The Ricochet Podcast - The Party's Over?

Episode Date: April 1, 2016

Well, it’s another week that we must bring you yet another sobering meditation on the state of the Grand Old Party. Today, the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger stops by to discuss his recent column Obama’s Greatest Triumph (it’s paywalled, but the gist is that The president is “is now close to destroying his political enemies—the Republican Party, the American conservative movement and the... Source

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There has to be some form of punishment. For the woman? Yeah, there has to be some form. 10 years. Ten years. Ten years. I don't know. That I don't know. I'm not going to get, I don't know what's going to happen here.

I don't have any information on that. They don't understand what you're talking about. And that's going to prove to be disastrous. And what it means is that the people don't want socialism. They want more conservatism. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and Peter Robinson. I'm James Lallix, and today from the WSJ, Dan Henninger.

From NR, Kevin Williamson. Let's have ourselves a podcast. There you go again. Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, number 298. April Fool's edition, and there'll be no April Fools. I hate those things. No joke, we are brought to you by the following.

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Can't have free enterprise without freedom. Also brought to you by Ricochet.com. This is the point usually where Rob Long comes in and tells you why you should join. But Rob, we understand,

is having a bit of a plumbing problem at his home. And it brings to mind some other plumbing problems in ancient history. There was a book I read about Pompeii, I believe by Robert Harris, wonderful historical novel. The hero is a hydrologist, a Roman water engineer, who discovers that the massive, huge sewer underneath Pompeii had become blocked up because, well, they had great sewage plans for their time, but people just threw everything down the drains, silverware, carcasses, people, everything. And it all got bunched up into their underground sewer and threatened the livelihood and the health of the people of Pompeii, which is kind of like the comment sections on the Internet.

You know, it's just a massive sewer where stuff backs up and you don't even want to go there. You don't have that problem at Ricochet, as Rob would tell you. Now, what you need to do is go to Ricochet, if you're not there already, and sign up because it's absolutely crucial that civil discourse not lose us in these days. And since people at Ricochet have skin in the game, as he likes to say, as everybody has an involvement and a chit in this operation. People behave. Of course, if they don't, you know, we'll take them aside and have a little talk. But it's the place where you can get qualified civil conversation from a center-right perspective. And yeah, you know, it's been as sparky as I've ever seen it. But still, yet, there is the feeling of friendship and communality. So go there. And as Rob would tell you, it's essential.

We need 10,000 members in order to conquer the world. And the world waits for member number 10,000. And I believe when that happens, sirens go off and confetti and, you know, klaxons and the whole bit. So you could be that person. Ricochet.com. If you go, you'll also find a variety of coupon codes, I believe, that help you rejoin at a little smaller discount or just give it a try for a while to see what you like. Once you commit, you'll never want to leave. It's that kind of a place.

Peter, welcome. How are you this fine day? April upon a spring, no doubt, in your part of the world is bursting out everywhere. You hate April Fool's jokes, but do we know that rob hates them do we know that this claim that he's attending to a plumbing problem is not some kind of april fool's teehee on rob's part he's actually sleeping in would be my guess i don't trust it i'm well no no plumbing problems no underground sewer backing up here in our lone little pompeii of northern california California. I trust nothing in it. But I'm a happy man at the moment. Isn't that odd how we see

the whole thing just sundering around us and yet our own little situation is fine and out the window with a beautiful view? What do you mean that civilization is falling apart all around you? Well, actually I think back semi-serious. This will be serious. I'll leave it to you to insert the semi-serious to keep it from becoming too heavy here since we don't have problems.

It's like semi-solid. Exactly. When I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, lo, these many years ago, someone came to speak a couple of times during my four years at Dartmouth. And I interviewed him for the school newspaper. And that person, you're going to have to tell me how much explanation this name will need, whether anybody remembers him, nobody remembers him, was Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist. You remember Muggeridge? Yes. Okay. So he was a great British journalist. He's now been dead for at least 15 years, I'm sure. By the time he came

to Dartmouth when I was an undergraduate, he was already quite an old man. He had been a communist. He was one of the few who visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s and wrote as a journalist, then for the Manchester Guardian, wrote the truth about what was going on. That had cured him of his own sympathies with the left and very late in life he was he did a documentary for some it may have been for the bbc which was still a reasonably good operation in those days in any event he did a television documentary on mother theresa of calcutta which changed him and late in life he himself became a Christian. All right, set all that to one side. What he said at Dartmouth was he was convinced that the civilization we knew was ending, but he said this is no reason for immediate despair. I, Malcolm Muggeridge, often think to to myself of saint augustine who was raised in northern africa saint augustine in the

first third or so of the fifth century who who wrote his confessions and the city of god as a result of this event so saint saint augustine who had studied in rome who was deeply versed in Latin culture. He was one of the last great classical products of classical Roman education, is receiving the news in northern Africa that Rome has been sacked, that Alaric, that a thousand years of Roman impregnability, the city itself has been sacked. And the barbarians have romped through Rome for several days, stealing everything, slaughtering people. And Muggeridge said, and yet Augustine lived a good life, wrote important books. There's really no cause for despair. Our civilization may be falling down around us, but we can still lead good lives.

And at that time, when I was, what, 19 or 20-year-old, I thought, oh, my goodness, what a lot of melodramatic – this is just old man-itis. And there may have been some of that in him. And for who knows, maybe there's some of it in me right now. But I do – with the perspective of these additional years, I do think I know what he meant. You do see certain things, the coarsening of the culture, Donald Trump unthinkable as a presidential candidate now leading for the Republican nomination, breakdown of the family, all the things that we've talked about with Charles Murray when he was on a couple of weeks ago. And you have a feeling, I have the feeling, that certain things are slipping away irreversibly. Certain things, no matter how good the next president, you may be able to get the economy to rebound. But how do you put the family back together? How do you put some sense of civic decency back in place? Maybe we'll have a restoration or renewal, but I do have the feeling that certain

things that I'm now old enough to have seen in my own lifetime, certain things slip away, possibly irretrievably, and yet life goes on. Yet we record podcasts, yet each of us still has the opportunity to lead a good life in the circumstances in which he finds himself. That's what I mean, James. Now, lighten that up fast. Well, yes. Well, enjoy your weekend, everybody. This has been the Ricochet Podcast.

Signing off for good. There's no point. Well, the Bishop of Hippo had the consolation of distance, didn't he? If he'd been in Rome when the barbarians streamed over the walls and started stabbing and hacking and taking things, I think he would have had a different opinion. He also had the consolation of the knowledge that half the empire, the eastern half, would survive, or at least did and maintain some role. Traditionally

that the rotten core had fallen. It's, but that was a moment, that was an event that happened and to make an analogy between our own times, which seems like a slow motion dissolution of society. I understand the point you're making. And it's not hard to look at the landscape and say so much is being unraveled and it cannot possibly be sewn up again into an arraignment that we all can wear but that said those of us in peter i know you were there too who grew up in the 70s and who had dim memories of the 60s know that

there's been times when the social fabric has been just as frayed and just and anybody growing up and say oh i don't know 1860 might have thought that the american experiment was about to be sundered for good so i i agree i i understand what you saying, but I just don't want to go there yet because once you mentally settle into that comfortable chair and pour yourself a brandy and look out over the parapets as the city below burns, thinking that's very pretty. I hope somebody is taking a nice picture of this. I don't know. That's a disconnect from the society in which you live that I'm not comfortable doing. And it's tempting. It's so tempting. Why do I have to bother? Why do I have to worry? Why do I have to care when obviously the people are creating the society that they want? And even though I may see that the results of this, the ramifications of all

these decisions, be they communal or be they lazy or whatever they are, if this is what they want, then they shall have it good and hard. I mean, you can't really say, I'm done trying to pretend that this country is something other than it is. But then, you know, you look around and you look at your own community and the people and the society and you realize that on a macro scale, all seems lost. On a micro scale, on so many ways, all seems solid. Oh, sure.

Thus it has always been, he said pretentiously. But you mentioned the Donald Trump fellow. And I believe that actually that there's been a conversation now and again on Ricochet about that guy. And there's a common phrase that keeps coming up, and that is that we are required or we should extend a certain amount of respect. I'm not sure why, but let's take him at his word and go with one of his strengths, which is dealmaking and hiring the best people. I hear this all the time, that even though Trump himself may be a strange character who says lots of things, he can hire the right people and get things done. And he's also an expert negotiator. None better. None better. Well, there's a story in the New York Times. Yes, I know. The establishment mainstream press. Oh, yes, everybody has a story about Trump meeting with the RNC.

He's read this this particular one. No. Is that today's paper? I believe it is indeed. He met with Reince. And incidentally, if you remove every single vowel from Reince's first name, you get RNC. If that isn't proof of GOP establishment, I don't know what is. And he was talking about the way in which he's been outmaneuvered for some delegates. I believe in South Carolina or somewhere down south, there's all kinds of arcane procedures. And he upbraided his staff in front of the RNC about why they hadn't been better and been on top of this, which I find interesting. Because isn't one of his core strengths supposed to be assembling the best people who can make the best deals?

And if he's getting outmaneuvered on a party level when it comes to a couple of delegates does that speak to his abilities or or is it utterly irrelevant because because because wall i don't know no no it does that strikes me totally uh totally fair to raise the point as best i can tell reading up on donald trump's career um by the way i had some friend during the 80s in New York when Donald Trump was in real estate. There were people who thought very, very highly of him. As best I can tell, he's about a decade or so, maybe a little more than a decade out of the business that made him Donald Trump. That is to say, in the old days when he was actually doing, I beg your pardon? Who were these people? I'm just curious. I'd love to make the point, but who were these people who were impressed by him?

Oh, I had friends who were in real estate financing deals. So I'm talking about way back, more than a couple of decades ago, when he was still putting together teams that built actual buildings on the island of Manhattan. And what I heard from my friends then was this guy, Donald Trump. He had a bit of a lip. He was sort of a showman, but he actually could, he was a, he was good at real estate. He was good at what he did. That all ended something like 10 or 15 years ago. He went into casinos, bombed bankruptcies. And then for a decade or so, he hasn't actually been in the business of running large enterprises that build buildings. He's been in the business of his own brand. He's been licensing.

There have been other projects. There have been some golf courses and so forth. But fundamentally, he's been in a different kind of business. He's now not – he's been surpassed in real estate on the island of Manhattan by at least half a dozen other outfits or organizations. He's not on the cutting edge of any project in New York right now at all. And bear in mind – actually, I mentioned this just the other evening. I think it was last night. We were watching the news and my wife and I were chatting.

Donald Trump turned 70 years old in just a few months. And he's just, this is not a man in his prime as a businessman. To the contrary, I thought to myself last night, you know, there's a reason they call this campaigning. There's a reason they call it running for office. It's physically very taxing. And Trump's looking a little tired to me. So it doesn't surprise me particularly that Donald Trump has a staff that doesn't actually know quite what it's doing when it comes to politics, partly because this is an entirely new departure for him and partly because he's about a decade and a half or maybe even two decades from his. Every year, thousands of students go on their first holiday abroad.

Our 5G roaming in 80 countries means they're connected as soon as they land. Every year, thousands of students go on their first holiday abroad. Our 5G roaming in 80 countries means they're connected as soon as they land. Just a reminder to wear sunscreen, love, because you're as pale as a ghost. Oh, and can you send me all your friends' numbers because their mothers are on to me. And always keep your cash in your bum bag, yeah. Every connection counts, which is why Ireland can count on our network. Vodafone. Together we can. Subject to coverage availability. Limitations and terms apply. See vodafone, together we can. Subject to coverage availability,

limitations and terms apply. See Vodafone.ie forward slash terms. Prime in actually running projects and hiring people. He's had a smaller operation around him that oversees the licensing. He's just, by contrast with Ted Cruz, who is – everything I hear and read about his staff and the nuts and bolts of politics is a superb organization. Whatever you think of Ted Cruz, whatever you think of his looks, whatever you think of his policy positions, whatever you think of the sound of his voice – and I know you have – you're dubious about all three. He's running a really good political organization. The quote is this. When Mr. Priebus explained that each campaign needed to be prepared to fight for delegates at each state's convention, Mr. Trump turned to his aides and suggested that they had not been doing what they needed to do, the people briefed in the meeting said. Well, when we negotiate that 40 percent tariff with China, that'll work. And I hear a little – Hey, gang.

The plumber has joined us. Hey, work. And I hear a little Hey gang, are we talking about Trump? We're talking about the fact that he had a meeting with the RNC to clear the air, to get on board, and to figure out where they're going forward here. So Rob, do you think this is because the RNC has, you know,

views Trump as inevitable and that they'd best get on board? Or because, what? I think that Reince Priebus and everyone in that RNC building is a realist in a sense. In one way, real about the small things and then delusional about the other things. Real about one thing, which is that he is the likely nominee, that it's 80 percent certain he's going to be the nominee. And if so, they need to make sure that they march in the second and third ballots, which is also possible, that he is he's been treated fairly and with some kind of, you know, respect for you. They owe the man who has at this point the lion's share of delegates and looks like the likely

nominee. That's what they're they're they're realist about what they're what they're delusional about is that there is any saving this, that there is any saving the Republican Party. I hate to say it. I don't really hate to say it. But I feel that we need to start saying it. The Republican Party is dead. If it's not dead, it's dying. It's got all of its limbs chopped off.

It's like the night in Monty Python Hall. It's over, and these guys are simply rearranging the deck chairs for their jobs in a building that should be turned into a Chipotle as soon as the general is over and President Hillary Clinton wins 47 states, 46 states. So that's my – I don't necessarily think that's gloomy. I think that those of us who see the reality for what it is should begin preparing for what we're going to do and what kind of party we want. If you're just joining the podcast today, the GOP is dead and American civilization is doomed. But we're –

No, I actually think the opposite. The second part I don't agree with. I think that we conflate those two things too much and we're too – we engage in catastrophic thinking too much. Yes. Well, you weren't here for that, Rob. You were plunging something out. things too much and we're too we're too we engage in catastrophic thinking too much yes well you weren't here for that rob you were plunging something out and so i'm sorry if you want to talk about those things show up on time like everybody else right it's fair we actually the world wants to know exactly why rob's plumbing is backed up we don't want to know what he's

putting in there or what happened okay so just hold thought. I know we need to get to a guest, but what we also need to get to is the idea that you can always learn something. You can always find time in your day to add a little bit to the store of your knowledge, and that's where The Great Courses comes in handy. It's The Great Courses plus video learning service. Now, instead of just trying to pick one course, there's unlimited access to a huge library of Great Courses lectures and so many fascinating subjects. There's history, there's science, there's cooking. You can watch the full courses start to finish or just specific lectures for free. Now, the Great Courses Plus has nearly 5,000 video lectures. There's the Skeptic's Guide to Understanding American History, the Conservative Tradition, Understanding Investments. They're all taught

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That's right, free. So get started today with this great offer. Go to thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet. That's thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet. Now remember, there's that plus in there, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash ricochet. And it's free. Now everybody knows that sometimes the best stuff on the web

can be behind a paywall, and sometimes you go to the Wall Street Journal and you're, I should subscribe. You should subscribe. And one of the reasons is to read the work of Daniel Henninger. He's a deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. And his weekly column, Wonderland, appears in the journal each Thursday. Mr. Henninger was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing in 1987 and 96. And shared in the journal's Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for their coverage on September 11.

Native of Cleveland, Mr. Henninger is a graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. You can follow him at Dan Henninger. That's with the at sign on Twitter. We welcome him to this, the Ricochet podcast. Glad to be with you guys. Dan, Peter Robinson here. In your column in the journal yesterday, you wrote about, I'm reading from the column right now, Barack Obama's health care summit at Blair House on February 25th, 2010, quote, that meeting was the last good faith event in the Obama presidency, close quote. Explain that.

Well, that may have been an overstatement in retrospect. Was there ever a good faith event vis-a-vis the Republicans in the Obama White House invited a group of Republicans to come and talk about the Affordable Care Act, which was then being legislated. And I was one of those people sentenced to watch the whole thing. It was two sessions. And Lamar Alexander opened for the Republicans and gave a pretty substantive generalized critique. He was followed by, among others, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a doctor, Representative Tom Price of Georgia, a physician, and ultimately Paul Ryan.

And, you know, all these guys are kind of health care geeks, and it was boring at times going into that kind of detail about deductibles and vouchers and whatnot. And at the end of the whole session, the Democrats, including Barack Obama, said they had heard really nothing new from the Republicans and call us when you have something to contribute. And I said, whoa, that, it looks to me like we're going to have a long, hard time with this presidency, because he doesn't do politics. He didn't even do politics with the Democrats. Barack Obama sucked all the political oxygen out of the air in Washington. And whatever else one may think about Washington and the people there. These are politicians. Politics means talking to the other side, talking to people. That's what they're in the business of doing. And it just kind of went, it became becalmed in Washington. And I think as a result, a lot of frustration set in,

especially on the Republican side, because they were basically doing nothing. They could not get anything out of this administration. Right. Dan, you go on to say, so there's an absence of politics. There's the mainstream media, which champions Barack Obama, his administration, all his policy initiatives. And during this administration, we see the growth of a new, you call it an alternative media. We know this story. Ricochet is one of them in some ways, but you talk about heritage action, the political outreach of the Heritage Foundation, the establishment of Breitbart and so forth. Now, here's another, it just seems to me,

a critical quotation. It's amazing. By the way, I'm asking these questions, but can I just also make an overall comment? In what, 800 words, you've got a doctoral dissertation on the last seven years in your column yesterday. I thought it was just an astonishing piece of work. So, quote, the hated MSM, mainstream media, is essentially a Roman phalanx. It stays in formation and protects the progressive castle. The conservative alternatives showed no such discipline. Early in the second Obama term, they commenced an internecine political war. Now, again, explain that.

The other side shows discipline. Our side goes to war with itself. Yeah, I think the Democrats and the liberals, I mean, their agenda is relatively simple, at least on the economics. It's tax and spend, get control of the levers of power, impose extractions, whether fees, directed taxes, and distribute it among their base. And their base includes, you know, not merely people at the other end of welfare programs, but the whole galaxy of nonprofits supported by foundations and such, or the grant-making community. I mean, global warming and climate change is basically built on an iceberg of grant-making, that sort of thing. Whereas the Republicans, conservatives, I think believe more strongly in principle, if I may say so, and they think principles are important. They know what they are, and when people deviate from them,

they get upset and they want to argue, which is healthy, about that sort of thing. But I want to raise an additional issue here, Peter, that I couldn't get into the column speaking of doctoral dissertations. The Internet, a lot of these Internet and websites, Breitbart, Red State, all of us that are writing on the web now, it's just an endless inputting of opinion, and it's highly energized opinion. And it got me thinking a little bit about the rise of factions,

and God knows we have seen the rise of factions the past four years inside the Republican Party. And this was the thing that Madison warned against in Federalist 10. I mean, it's interesting to think that back at the time of the pre-revolutionary period, the intensity of opinion was just as strong, but it was all written about. It would take time to absorb it. Now, the kind of environment that existed around the time of the American Revolution, I think, has come forward, but exists in an entirely different context, where these opinions, these strong opinions, are expressed with the same intensity, but pour at us 24 hours a day, and I'm not sure that we've gotten all that adept at adjusting to it or dealing with it or absorbing it in a constructive way. Hey, Dan, it's Rob Long in New York.

Thanks for joining us. I got one – just to follow up on that, the internet is a blizzard of opinions and it's true that there were also a blizzard of opinions during the Revolutionary War, although those opinions were written by Hamilton and Madison and Aaron Burr and ours these days are written by a thousand people, some of whom it seems are – I used this especially the people I see who are saying McConnell is not fighting. These people aren't doing anything without realizing the math isn't in their favor. Those people are still angry. They're angry at an establishment they think didn't do anything. They don't want to hear about Senate majority rules and filibuster rules or any of that stuff. What do you say to those people that's not irritating and condescending when you're trying to explain, I know what you want, but we don't have the votes? Yeah, that's something we are all wondering about.

It, I think, relates to the subject of the Internet and the Web. Some of us here have been talking about this thing lately. The phenomenon is, for instance, if you write, say, a column like mine or any other piece of opinion and put it on the Web, you end up with a lot of comments beneath, and the comments, again, are often tense. You know, you begin to realize that a lot of the comments are literally misreading the text that you've written, and they have not comprehended it accurately. We try to write as accurately as we can, or they have really just skimmed it, read through it very quickly, or extracted what they wanted from it. And I think-

TLDR, they say. Yeah. And that's kind of what's going on, I think, in politics generally, that people are absorbing so much, forming their opinions, they see something going on in the Congress, and without getting in too deeply to the details, say, of whether you have enough votes or not, they shape an opinion, say, a negative opinion about Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. And the aspect of that that you put your finger on that I don't understand why this should be incomprehensible is in politics, whether it is in the Congress or in one of these primaries, or even in the battle we're having for the Republican

nomination right now, you still have to have more votes than the other side. That's pretty simple, right? But you get the impression, looking at the primary fight right now, that some of the adherents and supporters think that if their guy wins the nomination, the election's over. We win. But what do you attribute that to? I mean, I found that I was the most disconcerted and baffled after 2012 when people on the Republican side seemed incredulous. Every year, thousands of students go on their first holiday abroad. Our 5G roaming in 80 countries means they're connected as soon as they land. Just a reminder to wear sunscreen, love, because you're as pale as a ghost.

Oh, and can you send me all your friends' numbers because their mothers are on to me. And always keep your cash in your bum bag, yeah. Every connection counts, which is why Ireland can count on our network. Vodafone. Together we can. Subject to coverage availability. Limitations and terms apply. See vodafone.ie forward slash terms. Mitt Romney lost and they kept trying to add up the votes in some way. And even now, four years later, we hear these conflicting and sometimes bizarrely misread impressions about what those election returns really meant and where white men didn't vote this or the base didn't come out when in

fact the base did. How do you, I mean, as a person in the information business, how do you fight that almost willful ignorance on the part of some voters? And I mean, I hate to say, I mean, I know I don't hate to say it. I have to say it. And their candidate that seems to embody that comment section on a website, Donald Trump. Yeah, you know, that's a good, I've been mulling this quite a bit. I don't actually have the answer, but it comes down to the phenomenon of political opinion formation,

which, you know, people do think and write about that a lot. How do individuals come to their political opinions? How do they form them? What is the basis? And I think a lot of us looking at some of these results out in the electorate are beginning to worry a little bit about the way opinion gets formed. It's not to say, again, necessarily that, say, Trump supporters have illegitimate opinions

or they've been falsely arrived at. It's just how did they get to the point where they attach themselves to a candidate who can say pretty much anything he wants to, such as not so much the abortion. That was really kind of politics 101. Anyone running for a school council anywhere in the United states would not have said that but um... more more substantively what he said tuesday and the cnn town hall about uh... u s nuclear policy uh... overturning are kind of

bipartisan consensus about nuclear proliferation that has existed since at least the nineteen fifties and it in the most offhanded way. And yet that, too, has no effect on the opinion of his supporters. So how people arrive at these opinions right now and what those of us in the information business ought to be doing to try to clarify situations like that is a good question. Again, it has a lot to do with the web. It has a lot to do with the Internet, electronic media, the way it's washing over people.

My favorite book, I'm sure one of you guys have read, Marshall McLuhan, The Mediumism Message. 1962, it's all there. It's all coming home to roost. Rob Long has based his entire life on that book, Dan. Well, in my career, anyway. It's my rice bowl. Hey, Dan, Peter here once again. Listen, you know I love the Wall Street Journal.

I revere you and all your works. Here's a question, however. In your column yesterday, you referred to Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio as hyper-ambitious. This is a Ted Cruz question. And you write, Ted Cruz, I'm quoting you now, used the Republican Party as a footstool. And in the review and outlook, the unsigned editorials in the journal have been consistently hard on Ted Cruz during the campaign, but even harder on him when he was causing trouble in the Senate. And here's the argument. The argument is, wait a minute, you just told us that there's a great deal of anger, that we live in an entirely new context. And the argument would be Ted Cruz wasn't

trying to reuse the Republican Party as a footstool. He was trying to revive the thing. Down in Texas, there was a perfectly reputable but not – he took on detail when he was trying to close down the government about why that was a mistake and so forth. But doesn't he deserve some credit for standing on principle? This is the distinction between Donald Trump. trying to rouse the party, rouse the powers that be in the Senate to respond to it while, and this is what distinguishes him from Trump, while continuing to stand on conservative principle and to articulate those principles. Gee whiz, Dan and Paul Gigo and all the fellows who do such a brilliant job at the Wall Street Journal, doesn't he deserve some credit for that? Well, I will happily give him some credit for that, for raising the alarm. But, you know, this whole issue of Ted Cruz and the government shutdown

and what flowed afterwards, I do not think has ever been quite fully understood what was happening there. It was, I think, not merely an expression of principle, and I'm willing to concede that it was that, an expression of principle. But I think there was an effort going on to reorder the centers of power inside the Republican Party. I mean, just a raw political effort to pull power away from a group that was identified at that time as the establishment. And as I suggest in the column, whatever was going on there, the charges against the establishment. And as I suggest in the column, whatever was going on there, the charges against the establishment that were picked up, not merely by Ted Cruz, but a lot

of the folks in talk radio, our friends at Heritage and so forth, I think in time became sloppy and indiscriminate. And a lot of people who were in the conservative movement or in the Republican Party, and I would include certainly the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which has been fighting for reform since the day Ronald Reagan walked into the White House, were perplexed at the broad brush with which the establishment was being painted. And I just came to the conclusion after a while that it was counterproductive, that what was going on here was kind of an internal coup in the Republican Party that was increasingly difficult to understand. I mean, yes, there were issues like immigration and amnesty but um...

there seem to be no issue on which one was able to give any uh... comfort or reassurance to that group of people that organized themselves around ted cruz and then ultimately uh... senator cruz uh... launched a presidential campaign built around that idea, which essentially puts Mr. Cruz in the position of running against 53 Republican members of the U.S. Senate. I just don't see how that's going to end well for us. Dan, James Lileks here. Unlike this pointy academic you got here and Peter and this entertainment guy you got, and Rob, I actually work in daily journalism and newspapers. And I love the Wall Street Journal. And I'm always waving around the weekend sections as exemplars of what the medium can do.

But I have to say, at some point, you might want to come up with a section like Mansion that is targeted at people who make less than $40 million a year. I'm just saying, there's a window of opportunity. Wait, are there such people? There are. Last question here. You had a piece about anti-terrorism after Obama in which you were discussing the need to revive the civilized world's unity as we had

during the years of the Cold War. And you said, quote, whatever one's view of the Cold War between the West and Soviet communism, the world was united then in containing and defeating an ideology whose publicly stated goal was to displace the liberal values of the democracies. Is that more difficult now because the left over the last 40, 50 years and its long march through the various institutions

has destroyed the idea that Western liberal civilization is itself inherently worthy and worth defending? Or are we left unmanned at this point when we need our civilizational confidence more than ever? Well, no, we are not unmanned, but yes to every other thing you just said about what the global left has done to our ability to unite against an enemy like this.

This is a process, as you well know, that's been going on for a long time and came to fruition in the person and presidency of Barack Obama. And, you know, at the end of the day, guys, this is why I wrote a column like the one yesterday about the Republican Party, which is that I don't regard the election of 2016 as just another election. This is in 1992. After eight years of Barack Obama, the United States domestically and the world has been left in a state of crisis, crying out for American leadership on both scores. And I felt that this was one election that we absolutely had to get right. By getting right, I meant winning the presidency, holding

the Senate and the House so that the conservative movement had 18 months, or if we were lucky, two years to try to turn this around. And that would include the war on terror, but obviously it would include the domestic economy and domestic policy in general. The left, President Obama, have put us in a deep hole. And to lose in 2016 and get another four years in the person of Hillary Clinton, who looks and sounds more like Senator Elizabeth Warren every day, a woman of the left, I think is going to put the United States at a tipping point. You know, you hate to talk in politics in those kind of apocalyptic terms, but I think we're pretty close to a situation like that,

and that's why I'm feeling so strongly about winning in November. Regardless of who wins, we know who we're going to read about the election. Thank you, Dan, and everybody, Wall Street Journal, Wonderland, really only need to know. Great to talk to you. Thank you, sir. Dan, and I mean it, that was, you're always great, but yesterday's was an education in itself. It was just wonderful.

Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Peter. Bye-bye. Thanks, Dan. Next time we have Maughan, I would like to ask the origin of the title of the column because when I think of Wonderland, I think of a former amusement park in Minneapolis which existed for about six years. Go ahead. This is just amazing. The way your mind works is a wonder.

And I have a point. This is a segue, so I'm sorry. I'll shut up. Go ahead. Hey, quiet, Peter. There's a segue coming. Well, sorry. No, I'll just have to go on with what I was saying.

All cities had one of these of a certain size, though. Electrification came in, and they built these great, long, huge, tall towers of light, and these great white ways splashed with electrical light, and people went there and saw the rides and the fat ladies and looked at themselves in the mirror and the rest of it. And when you look at the pictures, it's just this bygone world. And I know where it is, and there's not a trace of it left anywhere not so much as a plaque saying that something was here it's like my inbox empty absolutely empty without a single trace of stuff that was there yesterday and why is that because i have control of my inbox thanks to sane box now how many emails do you have

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perhaps with the spaghetti effect where it's attenuated into space. But unlike an actual black hole, it goes in, it is crunched, it is crushed, and is never seen again. I know they say that information cannot be destroyed in the universe, but that's pretty much what happens with the emails you put in your black hole. So you move an email there and you'll never hear from that sender again, ever, period. So, so rewarding. SaneBox.com slash Ricochet.

Go today and they'll throw in an extra $25 credit on top of the two-week free trial. And you don't have to enter your credit card information unless you decide to buy, so there's nothing to lose. And once you see that you get a little email from them once a day saying, here's what we've trained, here's what we've left, here's what we've done away with, you know you're in control and they're on your side. Check it out today and let me know if you love the black hole feature. Oh, yes. Inbox Zero, you can do it. That's S-A-N-E-B-O-X dot com slash ricochet. S-A-N-A-B-O-X dot com slash ricochet. Now, a lot of people have been asking, when are we going to have a self-hating black Republican who believes in white genocide on? And I'm happy to say that that's where Kevin

Williamson comes in. He is the co-host of the wildly popular Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast, He Would Be the Mad Dog, and he's the National Review's roving correspondent, one of the finest, sharpest writers that you'll find in that magazine, or any other on your stand, frankly. His exchequer blog covers deficits in the intersection of finance and politics, and is the author of the encumbered broadside, The Case Against Trump, which makes The Case Against Trump, which makes the case against Trump.

And watching him spar daily with the people who attempt to clamber over the parapets of his personality and do damage is an amusing thing. He's rather unsparing. We just hope he's nice to us today. Welcome, Kevin. Hey, what's up? Hey, Kevin. It's Rob's up? Hey, Kevin. It's Rob here. I got a question.

Two questions. One is, this is an umbrella question. When did the case against Trump come out? I'm trying to remember. A year ago, right? No, not that long ago. It was early autumn a few months yeah how many pages was it

how many pages like about 100 right no more like 40 40 how many pages would it be now ah many months later it would be volumes like like it'd be like the correspondence of Immanuel Kant. OK, that's right. And he liked written letters. We know that. Yeah. It would be a shelf full of books. OK. Now, my next question is this, is that I follow you on Twitter and you're a delight and you are, in fact, I consider a Twitter MVP. And when James sent his intro to you, referred obliquely to someone, I think, calling you a self-hating African-American National Review writer or something like that. Yeah, yeah. And you responded, as you seem to always do to people, everyone, anyone on the web.

Why do you do that? You tweeted out your address the other day inviting people to come by and have a palaver i did yeah i was a guy who uh said he wanted 10 minutes alone with me with a baseball bat yeah and i sent him the address and told him I'd give him $20. That's the love of Texas in Kevin Tucker. Why do you do that? Why do I interact with people on Twitter? Yeah, well, you know what I mean. Not just interact with people, but you're a Twitter pugilist.

A little bit, yeah. It's marketing, partly. I mean, that's really what Twitter is there for. It's to drive people to the website and to the articles and things. Partly it's procrastination when I have something more important I'm supposed to be doing. I kind of do this

sometimes to distract myself. Twitter's kind of a left-handed thing for me. I can do a couple things at the same time. Sometimes I'll be working on a column or something and doing some things at the same time. So sometimes I will be working on a column or something and doing some tweeting at the same time. And – But it doesn't make you mad.

It doesn't raise your stress level. Your cortisol levels don't zoom. I mean it doesn't have any negative effect on – I mean here's why I'm asking. Because the only other person I know who had this kind of zesty Twitter – You're going to say Andrew Breitbart and it killed him. Yeah, exactly. I don't know if it killed him, but you know what I mean? I'm worried.

There are people who think that, yeah. Reassure me that that's not the case. No, I don't get too stressed out by, well, much of anything to be honest. But certainly not by anonymous cowards on Twitter. I've got a list of people whose opinions I care about, and it's not a real

long one. I think all three of us do. Rob, Peter, James, we got that. It's sort of Brookheiser, and Ramesh is good because Ramesh is one of my favorite people in National Review because when he writes something stupid, he always kind of lets you know first. And that's a helpful thing. A service he provides, no additional charge.

Oh, wow. Yeah, that's good. So, no, you know, when some, you know, egg on Twitter, or it's always some guy with like Dungeons and Dragons avatar picture, and it's always... Or one of those crosses, one of those strange new crosses that have popped up on Twitter everywhere to indicate that the person is alt-right of a certain stripe, right? And the name is always something like New Charlemagne Charles Martel, White Guy Warrior something. And, you know, I mean, these guys are in their mom's basement to the Lanny Riefenstahl films.

I, you know, can't take them too seriously. They're not bad films, I mean, to be honest. She was a kind of a master. Well, Rick Wilson says the onanism is done to anime So we can agree that there's a certain amount of mom's basement wankery going on But here's the question We've got split-screen televisions these days Gentlemen, this is Ricochet

We do have standards I'm using euphemisms The thing that really, really upset a lot of people And not just people on the alt-right, but people on the normal right, and even some GOP types, was the piece that you wrote saying essentially that the dysfunction of the introduction, white genocide, which is the term that they used before you got there. But it's one that they like to paint the people who are standing towards Trumpism. How do you defend – what are these people supposed to do in the small town where the gypsum factory doesn't exist anymore? What do you think they ought to do? Move?

Yeah, I mean that's the main thing. You know, it's kind of funny. One of the depressing things about this campaign so far is the racial stuff that liberals always attribute to conservatives, which I used to think was true in about 7 percent of cases you know about seven percent of conservatives actually do you have these kind of you're not necessarily like racist racist clan white hood kind of use but you know sort of double standard stuff uh because kind of a general racial nastiness that i always thought was maybe around seven percent of our people that you know i'm thinking it's more like 30 yeah that's that's what i think now too. It's revelatory. working class Americans was that if you simply replaced the racial designation with African-American. Right. It would be basically what conservatives have been saying about an underclass forever. Right. Yeah. What I was thinking about specifically was, you know, sort of pre pre rapist Bill Cosby.

Right. Pre pre rape. Bill Cosby gives a speech when she says to young black men, hey, you know, the world has been unfair, but it's time to pull up your pants and get a job and raise your kids and empty adults and conservatives. All of our good Bill Cosby and, you know, harumph harumph and raise a glass and all that stuff. And I did sort of a milder version of that with the people who are, I didn't point it out maybe as strongly as I should have in the piece, but for lack of a better term, my people. I'm sort of from a tornado bait, white trash welfare background. And yeah, most of the problems in that community, the big wide social problems, illegitimacy, fractured families, drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence, all that stuff are largely self-inflicted. So I guess my question is, that was what depressed me the most, was the reaction from the people who disagreed with you.

Instantly, the people who I guess are Trump voters or somewhat conservatives instantly went back to the politics of spoils and the politics of where's mine? And that's what seems to animate that. I don't think everyone voting for Trump, obviously, but a section of that electorate is their argument isn't we need to have fewer government programs. We need to have fewer. We need to have less victimology. It's, hey, if you you're gonna give him some i want some too um and that i found really very close to the death of conservatism yeah it's um partly as identity politics for white people which has always been an undercurrent in conservatism you

know buchanan and to a lesser extent maybe maybe Ross Perot and some of those guys. But the thing about Trump, of course, is, yeah, you're right about that, that he is not a limited government guy. He's not someone who knows the first thing about our constitutional order, gives a flip about it. It's funny that the Trump thing is like the Oberlin sophomore real socialism has never been tried. Right, right? Right, right. I mean big government can work. Sure.

We just have to have the right people in charge of it, and obviously the right people are illiterate game show hosts. Okay. All right. I see your point, but I guess what I mean is that – I mean I'm trying to vindicate something I've been saying for years, which is that for years we've been convincing ourselves that we're really close to winning conservative majority. We have Republicans in the House and the Senate. Mitt Romney almost won. We have all these stories about how – and when conservatives get together, they almost always agree on one thing, which is, hey, the country is basically center-right. And that I think has now been revealed to be a complete lie, that the country is center-left if not left.

And we have a whole lot of work to do before we can start saying things like, I want Mitch McConnell to pass something or other. We are lucky. And by the hair of our chinny-chin-chin got into the House and the Senate, and the demographics and the voter trends and voter attitudes are firmly against us. True or false? No, true. A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece for Politico, my first and last, or so far, anyway, Politico piece. It was about Rand Paul. And my friends over at Reason Magazine had this article they'd written. It's the libertarian moment and why this is going to benefit Rand

Paul. You may remember this piece. And I wrote a criticism of that. There isn't a libertarian moment because those sorts of ideas actually aren't very popular. They are in the abstract. But when you start talking about actual policies like performing social security or reducing defense spending or various other things, those things aren't popular at all. And so conservatives and to a greater extent kind of libertarian-leaning conservatives like myself often fall for this myth that the country is full of people who are financially, economically conservative and socially liberal and therefore kind of open to libertarian persuasion even if they resist the word or maybe some of the ideological connotations of it. But if you look at the polling, the way people actually vote, the way people rank issues, those sorts of things, they're really closer to the opposite, where people actually pretty well like welfare programs, redistribution of wealth, government combating inequality and keeping, you know, evil, wily Orientals from selling us stuff we like at prices that are good and those sorts of things you know uh keeping the you know nefarious sweaty mexicans from coming over here and uh you know picking lettuce or whatever it is and um and and so if anything you know

i wrote a piece early in this uh season about Trump and Sanders. I spent a little time at both their events. And the headline was Adventures in National Socialism. And I know those are strong words, but that really is the default position of most of the American electorate. Kevin, Peter here. Hey. founders, not all the founders, but most of the founders, Washington, certainly Madison Adams, over and over again, wrote about the importance of virtue in a democratic system. Then we have Kevin Williamson marking the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty by writing a staggeringly well-reported and beautifully written but heartbreaking piece on white poverty in appalachia making the point that although with this 50th anniversary a lot of outlets were

talking about continued black poverty in the inner cities there's a swath of hundreds of miles where white people appalachians they're outside the, so they don't get them as much press, but they get it from Kevin Williamson, living on welfare, can't keep a family together, drugs and so forth. And then Kevin has what issue before last in National Review, an article in which he writes, quote, the white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump's speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin, close quote. So is Kevin Williamson telling us that Donald Trump is the symptom of a collapse in American democracy. We've reached the point at which it's not going to work anymore because the people themselves have become debased.

Yeah, that's not something really particularly new for me. Although one thing I would correct you on is I was down in Owsley County where the main part of my Kentucky reporting was. Yes. And they are not invisible to the media. I was talking to the police chief down there. He knows every reporter, every op-ed columnist at every newspaper in America because his town is where they all come. Because once a year, the census comes out and Owsley County is identified as the poorest place in America and someone like me comes down and he's like I forget who it was it was maybe you know oh yeah David Brooks was here a couple of weeks ago and you know it's uh it's they get a

lot of journalistic uh visits down there to the extent that they don't really like talking to us very much anymore because they know what the story is going to say because things don't change. Democracy is an idea with which I have a little bit of a complicated relationship, which I don't think maybe I'll go into entirely right now. But it's not a form of government. It's an aspect of a form of government. And it's really a terrible way to make decisions, which is why you want to have government making as few decisions as possible. I mean, there are some things that are necessarily national and some things that are necessarily happening in the public sphere. But the point where we're at right now, where we have a federal government especially,

but also state and local governments that essentially have no bounds, the idea being that they are responsible for essentially everything. And increasingly, that responsibility resides in the person of the president. And so you take these tremendously complex problems, you bundle them up into incomprehensibly bundles of tremendously complex problems. One of them is brand A, one of them is brand B. And then we say, well, which one of these guys would you rather have a beer with? And that's how 319 million people decide

which way to go on this stuff. And that's never really going to work very well. But if it's going to work at all, yeah, you're right, that we need better people. And one of those early small R Republican virtues was built into the understanding that government really is only there to do certain things and that citizenship is a really – it's an active proposition. It's not something that you are.

It's something that you do. Well, let's just all go out there and do it then. Gavin, we'll see you down the road. We'll see you in print. See you perhaps in the bounding main later this year. And thanks for being with us in the podcast. Have fun on Twitter. Be careful, Kevin.

Talk to you guys soon. Thanks, Kevin. Take care. Be careful out there. The guy tweeted his address, for heaven's sakes. I know. I just like, you know, as long as he says to me everything's okay, then everything's okay. But I can't help but think, you know, he's got to take something out of you, right?

Like I get mad at – I get unnecessarily mad at certain situations that are ludicrous, that are trivial, let alone like actually engaging in combat, verbal combat or Twitter combat with Twitters. I mean John Podoros does the same thing. I think it's crazy. Yeah, John does it as well. And with Kevin, I just – who knows? Perhaps we'll see closed-camera TV footage of him doing a Wilson Fisk on somebody, and that will be that. I forgot to ask him this.

Darn it, I was going to get to it. One of the things there – Breitbart recently did a piece about the strange respectability that the alt-right is getting. A piece that just gave me, I just realized I'm not going to take these writers seriously anymore. I was saying, yeah, sure, they're different from your father's Nazis. They're a lot smarter. And there was sort of this little giddy admiration for these alt-right types and one of the things that was interesting and pointed out um and elsewhere you can see this is that there's a sort of dis this this this blithe disregard for the constitution

as an archaic solution to that as an archaic instrument it really is some way of addressing that they call them people who believe in the Constitution vellum fetishists, as though just the medium on which these words are written can be just tossed away and given. Well, you know, no. That is the basis of the civilization, and it's important to hew to it. And if you're going to do that, you've got to know what it's about. But is there such a way to do that? Yes, there is a way. Yes, indeed. But I'm sure it's expensive.

Well, here's the thing. You can actually go to school and try to find an educational institution in this country that will teach you about the Constitution. You can read it on your own. You can go to Washington. You can stand in line there. You can look at it under glass. You can hold up the line as you mouth every little word and figure out what it is. Or, or you can go to Hillsdale, figuratively or literally. We're offering you the figurative virtual vision. Hillsdale College has made their Constitution 101 course available to everyone. That's you online. That's you online. And it's free because every one of the listeners owes it to yourself to learn about and study the Constitution. And as we keep saying, you can't have free enterprise without freedom. You can sign up for the free course in the Constitution 101 today.

And once you start, you'll receive a new lecture every week to watch on demand as you please, along with readings, discussion boards, and more. It's like going to college without the hideous tuition and ridiculous debt. Nearly a million people have taken this course and given it rave reviews. You can sign up for Constitution 101 free at hillsdale.edu slash ricochet. That's hillsdale.edu slash ricochet. Hillsdale.edu slash ricochet. Know something about the Constitution and prevail in conversations, which it actually tends to come up.

Well, gentlemen, we usually end here. Yes, Ron? I was going to say i i feel like we we we do this spot and when i what i like right but we don't necessarily i mean this is an amazing thing that hillsdale is doing it really is kind of extraordinary and they're doing it for free that that i think we should just take a little pause and as dark as things might be or seem under President Hillary Clinton, it still is amazing that you can take a class for free from professors like Paul Ray. I mean, Paul Ray does one of the lectures.

This is not just nothing. This is like big stuff, and it's free, and I think that's incredible. I just wanted to say that. Yeah, really. What it should have been is they should have charged you installments, and then they should have had you market it to other people. Yeah. Give some wonderful speeches about how successful you're going to be. How handpicked you're going to be, yeah.

Absolutely handpicked. Speaking of handpicked, of course, when the convention comes along and the GOP has their way and they drop from the rafters a candidate that the establishment prefers, as we all know is going to happen because it's stacked against, it's unfair, man. Some people are saying that Tom Cotton is the person to whom we should rally around. This was Hercules Rockefeller on Ricochet Today. And he wrote, should we find ourselves in the situation Ace describes, he's referring to a post by Ace of Spades about how the establishment's probably going to find a way to get their guy in there. Should we find ourselves in that situation?

I believe Senator Tom Cotton would be the perfect candidate for the party. His pedigree is similar to Cruz, but lacks some of the baggage. He's a decorated veteran of both the Iraq and Afghan wars. He was solid on immigration and sanctuary cities, and is the only senator to vote against the disastrous Corker bill. He is an an outsider but has generally remained under the radar and hasn't ruffled too many feathers i find him a tremendously impressive character i've heard many interviews with him on uu it's show and he's a straight shooting guy and he gets it um would either of you be on here i mean we've had him on yeah we've had him on and i did a long interview with him on Uncommon Knowledge. What do you think, Peter? What do I think?

Oh, absolutely. Hercules Rockefeller is 100% correct. If the following thing happens, if the convention simply gets locked up. By the way, what's going to happen in Wisconsin on Tuesday is tremendously important. If Ted Cruz does well in Wisconsin and holds Donald Trump to single-digit number of delegates, I believe the total number of delegates at stake is 42. Cruz is leading by 10 points and not one, but two polls that came out yesterday. If Cruz does very well in Wisconsin, the mathematical likelihood of a of an open convention of an undecided convention goes way, way up. What happens on Tuesday in Wisconsin is tremendously important. If we get to the convention and Trump and Cruz have become so

embittered and they've insulted each other, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and just say that's it. And Karl Rove has said this just yesterday, If the convention locks up and they need to bring in somebody from the outside and it's happened before, President Garfield was somebody who was not voted on at all in the first ballot in whatever that was, 80 some years ago. And within two ballots, he was the nominee. If they need to go to somebody from the outside, Tom Cotton would be brilliant. I'd be delighted with a Cotton Ryan ticket, Cotton Sass, great. The Wisconsin situation is fascinating to me because I do not know how anybody possessed of any shred of political instinct goes in there and criticizes Scott Walker for not raising taxes. On the right. Very good point. I don't get that. It's almost as if personal peak took prominence over trying to reinforce a conservative message. Well, what's weird is, of course, that like the – it's boring if you cover politics or you're a political junkie or something to watch the politicians when they arrive at a place talking about, oh, this is a great city and your mayor here is fantastic. And I want to say a shout-out to the city councilman and the guy who runs the parks.

He always says, they have these names on the cards. You think, oh, come on. They usually have one boilerplate joke they do and then they get into their speech. If you have to follow it all the time, you get bored. But if you're in that community, if you're one of those people, it matters. That's what Nixon did in his wilderness years. That's what Reagan did for 15 years. That's what Mitt Romney did in between runs, it's going to be really hard for you to do the same thing when you're president because you've got to do the same thing to get those congressmen to vote for you and vote for your initiatives and get those senators on your side. That's what politics is. That's why it's called politics.

It's not called something else. But you're right. The upside of all this, though, Peter, and I don't think I can say this for James, but the upside for us is that for this is the first time in my memory that I will have a reason to vote in a California Republican. Oh, exactly. Exactly. You're exactly right. Right. The primary out here will matter. It really does matter. It's come down to that. That's like what I love about this. And aside from the specifics and the details, what I love about it is that all these things that smart people have been saying will never happen, they're happening. We are going to have an actual convention in which an actual nominee is actually chosen. And it's highly likely that that nominee or possible that that nominee will not be the front runner currently. I don't I personally don't think that's going to happen. I think it's going to be the front runner. But but this is close. We've already come, at least in my memory. What you think is going to happen? How if he doesn't get the delegates, then the first ballot, poof, second one, then what? I mean, it's free at that point.

You think there's going to be weapons-free at that point. You think there's going to be a flood of delegates to Donald Trump to push him over? I don't think he'll need a flood. I think he'll need like 200. So I think – yeah, I think it will be – I think that's what's going to happen. Don't you guys both feel – who knows? Maybe you don't. But I feel – I feel – this is No, it's not an analytical point. I feel that we have passed peak Trump. The press is starting to get a little bit tired of him. He himself is starting to look a little bit puffy and tired. As I said earlier, he's within a few months of turning 70 years old. And this is all very wearing. It's physically difficult. And the arguments against him are beginning to tell, I think. And if that's correct, then you'll have the case where although

he goes into the convention in July with the highest number of delegates, his polls will have been dropping for some weeks beforehand. He's just not going to arrive with the shine of a winner on him. Don't you feel that's likely? What I feel is exhausted. Fair enough. Yeah. No, I agree. Ann Coulter, I can't – Rob, you can perhaps speak to what she was saying, but she was discussing how exhausting it is sometimes to be a Trump supporter, although supporter is a mild word for her, because it's like a 16-year-old. You have to keep bailing out of jail. Yeah, well, you know, okay. I feel as this last week, everyone says wasn't good for Trump because it essentially seemed, and why was that? I mean,

the number of curious things he said last week wasn't any more numerous or bizarre than things that he had said before. I mean, if you're going to muff the nuclear triad one week and you're going to refuse to talk about your defense strategy team the next, and then one week you say that the role of the federal government is, well, the top three are security, but also healthcare, education, housing, good neighborhoods. Good neighborhoods is a role of the federal government. And then you criticize Scott Walker for not raising taxes. And then you have the abortion issue. I mean, he's done, he's had weeks like that before. This one maybe felt different because it's just like, okay, already. All right. I get it. Good. People get tired of being inflamed by the guy pro and con. I couldn't agree more he's wearing he's wearing

out his own supporters i think that's right there will always there will always be a base that just has factored in everything he can possibly say and they don't feel compelled to defend him because it doesn't matter they they're you know these aren't the people who are streaming into the message boards to say that trump was right about abortion, that he was right about education. They don't care because it's the thumb in the eye to the GOP. And that's really all that matters. And they may not believe what he says. They may not believe that he believes what he says.

It doesn't matter. So those people are not tiring. They're not tiring because perhaps they're not enthusiastic in the usual sense. It's just their setting is right now. All their dip switches are set on Trump. and that's just the way it is. Well, look, it's a math problem. Every president sees a math problem. It's about the acceleration of your supporters versus the acceleration of the people who are dead set against you. And the trick is to get more supporters faster than you get people who don't like you. Because in American politics, at least the past 30, 40, 50 years, going to November, to that Tuesday in November, the people who aren't going to vote for you are really not going to vote

for you. That's about 42%. And the people who are going to vote for you are really going to vote for you. And that's about 42%. And you fight about the people in the middle. And that's pretty much the way it's been. It's the way it was. I mean, despite everybody's fantasies about what happened under Mitt Romney, that's exactly what happened under Mitt Romney. He lost independence. That's why he lost the states he lost. So Trump's problem is that the number of supporters he's gaining over time is much slower and slowing down, whereas the number of people who are now deciding they will never vote from under any circumstances is increasing and that's um that is i couldn't agree more that's a very very telling point the polling over the last

couple of weeks have shown has shown that his negatives are going up this is not the case that the more the american people see him the more he's on the campaign trail making an argument for himself, the more he's persuading people. That's just not happening. Yeah, but on the other hand, the two-thirds of the Americans see of him, the less they like him. or even the liberal media might have timed it perfectly. So he still gets the nomination in time for his negatives and the dead set against him to be insurmountable. I suspect that is the case. But I don't know. Well, I heard in the background there

some sort of like chanting that perhaps- Yeah, what was that? Telling us that we should take a Zen-like attitude toward all this. The guy arrived, the gardener just arrived next door gardener sounds fancy to anybody back east but here in california as rob knows everybody has a gardener because things just keep anyway he's using a leaf blower next door i will now mute myself to spare you the legal they're legal in la no no no they're legal here they're legal here. They're the most hateful devices ever created unless you're using one. And it's just awesome. But the sound of a leaf blower is

one of those things that sets everybody's teeth on edge. Well, we got to go guys. And even though there are a couple of things we could talk about, you know, we don't want to sit here in Babylon forever because people look at the clock and say, are they done? Can they go forever? Yes, we can go forever, but we shan't. What we want you to do is to go to thegreatcourses.com, greatcoursesplus.com. Go to hillsdalecollege.edu and sanebox.com. Each one of these guys has got the coupon code RICOSHET that will get you more information, a cleaner email box, and a better grasp and understanding of the Constitution. What more could you ask? What more could you ask indeed? Except that we'll do it again next week and we're just a few away

from 300 do we have a party planned i think are we going to la are we going to new york should we have a party for 300 right we should have had a party for this one i think we should let's figure that out and all right well i'll pack my bag and be ready at the moment may i just note in closing in spite of the leaf blower next door, that James just said people may be wondering whether we can go on forever. We can, but we shan't. James just became the first American since 1837 to use shan't totally unselfconsciously. Unbelievable, this man. All right. One doesn't use chant one doesn't well I'm going to have myself a sarsaparilla now and enjoy the rest of the weekend

alright guys we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 2.0 thanks for listening Peter, Rob, great see you next week thanks fellas the party's over it's time to call it a day. They've burst your pretty balloon

and taken the moon away. It's time to wind up the masquerade. Just make your mind up. The piper must be paid. The party's over. The candles flicker and dim. You danced and dreamed through the night.

It seemed to be right, just being with him. Now you must wake up. All dreams must end take off your makeup the party's over it's all over

my friend. The party's over. It's time to call it a day. Ricochet. Join the conversation. Now you must wake up. All dreams must end. Take off your makeup. Makeup The party's over It's all over My friend It's all over

My friend All over, my friend.