The Ricochet Podcast - Podcasting In America

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Even without being on the ballot, Democrats are determined to make the midterms about Donald Trump. And since that’s what they want to talk about, we wanted to hear from our friend Debra Saunders again, whose just launched her podcast Covering Trump. Deb fields questions from Rob, James and Charles about meat-and-potatoes stories, the mythological neutral reporter, and the incentives to write... Source

I really do today look like I'm from Alabama, don't I? I have a dream this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. No, I mean it, not a single penny. Republican wins, inflation's going to get worse. It's that simple. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again, democracy simply doesn't

work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Wickershire Podcast with Rob Long and Charles C.W. Cook sitting in for Peter Robinson. I'm James Liles and today we talk to Deb Saunders about her new podcast and her experience covering Trump. So let's have ourselves a podcast.

I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, and it's episode number 614. Join us at Ricochet.com. Why don't you? And you'll find out how we've got this far. Partly, mostly, by providing a place for civil, sane conversation that you don't find elsewhere on the web. That's it. That's a lot. I'm James Lylex in Minneapolis, where it just snowed and nobody's happy about it at all. Rob Long, I believe, is in New York.

Peter Robinson, we think, is doing the Grand Tour, and this very moment is at the Uffizi somewhere, probably a sweater gently knotted around his neck as he regards the great treasures of Western art. And he is replaced, although Peter can't be replaced, by Charles C.W. Cook. Charles, thank you for joining us today as the ersatz Peter. No one could be the ersatz Peter.

That's true. How very true uh well gentlemen here we are um i'm casting my mind over the big issues of the last week bombshells detonations and the rest of it didn't seem to be any unless i missed something um but we did have that little note about how the uh biden administration pressured the saudis to please please give us some oil because we got midterms coming up do you believe the story and uh does it strike you as plausible and if so uh will this have any impact whatsoever i laugh when i say it but i'm going to ask anyway which to whom are you directing that question i hope either one of you can uh well look i mean i think i think this is only, you know, all presidents do this with oil, oil supply for a whole variety of reasons, whether they connect it to the midterms or not. The Saudis aren't dumb. They they're familiar with the American political calendar. this seems very very similar to a perfect call a really perfect call that the former president made

with the current president battle president of ukraine and so it seems like it's interesting i mean it's you know it is it what kind of one it's not exactly the same but it's it is one more indication that well i think we need a new new word for double standard double standard now no longer has the kind of fight it should they would be exactly the same if indeed anything having to do with ukraine at the moment affected people's lives the way the price of energy does now uh the price of energy is affecting everything pumping up everything uh inflating everything and it's disastrous and everybody knows it so char, Charles, CNN has got the headline, voters may care more about the cost of French fries

than January 6th's compelling evidence. I'm stunned that people are actually looking around and saying, milk is now $3.50 a gallon. It used to be $1.89. That they care more about that than the insurrection, the coup, the threat to our democracy, etc., etc. Well, I read about this yesterday. Before getting to the meat of it, I think it's worth pointing out how crazy it is that an editor somewhere signed off on a piece,

the main thrust of which is people care too much that food is too expensive and in particular potatoes that the single most historically fraught menu item in world history that's quite true you gosh look at these people complaining about the price of potatoes but but you know i think the the key point here is well there are many the first is this is a good indication of the way the press lives in a bubble. And that's a cliche, but it's true. And I am on the record. I'm happy to repeat it again. Us believing that Donald Trump should have been impeached for what happened on the 6th.

Well, no, not what happened on January 6th. What happened after the election because january 6th is a distraction in one sense in that we were not close to a coup and we were not close to losing our democracy but the fact that he tried to stage a coup is an impeachable offense and he should have been impeached for it right um so this is not me downplaying what trump did or downplaying january 6th but the the the truth is is that Donald Trump's not on the ballot in the midterms. And the indifference toward relitigating 2020 increasingly cuts both ways in that, yes, voters don't seem as interested in the Democrats' self-serving conception of our democracy,

which now seems to mean Democrats have to win every race, then the Democrats would like them to be. But they're also not as interested in the Trump-esque obsession with 2020 as those Republicans would like them to be, as is being made increasingly clear in Georgia, where Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, both of whom were on the end of pretty much all of the lunacy that we saw in 2020, seemed to be coasting home. And in fact, coasting home against another election denier in Stacey Abrams. So, you know, I think that the argument that this is a big problem that people should be worried about is in and of itself somewhat flawed. But even if it weren't, you're just not going to take people off inflation because it is

catastrophic and it's causing extraordinary number of problems and not just the problems that inflation causes but the problems that fighting inflation causes too this is why it's so pernicious because you have inflation that increases prices and makes people poorer and destroys their wage growth and so on but also to get rid of it you have to raise interest rates to the point at which mortgages become very expensive cars become very expensive for most people and you have to induce a recession which is horrendous for most people so right right i'm gonna worry about this exactly i mean the the the the only known cure, I mean, for inflation is a recession. And that's sort of what they have to do. They have to create, as Paul Volcker did, it was a white knuckle ride for the first Reagan term to see if Volcker would tame inflation and the economy could pick back up in time for the re-elect in 84 that was one of the things they were terrified of turned out that it worked out but it was a very much a paris of pauline moment where the train is heading towards the tracks and and the damsel ronald reagan is tied to the tracks and he's going to have to pay

the price if and everybody knew it and then 10 years later barely 10 years later when um uh bill clinton was running for president people always get this wrong but there was a sign he had in the campaign headquarters that said famously it's the economy stupid and what that was was a note to everybody who works at that campaign do not talk about anything else voters do not care about anything else they care about the economy you had a smashing re-elect in 84 because americans care about economy you had an e-cal plurality win in 92 because americans care about the economy it should not be news that americans care about the economy but you know the the mandarins the left-wing mandarins and all the press want you to think about this thing that

almost happened but didn't really happen and couldn't really have happened this unruly riot that was deadly riot in the capital but was at no point ever in danger of changing the actual results of the election and so you're really what they're really saying is we want you to be more concerned with a thing that didn't happen and could never have happened than with the actual price you pay with your actual dollars at the actual gas pump at the actual grocery store um and that's just bananas but the reason why people have to deny the inflation you have to deny it as long as you can and say it's temporary this and that and the other is because the only cure for it is the chemotherapy of a recession and that is on nobody's um you know

wish list casting or otherwise casting the previous attempt to tame inflation in in terms of old movie serials and the perils of pauline has me now thinking of paul volcker with a long mustache and a black hat saying you must raise the rates but people maybe perhaps aren't concerned as much as the democrats want them to be by january 6th because they have memories of things that also transpired in 2020 do you do you think that if the lafayette riots if you remember those when the people were banging at the fences and burning the flags and the rest of it do you think if they'd gotten into the white house and been able to get into donald trump's office they would have killed him that's a really good question i mean that was a mean

mean crowd and they seemed bent on i don't know the insurrection anyway we're not supposed to compare the two because one was array had its origins and righteous anger and the other was just crazy proud boy talk but you're right um the idea that they wouldn't concentrate on the economy stupid it has to do possibly because i can't think of another reason they are so besotted by the agenda that they wish to get in place as fast as possible that the rest of these things seem like minor petty impediments i mean if you're going to change the world if you're going to transition us from that bad old polluting earth killing fossil fuel based economy to something that's new and

wonderful and vibrant and shiny and wind-based yes it's people caring about the price of french fries is incredibly irritating because you've got this serious work to do you have genders to realign you've got isms and structural isms to upend so why the stupidity of the american people not to realize that uh that a a stem to stern keel to to uh what's the other part of the keel the pointy part of the ship in other words the entire american enterprise has to be redone and rejiggered the rest of it and things like inflation i mean it says how how small how small are you people it's also a strange choice because um i i think different polling that i've looked at the uh um abortion issue if they number eight so nuts about it number eight but it would have but it was it was a it's a very good way for democrats i mean you know democrats they're

they're fortunes in the midterms improved uh radically improved um thanks to the dobbs decision and you know i'm just talking about politically it it it seems like that's where you want to be but their problem is that they're just as weird and as extreme as the other side you know most americans are roughly in the center here like i don't know first trimester okay you know most most americans are not classically pro-life they are for abortion regulation pro-reg basically um and so they had an they had an avenue to scoop up the vast middle by being normal and instead they elected i think in some strange way to double down on january 6th which is an issue of no interest to americans to ignore and to sort of a um a nitpick with definitions of recession and definitions of inflation for nine

months and and then sort of to forget where their fortunes lie in what everybody's fortunes lie which is with the economy it's just a very strange very strange choice both of these parties seem to me to be like running on empty they they they seem desperately to be need need to be replaced um by a newer and smarter model that's my larger takeaway i certainly think that the effects of dobss have diminished, as I thought they would, because they're being absorbed at the local level, and most people by this point who care about it are familiar with the laws of their state, which in most cases, if not all, line up with their own preferences.

Florida, for example. Now, Florida may change. DeSantis might push for a stricter set of abortion regulations. Maybe the legislature will do it for him. But currently, Florida is at 15 weeks, and the average Floridian's preference is 15 weeks. That's not my preference, because I'm a classical pro-lifer, as you put it. But that's the average Floridian's preference, and the average Floridian votes.

And as such, abortion has not been much of an issue in this race. And the only... Well, no, that's not true. I mean, abortion is really one of the reasons why Democrats aren't 10 points down. No, sorry, I meant in Florida. In Florida, right. They gain ground in a lot of places and they haven't lost it yet, but they certainly have not pressed their advantage because they don't really have one, right?

Their advantage would be, hey, listen, we're the reasonable people. And instead, they're like, well, we're insane, and we're just a little less insane than our opponents, which is – both of these parties are always going for the one quarter of a percent win they all they have they are desperately attracted to the high wire act in american politics which is not a way to govern and not a way to get anything done well the high wire act forms the basis of the cover art for one of supertramp's later albums uh famous last words which i believe we can talk nice segue later because charles is a super tramp fan as am i but i'm just i'm just wondering if an organization decides to go say no we're going to start to uh lobby for restrictions of abortions after nine weeks and they open up a bank account to do so they incorporate the rest of it and then their bank tells them i'm sorry

we're closing your account because more because reasons um unless of course you'd like to give us a list of all your donors this happened to a religious organization and they were cut off by chase it's an interesting story i'd like to learn more about it but it's worrisome and it's not one of those things where people say well you know private affiliation go get your own bank it's um it's a trend and it's worrisome you might wonder if there's any way around it there is we're sponsored today by donors trust it's a tax a tax-friendly way to simplify your charitable giving without compromising your values. Now, the question is, is cancel culture coming from your charitable dollars? Big banks that sponsor charitable savings accounts, or donor-advised funds as they're formally called,

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To learn more, download their prospectus or do it twice, prospecti at www.donorstrust.org slash ricochet. That's donorstrust.org slash ricochet. To align your giving with your values, visit www.donorstrust.org slash ricochet. And we thank Donor's Trust for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Deb Saunders, syndicated columnist, fellow with the Discovery Institute's Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership. For years,

she wrote a column for the San Francisco Chronicle before taking a new job as White House correspondent for the Las Vegas Review-Journal from 2017 to 2021. She got a new podcast, Covering Trump. It's going to tell the story of well covering trump deb welcome back how are you doing today we are all fine and or dandy uh but we got to start you miss your old job sometimes i miss it every day i just don't want to go back to it because it was it was it was it was it was one of those things that was the best and the worst. So, yes and no. By the way, very different covering Biden.

Very, very different. I was going to ask about that. Hey, Deb, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining us. I do want to remind everybody, your new podcast covering Trump is fantastic. If you are not, if you're not subscribed to it, you've got to subscribe it's fantastic um all right so i know covering biden's different so i want to ask like all right now you when you're watching the news or reading the news do you ever just jump out of your chair and think give me a break you know what i mean like do you ever think to yourself this is i mean as now as

a consumer of this of presidential coverage do you ever think to yourself okay is i mean as now as a consumer of this of presidential coverage do you ever think to yourself okay call the cops arrest these guys these guys are doing a terrible job i mean let's face it the treatment of donald trump by the white house press corps was very different than it was for donald trump now let's understand trump Trump sort of was pretty provocative with the press in a way that Biden is in a much more mild way. So that was part of it. And, of course, the bias thing. You know, I was there when the dossier came out in that press conference in Trump Tower. I was there.

And I took one look at that document and I said, this is a fraud. It's so clear that this is a fraud. And everybody in the press corps knew it was a fraud that's why all the big papers wouldn't cover it and then buzzfeed leaks it and it plays and all of a sudden they acted like it was real and that's the kind of thing that you'd watch and you'd think i think the press corps looks really bad with this story the way that they played overplayed russiagate when they knew how dubious it was that was just a stain on the media yeah so it's hard i mean you know trump wrote i guess or trump i don't officially the official trump communication to the january 6th committee

i read that this morning and it doesn't look like there are many other hands involved in the writing of it it seemed like it was dictated stream of consciousness right from his, you know, reptile brain. I don't mean he has, I mean, we all have reptile brains, the reptile part of the human brain, I should say. And it's all crazy. And, you know, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm going to, we're going to, everyone's going to turn this off.

I don't think he's fit to be president, but I read that. And if you, if you parse all the madness and the neurotic uh paranoia and the incredible uh insecurity there but he's right about pretty much all of the scandal stuff he's right about the certainly the first impeachment he's right about russia russia r. He's right about all that stuff. And so I'm in this awkward position of saying, well, he's right. Do you think anyone ever is going to say anything even remotely similar to that from among your former colleagues? Well, I mean, not everybody in the White House press corps was leaning left. There were people who leaned to the right. And there were more of them, I think, then than there are now. I mean, I think the other perfect example is the Hunter Biden story, the way that that was just not covered.

And it's still not getting covered. And you'll finally see the rare major newspaper story on it. And it doesn't tell you that much. And they're just not covering it so uh that that's got to change that has to change because it just looks bad and it's a problem i mean you saw jake tapper interviewing um the president about and he asked about hunter biden but he didn't ask the question about why did he get all that money whatever made people think that giving hunter biden this money was a good idea and and those are the follow-up questions that i thought were

more important so um if you were gonna if you would issue some if you were gonna be the managing editor of you know whatever we're calling the new cnn or whatever you know some some news some large news organization how would you how would you fix this unlimited power i'm giving you unlimited power for you know 24 hours what are you gonna do i would get rid of 60 of the people and i would go to i would actually look at regional news organizations to get people who have been working as journalists outside the beltway and have a better sense of what interests americans sometimes this stuff is so inside so i would look for people who have covered politics in different places and and and get them out there so you know

some smaller news stations local news stations newspapers and get people who have a better sense of what the american people care about as opposed to people at a cocktail party at the press club right i mean do you think i mean look look everybody i know in the press except for the people i know for a fact are not progressive democrats are progressive democrats i mean they they are they're not progressives in the sense that they don't they'll not they won't toss the democratic party off the off the side of the ship they seem much more partisan um and and partisanship seems like the most important thing more important than you know fealty to some kind of ideological mission, right? Is the, would it be wise just to label people, like, just so I know that, so they know that I know, and I know that they know that I know that they're, you know, left-wing progressives, and I

can kind of digest their reporting that way? Or is that, are we, what's the way it used to be? I mean, that's the way all these newspapers used to be 100 years ago well actually so having worked in for for three newspapers over 30 plus years most journalists think that they're actually neutral they're liberal democrats who think that they're neutral and they don't really believe that they're biased i mean they know it's if you really push them they'll say yes we, but it's for the good. You know, that's because we're smarter than other people. I mean, I've heard that.

Exactly. Because they all listen to the Washington, to NPR and read the Post and the New York Times because that's what's correct. That's what's right. And then on the other side of it are all these crazy people with contrary ideas. Speaking of somebody who, too, has worked in three newsrooms, actually four. So, you know, I'll give you a great example of how things are different. When Joe Biden saw a doctor, they managed it really well. When you saw the White House physician and they sort of mentioned it, they didn't bring the doctor in.

There weren't all these. Nobody asked a question about whether there were cognitive tests nobody asked sort of and and i remember being there when ronnie jackson came out after he'd given a physical to trump uh and okay some of the things he said were a little believable about how healthy trump was given given a certain you know given given his his weight at the time but um he you know they took questions he was out there and in the in the press asked a ton of questions uh very invasive questions at times so you just see a real uh and also of course this White House is in a position to punish people who ask too many questions and ask the wrong questions and not call on those people. So it's a very different atmosphere now.

Hey, I'm going to jump in here, Deb. Sorry, I got to interrupt because things just, you know, commercials, we got to do them and they stack up and things stack up and you don't know when you're going to get to them and you have to get to them. And so you find yourself doing things just in time, like right now. I got to get this done now. And everything now seems like it's got to be done just in time. There's back to school. It's wedding season. There's holiday prep coming up.

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like get a little detail here so did he know your name i don't know i mean i'll get i know here's one thing so i'm over 60 with curly red hair so you can make me out anywhere and people obviously would know who i was um he never called me deborah the one interview i had with him uh he didn't call me by, I mean, the one exclusive. I'd been to two other group interviews. I don't know if he did. Now, let me just say, I worked for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It was owned by Sheldon Adelson, who was his biggest donor, that Adelson's work. And there were a lot of people who thought that that meant that I'd have this great entree into the White House. That was not the case, because we were determined that we were going to cover the White House in a fair, newsy manner, and we weren't going to be lapdogs. And so

that never occurred. Every bit of access I had, I fought for. It wasn't something that was handed to me. You know, the reason I wanted to do this podcast is when you cover the White House, everybody expects you to write a book afterward, right? Well, again, I'm working for a one-person bureau for a regional newspaper. And what did I cover? I wasn't covering palace intrigues. I mean, I know that when you read the New York Times and the Washington Post, the fight between the chief of staff and director of communications is big news, right? But we cared about COVID and Yucca Mountain, you know, the possible nuclear waste facility. And those are the kinds of issues that our readers were looking at. And that's where my focus was. And so the experience was about actually most people who are covering that White House.

They're there for the issues. They're not getting all these insider stories. And they want to tell readers what readers want to know. And that's what I was in. So I talked about getting into the White House. first I'm standing, everybody is fighting for purchase in the room, all the way I had to battle to get access. One of the things I did was join the White House pool. And joining the pool is like the most stressful thing you can ever, ever, ever do. Because what you do is, I mean, I know people watch the, you can see it after a pool, they'll show it on cable news, and you'll see the people shouting questions. But you also have to write a report that goes back to other reporters and it has to come out quickly.

And and you better be right. And but that was the kind of thing where I got to know the staff better, because obviously it was the staff that was going to give me access. And so it's really about telling people all these things you see. You watch a briefing. There are 49 seats there. How do people get seats there? How does that work? How does the pool work?

What was it like traveling on Air Force One? And, of course, what happened to me in the course of that. So it's a little, you know, the behind-the-scenes stuff is sort of fascinating we just we just get it served up to us we kind of don't know how they make the sausage which is kind of terrifying but we do see the pool and we do see the shouting and there's no more ridiculous uh exercise in politics and journalism i i've never seen any point at which the president turns around after hearing a particularly piquant question and stabbed his finger and addresses it unless it's a you know west wing aaron sorkin show have you ever considered just asking things like do you prefer mayo or mustard i would love for everybody to shout a scrum of questions like that i think with trump we know it's mayo

probably right but we'd have him on record and it would be a thing that humanizes and flushes out. So I my advice to the press corps is just to knock that off. I was listening to a documentary the other day about the O.J. Simpson trial. And there's somebody thrusting a mic in front of O.J.'s face. O.J., did you do it? Well, you know, like he's going to turn around right there and say, you know, you got to in the interest of full disclosure, I did. So anyway, James, actually, Trump did make news because he would say things that there are times that he would actually go on for 45 minutes during these pool sprays and he would answer questions. Now, would he maybe give a different answer the next day? Yes. But he actually did make news during the pool sprays. And again, my work was my job was to get access with the staff and the harder they saw

you working the more access you got so i have a question and it's related to the media bias question but it's more of a question of news bias than than opinion bias or um substantive bias and that is trump was clearly to put it nicely extremely flawed and many of the things that people complained about were true were real it wasn't just mean tweets but irrespective of trump's flaws every morning there would be this press freakout. Whatever, he would wake up, he'd sneeze, and you would hear, oh my God, that's unconstitutional. He did an unconstitutional sneeze. It's a violation of the Logan Act. And then we'd have Logan Act discourse for three days. And we now have a president who's not Trump. And he has done, in my estimation, at least, quite a lot of unconstitutional or at least controversial things. He extended the eviction moratorium knowing that it was illegal. He has ordered

the student loan usurpation. He just took an action on Obamacare that Obama himself had said he couldn't do without Congress. And no one seems to care. And I suppose what I'm asking is the mechanics of it not when opinion writers at the Washington Post write their pieces why do they care about one or the other that's obvious but why does it seem to be the case that this behavior this controversial behavior doesn't even invite questions like shouldn't is am i wrong does it you know actually if you watch the briefings there were questions about the legality of of a number of things that were being done and there you know they weren't the first questions necessarily they weren't the questions always out of the front two two rows one of the things that i

i talked about in the podcast is how the regional press tends to be more on the ground and sort of more interested in what's happening different places but there were quite you know there there have been questions about that it's this it's just not the big narrative and that's just not right and what is it that makes it not the big narrative is it that the questions come later in the press conference is it the tone is it the words that are used is it that when the story gets back to the editor the newspaper he says put it on page 27 so how do those two things intersect when you watch tv news it's i mean most of the stories are confirmation bias stories this is what we thought about biden and this is what you're going to see.

And that's the true flaw in how the White House gets covered right now. And there was a different kind of confirmation bias with Trump. He's wrong. With Biden, there just isn't the kind of challenge that... And people don't care. I think people are actually exhausted after Trump, too.

I think people are just tired. trump too i think people are just tired there was so much heat and i i think that there is a certain kind of post-trump exhaustion uh and biden has benefited from it but dan you think that exhaustion will disappear the second it's say president desantis yes i absolutely do i don't think there's any doubt then the outrage returns and maybe again like it's it's look at most of the people there are most of the journalists in that room are liberals is that one of the reasons why they they they really fear and loathe desantis the most because he seems like he's the full package i mean he may not be but he just seems like for the first time you know i mentioned earlier before you got on the the republicans especially seems so because he seems like he's the full package. I mean, he may not be, but he just seems like for the first time,

and I mentioned earlier before you got on, the Republicans especially seem so absolutely desperately addicted to the political high wire act. You know, the candidate at the debate, and you're just, you have your heart in your mouth. You know he's going to say something weird or dumb or misspeak. Isn't that one of the reasons why they're terrified of DeSantis? Because he doesn't seem to be doing that. He seems actually, he seems sort of smart and articulate and fluid and like

he lives in the world but he's also doesn't back down let's face it i mean ron de santis has done a number of things that are very popular with florida voters and uh makes sense and i think that the press corps just don't really know what to do about that. So they go after his... He's too abrupt, and they go after his style, which is what they do. Let me float a theory by you, and tell me if I'm crazy. And I know

I'm sort of interrupting Charles' line of questioning, so he'll get right back to it. LBJ used to do this thing when he wanted you to do something um that you didn't want to do and it wasn't he would never demand that you follow his orders so what he'd say is oh my god you got to do this for me i'm in big trouble he did the whole week he was i i we have the tapes of him saying i really need you to do this i'm an if i if you don't if you don't help me out here i don't know what i'm gonna do right. Right. He just was essentially helpless.

That was his that was a way that was a way of getting a manipulating you into sort of doing what you wanted. Don't you think there's a larger issue? That's what kind of what the Democrats do with the with the compliant press. They say, listen, yeah, yeah. You know, we may have made a mistake, but but, you know, people are going to die if we're not in the White House. There's a war in Ukraine and a crazy Republican president would just be disaster. And abortion would be absolutely, you know, what psychologists call catastrophic thinking or catastrophic futurizing. If you print this piece about Biden not knowing what his pencil's for, then you are going to kill Americans. And I think if you're, you know, if you're a mildly partisan, but extremely, let alone extremely partisan person and committed progressive, you think, well, yeah, you know, I better not print that part. I better not print the news.

Is that theory work? I covered the Biden White House for five weeks, and they were very professional as I dealt with them. But I do know this. There are certain stories that you do. They make it clear. I mean, they're going to fight you every inch of the way. If somebody writes about Hunter Biden, for example, they're going to get pushback. And the pushback isn't going to be, this is bad for the world. It's more like, this is going to be bad for you. We're going to fight you every inch. And there are certain stories that you can

write about politicians and that they'll come back and they're just going to let you know that they're going to challenge it. I've covered certain people. I can think of one environmental group and they're involved in a lawsuit. And you knew that if you wrote about them, that they were going to spend two days challenging everything you wrote and be a complete time suck. And you know that. Wait a second. Hold on here, though. Journalists are firefighters. They run to the fires.

They are the ones I've seen the movies. When they get that kind of pushback, it only stiffens their spine and encourages them to dig harder and deeper. Why? They're there to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfort. The idea that you can't write about something or you will suffer professional consequences in your milieu goes against any number of motion pictures that have told us the contrary. So I guess I'm being lied to. But, you know, the thing is, if you're a White House correspondent, you've got one thing you're covering. And yes, there are other sources that you can have, but there's a certain pull that

they have over you on access. And that is an issue for people so do you think that your access is going to be questioned that's it so that's i think really the i mean that's what you're basically saying is that i'm wrong but because i was saying it's not about professional access or professional perks it's about an ideological position you put your fellow progressives who are technically on the other side and the press side again if you write this you're helping the other side and helping the other side is immoral and will lead to um you know the collapse of democracy if you if you print a story about hunter biden and his laptop in late october 2020

you're you're basically making it you're basically electing donald trump and none of us wants that say they say they to you and then then you go to the press you're like okay well yeah i don't really want to help donald trump so i'm not going to print the truth that may well have been done that certainly is possible but i as i said i think they also just there's a more strong arm kind of thing. What do they control? Access. What do people do?

It sounds like if you don't, if you write about this, we are going to, in the future, curtail your ability to listen to our lies on different subjects. Well, so I have a highly ironic way to put it in a sense a follow-up question to rob's but also i suppose a an implicit mild disagreement with him in the sense that i think that it's become more insidious than he proposes in that it's one thing to say well if you publish this story or if you frame this news in this way then abortion will be made illegal but abortion is clearly a matter of great national debate and has been for a long time and any journalist worth his or her salt is going to want to deny that they would be swayed by the potential

effects of a story on abortion or guns or taxes or what you will but there is a a new tactic that has been adopted by the democratic party and i think picked up by many in the press it is far more difficult to get around and the incentives are far less strong for journalists to get around it and that is that democracy is on the line and so is truth and i wonder how much in your estimation obviously you're not able to look into people's souls but in your estimation the press corps has come to internalize this idea that we're not talking here about political disputes we're not talking here about whether the republicans or the democrats win or whether the tax rate is high or low or we spend or we don't or medicaid has expanded we're talking about democracy versus fascism we're

talking about truth versus disinformation because i from the outside the inside of journalism but the outside of reporting increasingly see a press corps and a bunch of reporters within it who think that if they for example this week tell the truth about john fetterman's condition that this might have the consequence of establishing an american hitler and that's much more difficult to talk people out of or or to appeal to a sense of fairness right so do you think that's much more difficult to talk people out of or to appeal to a sense of fairness, right? So do you think that's been internalized in the press corps or is it an excuse? I think that most, well, I mean, my experience was being in the White House and covering the White House beat and writing stories about what was going on. Most of the time, people are working on a particular story of the day. I mean, there are people who go in and they can ask a question

and it can evoke an answer, which becomes the big story. Certainly that happened with Donald Trump. But, you know, most of the people, they have beats within the beat. They have an environmental angle or a justice angle. And really, if you watch a briefing from start to finish, a lot of the questions deal with meat and potato stories. And that was certainly my interest. I was interested in the policies that they were doing. I was also, of course, interested in Trump because who can not be? And Trump himself was a story but i uh i've i've never had anybody say that to

me that democracy is on the line if i if i write something that they don't want to write that's all yeah okay that's good to know that's good to know So are we in general on the right to a little too paranoid about the press? Are we not paranoid enough? I open the New York Times every day. I get the New York Times every day. Just to use an example, right? I like to do the crossword puzzle. I like to do it on paper.

I don't want to do it on the app. And I want to do that crossword puzzle because it's the best. And I read the news. I read the news in the New York Times because I get the best um and i read the news i read the news in the new york times so i get the new york times anyway um and i kind of like look at it and i yeah i have a little like a one eyebrow cocked when i read it um and every now and then i mean a lot of the work coverage i think is really great a lot of the foreign policy stuff i think is really good um some of the political stuff i think is okay but i i kind of you know it's like i put on a special pair of glasses to read it am i am i being too paranoid or not paranoid enough or am i just is that the way

we have to read the news now well it's it's really clear when you look at it at the washington post new york times that there are a lot of things that we think of stories they don't yeah the other and and immigration is a great another great example where all these things are happening at the border and they haven't covered it as if it's a story so they're obviously you know the biggest way that bias shows itself is in what people don't consider to be a story and that's an issue uh but but i don't think again i think it's most largely unconscious i i i've worked with people and you and they they think they're neutral. They think everybody should think the way they do.

They don't understand this other point of view. It's just so sad the way you look at the balkanization of stories, the fact that you can read stories about the laptop and Hunter and hunter biden in general and somebody and and and they'll be they'll be in the conservative media because and the conservative media will cover uh you know aggressively because the other mainstream outlets don't so it's it's it's a problem and i i i really do think that that when you get outside of the beltway you see less of it but you know newspaper newspapers hire liberals there there are the editors are liberals the top management people are liberals that uh they don't necessarily even know they live they're liberals but they know but they do know and that's who they hire and And it becomes, you know, it's an echo chamber.

And that's a real problem with journalism. But I will say one thing. Under the Trump White House, and even this White House, there are a lot of good conservative outlets that cover things aggressively, know what a story is. And that's something we should see more of. Yeah. All right. Can we just go back to the big orange elephant in the room? What's he going to do?

I knew you were going to ask that. He's got a bunch of stuff going. I mean, I don't even mean is the election running again or not. He's besieged,ged really on all sides. You know, in New York and financially and January 6th, all that stuff. Is it, is he,

are they poking that bear so hard that he's got to run? Or is he, what do you, your instinct having covered him, is he looking for a way out? What's going on right now in that very complicated brain of his? So, I don and i've talked to people um you know there are people there are a lot of people who don't know uh i just have my suspicions and my guess would be my instinct is that he does not run that he's i think he's and it's i think he's spiraling down i think that as he's you know he's the better people who

have worked in his administration and there are many great people who worked with him they're not part of his team anymore he's just in the room with a bunch of grifters and he's hearing what he wants to be told in his hold i mean when he had people in his in his in his west wing who were realists and telling him this is how you should do it he often didn't listen to them but they had him tethered he is untethered now and uh that so it's possible he does run but i don't think he has the discipline or the organization to get what he wants. I remember talking to people who thought that he would not, if he lost, he wouldn't admit it. And it was clear to me that he didn't have people who could make that argument left anymore in that White House.

By the time he lost, were gone and certainly they were gone by january 6th right so i just see him as um he's he's just isolated in a way he's not been before and he has and all of the people he listens to are telling him the wrong stuff he doesn't have people who are telling him the right stuff other than melania i presume in his kids um but that's so i don't i think in the end if he runs it will be for a short amount of time it'll be it'll it and it won't last it will be like his last international trip was a nato trip in london and we're i'm there covering it and every time there's a pool spray with the other world leaders he can't stop talking and it's unbelievable these little short pool sprays it should be five or ten minutes or you know they go on for 30 40 minutes and it

delays the whole timetable and nobody can believe he does it and so when it's time for him to do the press conference he's so angry he doesn't do it and he leaves and that's sort of what i would if he decides to run he's going to overdo it he's going to over talk and overplay and then when he doesn't get the result he wants he'll go he'll go we have seen him overplay his hand he did it in the debate he wasn't able to calibrate the disdain and the anger who was the most professional person who you worked with in the trump administration or maybe a press secretary or a handler i i made a point in the in the podcast of not naming people lest i get them in trouble if you like somebody if they've been good to you i'm not sure i'm doing them a favor saying it so that's uh uh well i mentioned different characters i mean i i was there through four

press secretaries um sean spicer uh um what's her name obviously sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham, and Kaylee McEnany. And, you know, they were, I mean, we saw, I can tell you the worst was Scaramucci. It lasted a week? Yes. 10 or 11 days, depending on how you count. Right. That Adam decayed quickly. See, the thing is though, Deb, when pitching your podcast, just to say to Charles question,

I, you know what, I'd love to tell you, but that's something for the podcast. And then people tune into the podcast. You don't have to tell them, but you can tease it thus. Uh, and you're teasing it thus now, uh, covering Trump, your podcast is available. Um, where is it available? On Ricochet. Yeah. On Rico ricochet that's exactly what we want to say and we're happy to have you there we go part of the ricochet audio network deb saunders thanks for joining us again it's always been a pleasure and we hope we'll see you again in the future we hope good luck with the podcast thank you this is great i appreciate it it's great it's riveting you gotta listen to it thank you so the you know she's saying that he's not going

to run which brings to mind the image sort of trump just wandering mar-a-lago like citizen kane like charles foster kane towards the end there um you know in a robe perhaps or not or maybe you know i don't know do you wear a robe around the house i don't but uh you know when i change i'm in a room with no windows Maybe you're the kind of person who changes in a room that's full of windows with the curtains up. I don't know. Maybe that's your thing. But even if you did, you know, you kind of might wonder what some kind of weirdo outside is looking in at you, right? I don't have anything to hide, you say. Privacy counts. And without a virtual private network, VPN, you are exposed. You're exposed to internet service providers. ISPs can see every single website you visit, and they can legally

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You can secure your online activity today by visiting expressvpn.com slash ricochet today. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash ricochet. And you can get an extra three months free, an extra three months free, but only if you go to expressvpn.com slash ricochet. And we thank ExpressVPN for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. All right, Rob, before we get to our final little confab here, why don't you tell people where they can actually meet up in real life with other human beings. In real life. Breathe oxygen, consume proteins, and then make air pass over their tongue and larynx to create sounds we call words. I know in this virtual Zoom world that seems like a strange thing to do, but you're all

for it. Dangerous. Dangerous. Well, listen, I keep telling you you should join Ricochet, and I say that because we want you on the site. We want you to join in the conversations. We want to hear your voice. But we also want to see you in real life.

So the Ricochet meetups, that's where we do that. Where are these meetups? Well, when you join Ricochet.com, you'll know, but we're happy to give you some hints. We've mentioned over the last few weeks that events will be going on in Huntsville, Alabama. That's the 22nd of October. So it's this month. So if you're in the area, go. There's a group meeting on the National Review Institute cruise, which is in November. And I think there's still some places available there. We have one scheduled in Pittsburgh in December and finally finally, New Orleans next year, 2023, during French Quarterfest.

I'm going to do whatever I can to be that one. That one sounds great. I mean, they all sound great, but I have a special, special fondness for New Orleans. Jay, Rob, none of those are near me. What do I do? Yeah, well, so you were probably thinking that if you'd like to go, but none of them are near you as my interlocutor. It's so rude

to really interrupt somebody when they're doing a promo. Really, I thought better of you, James. But look, it's a big country. Money's tight. If our meetup locations are out of reach or the timing's not right, you aren't doomed. Just join. That's the secret sauce. Join Ricochet.

Give us a place and a time. I guarantee you Ricochet will come to you. That's the benefit of being a member of the club, and we would like you to join. So for details on our Ricochet meetups, go to ricochet.com slash events. There's also a module in the sidebar on the site. All you got to do is join, which you want to do anyway. And now here's another reason to do it so that you can raise a glass or two or 10 or 27, as we all did in New York recently. And meet some really, really funny, interesting, thoughtful and incredibly, incredibly genial, nice folks. Lifelong friendships. We've had marriages. I think we've had some marriages. We've had Ricochet is really a place that is more than just a place to type out your thoughts that it is before we go uh there was an intersectional

nightmare in dearborn michigan over the past week there were a variety of parents who were protesting lgbt material in the classroom and they were muslims they didn't like it they had signs in english and arabic said keep your dirty books in the classroom, and they were Muslims. They didn't like it. They had signs in English and Arabic that said, keep your dirty books in the closet, stop grooming our kids, homosexuality, big sin, and other such things. I've always thought that the progressive embrace of Islam was rather paper-thin and hypocritical because there aren't a great number of rainbow flags outside of mosques, that when you drill down into what people actually believe it's it's contrary to many of the beloved precepts of the progressive side but here uh apparently there was a there was one fellow gay fellow who got up and said you can't unite with

the right because they hate you they don't but this is an issue which seems to have brought together a broad spectrum of people a diverse spectrum people, to oppose what they saw to be the unneeded introduction of sexually explicit materials into lower grades. Does this portend a crack-up of the Democratic coalition? We're seeing Hispanics move to Republicans as well, particularly on issues like immigration. Is this more signs of fissures and cracks that will only widen in time, he said, leaving it open-ended enough for somebody to say yay or nay? Yay or nay, Charles? Well, it's quite an interesting topic. Am I violating the yay or nay rule?

That's no rule. it's a guideline it's an interesting topic this because in 2000 republicans worked quite hard to win muslims and did pretty well with muslims and in fact muslims were one of the reasons that they won florida just and of course 9-11 changed all that because although it was entirely unfair to propose that george w bush had been rude about muslims he wasn't at all he went out of his way backwards yeah uh there was this perception uh that the republican party had decided that muslims were the cause of all the world's problems and the muslim vote swung back toward Democrats. But the argument that you heard in 2000 for George W. Bush over Al Gore was actually pretty much the argument that was on display in Dearborn,

which was the Republican Party is the party of social conservatives and Muslims are social conservatives, therefore. And, you know, the fight over international terrorism had for a long time overshadowed that but you you could be forgiven now for wondering if that's going to change again um you know the democrats are crazy on a lot of social issues and you know i'm somebody who is pro-life but is not in many other areas particularly socially conservative i'm not in favor of say the drug war um i'm a bit of a squish on criminal justice i've been in favor

of gay marriage forever um abortion is the one exception um the democratic party is far too social liberal for me because it has embraced all these bizarre theories. And yeah, if you're a devout Muslim, you probably do look at it now and say, well, do I belong here? So it would be very interesting if 22 years after this outreach effort, the Democrats begin to lose muslims again to a republican party for the same reason they began to lose them in 2000 just before 9-11 so i don't i don't know but i i can absolutely

see this this happening yeah right well i mean the the the the secret strategy winning strategy complicated winning strategy to all american politics is you have to appear to be less weird and less nuts than your opponent for about five more minutes than your opponent. That's kind of all you have to do. And what's so strange to me is just the relentless need of the Democrats to invent new things to be weird about things that we didn't even know were things five years ago four years ago two years ago that they've not only now sort of identified and and uh integrated into their political platform but they've gotten really weird about it too and i just find that's a very strange kind of a strange death drive i mean i don't know about it but it does seem like an organism trying to jump off a cliff and i call it their suicide machine and i've

written about this but the the reason it is particularly weird i haven't written about this is that it does work but it works among the people who don't vote and that is that i have noticed that if you go onto a college campus you will find people everywhere who will say well i i'm not really interested in voting republican because of the party's position on insert thing they hadn't thought about and no one in the world had thought about until 27 seconds ago right but those people don't vote so why do it one last thing that before we go to pitch charles podcast i'd like you to tell me as succinctly as possible why you think Mm hmm. So why do it? I say this because Charles, like myself, is a fan of Supertramp, an unjustly attacked band, which did some remarkable work and bridged the gap between progressive and pop in a way that few others have. With two disparate personalities whose warring intellects and ways of looking at the world eventually would rip everything apart.

And they were lesser alone than they were together. But Davies and Hodgson stand up there as a songwriting team that I think can hold their own against anybody else in their time and their genre. Am I right, Charles, or am I wrong? Well, so I have to say, James, I'm honestly not being coy here. I didn't know that they were disparaged. I didn't know that either. Well, welcome to the real world.

Yes, I think they are, I think in the same way that Punk, you know, wanted to dethrone the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac and everybody else. So all my favorite bands then. Right. I have a Supertramp

anecdote, which I'll share. Please do. I know we're running late, but I'm just going to share it anyway. Last night I met a bar restaurant that I love in New York City. It's called Neary's on 57th Street between 1st and 2nd. Old Irish bar has turned into kind of a slightly fancy, but not really, steakhouse.

The owner and presario of it, James Neary, died at 90, I think within the past six months. A great place, great bar. Big old Irish bartender, like the classic. You walk in, you know you're there. They kind of want you to wear a jacket if you're a guy. That's kind of what that's like. The guy taking the

coats and the bags is a drummer. When the night got thin and the bar crowd sort of stumbled out, he started talking about drummers and he and the bartender started talking about... And the playlist in the restaurant then entered a super tramp kind of vein so there was some super tramp in intermixed and we talked about super tramp a lot and how nobody listens to super

tramp anymore it's kind of echoing you and i told him this story about my godson we were driving back from the beach in santa barbara this is many many years ago at least 10 15 years ago and i had super tramp on uh and i on my phone i guess i had my phone hooked up at that point and um i was playing him super tramp breakfast in america and i think he was maybe 10 years old 10 or 11 years old and the dogs in the back were driving back and he looks at me and he says who are these guys this is the greatest album i've ever heard it was and it like i i remember listening to breakfast in america as the not i was thinking a little

older than he was at the time and thinking exactly the same thing uh-huh uh-huh no it's timeless james don't let this be one more burden on you to get to to contribute to your dour midwestern way of looking at the world are you kidding some of the most joyous moments of my life of him driving down the highway at excessive speed with the roof open and all the windows down and the guitar solo from Goodbye Stranger at the end of it playing in all of its one-note glory. I mean, that solo. I mean, he just starts with one note over and over and over again. Then he uses his phase pedal and his wah-wah to move it around. And it's just great.

And he's such a hippie. I mean, he's a long-haired, cosmic, Gaia-loving hippie. But, man, that thing rocks. And they fade it out because I don't know if they were short of space or he just ran out of ideas. But that fade is one of the saddest things because I just wanted to keep going forever and ever and ever. Maybe that's the point, to know that it's out there playing somewhere. And perhaps at some point you'll hear the rest of it. Maybe when we die or shut off the podcast.

I'm telling the producers, either go out with that solo, or just fade us all down like they do there. On a record where the band couldn't come up with a way to end the song. Charles C.W. Cook, listen to his podcast. Thank you again for sitting in for Peter. We'll see you next week. If Peter is waylaid somewhere, perhaps in a trunk, thanks to the Bregato Rossi. Rob Long in New York, ever great, always fun. And thanks, guys.

It's been a pleasure. We thank our sponsors, of course, Donors Trust, Harry's, and ExpressVPN. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0 next week, guys. Next week, fellas. Thank you. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Thank you.