. We'll see you on television, on the web, here, there, and otherwise, and take it easy, my friend. Thanks, guys. Have a great weekend. You too. See you soon. Well, we're about to leave here, but before we do, because we don't want to go on and on, we could. We're podcasters. We're writers.

Lots to talk about. Love the sounds of our own voices. You can't shut us up. But we should probably leave by noting that we had a D-Day anniversary. And I wondered if you guys had any thoughts, anything that my contribution to this, which, of course, should be minimal because it had nothing to do with it except for living in the wonderful world that was granted and gifted to us by these men, was to explain why in World War II movies and cartoons and in the movie The Longest Day, you hear this note, bum, bum, bum,

bum. You hear this motif, bum, bum, bum, bum. You hear this motif, bum, bum, bum, bum. What does it mean? How is that tied to the culture at the time? And when are we going to forget it? Because people are going to watch that movie 20, 30 years from now and will not immediately grasp why that rhythm, bum, bum, bum, bum, appears in the movie. Anyway, you'll have to listen to my diner podcast

coming on Saturday and Sunday in order to figure that out, if you you don't already know what you probably do uh so briefly i don't thoughts you don't know well i'm not going to say here you'll have to listen that was a great tease yeah yeah that's me as i so the question is what will we ever forget it will we ever forget what it means uh no you're gonna have to have somebody completely you'll have to have somebody explain it it's it's you know there are these things that the culture that everybody knows and then everybody who knew them knows them yeah guys and i've been trying to research for example there's a radio show that was in the in the u.s in the 40s late for or late stages of the war called victory fob and the ads seem to assume that everybody knew what FOB stood for. I don't. I had to

research it, and I had to figure out by thinking backwards, it's some sort of nautical shipping term that everybody got at the time. And all of these, you know, the words, the phrases, the references, the acronyms, the little details of history, all of that, I've said over and over, I would give anything not to find a lost manuscript from the twenties, thirties, and forties, not to find a lost Thurber story or so, you know,

or something like that. I would just like to know kind of what all the gum tasted like, what the theaters smelled like when you walked into them, what an automat smelled like actually, when you did with the street, you know, the sound of the streets in the 1920s, the particular timber of the car horns, we don't know the sound of a gramophone spilling out of a window and radio, all of that stuff. Unless somebody writes it down and nails it down,

it's very hard to rebuild history from that. So we're left with the bones. We're always left with the bones. And there's our history is full. Everyday day life is full of like the little tiny fish bones. You were always afraid of catching in your throat when you were a kid that made up the body, the corpus of the times. We don't know them. So you have to remember and you have to research and you have to keep reminding people. Anyway. Yeah. I also think the physicality of it, too.

Just the idea that you had to take all these people. You had to land them on a beach in a boat. You had to invent. And then the con and they had to take all these people you had to land them on a beach in a boat you had to invent and then the con and they had to feed them you had to make sure that they could be taken care of a place to sleep that night you had to make sure that we had confused the enemy enough so they weren't entirely sure where we were going to land they knew we were going to land there's nowhere right the the constellation of efforts and and uh work sheer brain power that had to go into it before the brawn power before then it all came down to the individual acts of bravery by individual young men who were most of them born thousands of miles away it's just kind of astonishing it is um to think of what we what

we're capable of doing when we believe that there's nothing else to be done. Logistics. Logistics is that. Imagine if you were the guys who were tasked with working on the dummy army that they were setting up so that they thought that they were coming over at Calais. I mean, how would you feel about that? How would you feel not having been there and done your part? Somebody pointed out yesterday, you know, hat tip to the guys who knocked over Rome 24 hours before D-Day.

You know, he had a day in the sun of getting into Rome before the attention shifted. And again, I was looking at a newspaper a few days after D-Day, because it was a touch-and-go fraught thing. I mean, it was, in retrospect, we think, well, they landed and they won. No, they had to fight. And there were newsreels that were playing 24-7 downtown.

A guy could walk out of his flop house at three o'clock in the morning with a snoot full and find himself sprawled in a theater in the middle of,

you know, of a June day watching the war on the big screen days after it had happened. Yeah. It's just a fast-moving time. I know we've got to run,

but can I just, so we're talking today because I just have one interesting story. Lionel Chetman, great writer and director, did a great movie called Hanoi Hilton. Wonderful guy. He tells a really funny story. He was pitching a World War II movie once to a room full of studio execs.

And it's about a Canadian regiment on D-Day. And they had to invade the heavily fortified German... some German fort on the coast. And it was all a diversion to divert Nazi forces away from the actual invasion at Omaha Beach. So it was a suicide mission. But it was a crucial suicide mission. And everyone on that boat knew it. They knew that this mission was designed to result in catastrophic action and that they were not

going to probably be able to take that fort and they were not expected to and they still did it and i've heard him give this pitch the pitch is insane i mean you're leaning forward it is if you're not in tears at the end of this i'm telling you maybe 15 16 17 minute pitch you're not alive it's amazing it's a crazy story so he pitches this thing and he winds it up and the executives are like oh we love this we love this but one question who's the enemy here and chet was like well you know it's Hitler, right? And they go, yeah, obviously Hitler, yes, yes, yes. But who's the real enemy?

Because what they wanted was him to say, well, it's obviously the bloodthirsty American general, Dwight Eisenhower, who was sending these poor Canadians to die. But it's Hitler, that's all. It's just the Hitler, it's the Nazis, that's it. It's really simple. They're the enemy and we try to kill them. And it's complicated than you think and there's this is the act of bravery that's and they just didn't get it they just like couldn't accept the fact that there wasn't a real enemy so there you know we started we started out the podcast talking about disney movies charles did you watch boys in the boat yes i found the feeling we've talked about this i think we did

deja vu oh i love the fact that it's such it's such a simple throwback of a movie that hitler is in it and they make him mad in the way that movies of the 40s and the cartoons used to do i just loved it and people in the theater loved it too it's like yeah we hate that guy and we're making a man we're pissing him off because we're yanks and we're good at this yeah which reminds me reminds me, we'll end with this. Charles, the United States beat Pakistan at cricket. Yes. And from what I understand, our team isn't even professional cricketers. No, they're all Silicon Valley. The guys who like the thing.

And I've watched cricket. I've sat down with a cricket enthusiast and who's guided me through all of these things and these tests that last for six weeks. So I'm really happy that we did it. And you must be happy as well, this being your adopted and beloved country. Absolutely. I do love cricket. I love baseball as well.

I watch a lot more baseball. I've watched the Yankees beat up on the Minnesota Twins, incidentally, James, in the last few days. Well, we've enjoyed talking to you. Podcast number 695 on the Minneapolis home of the Twins. My spirit having drained now completely from my existence and my enthusiasm gone for the podcast.

Yes, Charles, I know, I know, I know. You're right. Go on, go on. I do love cricket. I mean, this is a remarkable thing. Cricket is a Victorian game, which is one reason it's so slow. As you say, test cricket can take 25 days of play and then still be a tie,

which is one reason it didn't take in America. But it's not just a Victorian game, it's an imperial game. And so if you look through the lists, it's Pakistan, India, the West Indies, Australia, New Zealand, England. the lists it's pakistan india the west indies australia new zealand england you know it is it is a victorian british empire and so it's very jarring to see on a piece of paper the united states beat pakistan at cricket no this is crossing the streams this is wrong this is mad libs but it

did happen which is really great in america But I think it must be intensely embarrassing in Pakistan because the Americans are all celebrating ironically. They're all saying, ah, we're the great Americans. Whatever we do, we win. But in Pakistan, where this is an enormously popular sport, it must be driving people to despair. The tender feelings of the people of that nation are not exactly prime concerns for me at this point. I'm going to laborate in our own cultural imperialism here and our willingness to just take this on as a lark and beat them. That's great. Who cares? Yay, go us. All right, as I said, this was Podcast 695. We thank you very much for listening. We thank Annie McCarthy. We thank Lumen for sponsoring this. Support them and you support us. We advise

everybody to go to ricochet.com and take a look and join so you can get to the member feed. What's that, you say? Well, you don't know until you get there, and believe me, it's the community you've been looking for all your days on the web. The sane, center, right place where we talk about absolutely everything. Better than Facebook, better than Twitter. People you know, people, friends you meet.

I love it. I'm handing there this afternoon. I'll be there tomorrow on Saturday to discuss old-time radio and songs of the weekend and the rest of the things, because it's not all politics. Life isn't all politics. As a matter of fact, most of life is not.

And you were all the happier for it. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Rob. Thank you, Charlie. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, fellas. Ricochet 4.0. Next week, fellas. Ricochet. Join the conversation.