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- [00:00]
A
I wrote a little song to remind you. Choice hotels get you more of the experiences you value. The Cambria Hotel's got it all. A rooftop bar.
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B
Have a ball.
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C
Cocktails up here feel just right.
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A
It's Cambria. Amazing. All right, bring a date, your teen,
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B
or even your mom.
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A
Book direct@ChoiceHotels.com See you on the roof.
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B
Greetings.
- [00:38]
A
No, that's not right. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jonah Goldberg. Now, I'm not, in fact, hosting most of today's podcast, just some of today's podcast, because Steve Hayes, as is his wand, had a technology failure of biblical proportions. And so he started it, then he couldn't finish it. And so I jumped in with Kevin Williamson and recorded the second half because we lost the first half. There were plagues, there were locusts. Small children were hiding behind their mother's skirts, terrified to see the spectacle that it had become. And so we start out with Steve moderating and Surya Gowda, a reporter for the Dispatch, joined me and Steve and Kevin to talk about Donald Trump's $2.2 billion financial gain since taking office. Then Surya left voluntarily. Steve was ejected by the technology gods. And so Kevin and I just had a conversation about the latest developments with Graham Platner, some of the Iran stuff, and I think it all will come together just fine. But I figured as long as you guys know about it, you won't be freaked out about it. So there you have it. And let's get on with the.
- [02:04]
C
Welcome, everybody. And a special welcome to you, Surya. We're very happy to have you with us on the Dispatch podcast. You worked on Monday's Morning Dispatch item, big item that was headlined Trump's Presidential Payday. And it followed some reports about Donald Trump's 927 page financial disclosure forms last week that detailed the money that the President has made thus far in his first term. I wonder if you could just give us sort of a big picture view of what we learned from those financial disclosures and the angle that you chose to focus on for the TMD item on Monday.
- [02:45]
D
Yeah, so I guess just to give some kind of background context. So Trump did make money while while in office his first term. So I believe in 2019 he reported $440 million in revenue, and it was mostly from real estate. But the most recent disclosure from 2025, he reported $2.2 billion. And this is in comparison to last year, before he was 2024. So before he was president again in his second term, he reported only 622 million. So that's a pretty big jump. And maybe to give some other context, Biden in 2021 he only reported 610,000. So these are kind of the levels of income or revenue we're talking about here. And so one of the biggest kind of differences that we noticed from the first term Trump to the second term Trump, like why did he make so much more money this time around was because of his crypto investments, which basically he didn't have crypto investments the first term. He was calling crypto a scam, like even as late as 2021. And so now he has these like different investments in terms of Meme coins with the Trump Meme Coin, the Melania Meme Coin, and also his own crypto company which is called World Liberty Financial. So those are the two main sort of crypto investments that caused this big shift that I wanted to focus a bit on.
- [04:31]
C
And for people who aren't familiar with crypto or who like me, have read dozens and dozens of articles about crypto over the years and have read beyond just the Morning Dispatch on Monday to understand this windfall to President Trump and his family. We'll get into his, his family a little bit later. What is World Liberty Financial and how does one make money on crypto and meme coins?
- [04:59]
D
Yeah, so World Liberty Financial is his crypto company that he started in 2024. And so there's kind types of investments here. So the company itself, like that its key product is called USD1, which is pegged to the US dollar. And so it's called a stablecoin when it's pegged to a real asset. So that's somewhat more of a tangible thing that we can kind of think about. But so the meme coins is kind of a separate issue. So that's actually just pegged to nothing. So it's value really comes from being able to tell a story about or just a narrative about the product. And so it's not really tied to, you know, some kind of objective analysis that we might have of a company of like what's, what's this product like? Why is it valuable? So those are the two things that we're looking at here.
- [06:01]
C
And the people who invest in something like the Trump meme coin. Kevin, are these primarily Trump supporters, Trump fans? Do you have any sense of why Donald Trump sort of abandoned his skepticism? As Surya points out, he was very, very skeptical and calling it a scam before he set up his own crypto company. Has he given any explanation as to why he changed his mind on that. And how do people invest in a Trump meme coin? Who are those people?
- [06:29]
B
I'd like to do my impersonation of Donald Trump's evolving thoughts on crypto. It's scam. Yeah, it's a scam.
- [06:40]
C
It's a scam. Advantage to YouTube viewers of the podcast to see Kevin's facial expressions.
- [06:51]
B
After twice trying to get me to talk about soccer, now we're going to talk about crypto. So Steve Hayes is clearly a statistic sob. People who, who invest in meme coins are fools. And setting aside serious tendentious claim about US dollar based coins being based on a real asset, because US Dollars maybe, but crypto performs a useful function in some cases. It does what money's supposed to do. It's a store of value and a means of exchange. There are people who use Bitcoin for useful things, I suppose. Although what the great advantages of it are still not, I think, really evident to me. Meme coins are just like meme stocks and things like that. They're basically a joke that people put money into and then they become a kind of pyramid scheme where more people get into the joke and then inflates the value of the non asset that starts to look like an asset, which I guess it kind of sort of becomes in some economic sense an asset because you can sell it. And in some of them there is, you know, some persistent value that stays around for a long time. People who buy it are Trump fans and fools to the extent that. That's not repeating myself. But yeah, it's a whole different set of things that I don't think there's much of a case for. And I think that if you look at the actual performance of the Trump coin and the Melania coin, which there also is one and the rest of this stuff, you will conclude that it's probably not been a very good investment for most people.
- [08:13]
C
Jonah, these are eye popping numbers, obviously. I mean, if you look at just the context that Surya laid out, Trump one versus Trump two, Trump too versus Biden, if you're going to make a defense of the Trump administration, you'd say there's no suggestion that stuff is illegal. The President, President Trump is far wealthier than Joe Biden. So it stands to reason that he would make more money on sort of leveraging his own assets, making investments as he would. Why is there a problem with this? Just in the strict sort of legal sense, why should people care?
- [08:48]
A
Well, I mean it's. We'll take it as a proposition for argument's sake that he's done nothing illegal. I'm open to that. I'm also open to the idea that we just haven't found out yet. But let's put that aside. It is obviously by any historic standard of the presidency, unethical. I mean, like some of these things he's done are just gross. But the meme coin thing, not to mention, you know, all the other tchotchkes with his name, the watches and all that other stuff that Surya got into, he is directly profiting off of the presidency in a way that, I mean, I heard somebody make the case, Google George Washington and land warrants or something like this. These really desperate sort of attempts to put this as a historic norm. But if you just look at the charts of stock trades from previous presidents, all increases from zero are infinite. So you can't even do it really as a bar chart in the sense that it's 000-000- tens of thousands of them by Donald Trump. And I understand we don't have the AO crowd here about presidential immunity. Presidents are not bound by the ethics rules that his cabinet members and other staffers are. But if a cabinet member had done some of the things they were doing, it would be illegal. So one of the buzz phrases that people love to throw around during impeachment controversies is the president isn't above the law, but he isn't below the law either. He literally is now above the law in the sense that he can do something that other government officials cannot do. And so it is profoundly unseemly. I also think if you were to describe it to somebody in the before times, up until about a decade ago, on just the objective outlines of what he's done, people would say, well, obviously that would be impeachable and he would be impeached for it. Right. Forget the emolument stuff. Air Force One and the Qatari plane, Syria got into a foreign power backstopped these digital currencies, currencies with air quotes in a way that inflated their value. And if the standard, which historically had been a real standard of the appearance of corruption is held constant, or the appearance of impropriety, the fact that not only did he have this windfall profit from it, not only did he soak investors, there's a quo to the quid pro in the sense that we agreed was it to UAE the sale of these very high end, very in demand, very national security sensitive computer chips. And so it would be worse if it was flagrantly and obviously illegal but that's not a defense of it. That is simply a. It is something that TV lawyers can cite as a way to say there's nothing to be seen here. But I'm obsessive about the point that there are an enormous number of people who think an explanation is an excuse. I can explain exactly why Hannibal Lecter likes to eat other humans livers. That is not an excuse for murdering people and eating their flesh. Right. A lot of the pro Trump punditry on this explains. Well, technically he's not bound by these ethics rules and technically it's not illegal and he's being transparent and you know, and he was a rich guy. Fine. I can stipulate or I can concede all of those things for argument's sake. None of it is an excuse. None of it is justification for it. You know, it's funny. Just one last point on this because I've seen nobody make this point. J.D. vance just came out with a book that he wrote while vice president. He's not giving the royalties to charity. He's not. At least he's not said he is. I've searched in vain for any evidence of this. He is literally profiting off of his job by writing a book that's a campaign book for a future race on government time with government resources. Now, vice presidents don't necessarily do a lot and all that, but, you know, the precedents are very few and far between. Barack Obama wrote a kid's book that he mostly wrote before he took office. It was one of these gitchy goo little things, whatever. The previous precedent, I think is Al Gore's like manual on reinventing government that was basically a government report. There were times where a vice president writing a book for profit, using his office to sell the book around the world and plug it all over the place on government time would be considered fairly scandalous now compared to what Trump is doing with this stuff. You have to be one of these fastidious, popinjay former White House ethics czars to even find it troubling. Just the deviancy has been so redefined here that that kind of thing is just background noise.
- [13:52]
B
There was a time when you could be speaker of the House and get into trouble for for sure.
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A
Right.
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B
Jim Wright, that sort of thing, and then be the guy who deposed him and get in trouble for the same thing.
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A
So I think it's all gross. I'll defend crypto a little bit more than Kevin. I basically agree with him just insofar as I think it's an Important point to point out. The Meme coin stuff is just stupid, right? It is basically investing in Cabbage Patch Dolls or some other fad. And if you want to do it as a part of history and you know that it's not a good investment vehicle, fine, go ahead and do it. That's fine. But crypto in countries with runaway inflation, corrupt governments, tyrannical governments, having a storehouse of currency that is highly, highly portable, that you can leave Nigeria or Egypt in a moment's notice and not have to sew diamonds into your wife's dress or something, has real value, which is why the people who use it most are in places where they don't trust the government not to confiscate their wealth. That's fine. The irony is, is that given some of these policies, maybe we'll be that kind of, we'll have the same use case here.
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B
What I get from this is, this is how Jonah buys his Cuban cigars. By the way,
- [15:06]
C
Surya, if you imagine this as one of those charts with the yarn and the stick pins on a bulletin board, it's hard to make sense of this because it goes in so many different directions. And it's not just President Trump, it's his sons. And we'll get to that in a moment. But one of the companies that's sort of at the heart of this is Binance. And you talk about Binance in this morning Dispatch item and the fact that President Trump pardoned its founder Changpeng Zhao back in October. Can you give us just a bit big picture overview of who he is and what role Binance plays in all of this?
- [15:45]
D
Yeah. So Binance is the largest crypto exchange in the world and it holds, I believe, 87% of the world. Liberty Financial's main product, which is the USD one that we were mentioned. Like it holds basically the vast majority of that product circulating supply. And so Trump pardoned the founder of Binance after he had like a four month sentence for this anti money laundering violation. And so prosecutors had also said that Binance was allowing transactions that was, that were benefiting Hamas and Al Qaeda. So this is also some very sketchy stuff. Stuff. And something I also wanted to mention going back to the Meme Coin point was it does sound really ridiculous. But at the same time like investing in this Meme Coin kind of bought you access to Trump in that he held this dinner for the top investors in the Trump meme coin. And one of these people was also pretty sketchy, named Justin sun, who was this other like crypto entrepreneur who later, the charges were dropped against her. So, again, like, it sounds really ridiculous, but I think that the buying access point in the Meme coin story is also another sketchy point. Same thing as the Binance founder with his.
- [17:19]
C
Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is, you know, you get people who will defend Trump on these numbers and on these business practices, who will point to things like, you know, Trump stakes and the actual Trump labeled businesses and say, look, he's doing all this out in the open. There's no suggestion that this is yet illegal. Why is this a problem? And yet, you know, the dinner that he held at Mar A Lago certainly raised a number of eyebrows. If you look at what he has said in his own defense on these issues, I find it fascinating. He's given answers that sort of echo the answers that his sons have given. He was asked in this extensive New York Times interview at the beginning of 2026 why he reversed a first term policy of not having his family do business overseas. And this is what President Trump said. Well, because I got no credit in the first term, I don't have to agree to that. And in the first term, we did nothing. We did, we were just, and my kids were asked to do business all over the place. They run it now. I have a great company, one of the greatest companies, and I think it's one of the, in terms of beautiful assets, great assets, great property, et cetera, et cetera. I didn't let my kids do anything because to me, the presidency is the highest calling. But I got criticized, nobody gave me credit. So move down. The Times reporters sort of push back and say, Mr. President, we reported that you'd given back your salary. We reported on this. And then Tyler Pager, New York Times White House reporter who does a very good job covering the Trump administration, said, and so why now? Why the change? Why now are you doing the deals? And President Trump responded, because I found out that nobody cared. And I think that turns out to be pretty true given the magnitude of the deals that we're discussing. And there are a number of others that time won't allow us to get into. There's a critical minerals deal that the Trump sons are involved in with the government of Kazakhstan that was signed in the Oval Office, got government backing, US Government backing for some loans attached to the deal. There's a resort that Donald Trump's daughter has undertaken off the coast of Albania. There are a number of these things. And when you scrutinize them, I wonder, Kevin, if part of the challenge is this Stuff is really complicated. I mean, crypto itself is complicated. But then you look at sort of the contours of all of these deals, and it's just really hard to keep track of, much less hard to explain to people who are busy living their lives. Is that part of the reason that this hasn't been more sort of eyebrow raising?
- [20:00]
B
Well, I think the complication is part of it. I also think that that is fortified by the fact that Americans don't take financial corruption very seriously, for the most part. So the example that I've used off and on is that, you know, in the 1990s, if you tried to explain Hillary Clinton's cattle future stuff to people and tried to explain to people what futures trading was, you would just get this blank look, nobody cared. It was actually pretty sketchy stuff. And there's evidence there of some pretty serious wrongdoing. You tell them that Bill Clinton's got his pants down with the intern in the Oval Office, and everybody gets it. Trump can do all this stuff that's, as Jonah points out, wildly unethical and inappropriate. And people will say, well, but it's not illegal. So that's all right. Now, if Trump had said, huh, she's 18, it's not illegal, everyone would understand why that's a problem still, right? If there was, if it was a sex thing and not a financial thing. So it's just, you know, what we, what we tend to focus on, what we tend to process as Americans and how we, how we think about this stuff. And, yeah, you throw Kazakhstan in there. And I think that, well, we're very anti Kazakhstan in the Williamson household for reasons that some of you know about, I think. But people don't know where it is, what it is it ends in. Stan, it sounds sketchy. They just assume that it's like some Borat kind of thing that's necessarily going to be corrupt to start with. I also kind of think that a lot of people just sort of assume that everyone at Trump's level of wealth got there through corruption. Americans do have this populist streak where they think about that sort of thing that way. I remember when I was a youngster first kind of learning a little bit about finance and Wall street and what these guys do, and it all seemed like a species of magic. And like there were these super smart people who had this very specialized knowledge. And then once you kind of drill into it and you start to understand what the jargon is and all that, you're like, oh, it's just like, you know, it's banking and loaning money and investing, pretty straightforward stuff. It's not really magical at all. But if you're on the completely on the outside of it, you don't know the lingo, you don't know what this, that and the other thing means, which, entertainingly Trump doesn't like. He clearly doesn't know the difference between like what a hedge fund is and what private equity does and those sorts of things. He just kind of lumps it all together because it all looks like voodoo to him too. But it also looks like a scam that he wants in on. And now he's in on it. One of the things I grudgingly admire about Trump, I suppose, is that there's this literary conceit that the devil always tells people the truth and that even though he tells them the truth, they go ahead and do what he wants them to anyway because he says it in such a way that they want to hear it. Trump, even though he tries to lie about everything at critical moments, he just can't help but telling the truth. And as you were pointing out, well, no one cares about this stuff, so I may as well go and do it. Like he didn't try to even make any defense about. That's not really dirty, it's not sketchy, it's not embarrassing, it's not a violation of our norms or ethical rules or anything like that. Yeah, nobody cares, so why not? And he's not wrong.
- [22:42]
A
So I agree with all that, Kevin. But I do think that there's one explanation that we haven't mentioned and then there's one issue that we haven't mentioned. The explanation is, and this is a point Doug High and some other people have made when I've been on TV with him, is that people have already priced in their opinion that Donald Trump is corrupt or at least sketchy. Right. And so he is playing to type. And when you play to type, people are like, well, we kind of knew this about him already and he's just sort of getting away with it. And, and we have this thing in our politics where it has to be shocking to sort of get people to lock onto it. And it's just, I mean, the scope of it is shocking with Trump, but the fact that he's self dealing and doing this sort of thing is just not shocking for people. And so you're not gonna convince a big chunk of people that it's terrible. The other point, which is not so much as an explanation, but I just think it's worth pointing out, I'll see if I can find it. And if I can, I'll put it in the show. Notes. There was a montage, I think, on CNN of all of the times Donald Trump attacked Joe Biden for profiting off of the presidency. And he campaigned on this about it being outrageous that these guys are enriching themselves and all that. And I think Biden was much more corrupt than people thought and that the press wanted to cover. And a lot of it had to do with Hunter and also with Joe Biden's brother. And I think a lot of that was a legitimate thing to look into. But even if you take the most extreme narrative from Comer or whoever or any Fox News host about Biden's corruption or the Biden crime family, you have to add, I don't know, 1, 2, 3 zeros before the decimal place to talk about the kind of money that Trump is making and it's just not obtaining. And I think it's kind of remarkable, you know, I mean, Surya is a wee lass. But the three of us have been talking about liberal media bias and how the mainstream media runs cover and protects Democrats in ways that it doesn't about Republicans. And I believed all of that, and I still believe it to a certain extent. You know, we have to talk about a case by case basis kind of thing. But the ability of Republicans to get narratives out into the bloodstream is just as effective, if not more effective than Democrats at this point, because the amount of time and energy spent covering Biden corruption, particularly at Fox, just dwarfs anything we've seen about Trump. And part of that as the function is that Democrats don't control the House, Republicans control the House. So they could have hearings, which were by definition news events. And so I think some of this stuff will become much more of an issue if Democrats take back the House and, or the Senate. I don't know if we're gonna get to impeachment. I don't know if we should. Blah, blah, that's a whole other conversation. But in terms of the oversight and going after corruption and subpoenaing people and saying, how do you justify making this money and going after Lutnick and Witkoff and those guys, if Democrats win in November, we're gonna see a lot more of it. And that will give ample opportunity to the press to cover it a lot more.
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B
Do you ever kind of wonder what he wants the money for?
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A
Yep.
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B
I mean, seriously, he likes McDonald's and Florsheim shoes. You know, like even Jonah Goldberg, who Donald Trump famously said couldn't afford to buy a pair of pants, can buy McDonald's.
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A
He said, I didn't know how.
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B
I thought you couldn't afford to buy a pair of pants.
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A
No, I think it's, he doesn't even know how to buy pants. I think is the. Well, I have a team of staff who've worked on this issue, so. But I'm pretty sure that's what it was.
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B
But even, even, even Jonah Goldberg can afford probably all the McDonald' he wants and all the Florsheim shoes he could wear.
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A
Fact check true.
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B
Fact check true. I wonder what he wants the money for.
- [26:35]
C
I think that's a reasonable point. I think some of it is for his sons. I mean, his big argument is they're in charge of the company. They should be able to do this business. They sat it out in the first term. They should be able to make money. Now, this is what Eric Trump, that was his direct argument when he was asked about this during the 2024 campaign. There's one other thing I want to touch upon before we move on from this issue, though, because I think it goes far beyond, you know, the president enriching himself, which I think is problematic for the reasons that we've discussed. But, I mean, if you go back and you think of the Clinton foundation scandal, and I think it was a scandal, I think there were real questions being raised about whether foreign countries were giving to the foundation as a way to influence Hillary Clinton's campaign, their thinking, to get in good with former President Bill Clinton, to be able to exert influence on U.S. policymaking and thinking in a way that we wouldn't want. And even that, if you go back and reread some of those stories, it was always sort of a double or triple bank shot to get to that point. And it looked like it was hidden. What we're seeing here in many cases is just straight out in the open. You know, the deal that the Trump family struck back in April of 2025 that would allow them working with a Saudi company, also working with a Qatari company owned by the Qatari government, which had been, you know, criticized for years as a state sponsor of terror, of radical Islamic terror. This deal creates this beachside resort, an 18 hole golf course. And it happens at a time when the Trump administration is then accepting a plane, a new Air Force One, which the president flew on to a NATO summit this week, did not fly back on that same plane for potentially pretty interesting reasons. But we get this gift in exchange, then President Trump offers in public remarks basically a security guarantee to the government of Qatar, where there's now this going to be this new Trump family resort. It's all so out in the open and I guess, you know, the crypto schemes and some of the sort of complicated financial deals that the Trump administration, the president and his sons have sought and struck sealed, I can understand why those are hard to comprehend. I guess something like this at least raises questions that I think are easier for the average American to get their head around, and yet it's still not really breaking through in the manner that we might expect it to. Well, Surya, thank you very much for joining us and helping us understand at least one aspect of this. We appreciate it and we look forward to having you back.
- [29:31]
D
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was so fun.
- [29:34]
C
You bet.
- [29:36]
A
All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast.
- [29:43]
C
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- [30:47]
A
we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. All right, everybody. We had a technological failure of biblical proportions where Steve's WI fi just not only quit like the software that we use straight up rejected the idea of letting Steve even try to get back in. So adding to that, Kevin and I recorded what I think future historians will recognize to the extent they can verify it. Probably the smartest, wisest, funniest, most entertaining conversation in all of human history, and it is lost cause. It never got uploaded. And we are loathe to try to put lightning back in the bottle and do that exactly as it was. But we are gonna talk about Graham Bradley.
- [31:38]
B
But now we know how they felt when the Library of Alexandria burned.
- [31:41]
A
For sure. This is sort of like what happened with. A little like what happened with episode 11 of the Remnant, which we don't
- [31:46]
B
talk about, but I'm not saying we're on the same level with Aristotle. But he got close.
- [31:50]
A
Yes. I mean, what was it like? Half of the work of Aristophanes was lost in Alexandria and, like, three of. Well, there are, like, three major works of Aristotle that were lost, right? Something like that?
- [32:00]
B
I think so.
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A
I can't remember what is.
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B
Yeah, his underrated second book.
- [32:04]
A
Why don't we start where. Since there's been news since we recorded. Graham Platner had not dropped out when we recorded yesterday. He has now dropped out. The presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, accused of sexual assault by a credible but unproven accuser in a Politico story. Kevin, what do you make of all it.
- [32:28]
B
Well, you know, the first thing that comes to mind is, I suppose, not Grant Platner. You know, I'm not exactly shocked by this. It seemed like, gosh, if you were writing this as a script or something, this would be the moment you were building up to and obviously telegraphing and coming to. So Platner is obviously a person of low character in lots of ways. You know, there's the Nazi tattoo thing, which. Okay, you know, lots of people have regrettable tattoos and lots of people drink too much and make some bad decisions when they're young. And I don't want to psychologize him from afar, but, you know, there's talk of, you know, him having some mental health problems related to his military service, which would be entirely understandable. That kind of stuff you can probably get past, I think, in a lot of ways. But his inability just to tell the truth about it, to be sort of straight up about it, his need to continue lying about this stuff, that really is something that speaks to his lack of suitability for a position like this. There is a part of me that always wants to take a step back a little bit when someone is accused of a crime outside of the context of being charged and tried on those charges and convicted, because even though I don't think there's any reason to doubt this woman or her story, the way you get justice for someone who is accused of, let's, you know, be clear here. What's a violent sexual felony? Crime is to charge that person in a court of law and conduct a trial in accordance with the excellent standards of evidence and criminal procedure. That we have in the United States, that's how we go about doing this stuff. And this thing that we've developed over the last couple of decades, foregoing that, particularly in cases of sexual crimes, and saying instead, well, what we're going to do to achieve, quote, unquote, accountability is to wait for some crucial crossroads in this person's public or professional life and then launch these allegations in a way that can't be proved, can't really be evaluated. Your attitude toward these charges will probably reflect what you already thought about Graham Platner going into it, which is natural. And that's not necessarily a criticism of how people come to these conclusions. But there isn't going to be a trial, there isn't going to be testimony, there isn't going to be evidence, there isn't going to be criminal procedure. And again, even though I don't think there's any particular reason to doubt the story in this case, it does create a set of incentives, I think, that are very destructive. I do think that in the case of Kavanaugh in his hearings, that those were fictitious claims. I do not believe them. I think they were made up for political reasons by a attention seeking person with some mental health problems. Very likely. And I just said I don't want to psychologize people from afar, but I just did. But, okay, sue me, don't actually sue me. And I don't want to create more incentives to weaponize that sort of thing. Both because it's unfair to the accused in cases like Kavanaugh when he is obviously, I think, not guilty of the thing of which he was accused, but also because it creates incentives for poorly serving the people who actually are victims of these crimes, which should be addressed through police and the courts. That's what you do with crimes, particularly very, very serious crimes like this. Rather than saying, well, we're not going to treat it as a crime, but we're gonna treat it as a testament of what this person's character is like, which it is. It is that, but it's also a crime. And crime victims deserve justice, and justice comes in a court of law.
- [35:55]
A
Yeah. So obviously we talked about this a little bit yesterday, and I've been thinking about it a bit, and my basic take is, you're absolutely right. In theory, that's how it should work. When I say in theory, I'm not trying to be dismissive. That is the ideal way it should work is that. And that's the only thing that Platner said in his statement. Did you watch any of his video resignation. Okay. Because I want to talk about that in a second. It's the only thing where I have actual agreement with him in that he says accusations are supposed to be the beginning of a process. Accusations are supposed to be the beginning of an investigation. And I think that's right. Right. It's like the accusation isn't the conviction of the accusation, it is the introduction of a question. And that said, I think part of the problem is with your formulation is there's kind of like no good moment to declare that the rule. Because we were so far down the road on this stuff. And so if you actually look at. Let's assume that the accuser is telling the truth, I find her credible and I find the fact pattern of why she came forward and the evolution of why she came forward certainly plausible and credible. And I don't wanna get deep in the weeds on the rape accusation, but simply to say that we have a media industrial complex, which is part of your complaint, that does this. Right. Does this with me, too. It's been doing this for basically since Bob Packwood, if not earlier. And that kind of reporting, which can be of service. I mean, I think we both thought the Cesar Chavez reporting was very useful after he died. As you pointed out. New York Times is very good at doing history. It's the journalism they struggle with.
- [37:47]
B
But that was a good line. Thank you for reminding me of it.
- [37:49]
A
Yeah. But the point I'm trying to get at is living on the ground in the real world. When this woman sees what the New York Times did and ignited with making the issue more about the credibility of a previous accuser of physical assault, you then create a moral dilemma for the person. Right. So not for the journalists, but for the person of do I come forward if I have the truth in my heart and I know what actually happened and I have the facts, and I didn't want to do this for all sorts of understandable reasons about not wanting the stigma, not wanting to go to court, not all that kind of stuff, but I feel morally compelled to come forward now. That person is going to find an outlet that is going to take their story. And then once it's. Once it's. Published, it's news. And so you're left with these princess and the pea kind of like, how do we get out of this cycle? Kind of thing that I don't like. If she had come to us at the Dispatch, I don't know what we would have done with it, but I'd have published it. Yeah. So far down the road on this thing that, I mean, obviously we shouldn't have gotten into World War I, but here we are. Right?
- [39:05]
B
Let me just add something, just real quick. So I was saying with Platner, your attitude toward the accusations will probably be dependent on your attitude toward the. The subject. And I think that's true in all cases. And as we got into a little bit yesterday, I actually did some years ago teach journalism seminar on the Rolling Stone UVA rape case. And this is a case of a woman coming forward with these, you know, story of this, you know, horrible sexual assault that she suffered. And it bolstered the writer's attitude toward a certain class of people, these, you know, entitled frat boys at the University of Virginia and the lacrosse team, I guess they were. And the story was, not only did they do this, but this is the sort of thing that people like this do. And that's a really easy thing for people to fall into, particularly when it comes to one's political enemies. Now, that story turned out to be made up. It was entirely false. It should have been obvious to the editors and writers of the story that it was before it went out, but it was published. And, you know, Rolling Stone is. I'm not sure I would still call it a great journalistic institution, but it's an institution with some history and some resources and things like that. And it can get things spectacularly wrong in a way that was going to wreck the lives of these young men who had not done the thing of which they were accused of doing. So I think we have to be really, really careful with allegations of crime outside of the process that we have for evaluating such allegations. Now, again, I agree with you entirely. In this particular situation, there are all sorts of reasons for her to come forward at this time. I don't blame her for doing that, but I think that when we're thinking about it as journalists and political people and as citizens, we should be a little bit more circumspect, I think, than we often are in these things, rather than just saying, well, this comports with my priors and it serves me politically right now, so I'm going to run with it and assume that it's entirely true because we've seen, you know, situations where not only was it entirely made up, situations in which we have pretty good reason to think things were either made up or exaggerated. And then there's some, you know, gray area in. In some. In. In some of the other cases. So it's a. It should be an occasion for some intellectual and epistemic humility.
- [41:18]
A
That's all fair. I, I, I, I don't want to keep this as a journalism and philosophy seminar as much as I am in favor of epistemic humility. But so here's the thing that I got very angry about when I actually saw the video of Graham Platner's withdrawal announcement. He look, if he was blackout drunk in this alleged rape situation, he may not actually remember what he did, but he does remember that he was blackout drunk. Right. And if he was blackout drunk, and he may remember more than that. Right. So if he did it, his statement was so fundamentally, morally and ethically grotesque that I find it sort of borderline scandalous. He is basically saying, like, if you listen to, maybe it's because I've been doing this deep dive. I was telling you about going through the various caucuses and the Democratic Socialists of America and all these Maoists and Marxists and whatnot. He is making a classically Marxist argument about what happened. He says in his statement that he's not guilty. He says in his statement that this isn't just about getting them off the ballot. This is about, we should be outraged about how the structures of the system are being removed from us, that we did this the way they told us to. And basically the capitalist ruling classes are combining with corporate media and the power structure and all the rest to deny you a voice in our politics and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now, I think that's all BS on the merits, on the facts, but I would find it forgivable, more forgivable if he is, in fact, not guilty. Right. Because then when you're wrongly accused of stuff, you start coming up with, oh, the system's out to get me. And he's inclined to go that way if he is guilty or if he thinks it's even possible that he is guilty and he is doing this. It is un American. It's unpatriotic. It's incredibly self. It is. I mean, the stakes are much lower, but psychologically, it's no different than Donald Trump knowingly saying the election was stolen when it wasn't. And it's that sort of mindset that I just found pretty appalling in what he was saying.
- [43:32]
B
Yeah. You know, it's seen in one of my favorite movies in Beckett, where they have these two kind of, you know, corrupt, contented Italian cardinals talking about political strategy. And one of them says to the other, well, you know, sincerity is just another, another strategy like any other. I've been known to use it myself. And there's the old joke that authenticity. If you can fake that, you can do anything. And Platner is again, to revisit our last conversation yesterday, you mentioned the thing about Donald Trump being a poor person's idea of what a millionaire is like. And Platner is a couple of very cosseted, insulated political consultants. Idea of what a working class guy is like. And so they see this guy and they're like, well, he doesn't have a great job and he's got unkempt facial hair and this, you know, kind of walrus mustache thing going on. He must be, you know, a personification of blue collar America and the working class. And turns out he's, he's not that at all. And, you know, Platner talking about the ruling class overlords being out to get us and all that. If there's an example of that, it's him because he's a creation of that very political machine. You know, he is a product. He's, he's not some guy who rose up organically through the ranks because he was, you know, the vice president of his local union chapter who decided to run for city council and then ended up going to, you know, a Senate campaign. He's this guy who did some social media stuff that some political consultants looked like and said, we can use this, you know, we can put some soap in that soapbox and sell that laundry detergent, because the box is what we're selling, not the detergent. And my father worked for Procter and Gamble. I guess Tide just comes to mind in all marketing, in all marketing conversations. So, you know, Platner really is an example of the thing that he was pretending to decry, which of course is perfect because when you are someone like Donald Trump or some other well heeled populist, you're always out there telling the rubes to be afraid of and to resent the thing you are. You know, if there's an example of insider dealing, kind of comfortable, cozy relationships between private business, corporate interests and, you know, politicians, I mean, is, is there a better example of that than Donald Trump? I mean, certainly after he's become president. But before too, you know, his building career in, in New York was built on, you know, political favoritism and access, purchasing and all that by his own, you know, account. And, you know, Platner is kind of the flip side of that same model, I think.
- [46:06]
A
Yeah. So, like, I, I've been writing versions of this column for a very long time about what I call sort of the, the Johnny Bravo form of politics, which is. I first started writing about it with. What's his name?
- [46:16]
B
Johnny Bravo.
- [46:18]
A
No. The former commander of NATO. Wes. Wes Clark.
- [46:21]
B
Yeah.
- [46:21]
A
Right. In 2004, the Democrats brought him out because they thought they needed a guy in a uniform to beat George W. Bush in an Iraq war. And they didn't actually care what he had to say or what he thought. He just fit the costume. And I'm not calling them uniform a costume. He was a noble public servant who served his country and all that kind of stuff. But that's how people like. Yeah, that's basically the argument for why John Kerry got it is like Democrats didn't like him. They thought Republicans would like him. Right. And the Johnny Bravo reference is there was an episode, if you were raised thinking about commercial detergent projects. I was raised watching the Brady Bunch, and there was an episode of the Brady Bunch where Greg Brady gets recruited by some slick Madison Avenue music producer types and promoters who want him to break off from the family band and launch a solo career as Johnny Bravo. And Greg thinks they love his. His authentic voice and skill and talent and music and all this kind of stuff. And turns out, no, he just fit the costume and that's why they wanted him. And you see this with, you know, the candidates that, you know, like, James Talarico is just the latest version of this where he is a. Well, he's a pastor. Those people like pastors. So we don't know anything about the differences between kinds of pastors and all that and will just get those people to vote for him while he doesn't actually have to, like, be a conservative in any way. Right. And I think that this is sort of Graham Platner thing is he's a. He's a. He's an oysterman. Johnny Bravo.
- [47:58]
B
Greg Brady, of course, had the self respect not to be the Milli Vanilli of the middle 1970s and to not go forward with it.
- [48:05]
A
That's right. That's right.
- [48:06]
B
Talarico less so, I think just on
- [48:09]
A
the raw punditry side of this, is this good news or bad news for Susan Collins?
- [48:14]
B
Well, it's bad news for Collins in that Platner would be a very easy person, I think, to beat. And almost anyone that the Democrats are able to recruit to stand in for him on the ballot is going to be a stronger and more plausible candidate than him. And I think that that would be true even without a lot of the. The personal scandal stuff. He's just kind of a crackpot. And Maine voters historically are not super, super crackpot friendly. The outrage of a certain kind of progressive toward Collins to me, is illustrative in some ways. You know, if you're a kind of normal middle of the road Democrat, you know, someone who probably voted for Obama twice, but doesn't necessarily think that you want to drive a tank into Prague. Collins is one of the, the least offensive Republicans probably in, in politics. She actually is fairly moderate. She actually is bipartisan by, you know, contemporary standards. Although, like every person in the Senate, she largely votes on party lines most of the time. But she's, you know, more likely to, to cross that than, than most other Republicans are. Most other Democrats are, for that matter. And of course, the irony here is that, you know, part of the case against her was that she voted to confirm Kavanaugh after these allegations were made about him. You know, we mentioned Talarico earlier. I could see swinging for the fences a little bit with staying on board with a crackpottish candidate if you're trying to take out Ken Paxton to try to keep him out of the Senate. Because if you are a sort of normie Democrat, he's the sort of person who's gonna really annoy you. I mean, I'm a normie conservative and he knows me, so it's gotta be gonna be that much worse for somebody. But the, you know, trying to get the world outraged and ginned up about Susan Collins is just gonna be hard to do, I think, in some ways. And so even if they, you know, replace Platner with, well, there are two ways they could go, right? They could do with a sort of more moderate kind of normie Democratic candidate, and then you've got the problem of, well, between two normies. Why not the normie we already know and familiar with and who has some seniority and that we kind of trust? Or you can try to find another Platner esque candidate and run as a candidate of outrage against, you know, the system and capitalism and all that kind of stuff. But you still got to put Susan Collins out as the face of that thing you're running against. And I don't know, there's nothing about Susan Collins that just makes me want to go to the barricades.
- [50:34]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was basically my position yesterday when we recorded this before Graham Platner dropped out.
- [50:40]
B
I know, but you asked me, so I stole it.
- [50:42]
A
No, that's fine. That wasn't my point is that it's still my position largely. I think it's just like the oppo file that they had on Graham Platner, he was already kind of losing Normie support. You know, they, I think they had a plan. It was a good plan. Whether it would have succeeded, you know, we'll never know. But like, I would have bet on Collins against Platner and now at minimum, they have uncertainty. So we'll see. But I was listening briefly to the beginning, I listened to the beginning of the commentary podcast yesterday about this. So the Wednesday one, and our friend Eliana Johnson was saying how this is really bad news for Collins. I'm not persuaded, but I did, it did shake my confidence a little bit. But part of her point, which I think is probably right, is that this is going to elicit a major sort of intra Democratic civil war in Maine because the GSA crowd had their guy, they loved their guy. They had written off all these faults as running dog, capitalist bourgeois propaganda. And now if they put in a Normie Schumer proved establishment person, they're gonna scream bloody murder. I don't know if that's true, but it sounded pretty plausible. I still think. I try very hard never to use the formulation X amount of time is a lifetime in politics because it's just such a frigging cliche. But November is a long way away. Platner is his trajectory towards being the answer to a trivia question has started. And the anti Trump spirits of the Democrats are going to be very, very strong in Maine. And this is the place where I do push back on you a little bit on this, that demonizing Susan Collins is ridiculous and very hard to do. The problem is we live in a political system now where the idea of all politics being local really doesn't apply. And if you tell people like people think we live in a parliamentary democracy and they vote like we are in a parliamentary democracy, and that's why people are going to vote. A lot of people who don't like Ken Paxton are going to vote for Ken Paxton. And it's why a lot of people who don't like whoever the main candidate is going to be are going to vote for the main candidate because the point is to take power away from Republicans and mount resistance to Trump. And I think that is going to drive a lot of turnout and Collins will not have a persuasive story to the people who feel that way that she's, quote, unquote, stood up to Trump. And so I think she's. It's going to be a hard race. It's something I bet on her, but it's. I wouldn't bet a lot of money on. On the outcome of this thing. The thing. Last point. Graham Platner could have made a ton of money because it was 95 to 5 on, like, poly Market or whatever, that he was going to drop out. He could have. He could have just said nope and, you know, deal with it.
- [53:49]
B
Man, that's. I should write something about that one of these days. But that does create all sorts of bad incentives as well. I thought you were going to say just to hold out for some kind of, you know, payoff to get out of the way. Not to go off on a tangent here, but.
- [54:00]
A
And he might have gotten one for all we know. I'm not. We have no evidence of that. But, like, if he was going to get one, we wouldn't have gotten that evidence for it either.
- [54:07]
B
You know, I know that. That Kamala Harris doesn't ever get up in the morning saying, I really should have taken the advice from that Kevin Williamson column a few years ago, but she could be the president of the University of California system on her way to being governor of California if she wanted to be. But she wanted to get her tail kicked politically by Donald Trump and go down in history as a laughingstock instead, and that just seems like a bad decision.
- [54:30]
A
Yep. Yep.
- [54:31]
B
And Platner probably could have got something. He probably could have got, you know, I'm going to be. I'm going to be the, you know, president of some lefty think tank, and it better Suddenly get a $10 million endowment so you can afford to pay me $100,000 a month for the rest of my life. Or at least until you forget who I am and you win the Senate race.
- [54:47]
A
The Oysterman Institute.
- [54:49]
B
The Oysterman Institute. That would be actually a pretty good name.
- [54:52]
A
Yeah, it sounds like a little bit like a Ludlum novel.
- [54:56]
B
The Goldberg Paradox.
- [54:57]
A
Well, we already have the Goldberg Variations.
- [55:00]
B
That's right. You have, by the way, manfully resisted ever publishing a collection of your works and calling it that, which you got to do one of these days.
- [55:07]
A
Yeah. Before we take an ad break, consider becoming a member of the Dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up@thedispatch.com join. That's thedispatch.com join. And if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get one free month. And speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders and more. Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. We should switch briefly to Iran.
- [55:59]
B
Okay.
- [55:59]
A
Iran so far away.
- [56:01]
B
Soft lock of seagulls.
- [56:03]
A
Donald Trump yesterday. We're recording on Thursday this happened. Might have happened late Tuesday because of the time zone differences, and time is a flat circle. This week, Donald Trump announced that the ceasefire is over, that the Iranian regime is scum, and he just doesn't want to deal with them anymore. Shooting has recommenced in the on boat in both directions in the Strait of Hormuz and in the surrounding neighborhood. 0 to 10. 0 being not shocked at all. 10 being gobsmacked, as the British say. How much below zero are you?
- [56:40]
B
It's like roughly, like negative PI squared. Actually, no, that wouldn't work. Negative squared would give me a positive number. So that would actually take me entirely in the wrong direction. So I should stick to my English major math here and say, yeah, about, I don't know, what's the temperature New Year's Day where your wife's from in Alaska? About 13 below, typically.
- [56:58]
A
Something like that.
- [56:59]
B
Yeah, throw it around there. You know, it wasn't that long ago where Trump was saying, hey, these are the most reasonable guys we've dealt with so far. You know, we basically got regime change by whacking the old guys, and now there's this new gang in there that wants to do business with us and we can work with these guys. And Trump, of course, what he said an hour ago is completely forgotten by his colleagues and friends and admirers and sycophants, much less what he said a week ago or two weeks ago. Iran is winning this thing, and they understand that they're winning. And we have a problem in that. The United States, maybe in general, but also the Trump administration in particular, doesn't understand that the Iranians define victory in a way that's different from how we do. So every day they last against the Great Satan, the United States, and stick a thumb in our eye and show that they can control the Strait of Hormuz and collect rents and do the rest of it is a day full of sunshine for these guys. And, yeah, their people are suffering economically, and some people are going to get killed by American military power. They can live with that. I mean, they killed 20,000 people to make a political point not too long ago. They might have killed a lot more than that. Who knows? So if you are the Iranian rulers, whoever that may actually be, it's not really entirely clear to me who's in Charge over there. Why would you want this to stop? Because if it stops, then you got to go back to trying to run Iran, which is a terrible job because it's a poor, backward country with a non functioning government and a decimated, actually, decimated is not nearly strong enough a word. A crippled economy and not much in the way of prospects. And, and it's run by people who are at least intelligent enough to understand that the things that they would need to do to radically improve their country's position economically and get it more globally integrated into the world markets and such would require the kinds of reforms that are the opposite of what they actually want to do. They don't want to be a normal country. You know, the comparison case for Iran is Saudi Arabia in a lot of ways, which also run by sort of backward looking Islamic fanatics. But Saudi Arabia wants to be a rich and modern and sort of more normal country. And so it's taken various steps to get itself that way. It's still not Nebraska, you know, it's not Connecticut, it's not even Singapore. But it's been moving, you know, in the direction of reform and openness and, you know, better kinds of government and decency and institutional reform and all the rest of these things. And Iran doesn't want to move that way. Iran's got different ideas about what its role is. It really is this genuinely millenarian, apocalyptic outlook that defines how Iran goes about its business.
- [59:41]
A
I don't think you disagree with me, but we should clarify we're talking about the Iranian regime because I think this is exactly the fault line.
- [59:48]
B
Right, yeah.
- [59:48]
A
The crowds protesting want to be a normal country.
- [59:52]
B
Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah.
- [59:53]
A
And the government doesn't want to, you know, Iran.
- [59:56]
B
Again, I'm far from an Iranologist, but my understanding is that the revolutionary regime's political base is really basically in strongest in undeveloped rural areas among people who are poor, not very well educated, and who don't have a lot of hopes of gaining anything from Iran being more closely integrated into the rest of the world. So people get mad when I point this out, but the, their coalition looks a lot like Trump's coalition in a lot of ways. It's, you know, it's rural, religiously fanatical, downscale, poorly educated, backward looking and afraid of globalization. So the question is, and it's never been clear to me, and I've done some reading on this, but it's just how much support the regime has. You know, it's probably not majority support, but it's also not 2%. And so if they can really count on the support of, you know, 20% of the people, that's one thing. If they can really count on the support of 35% of the people, that's, that's a different thing. They're obviously not enough of a paper tiger that we can just knock them over the way that we apparently thought we could, Venezuela style, and just go in with some, you know, 15 minutes of extreme violence and then put in some new people who are going to be more plastic and more amenable to doing our bidding. So Trump administration, surprise, surprise, didn't do its homework, got it wrong, and now it finds itself in a mess that it can't win and because it's not willing to do the things that would be necessary and there's no way out of.
- [61:19]
A
Yeah, I had interesting conversation with Aaron McLean, who hosts the School Award podcast,
- [61:25]
B
and I listened to that just this morning.
- [61:27]
A
And the basic problem is people have learned that the way you win is not lose. That's really it, right? Is just stick it out, become a pain in the ass, make a superpower spend a lot in, or at least make America spend a lot in very expensive munitions and muck around with international commodity markets and threaten the rise of the stock market. And America, I mean, this is a point I think Aaron is right about. I should be careful. Donald Trump will lose patience, and I think the American people will lose patience if they haven't been convinced the war is in their interest. Andy McCarthy, our old friend, makes this point from time to time that if you convince Americans that something is really in our interest and that our honor is fundamentally at stake and that American lives are in danger, Americans will tolerate a lot of sacrifice. It's just not infinite. So even though people got tired of the war on terror, I think in part because they realized we got the low hanging fruit, we got Osama bin Laden, we did the things that we were supposed to do, and then they're like, okay, enough of this already. And I get that for sure. But when you do it the way Trump did it, which is don't have a debate in Congress, don't have a debate in the press, don't telegraph that you're going to do it, don't ask for permission to do it, don't talk to your allies about it, claim that you're doing it all unilaterally, declare unalloyed total victory prematurely, demand unconditional surrender and essentially regime change, and then fail to get all that, surprise, surprise, it's the most unpopular war in the history of polling from the outset, just because no one was asked to have buy in for it. And I honestly, there's a cause for optimism here insofar as I think it's good for some optimism. I think it's good that Donald Trump called off the ceasefire. I think it's good that he called their BS on attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz and said, this is not what the deal was. You're breaking the deal. Screw you. And again, I think it was a mistake to get into this war, given how it's played out so far, but better to call the Iranians bluff and say, hey, look, you can't turn the Strait of Hormuz into a toll road. And if you're doing that, people forget the Iranians within the four corners of this incident started it because there's another channel off the coast of Oman that is not the one that the Iranians control. They don't want people using that because they're trying to lay the foundation to say, once the 60 days is up, we're setting up toll booths. And America doesn't want that. A lot of our allies don't want that. And so we called their bluff on it. But I just don't know how it ends because the Iranians are very triumphant. I was just listening to an Economist podcast about it where they really feel, they're feeling the roads. They think they really milk that funeral, too. Yes. And you know, at the event in Iraq, not Iran, in Iraq was a sea of Iranian flags. Right. So they feel like they're projecting power and the IRGC is unconstrained by the mullahs, which people who are afraid of Islamic fundamentalism think is a good thing. It might be in the long term, but in the short term, it's not a good thing. And so I just, I just have no idea how this thing ends. And the only thing I only argument I will utterly reject is anybody claiming that anything is going according to a plan.
- [65:26]
B
Yes. Well, I have it on the good word of J.D. vance that, you know, you neocon war hawks just want to kill every Iranian anyway, so.
- [65:34]
A
That's right.
- [65:35]
B
Obviously, this is going to please you. You know, you think about it like, I mean, to use maybe a tortured metaphor here, if there was a guy who came by your house and shot a rifle through your window every night at the same time, roughly, like, you wouldn't love it, but you could learn to adapt to it. Like, you wouldn't be in that room, it'd still be scary. Still Be dangerous. You still want to have your kids somewhere else. But if you were 99% sure the guy was never going to kick down the door, but you knew he was a lot better armed than you, you wouldn't want to go out into the street and fight him. And we're essentially the guy shooting through the window. You know, the things that are necessary to do to really dig these guys out of the ground and have regime change in Iran, or short of that, just to get the things accomplished that we want to accomplish, like, you know, seizing the nuclear materials or these other things the administration has said just requires a kind of commitment to this fight that we. By we, I mean the US Government, which I hate to even use the personal pronoun with that, but it is our government. We are not going to do those things. Donald Trump does not want to have another thing that looks like the Iraq war, another occupation, troops on the ground, people having to go door to door and do X, Y and Z, or deal with, you know, IEDs and booby traps and that kind of stuff. You know, they want to do this kind of antiseptic warfare from ships and from airplanes and maybe the occasional Special Forces operation here or there. But that's not going to get done what we apparently want to get done in Iran. So I would expect what we're going to end up with is just, you know, essentially a quagmire in which Trump will declare victory every six weeks and then say, well, you know, those dasherly guys, they're not trustworthy and as though that's their problem and not his problem for continuing to make deals with these people who obviously aren't going to keep them and have interests of their own and a different way of going about politics and military engagements and just going to go on and on because the guy is 80 years old and he doesn't know the difference between Putin and Zelensky and Iran and Japan. And his number two guy is a guy who has a very different view, I think, of foreign policy than he does, who's just watching the president spin around like a pinata and wondering where this to torture another metaphor game of musical chairs is going to stop and whether it's going to be something that is more or less hospitable to the long term aspirations of one J.D. vance.
- [67:54]
A
I will not poke you about J.D. vance, because. Poke away. No, no, no. Just because I'll set you off and then you'll set me off, and then we'll be here for another 45 minutes and we've Already gone on too long. But I did promise you yesterday that we needed to have you back on the Remnant. You shamed me. I guilted you, yes, because I'd said, I'll have you back on soon, over about a year ago, and so we will.
- [68:19]
B
And then you tried to rope me into doing the solo, and you begged
- [68:22]
A
off, which I was. I was a little surprised by.
- [68:24]
B
Let's take a vote in the comments section. Who wants to hear Kevin Williamson get up in the morning and talk for 45 minutes to an hour about whatever comes into my head? And although I was talking to my wife about this, and she said she would have enjoyed it, but I'm gonna do my best Jonah Goldberg impersonation and get up and say, it's overwhelming schedule right now, and I haven't been feeling great and not sleeping well, and I'm in this little apartment and I got dog issues.
- [68:48]
A
Yeah.
- [68:49]
B
And, well, you know, my lumbago is acting up. You know what it would sound like? It would sound like those radio intercepts from Kurtz at the beginning of Apocalypse now, where it's just me at 4:00 clock in the morning when I go up saying, we have to go from village to village, army after army, the horror cow pickup. And. Yeah, that wouldn't be. Wouldn't be good for anybody.
- [69:11]
A
All right, so rather than redo the not worth your time thing that we talked about yesterday, since we've gone along here, I will just throw it to the comments. Is it worth our time to have Kevin try to do the solo remnant? I bet you votes are. Because, look, here's the thing. The people who love you and want to hear what you have to say want to love you and want to hear what you have to say. The people who love me, those people
- [69:37]
B
live with me, Jonah.
- [69:38]
A
Yeah, okay, well, the people who like you, right? The people who hate you want to hear, want to see you screw up. So, like, I don't know that you're going to get. A lot of people say, oh, no, don't do this. Right. So, for listeners who don't know, I do a solo podcast on Fridays, usually on Fridays, and I Wish it was 45 minutes to an hour now, but it has been creeping northward for a while, and I'm going to be away next week, and I asked Kevin if he wanted to submit for me, and he took a pass. So I think now we're going to do it as a Q and A kind of thing, me and Victoria, some evergreen kind of thing, because I want to honor my commitments on this front, but I'd be happy to have you come do it another time. And you should think about it, give it some thought. It's weird, but I think it's good. It's actually good practice in some ways. I mean, I think I've gotten better at it. But, you know, I used to sub
- [70:31]
B
on radio sometimes, like on Sirius XM on their. On their. Whatever. Their right wing channel is Patriot, and like, three hours of talking on a Friday night when it's just like you and the two truckers who are listening because they're not a lot of calls coming in or anything.
- [70:45]
A
Yeah.
- [70:45]
B
And that was really hard. In fact, first time I did it, I sent a note to Rush Limbaugh afterward just, you know, complimenting him on making it look easy when it's not. Not that easy.
- [70:56]
A
Yeah. I will say I did a little guest radio hosting. Like, I took over Bill Bennett's show a couple times. Oh, yeah. And I have to say, I didn't like it in part because it seems like you're talking a lot, but in reality, with all the commercial breaks, there was just, like, too many little set pieces that you had to actually be disciplined for. I mean, that's the problem with the solo is, like, there's no artificial external constraints that say, okay, now it's time to wrap up on this topic. And you end up having logaria, or I end up having logaria quite often, but there we are.
- [71:29]
B
So now I can. I can talk to you for an hour. I can talk to, you know, Charlie Cook for an hour. I can do that sort of stuff. But just, like, into the camera, I think I might lose it.
- [71:38]
A
Well, we don't use the camera for the solo because it's paywalled and doesn't go up on YouTube. So. Which I would like to fix at some point, not because I think the world needs my mug, but I don't know, I think the real worry that I get is, like, you forget that you're talking. Right. And so, like. And then, like, you're like, what did I just say? So people will send me email about stuff I said on the solo. I do not remember saying, like, because it's just when I finally get up and going, and that scares the crap out of me. What did I say about invading Poland? You know, that kind of stuff.
- [72:12]
B
Yeah. I have fewer of those conversations that I don't remember the next day than I used to.
- [72:15]
A
Fair. Yeah. Different reasons. More platinum or adjacent reasons.
- [72:19]
B
Yeah.
- [72:19]
A
All right, Kevin Williamson. Thank you for doing this, everybody. It's really important to mock Steve Hayes. As we were saying yesterday, of all the technological issues that we have had with the Dispatch podcast over the last seven years in terms of connectivity, Wi fi Steve, who fancies himself the CTO of the Dispatch, makes up about 70% of it. There is just something about the guy. He's like Pigpen or whatever. He just brings this cloud of like EMP energy around that disrupts normal EMF frequencies. I don't know what it is, but maybe we should get him to wrap parts of his body in tinfoil before he does this podcast because that will disrupt this this cycle.
- [73:00]
B
We could drop him on North Korea.
- [73:02]
A
That would be cool. Steve as an EMP weapon, I like it. Just a massive cheese curd splat in the middle of Pyongyang or whatever smells
- [73:10]
B
like Schlitz in here.
- [73:13]
A
Thanks everybody for listening. Apologies to everybody for me and Kevin going so long. It's all my fault and subscribe to the Dispatch. See ya. If you like what we're doing, you can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. As always, if you got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email us@roundtabledispatch.com that's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure, thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.