The Ricochet Podcast - The Civil Wars

Episode Date: March 22, 2019

This week on America’s Most Beloved Podcast®, we meditate on the idea that Millennials (including one who was recently elected to Congress) feel as though they have never experienced American prosperity. Really. Then, the great Victor Davis Hanson joins to discuss his new book, The Case For Trump, and gets on a certain podcast host’s case for not…well, just listen. Finally, we call on Electoral... Source

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Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lilex, and today we talk to Victor Davis Hanson and Tara Ross about the Electoral College. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, and it happens to be number 440. I don't know what things were like during number one, but I know that they're grim now for the youth of America. They're downcast. They're miserable. They turn their tear-streaked faces

to the shining light of socialism in the sky, which breaks through the dark clouds of their lives. All of their existence, these millennials – oh, gosh. Peter, Rob, listen to this. Charlotte Alter is previewing a piece that she wrote about AOC. And I have to mention that it's OC, not just C because it's racist to say just the C. And she said that AOC – grab your towels, tissues, guys – were born in the same year. She was a dunkaroos kid. I liked fruit roll-ups.

People our age have never experienced American prosperity in our adult lives, and that is why so many millennials are embracing socialism, democratic socialism. So guys, do you think this is necessarily the case that millennials who in their adult lives, 24, 25, 26, have discovered that saddling themselves with an erroneous amount of debt in order to get a degree that prepares them for absolutely nothing and then living in a city where the cost of living has been driven up by democratic policies for 40 years and being unable to really do anything of consequence because they don't know how to do anything of consequence. But yet they are surrounded by the prosperity that results from people who are doing things of consequence, and they somehow believe that they are living in an impoverished place. Can you help me with this? Can you help me? Can't help you with it, James. You nailed it. What's interesting, of course, is that that is the truth, is that, I mean, in a way, I don't know how old she is, but it has been. We had a calamitous financial event in 2008, and it did sort of remind people that things aren't inexorably going to move upward and to the right.

The irony is that those very people were telling us and tell us now that despite – that if we say, well, the Trump economy is – what is it? 3.3 unemployment, 3.3 percent unemployment, economic growth. Well, that started under Obama. The prosperity part started under Obama. So sometimes we were very prosperous for eight years and sometimes we weren't. It just all depends. The reality is that America

is incredibly prosperous. And the world is incredibly prosperous. The world is so much better than it was 20 years ago or 10 years ago or 5 years ago. And it is better predominantly because of American leadership in the 20th century and 21st century. I grew up in the 70s and I just – I mean I would never have said anything as stupid as that in 1980.

Because even though we had diminished economic circumstances and we were worried about the future and the rest of it, the idea that this was not – we're not surrounded by prosperity and participating in prosperity would have been absurd and that was 1979 78 what is what i'm just trying to think out how the lack of historical i i don't mean historical knowledge that aoc doesn't have a history i mean just the kind of historical understanding that you would ordinarily expect a reasonably bright person of her age millennial to to develop just by talking to family members and neighbors what how can this be maybe so james when you and i were in college your your dad certainly grandparents remembered the depression right they remembered they remembered the World War. They remembered what it was like. The 50s were this great time when you could get work. You could get work. So this notion that

even during the 70s, when the country was experiencing inflation, which was very disconcerting to people, there's absolutely no doubt about it. But there were gas lines because people had cars. And just a quarter of a century before a car was something for the upper middle class and above ordinary working people very seldom had i just ran into my friend david brady who's a just retired professor of political science here dave brady grew up in kankakee illinois once one of six kids in an irish family his dad worked down at the mill the general general mills mill and they did not own a car david david brady left so where is the how can you say the lack of understanding of the growth and buoyance in this country is just

astounding it's twofold and part of it when you say that uh you know the the upper class had the car and that it was a change when everybody did, they will point to this as something that is very wrong about America. The standard narrative that all of us I believe accept, which is of individual choice and liberty, living where you want, driving where you want, all of those things, to them is anathema. It's part of the corruption of America, the way the GM made all the transit systems go out of know so that they could sell more cars and the rest of it that their society was destroyed and the environment was destroyed by the car so they won't even accept that basic term the terms that we have for defining what constitutes a prosperous and happy civilization is not the same set that they have because they have this adolescent need to believe that they are at the absolute end of history in a bad sense and nothing will get better unless radical revolution takes bear it takes place and rips out

root and branch the things that are wrong which is patriarchy white supremacy heterosex you know all of the isms that they subscribe to and it's romantic nonsense it's yes but there's nobody to it's unfalsifiable because it's never been tried so when we do it it'll work and it'll work great but they don't know exactly what it is except right it is more of the state right who's who's controlled right that's what it doesn't but that does happen i mean that does happen you can say that it you know obviously the country took a gigantic step left uh in the wake or the throes of the great depression um huge step left i mean these are these throes of the Great Depression. Huge step left. I mean, these are unthinkable policies for the federal government to take on, unthinkable entitlements

the federal government took on in the 30s and 40s, unthinkable entitlements the government took on in the 1960s. I personally believe that some of those bailouts and some of those guarantees that we made in the wake of 2008 were also unthinkable federal interventions in – You mean unthinkable before the economic crisis that suddenly made them thinkable. Right. Or unfortunately, they're all too thinkable. A lot of those people believe they were going to be backstopped by the federal – by the taxpayers, and they were. So, I mean, it isn't wrong to suggest that the country often, when something calamitous happens, turns left. But it is – it's the height of ingratitude, of historical ingratitude to think about 2019 America or 2010 America or even 2008 America as anything but historically a paradise.

I mean an absolute paradise with untold opportunity and untold wealth for the lowest rung American lives better than the middle class American did 100 years ago. And that's just statistically not arguable. You may say that Ms. Alter's piece is just a one-off. Oh, sure, it's the cover of Time. But I found something that was brought to me by Dig today. It's in Splinter, which apparently is part of the A.V. Club, Deadspin, Gizmodo, all those places. It's by a guy named Hamilton Nolan,

who apparently during the last presidential campaign was traveling through Iowa. He has decided to go back to Iowa and see what the hellscape is there now, and his hook is to go to a different pizza ranch restaurant in every Iowa city that he goes to. And let me tell you, he doesn't like the food. But if you think that maybe he can get something larger out of a Christian-run franchise pizza restaurant chain, you're absolutely right. Steal yourself, gentlemen. This is where we live today.

He wrote, pizza hot, it turns out, is just like America itself. Begun unnaturally in the strength of an unlikely idea, it is alluring from the outside. Toys, flashing lights, abundance. The consumer choice is dazzling. begun unnaturally in the strength of an unlikely idea. It is alluring from the outside. Toys, flashing lights, abundance. The consumer choice is dazzling. But after a while, what once seemed like endless options are shown to be smaller and less thrilling than you thought. The longer you spend inside, the more you feel a nauseous, repugnant feeling creeping into your gut.

The edges of life's buffet are revealed to be prison walls. And over time, your motive will evolve from greed to a deep desire for escape. That's how he sees America. A poisonous buffet inside of a prison. Who is this? Hamilton Nolan, a lefty scribe

writing for Splinter, the inheritor to Gawker. He was a Gawker guy, which is not surprising. So there you have it. I mean, this goes beyond we need to fight for 15. This goes to the essential unsustainability and evil inherent in the very American experiment itself. He should – I mean Mueller should investigate him because this is an in-kind contribution to the Trump 2020 campaign. Well, what I loved was I took a look at the map at where this pizza ranch in Iowa City that he was sitting in was, the one that he could not escape from, the pizza ranch that was a metaphor for America itself. Well, there was a taqueria right

across the street. There was a Culver's, as a matter of fact. It's got a pretty good burger. If you wanted a better artisanal pizza, you could walk about four or five blocks and you could get that. Then again, he was right by the airport, so he could have gotten on a plane and hopped to any place else in the country that had a different buffet option than the Pizza Ranch that he wants to make for a metaphor for America. You want to make Pizza Ranch a metaphor for America? I'm happy to do so. I don't want to eat there, but the very fact that it exists and flourishes and the fact that this guy could have walked to Walmart if he wanted to at 3 in the morning and gotten himself ingredients to make a far better pizza than he did. That this country provides good, fresh vegetables at 3 o'clock in the morning because you wake up and

feel like you want to make a pizza on your own and it's there but yet this is the worst bleeping place on earth the the audacious selfish you know rumple stiltskinism miserable ingratitude of these gets sometimes is what gets to me and it's it's you know it's not the fact of the criticism it's just it's the ahistorical mindlessness of it and the presumption of course that things have never been worse okay can i just add one thing although two things one is that this is uh i feel like i'm in a time machine and reliving my first introduction to james lilacs when you wrote that you fisked that piece about the Olive Garden, which we should re we'll,

we'll put links in the show notes. Cause it's a, it's a, it's a staggering, staggeringly brilliant piece. But the second thing I would just say is that the problem with all of these, the, the problem with all these arguments is that they insist that there is

something unique and dramatic and dramatically important about their time that their time in history yes is unique and dramatic not as we used to think about in the past not because it's calling on them to sacrifice or calling on them to build something it's that it's unique because they are uniquely victimized by the times. They are uniquely weakened by 2019. And that is a very, very different – I mean ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. We're going to put a man on the moon or even since then, the idea that young people

don't have – you're not supposed to sit in a room and categorize and catalog your weaknesses and your victim status. You're instead supposed to go out and build something and create something. And it just seems so beneath these people, especially these young people who have actually managed to accomplish something. I mean Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in Congress. She did a pretty amazing thing. I mean, she is an example of great opportunity in this country. I celebrate her success. That's great. Good for her. And this Charlotte Alter is, you know, she's the daughter of a very prominent journalist and she's been born to privilege and born to access. And the idea that she's going to waste some breath or some time trying to compare herself or her lot to something bad is just kind of kind of like not done, I mean, in a way. Like if you're – you know what I mean? Like you're blessed. You should be grateful. This should not inspire you to self-pity.

It should inspire you to great, great things. Go build something. Shut up and go build something is what i would say well just for any listeners who may be in any doubt uh for rob long rob long of handover and yale to say that something is not done is a thunder i'm sorry i don't have a code of conduct i have never heard him so i so outraged on this how true it you know and if if they want to go out and do something these days, there are lots of opportunities and lots of resources. I mean somebody in my parents' generation had to go cap and hand to the bank, twisting their threadbare little head covering in their hands nervously while they waited for the guy behind the big desk with a monocle to examine their balance sheet and find them wanting. No, sir. We shall not lend you $400 for your endeavor.

Don't make us laugh. You have nothing to put up. Be gone. We all saw that scene in however many movies. I mean, and the idea that kids today who live in a world where they literally can get somebody to loan them money online, just online, I guess they assume that that's just the way it's always been and always will be.

Speaking of which. You can't do that, though. I mean, let's not write science fiction. It's just impossible to do. Science fiction would be hooking your head up to some brain oscillator, and then some credits would clatter out of the replicator. No, this is not like that yet, but close. Lending club, that's what I'm telling you about. Now, for decades, the credit card companies, you know what they've been telling you?

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check your rate and in minutes, and you can borrow up to $40,000. That's LendingClub.com slash Ricochet, LendingClub.com slash Ricochet. All loans made by WebBank, member FDIC, equal housing lender. And our thanks to LendingClub for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Victor Davis Hanson, Martin and Ellie Anderson, And our thanks to Lending Club for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. So, you know, a lot of your book isn't about Trump so much as the divide between the two Americas. I was talking to a friend who clearly admits gleefully that she has Trump derangement syndrome. And I was saying to her, you know, you listen to what he says and you get very spun up about it. The people that I know in North Dakota, my family, they don't care what he says. They really don't.

They shrug it off. What matters to them is that the economy is booming and that the other party wants to literally take our family's livelihood away through legislative action and in the absence of that. So they don't understand exactly what my friends in North Dakota, my family, they don't understand why their concerns, their worldview is anathema, is almost beneath contempt of those people on the slivers of the coasts. This to Americas, you've had experience with it. How do we bridge it? Well, it's going to be very difficult because it's not just geographical, but it's economic and cultural.

And I think what's happened is global evasion did a lot of good things. And it's basically Westernization, but it, it set the standard that if you had muscular labor or you produced things like food or minerals or timber or you Democrats. And then anything that couldn't, like high tech or financing, media, the fortunes, the new fortunes that have emerged in Google or Bloomberg or Warren Buffett or Microsoft, then they had a sudden 7 billion person market. That was okay. But what happened is as one area got poor and one got richer, there became, and the richer one was on the coast, the historical nexus for cosmopolitanism,

they created a, they reversed cause and effect. And they almost said, well, we're rich and we're powerful. And because we go to Harvard or Stanford or Yale or we live on the Upper West Side or we have Atherton or what Bill Maher said the other day about food and neighborhoods and you guys sort of took opiates and drove away all of your industries and that's where we are now. It's a very dangerous thing because anything in the time of American history when cultural or political differences take on a geographical element, as we saw in the 1850s. And what lies ahead can be pretty scary. You mentioned the food. I mean, yes, the cities cannot exist without Nebraska, without North Dakota, without what we give them.

But instead of being grateful, there seems to be this sense, well, we have to extend our rule over them. We have to make the Senate representational. We have to make the Senate representational. We have to eliminate the Electoral College. We have to bend the entire city to the will of a few metropolitan areas. Do they think that this is actually going to work? No one will be happy with it, but do they think that they can do it? I mean they obviously think it's the best thing to do. No, I don't know, although they're very deluded.

I mean Beto O'Rourke said yesterday he ate dirt after the election. So I'm not – I don't know what although they're very deluded. I mean, Beto O'Rourke said yesterday he ate dirt after the election. So I'm not I don't know what they're capable of. But I think what's happened is their agenda as it's shaping up and they're going to try to tag who was ever the nominee. I don't know how the nominee will get through the debates in the primaries without being tagged with reparation, veritable infanticide, abortion, wealth tax, 90% income tax rate, open borders. They want to abolish everything, abolish ICE, abolish student debt, abolish electoral college, Medicare for everybody. That agenda never pulls 51% on any particular issue. And they know that.

And so they feel that in California during the last midterm, they vote harvested. They flipped about eight seats after the election was over that they had supposedly lost through absentee vote harvesting. And they feel that if you get felons to vote in Florida or 16-year-olds to vote in California, you vote harvest or you change the electoral college or you allow amnesties for people coming across the border to vote. What I'm getting at is if you don't have the right vote, then you have to change the way you vote and who the voters are. And if you can do that, then this agenda that I referenced that's not popular might be permissible or acceptable or palatable. And the other fallback position was that if you don't have the agenda, then you say Donald Trump is fill in the blanks and you try the emoluments clause and the 25th Amendment

or sue for the voting machine or try to influence the electors not to vote the way they were supposed to, the Mueller investigation, that pathetic McCabe, Rosenstein, pseudo-coup, or whatever it is, but that doesn't seem to have worked. So now they have to come up with a positive message, and that positive message in the vernacular ain't so positive. So you change the system, because what's behind it all is the idea that they have a nobility and a quality of result, moral superiority that allows any means necessary to achievement. It's the old historical mantra of the left.

Victor Peter here. Yeah. How – the book is called The Case for Trump and you and I will be recording a whole episode of Uncommon Knowledge on the book on April 1st I think it is. So I haven't got all my – all the arguments from the book lined up in my mind or I'm certainly not on paper in front of me just now but I'm struck as I read the book that it could almost be titled The Case for the People Who Voted for Trump. Is that an accurate reading? Yeah, that reflects a lot of the titles that I sent in. Oh, I see. Okay, the publisher wanted to. Okay.

The publisher wasn't wrong. The Case for Trump is selling. You're right up there in the New York Times bestseller list. Okay. You're wrong. The case for Trump to sell is selling. You're right up there in the New York Times bestseller list. a deep-seated anger, both at Democrats and Republicans, but at the Republican message. I mean, Trump was a doctrinaire conservative, and 80% of his messages of tax reduction, defense spending, strict constructionist judges, more oil and gas, bringing the universities to account, all that was, everybody agreed with that before he got missing. What separated him were those four signature, five signature

issues. China is not fated to take over the world and can be stopped. Asymmetrical, unfair trade is not going to be allowed under the rubric of free trade. The open border will destroy sovereignty because immigration is not legal, it's not measured, it's not meritocratic, and it's not diverse. And when we go over abroad to get in these optional engagements, let's make sure that strategic resolution in our favor is achieved by tactical victory. If it's not, then we have to analyze it in the cost-benefit. And then finally, it's not fated that Detroit's always going to be Detroit or Cleveland's always going to be Cleveland, that that hollowed out interior can be brought back with symmetrical trade and cheap energy, et cetera, et cetera. And then he added the messenger to it. And that was, I'm not a Marcus of Queensborough Republican. I won't rule out as John McCain did, Reverend Wright, or I won't be like Mitt Romney and Grimace when Candy Crawley hijacks that second debate.

And people, for some reason, they wanted chemotherapy to kill the perceived cancer. It made them a little sick. The latest example of – as I understand it, as I follow it, the never Trumpers started with all kinds of arguments against Trump, one of which was he's not an authentic conservative. You just discussed that point. Another was he'll be bad. He's not going to be – he'll disappoint everybody. He'll raise – and the economy is booming and wages are rising. All right. So what they're left with now is that he is coarsening the political culture.

He's coarsening the country itself. And here's the latest example. For the last two or three days now, Donald Trump has been attacking a dead man, a dead hero, the late John McCain. And Brit Hume, who is a more than decent man, a fine broadcaster, and as far as I can tell, a pretty thoroughgoing conservative, tweeted just this morning, it's the first time he can recall a president of the United States ever taking on a dead man and losing. All right, you get the picture. This is Trump in some ways that is worst, and it's now the principal argument of the never Trumpers against him. How do you deal with that argument? With that behavior?

Well, I mean, well, I don't condone it. I'm critical of it. I gave an interview this morning. I was critical of it. that his crude or coarseness is so unique in past presidential history or it's so foul that it cancels out his agenda, you have to make a couple of assumptions. The things that he does and says, did LBJ do that?

Why he was president? Did John F. Kennedy? Did, I don't know, Barack Obama? I mean, Peggy Noonan wrote an article saying that he created this new discourse that created Omar and Representative Tlaib. And there's no evidence. I mean, we're coming off 2006 and 2008. We're in the Congress. Everybody was calling George Bush a Nazi, a brown shirt.

And where was John Wilkes Booth when you needed him? And let's write a novel about how to kill him. So he didn't create this climate. As far as McCain, it's a very unwise thing for him to do that. You know, as you said, as we say in Latin, nihil dicule nisi bonum de mortis, don't ever say anything about the dead unless it's good. I agree with that. But they had a long feud that goes way back. And I mean, the terrible thing that Trump said about McCain's service, they should capture rather than decapture, was a reply to a terrible thing that McCain said.

He called his supporters crazy. A very nice thing to say about people who sincerely had their hopes invested in Trump. And then they went back and forth again. And then McCain took a dossier that was unverified right after the election, before the president even had a chance to rule. And he gave it to his assistant, and they seeded it in the federal bureaucracies with the intent of destroying Donald Trump. And then McCain ran in the primary on the premise that Obamacare would be his signature campaign, the repeal of Obamacare. I can show you the speeches he gave.

As soon as he got reelected and it was convenient to hurt Trump again, he did it. And then during the funeral of McCain. Meaning that McCain was the one vote that prevented the Republicans from repealing Obamacare outright. Got it. And he completely flipped, not on principle, but of personal animus to Trump, like an understanding of animus. Nevertheless, he did. And that destroyed the entire effort of Republicans and millions of people's chance to get out of that burden of Obamacare. It was a terrible thing to do.

And then I went back and looked at the tape of the Paul Wellstone funeral, and I looked at the tape of the McCain funeral, and they were not that dissimilar. They turned that solemn occasion, we're talking about solemn, into a, I mean, Meghan McCain had a virulent attack, and she didn't mention Trump by name, but on Trump, so did Obama and Bush. And so what I'm getting at is Trump doesn't understand that when he goes tit for tat, he has legitimate arguments, but you don't do it when somebody is dead and you don't do it when you have a positive record of economic and foreign policy achievement. just 590 days before the election. It's politically stupid. It's culturally insensitive. But you can see why he does this thing. He creates this, if you attack me, I'm going to, you hit me, I'm going to hit you twice. And that's what he does with everybody. Sometimes it's effective, sometimes it's not.

I will say, though, not so much in his defense, but after writing this book, it's been out, I think, 12 days or 13 and being called a racist, a sexist by The New York Times and New Yorker, a veritable Nazi and Heidegger who wrote on behalf of Trump, Hitler, by Gabe Schoenfeld and the Boer. where I can see what it would be like just to take that one million every single day and have people try to abort your presidency through all of these things. I mean, we never, no more stop the discussion of his cholesterol count. Then he has to recite by memory, something to prove that he's not crazy. And then we're told, you know, that he's made millions, even though he lost a billion dollars since he's been president. So every single day it's something and it's Hitler, burn, kill, stomp, tear apart, cut off his head if you're a celebrity. And so at some point,

you hope that someone says to him, don't Trump, they're never going to like you. You're like Shane or High Noon or Ethan Edwards and the Searchers. You came in to do a job, do it, but don't ever expect, given your character and your vocation, they're going to like you. You have no political or military experience prior to being president. Come in, fix the problem right off in the sunset. And I think that's probably what's going to happen. I don't think he's ever going to be invited to a funeral of ex-presidents. He's not going to be a sober and judicious wise man. president were Jimmy Carter and Jerry Ford between 1973 and 79. They were wonderful people. They told the truth by and large. They were not too vindictive. They were, and I can tell you as someone who worked with my parents farming those years and went to school,

I cannot think of a more dismal, miserable economy between 1974 and 79. I cannot think of a more pathetic foreign policy. And I saw a lot of lives ruined. And I look out the window as I'm speaking, I see the skyline of my little town. It's booming. And I see people who say, six employers tried to hire me today.

Can you believe that, Victor? But that in a weird way is a moral act. In Selma, the Central Valley is booming? Really? It is, despite California. Yeah, I mean, it was wiped out under globalization. The Poohawk trailer shut down. The Upright Harvester shut down.

The Del Monte Camry shut down. The Calcan shut down. And now there's new housing going in, and there's construction. There's manufacturing. And there's a big, there's a big upbeat optimism. Somebody did that. I'm not saying Trump did it all, but does that mean that a bad, a bad tweeter or rude, crude person can do good things? Did we want Omar Bradley to run the Third Army rather than George Patton?

Would it have been better for General Hansel to stay in command, the B-29 program, so we didn't have that loud, grotesque Curtis LeMay with his cigar. I don't know, but what I'm trying to suggest is there's certain times when sterling character and effective leadership are not synonymous. I wish they always were, but they're not. Victor, our own cigar chomping Curtis LeMay, Rob Long, now wants to hear. Yeah. Hey, Victor. Thanks for – so I mean I guess – Trump is so problematic for me because I just think he's so yucky. And I mean yes, and it always makes me happy when I hear you say, yes, he's yucky. So what?

Because I think, OK, well, at least we're on the same square there. But I guess my – I have a larger question, which is – Look, can I just preempt you just a second? Yeah. Tell me somebody who wasn't yucky. Yeah, I know. I know. I know. It's just constant. Barack Obama.

I hear you. I think you're talking about the frequency. He's so frequently yucky. The lowness of it. The lowness of it. The lowness of it. Like there's no part of him. He hasn't called people teabaggers yet. No.

Homosexual, homophobic slur, get in your face, or take a gun to a knife fight, or punish. I can go on. No, I hear you. I hear you. I'm not even pushing back on it. Yes, I hear you. I just – I don't know. It just hits me differently. It's just a taste thing, I guess. I hear you. I hear you. I'm not I'm not even pushing back on it. Yes, I hear you. I just I don't know. It just hits me differently. I just it's just a taste thing, I guess. Whatever. But the larger issue for me is just or larger question I have for you is this is that it isn't really accurate to say that the hollowed out parts of the rust belt were because of globalism i mean as a conservative we

have to say they're because of um you know there's certain that may be part of it but even if we get tough with china um and i think we and i mean at least we have a president i'll give you that who's talking tough with china i think he's talking tough on the wrong issues. But OK, just he's in there swinging. We're not going to get Detroit back and we're not going to get parts of Ohio back. And some plants are even closing in Ohio. Some plants are closing in Ohio because of his trade policies. So it's not exactly the same thing. But we haven't had middle class wages go up in 10 years. They went up 3 percent. So it's not exactly the same thing. But we got close to annualized 3% GDP. We hadn't had that in 10 years. We've never had in 70 years peacetime unemployment at 3.7, which we achieved last year.

So it is changing. And when China is running up with $600 billion trade surplus, Germany is – here's what I'm getting at. They're running up that trade surplus based on patent infringement, copyright infringement, dumping, technological appropriation. I don't like tariffs either, but you just say, please don't do that. That's what we did. And Germany is running a $65 billion surplus and can't even spend 2% of its huge economy to meet its NATO obligations. Mexico is running a $71 billion trade surplus and getting $30 billion in addition in remittances, 50% of whom are the people sending them

are in state assistance, but we're subsidizing. So that does affect those people in those states. And when I go to Hillsdale on the hollowed out Southern Michigan landscape every year, I can see a big difference. The last two years alone, maybe it's psychological. Maybe people thought,

if I hear you didn't build that, now it's not the time to profit. At some point you may have did. Yeah, okay, I agree with that. And they hear another message. Things are changing. I don't, as a historian, I don't believe that decline is always faded. It's usually, it's not, it's not a-speed rail and China airports, Chinese religious intolerance, Chinese racism. All of that came – it's like somebody pulled their finger out of the dike and all this stuff came out.

Yeah, somebody did turn a switch on it. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that the benefit of a free economy and what we have is that it's flexible. And so we don't get trapped. No, I agree. But I don't I don't think he's managing the economy. I don't. What I very quickly, because I know we were running. Everybody I know went broke here in the San Joaquin Valley. And when we had a delegation of the Reagan administration come out, whom I like, and

I work at a place with Milton Friedman, I canonize his memory. But I was told that it was pretty good when raisins fell from 1,400 to 400. Here's what I was told. A, consumers will have a cheaper product. B, the tough will survive and they'll be more efficient. They'll make a profit on 400 and you can't and see the people who are subsidizing raisins in europe i.e greek raisins uh won't be sustainable and as i said to them at the time well maybe this what this shaping up of the eu won't be sustainable but we'll be dead when it's unsustainable maybe

corporate america will buy all of our farms off but but I'm, again, looking at 360 degree, and I can tell you, in my general vicinity, two people committed suicide. There's a crack house about a quarter mile away, and of the 12 farms, including my brothers, all went broke. Their lives haven't been very nice. But of all the 12 family farms, every one of them is broke. The communities are devastated. They're all run by corporate latifundia. And we have illegal aliens living in almost every home here who are working for very low wages. So my point is, I believe in creative destruction. But my problem is that we always talk in the abstract about it, but we never go to the people who suffer.

And this crazy millionaire, billionaire comes into places like West Virginia and he'll, he says, well, you know, coal's going to go broke. You're going to lose your job. He says, I love big, beautiful coal. He goes into the Midwest and he says, our farmers, our steelwork. I never heard Ronnie say our, he said 47% of you on the, on the dole. And I can never convince you that was a very stupid thing to say for a,-of-work guy who depended on Social Security disability or something. So I'm not defending all of Trump. I'm just trying to tell people when I wrote the book that Trump, he didn't create this. He was created by a pre-existing wanting or absence of empathy in the Republican Party.

And that never trumped people. Every time I see them, I think, you know, these guys are some of the brightest people I met. I know, but I would just like to take them for one month and put them on a tractor for $12 an hour and see if they could do it. Just one month. The people I think we're talking about,

you would never want to pay $12 an hour to do that. They would not earn it, Victor. I'd like to take their kids and put them in the Selma school where my kids went. And then I'd like to hear all of the beauty of diversity. And I'm talking about a person who loves Mexican-American people. I love all different minorities. But I tell you, when you put your child in a school that's a third illegal aliens from Oaxaca, Mexico, it's not going to be Sid Wolf Friend, believe me. I have a vision right now. needs a wall but every time i go to washington i just got back in a suburb sorry went to san francisco everybody seemed to have wall and that's what made tron that idea that our elite never lived by the consequences of their own ideology now i have an image of bill crystal uh behind the wheel

of a tractor like eddie albert and green acres bobbing along although they'd probably be stunned to find that the, you know, the, the, the, the track, the member told us bill crystal told us, uh, if they're, these guys are so lazy, he said it in AEI quoted him in the book. And these guys are so lazy. Why do we really want them around when we can swap them out for legal, legal immigrants? Or he didn't even say legal from the immigrant, something that Brett Stevens joked about. Max Boone was very angry because i quoted him but

he said the same thing about uh i think he called them cowardly republicans that could be swapped out he says he meant only republican senators that's not what he wrote so there was a whole genre of let's get rid of these superfluous losers and let's get some better people in and that doesn't go down well with people. These coastal cultures should go out to Bakersfield and Tulare and then stand on the corner and start espousing their theories and see what happens. find our credentials. Not because of Trump per se, but if you can get economic growth and you don't have the requisite degrees and experience, that kind of is a referendum on people who do. So I don't think the paradigm of going to Harvard Law School or Yale Law School anymore is synonymous with doing very well as president is what I'm trying to say.

Right. Well, I'll let you go. I'll let you go to this and push back a little bit on what was Rob was saying. Maybe car manufacturing is not going to come back to Detroit and Ohio, but we have a tremendous boom in energy. As a matter of fact, there's huge infrastructure projects that are going on right now to dredge and permit us to ship liquid natural gas to places where we didn't do it before, which hurts Putin, which is wonderful for us,

which is big brawny stuff that takes guys swinging hammers. And it's not because Trump said... Well, farming is... No, I know you're right. We're going to be the largest, not just producer we are now, but exporter, apparently, of gas and oil. And you're absolutely right about that. But it's not because Trump sat down and said,

this is my vision of an energy policy. It's more because we have the ability, we're letting things happen as opposed to using the levers of government and the rhetoric to keep them from happening. And that's what a lot of people. No, you're absolutely right. He created a climate. First thing he did was he said, you can open up an war and you have federal lease, more federal leases on federal land that create a climate. Anyway, I,

I guess I got to go. Yeah, well, you know, we all can understand you're a farm guy, so you know that Rob may think that Trump's rhetoric is icky, but icky ought to be referred perhaps to walking into a chicken coop barefoot because that's a whole different standard. That's icky. Well, I agree with that. Okay, you guys.

All right, Victor. Talk to you later. Victor, take care. Yeah. Victor Davis Hanson, you guys. All right, Victor. Okay. Talk to you later. Victor, take care. Yeah. Victor Davis Hanson, the author of The Case for Trump. Lots of fun. Robert, you were mixing it up there. That was –

Not really. I mean you can't really mix it up with Victor. But I do like the idea that we – I love Victor. We've had him on a bunch of times. And this is the only time he's ever been hopeful. It's like Victor – remember he – come on. I probably – this is during Obama. And it was just like, oh my god.

Come on, Victor. There's some sunshine somewhere, right? And then – and now he sees sunshine in a place that he was convinced was gone. I mean I don't – I don't i mean i i'm you're right i'm too much of a small c conservative i cannot ascribe i do not ascribe progress to a president any president and i don't ascribe that to this president or or anything i mean i just just i just don't do it the economy is humming though the economy is humming and it's coming for reasons partly i think they have something to do with i think they have a lot to do with donald trump but i think they have a lot

more to do with 2010 they have a lot more to do with the fact that uh the most liberal progressive socialist president we could ever have imagined at the time got stopped dead yes yes yes um he got one big thing and that one big thing is super problematic in a lot of ways, but, um, well, you're right.

I mean, Victor has been, it has been, uh, I wouldn't say depressing in the past, but there's a stoic calm that he's always had. Like, like somebody who was sitting regarding the,

the, the slaughtered troops on an endless plane in some old Greek battle. Still calm and centered as the man is. He doesn't suffer from that worldwide epidemic we call stress, does he, Rob? No, he doesn't. He doesn't. He doesn't seem stressed out about anything. No, and I'm sure that he's working longer hours.

Like, you're working longer hours. Stress is one of those things that's impossible to really... Well, you'd think so. Stress is just it. You just have to accept it. It's like decline. The constant news cycle. You know, everybody's connected to really to – I mean stress is just it. You just have to accept it. It's like decline. The constant news cycle. You know, everybody's connected to this.

You're tweeting. Everything is always revving you up and spinning you around. Oh, stress. Yeah, it's a part of life. But it can be very easily done away with because you don't want stress to affect your overall well-being. Do you, Rob? Do you, Peter? No, you don't.

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And our thanks to Calm for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. Now, come the general election, presidential candidates don't come to places like Mississippi. Yeah. They also don't come to places like Mississippi. Yeah. They also don't come to places like California and Massachusetts, right? Because we're not the battleground states. Well, my view is that we can have national voting and that

means get rid of the electoral college and everybody. I tell you when it comes to the old standing constitutional norms some of the Democrats are starting to sound like those farm kids who would stick an M-80 up a bullfrog's butt. It is not good. So we need to talk about exactly what we're talking about getting rid of. And that's why we have Tara Ross on the program. We're glad to have Tara.

She's the author of The Indispensable Electoral College, How the Founders Plan Saves Our Country from Mob Rule. Tara, why do you hate democracy? Why do I hate democracy? Because it is mob rule. That's why. Our founders were never trying to create a pure democracy. They did want to be self-governing, of course. They had just fought a whole American revolution over the concept of self-governance. But they knew something that we forget too often today, which is that even if they had been given a seat at the table in Parliament, they still would have been outvoted time and time again by the majority of citizens at home in England. knew this. They knew that it's not always enough just to have a simple vote. The modern example is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. That's democracy. So they understood this dynamic and they wanted something better. How can you be self-governing but balance the need

to give large minority groups within a country a voice so that they aren't trampled by a bear or emotional mob? The very thing you said about minority groups, of course, we're being told that Madison believed the Electoral College was evil and that it was there to enshrine and perpetuate slavery. That's the line that's going around these days. Well, if you can demonize the Electoral College as the byproduct of slavery, you could get rid of it easier, right? So that's why they're saying that. But it's not true. It's literally, if you read the notes of the convention and go through it, they don't talk about it. What you see is you see large states on one side, small states on the other. And they're going back and forth talking about how to balance power between the two.

And the small states are telling the large states over and over again in various ways. We don't trust you. You will run over us. You will trample us. The president will be your choice, not ours. And that is the dynamic that you see. Now, I should emphasize here that some large states were slave-owning states, some were not. Some small states were slave-owning states, and some were not. And the breakdown is always between large and small, not between slave and not slave. Hey, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining us. But isn't it already that? I mean, look, if you get

California and Texas and New York and Florida, you're getting electoral votes and you're getting popular votes. I mean, isn't that isn't that sort of what's happening anyway? I mean, I guess what I'm trying to say is what's the gambit here? The gambit for the Elizabeth Warrens of the world is that they're going to they're going to get the votes that they don't get in Texas. Well, I mean, there's the way they try to sell it. And I guess there's what's going to actually happen. They say things like, if you're a Democrat in Texas, now you're going to have your

voice heard all of a sudden, or if you're a Republican in California, New York, oh, guess what? Your voice can finally be heard. But what I think will actually happen is that the dynamic that say, if you're a Republican in New York and you're complaining because your voice is lost, just drowned out by New York City, they're going to take that dynamic that already exists in New York State, and they're going to make it bigger so that it covers the whole country. And now instead of just being ignored in their own state, we can all be ignored together. They will just make a bigger problem. And it's puzzling to me that people will claim the opposite and they will say, no, no, I promise, you know, all you people in the, you know, fly over red country, your voice will be greater,

it will be more heard. Well, no, if you take a presidential candidate and you tell them the biggest prize goes to the person who can get the most individuals on board, guess what? They're going to go where the most individuals reside because that's where the biggest prize lies. It's just common sense. And it's a function of presidential candidates don't have enough time and resources to go to places out of the goodness of their heart or based on some idealistic notion of fairness. They're going to do what is efficient. That seems like a strange metric, isn't it? The idea that a presidential candidate doesn't come here, so therefore your voice isn't heard. But she was wrong even about that. Wasn't Elizabeth Warren in that clip with which we opened, wasn't she just

flatly mistaken? Mississippi has a population of under 3 million people. Absent the Electoral College, Mississippi is precisely what every presidential candidate would ignore. Not only did she get it wrong, she got it exactly wrong. Well, I mean, I would contend, I don't think anybody's ignored. I think that some people make up their minds early in the process. I think some people make up their minds or some states make up their minds late in the process, but it doesn't make anybody not heard or not important. It just means some states are relatively satisfied at different points in time. But really, if you look at what happened historically, the identity of safe and clean states is constantly changing. There's a bunch

of southern states that voted for Bill Clinton that won't touch Barack Obama with a 10-foot pole, you know? Or if you look at Utah in 2016, a state that was supposed to be safe, red, little, a safe little red state, and it started to, you know, make noises like maybe it wasn't so happy anymore. Well, Mike Pence was quickly dispatched out to Utah in the closing days of the 2016 election to save the small, safe, red state. There's a whole bunch of states that were supposed to be part of the blue wall that Hillary Clinton could count on that she took for granted. Well, and they reminded her that was a big mistake. You know, you can go to West Virginia in 2000 was supposed to vote for Al Gore.

They were a safe blue state. They completely changed on a dime. And now they're a safe red state. States make their opinions known. They have opinions. And if they're relatively satisfied and they're doing OK, they probably make up their mind early in the process and we think of them as safe states, but it doesn't mean they have to stay that way and it doesn't mean they were unimportant. Tara, Ross Douthat tweeted just a couple days ago, Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and a friend of everybody who's talking right now. The electoral college has its advantages, but its defenders, he's talking to you, Tara, its defenders need to recognize that too frequent popular versus electoral mismatches

are one of the more plausible catalysts for a regime crisis. In other words, right up until, what, George W. Bush in the election of 2000, we had had, what, four presidential elections in all of American history where the Electoral College gave victory to a candidate who did not win the popular vote. And now we've had two of them in just a decade and a half. The system just can't take it, Tara. What do you make of that argument? Well, I would actually note that of the elections where there was a discrepancy, two of them occurred right after the Civil War. And I actually think we're in a period of time that is very analogous to that in many ways. There were close elections. There was a lot of anger.

There was a lot of division. There seemed to be kind of permanent divides between certain portions of the country. I would argue that, and then by the way, we came out of it. We came out on the other side and had landslide victories for FDR or whoever. I would argue, look, sometimes you get in these places where the parties maybe just need to be reminded. You've got to build coalitions. You've got to reach out to a wide variety of Americans. You can't just go to the far left or the far right to get the people that are just like you. We are in a period that is much like that. And I would say it is the absolute worst time to get rid of the Electoral College. In the years after the Civil War, it helped us to get to the other side and to get to the friendlier place where we remember that we're all Americans.

And we can do that again. But right now, what we need is for people to quit pointing fingers at each other and start looking inward, quit pointing fingers at the presidential election system and saying, it's that, you know, it's that thing's fault. And instead think about, OK, how can I do a better job? How can we as a party do a better job of nominating candidates that are unifying, of nominating candidates that appeal to a broad cross-section of Americans instead of just one portion of the country? And when one party, both parties don't even have to do it, just one party gets its act together and starts doing that, they will start winning in landslides and the other

party will have to fix themselves just to be competitive. If there's a Nobel Prize for political science, I'm nominating you. Well, OK, but so but all right. So what do you say? You know, here's the argument, right? Los Angeles County. Is a incredibly populated county. It is, you know, it's bigger than in population than you know all those blue states that everybody hates right those people they get 55 they get to participate

in 55 electoral votes or 56 whatever it is now in california um why are they not what what is their argument for them for them not to say that they're not disenfranchised, that they are essentially all those people. They have the preponderance of this population and the concern, and their concerns are lumped in with everybody else in California. Meanwhile, all the other states get that kind of – get a different kind of representation. What's your argument there? Well, I guess, honestly, of all the states, I feel like California is, and probably LA residents,

I feel like are not disenfranchised at all. I mean, there's no Democrat that wants to lose California. They all want, it's a big block of votes, 50. And it's driven by what happens in LA or San Francisco, the more densely populated portions of the state. You know, Republicans in California probably are a little bit having not as good a time outside of the cities. But of course, they have a problem in their state in general. I mean, their voices probably feel a little bit lost for the governor's election and for some of the statewide offices and some of the other things that are happening. So, and I'm not trying to make light of that, but I'm just saying they have an overall problem

and they need to work on it in their state, making their voice heard. And if we get rid of the Electoral College, we don't solve their statewide problem. We just impose it on everybody else also. So, you know, and of course, they're not disenfranchised. They're just losing elections. And that is that is ultimately the issue. Ultimately, the issue at the bottom of this is it's not that you're disenfranchised, that you lost. Right. It's that you lost. And we have 50 50 state elections for presidential elector. And then we have, of course, one in the District of Columbia. So 51 purely Democratic elections every single presidential election year, 51 of them, where, you know, whoever gets the most votes wins, period. One person, one vote, that's how it works.

And those are the elections for presidential elector. And then we take that, of course, and we add a federalist, a state by state component to it. And that's when the electors go on to cast their electors does let the voice of the people be heard. But when you do it state by state also, you just make sure that parties can't ignore huge blocks of the country. Well, if you believe that the states are just vassals to a centralized authority, of course, your attitude would rankle there. Last question, though, since they know that the Democrats know that they're not going to be able to overturn this, 38 states are not going to go along and say, oh, yeah, sure, disenfranchise us. We don't care. So they're just going to pass laws, aren't they, that say that their electoral votes go to whoever won? That's all they have to do. If they do that

in enough states, the electoral college is irrelevant because it'll be based on popular vote according to what the states themselves have decided to do. Isn't that their real strategy? Right. So you're referring to the National Popular Vote Compact, which has been approved by 12 states plus D.C. That's 181 electors. There are New Mexico and Delaware are close on the heels and literally any minute now the governors could sign bringing it up to 189. Now they need 270 electors to put their compact into effect. But what the compact says is we promise we're going to give our electors to the winner of the national popular vote instead of the person who won within our own state's borders. So Colorado, which just joined this compact, if candidate B wins Colorado, but candidate A wins nationally, well, then Colorado says, oh, forget the fact that our people preferred candidate B. You know, candidate A gets all nine of our electors.

And they all agree to do this. Now, you know, you wonder what will happen if they don't like candidate B, if this will actually happen in practice. But that's what they say they will do. And if they get the compact into effect, they will have effectively eliminated the Electoral College, although it will still exist on paper. Well, at least that'll be another book we can read from you. Thank you, Tara. Tara Ross, the author of The Indispensable Electoral College, Indispensable Still, How the Founders Plan Saves Our Country from Mob Rule. Thanks for coming by on the podcast.

We'll talk to you later. Thank you. Tara, thank you. Oh, no problem. Thanks for tackling the topic. You know, it's almost as if the left believes the Electoral College is an archaic operating system, that we're still using IBM Iron, you know, the old thing. And we have to completely get rid of the old OS, and we have to put in a new one. If only you could figure it out, though.

It's impossible enough software to buy. You know what I do? I just don't even buy it because I just can't figure it out. That's your problem, Rob. Well, your problem is too full. I have many problems, James. Your problem is too full. That's my problem?

Wow, that's fantastic. One, that you don't really know where to get good software. And two, that your segue interrupting skills are atrophying. I mean, you really should have let me go with that for another 15 seconds before you expertly showed up and ruined it. But Rob's making a good point there, though. You know, a lot of people are confused. They don't know exactly if they had to buy new software, large or small, for their business. What would they do? Where would they go? How do you know? Well, you do know if you go to Capterra. Now, you've all read some surprising online reviews, right?

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And our thanks to Capterra for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. podcast well i hope this isn't uh overcome by events but aren't we supposed to get a mullerish type thing sometime soon and does the fact that there doesn't really seem to be a great clamor for an excitement and dc doesn't seem to be a buzz fit like fitzma's um may suggest that they don't think there's a there there. Peter? Yeah, that's exactly right. I have nothing new to offer on this. No fresh insights. And I defend myself by saying that's the way it seems to me for the press, the country generally. Whatever is in that Mueller report is not going to be collusion or an impeachable offense.

And it's already been priced in so to speak to the journalistic and political market i just believe we're preparing for a big meh rob yeah no i i agree with peter i there's a very funny a writer i follow put a very funny tweet and said uh something i will i will bolderize it because it was a little a little risque he said i've been exactly where Mueller is right now. My bet is he hasn't written a word. He's just a writer on a deadline. He's like, oh, it's coming.

It's coming. I'm working on it now. And really, you're just sort of basing. The problem is that nobody – Excuse me for a second, but there's the writer in Rob who quotes the line but doesn't give the guy credit. Yeah, exactly right. I forget his name. Yeah, forget his name. How convenient name but i retweeted it so if you go to my if you go to my twitter twitter thing i retweeted it but i

didn't steal it but i'll find it no you didn't steal it you did not steal yeah uh i would say not that i'm about above that i mean i think that's important um i it was all it always seemed like a bizarre set of fantasies to think that some investigation was going to reveal anything. Other than. Probably some FEC violations, which every president does, and and some other ancillary nonsense, right, Because the ancillary nonsense is where everybody goes. The people who went to jail during the Clinton administration went to jail for things that they did before he was president, I think even before he was governor. Webb, Hubble, all those people, they had trouble with their billing records and their taxes. They didn't have trouble with what they did in the White House.

So there's that possibility, not only that possibility here. That is literally what has occurred. And there is a chance that there's a kind of a minor campaign finance infraction if you pay money to silence the porn star. And that's possible, right? But none of it is – Even that is – as a legal matter, as a campaign finance – a matter of campaign finance law, even that is unclear. Yeah, well, that's the point of campaign finance law. It's designed to be unclear.

Yes, yes. It's designed that whenever you point that particular cannon at any politician, the most honest one or the most dishonest one you're going to get something um so i so i but i think that the the the the the cue here um for the democrats has been from nancy pelosi who i think said it belatedly but i think she said it in a very smart way which is that we are not going to impeach this president um and it is smart for for them all to sort of ignore this the problem is that they have this base they have these sort of trump anti-trump crowd that has been so whipped up by this that it can't help but be this horrible deflation of energy and anger and

um commitment and what they need to do just politically is to build down from, hey, we're going to impeach this president. He's going to be marked frog marched out of the White House to, hey, this this means that we can send us fifty dollars so that we can win in 2020. Make call. You know, it's going to have to translate into actual political activity. And that's a hard leap for people. So I suspect that this thing is going to be kind of a disaster for the anti-Trump crowd because it's not going to provide them with anything that they can even, you know, summarize in a sentence. It's not going to provide them with any ammunition that's going to translate into political action. And the nightmare for Democrats is that 2020 isn't 2008 or 1996. That 2020 is 2004, right, where they just couldn't believe they were losing to that guy.

To this guy. To this guy. Why? It's not just to them, but it's also to people who have made an entire personal industry out of believing that there was something there and pushing Russia, Russia, Russia. I mean, Rick Wilson is going to be doing balloon animals at Chili's if he, if, if, honest, honest to God. I mean, there are people who were interesting to me to read who all of a sudden decided to put everything – I'm not saying this is true of Wilson, but occasionally – put everything through the Russia-Putin prism for a while there.

Kind of hard to look at them again and say, boy, you bought that completely. And as you both know, I was never a Trump guy, and I feel a lot like Rob does too. I never thought that there was anything to that. It just didn't strike. And I had all kinds of questions about the Russian servers pinging the Trump Tower computers and the Pfizer. I mean I followed it all very – but it never gelled to me. Today, what did we have this last couple of days? The Golan Heights came out and said, yeah, you know what?

It's theirs. Throwing BB a little bone, which you do with your allies, recognizing something that's true on the ground. And who hated that? Who was instantly hating that? Russia. Who hates our energy policy? Russia. Who hates our, you know, warm-hearted embrace of Poland? Russia. So it just never, never put together to me. Who would be, who would be more likely to decrease our nuclear stock and, and, and tamp down our energy production, Hillary. So I just, I didn't get that. What's fun now is that some people are saying that the Ukrainians want to open up an investigation as to how the information about Manafort got into the press and was like,

you know, so if, I mean, if it turns around and instantaneously we start – the idea that we would at this point in history be discussing her emails is rather amazing. And now he's got to – poor Manafort's got to go to Ukrainian jail too. He's a poor guy. He only spent less. That's actually a lesson for Paul Manafort. You've got to live – you can't live large all the time. You have to know how to live small and when he was living large he would just had to pay those bills and so he had to do whatever he could do uh and promise whatever he could promise but i mean i

guess the larger issue there i mean the larger issue here is that we we became this culture which refused to debate policy and instead reverted to debating goodness or badness or character or lack of character. And that has been – I think Victor is right. Trump didn't create this. Trump simply walked into the opportunity that he saw. And I think the irony is that if Putin was at one point crowing in the Kremlin about how he had had an American politician in his back pocket, what he's discovered is that this president above all has no, absolutely zero problem with doing an about face and changing policy in an instant. He'll do it. He doesn't have the part of the the part of the ego, which,

you know, he definitely has an ego, but the part of the ego that keeps people from saying, oh, I'll do the opposite now or insists on their behaving with consistency. This guy don't have. He's got a lot of other ego problems and a lot of other personality problems, I think. But he didn't have that one so the idea that he could he could say on television now putin's a great guy and then turn around and send um and then turn around and do sort of uh um what what the russians interpret as sort of incendiary provocative acts like sending troops to places and recognizing Jerusalem and Golan Heights. That's what they have to accept with this president.

He's going to surprise you every day. Sometimes – actually, I have to admit it. As somebody who does not like him or admire him, I've got to say sometimes he surprises you in a good way. I expect somebody will take Rob's little peroration there and chop it up and edit it so it says i rob long have to admit it that i like admire donald trump it can't be done and it wouldn't surprise those people uh by the way that's exactly the way rob would sound even unedited if you were forced to say those words exactly right i'd be blinking sos sos like jeremiah denton by the way tim murphy was the person who wrote that line that Rob ably tweeted before and bowdlerized. And Tim Murphy is a Mother Jones writer.

So I think we've uncovered another fact about the squishiness here. Hey, Mother Jones writers can be funny too. You're following commies. Yeah, I probably follow a few of them too. Hey, what you should do following this, everybody, is go to iTunes and leave a review and tell everybody that this is fantastic so more people join and more people go to Ricochet and it prospers. Next week, we're going to return with Rob shaming of the people that he wants to be put in the back of the pickup truck and paraded around the public square for not paying up. But for now, we're just going to say Ricochet depends on you to be here.

And without it, believe me, the podcasts, all of them, and all of the commentary, and if you're a member, you know how valuable the member feed is. All that stuff depends on people ponying up. So pony up. And also, you might want to head over to Calm, Capitera, and to Lending Club because wonderful products, wonderful services support them for supporting us. And that'll do it. We thank you for listening.

I'm James Lylex with Rob Long and Peter Robinson, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 3.0. Next week, boys. ¶¶ Thank you. In the winter of 65, we were hungry, just a valley of mine. I made ten, but Richmond had fell. It's a time I remember of so well. The night that your morning set down, When all the bells are ringing Tonight

Take your horse and sit down And all the people will sing La la la la la la la La la la la la la la Back with my wife in Tennessee But one day she called her man Said, bird, you're quick, come and see There goes the property land Now I don't mind Chopping wood

And I don't care If the money's on good You take what you need And you leave the rest But they should never Have taken the very best The night That no old Thing slid down The night that no more things sit down

And all the bells are ringing The night that no more things sit down And all the people are singing La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la Like my father before me I'm over the land And like my brother a boy he took the rebel

stand He was just 18 proud and brave But a yankin' a lady lived in his grave And I fell by the poison on my feet You can't blame the king

back home when he's in defeat Ricochet. Join the conversation.