Why Democrats Failed on Immigration | Roundtable

Summary

The Dispatch Podcast: “Why Democrats Failed on Immigration” | Roundtable

Date: December 19, 2025
Host: Steve Hayes
Guests: Jonah Goldberg, Kevin Williamson, Grayson Loeb

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Overview

This lively roundtable session on The Dispatch Podcast centers on an in-depth post-mortem of the Biden administration’s immigration policy failures, driven by a recent New York Times investigative piece. The panel also tackles the fallout from the unprecedented interviews given by Trump’s White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, before finishing on a lighter note with a discussion about memorable road trips. Throughout, the conversation blends sharp policy insight, on-the-ground reporting, and trademark Dispatch skepticism, focusing on the interplay between media coverage, political incentives, and policy outcomes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Media Critique: The New York Times Immigration Exposé

• Initial Framing: Steve Hayes introduces the NYT piece as an “extraordinary investigative” look-back revealing the administration entered office with no immigration plan, failed to heed early internal warnings, and eventually presided over an acknowledged “disastrous” four years.
  (See: [00:00–04:05])
• Media Hindsight vs. Real-Time Reporting:
  • Williamson: Notes the Times “can do history, but not journalism” when it comes to Democratic failures; the reporting comes “after the fact” when officials are more willing to talk. ([04:05])
  • Hayes: Defends this as a natural limitation—sources are reluctant to criticize an active administration on the record. “It’s a lot easier to get people to talk when they’re looking back at a policy.” ([04:51])

2. The Biden Administration’s Fundamental Strategic Failures

• No Clear Policy Goals:
  • Williamson: “The Biden administration didn’t have a strategy because he didn’t have a goal.” The team failed to understand or engage with the true diversity of Latino communities or formulate a coherent response to immigration pressures. ([06:07])
  • On misreading the Latino vote: “People of Latino backgrounds do not have especially permissive views of immigration… It’s foolish to lump all Spanish-speaking people into a single political category.” ([07:39])
• Kamala Harris’ Ineffectiveness: Criticized for her “California-based” perspective and ineffectiveness when notionally in charge of the issue. ([09:25])

Notable Quote:

“They didn’t know what they wanted, except they knew they had a political outcome they wanted and they went about pursuing that political outcome in a way that was incompetent and ignorant…”
—Kevin Williamson ([08:46])

3. Politics Over Policy: Why the Crisis Escalated

• Jonah Goldberg: Observes that to the extent decisions were made, “those decisions at almost all times were driven by political considerations more than policy outcomes.” ([11:53])
  • Biden’s aversion to the topic compared to his discomfort with abortion “because he knows it’s not the position he wants to have and would rather not talk about it.” ([11:53])
  • Staff “emissaries from the groups” (activist organization types) further muddied policymaking, reducing nuanced demographics into DEI buzzwords and pressuring Biden to follow shallow, symbolic gestures. ([14:03])
• Hayes: Points out that both parties have misunderstood or mishandled the issue, citing the 2012 RNC “autopsy” and Trump’s different political instincts. ([17:27])

Notable Quote:

“When you do public policy as allegories where each person in the room represents tens of millions of people, you’re going to get policy wrong and you’re going to get politics wrong.”
—Jonah Goldberg ([16:40])

4. On-the-Ground: Reporting from the Border

• Grayson Loeb: Fresh from Yuma, Arizona, underlines the practical fallout—a small city overwhelmed by daily crossings—making the crisis “real” and hard to ignore for local officials, regardless of their politics. Resources were stretched to the breaking point, illustrating the disconnect between federal inaction and local needs. ([19:18])
  • Humanitarian crises included lack of hospital car seats for newborns, fire departments rescuing migrants, and overwhelmed emergency response systems. ([21:19])

Notable Quote:

“The story is that there’s no story. This was one of the hotspots... now it’s like five arrests a day, which is basically nothing. But that’s the notable fact—such a contrast.”
—Grayson Loeb ([21:45])

5. Turning Point: Texas Busing Stunt and Political Optics

• Event: Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s decision to bus migrants to Democratic cities made the crisis inescapable for party leadership nationwide, shifting the Biden administration’s posture.
  • Hayes: While he “didn’t love it” as it used people as props, it was “effective, and in pretty short order.” ([24:30])
  • Williamson: Calls it an “obviously effective stunt,” which forcibly demonstrated that “this is a story about U.S. policy”—not just external factors. Suddenly, the problem “had faces and needs in New York, not just in Yuma.” ([26:23])
  • Goldberg: Argues the move forced Democratic strongholds to confront the realities local border communities had been facing for years. ([33:42])
• Gradual Policy Shift Too Late:
  • As the crisis grew harder to deny, the Biden administration acknowledged problems, made policy changes, and numbers fell—but “too late to change the sense of the country, certainly heading into a presidential election year.” ([35:02])

Notable Quote:

“It did make a difference. Again, it was a stunt... but probably useful… for people in the rest of the country to understand in more visible, human terms just what this issue really looks like.”
—Kevin Williamson ([27:16])

6. How Did Flows Stop? Policy or Rhetoric?

• Late Biden Clampdown: At the end of 2024, Biden’s team “really start[ed] to clamp down on asylum,” reducing the number but not eliminating crossings.
• Trump’s Rhetoric/Policy: Trump’s ascension and “even stricter” policies (virtually zero asylum/humanitarian access) led to “a drop from 70,000 people one month to 10,000 people the next month.”
  • Loeb and others argue this sharp drop is mainly attributable to the “message effect”—Trump’s aggressive deterrence rhetoric, amplified ironically by Democratic mayors and governors decrying his policies, may have been even more effective as a deterrent. ([36:31])
  • The episode ends with the recognition that policy, enforcement, and the rhetorical signal from the White House all play a role, but perceptions (and who’s in charge) can rapidly amplify or suppress flows.

Notable Quote:

“In terms of—we were on a downward trajectory… then it really just fell off a cliff to effectively like close to nothing. A lot of that can be attributed to the messaging.”
—Grayson Loeb ([37:43])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

| Timestamp | Quote & Context | Speaker | |------------|-----------------|---------| | 08:46 | “They didn’t know what they wanted, except they knew they had a political outcome they wanted and they went about pursuing that political outcome in a way that was incompetent and ignorant...” | Kevin Williamson | | 11:53 | “Those decisions at almost all times were driven by political considerations more than policy outcomes, desired policy outcomes.” | Jonah Goldberg | | 16:40 | “When you do public policy as allegories where each person in the room represents tens of millions of people, you’re going to get policy wrong and you’re going to get politics wrong.” | Jonah Goldberg | | 21:45 | “The story is that there’s no story. This was one of the hotspots... now it’s like five arrests a day, which is basically nothing. But that’s the notable fact—such a contrast.” | Grayson Loeb | | 27:16 | “It did make a difference. Again, it was a stunt... but probably useful… for people in the rest of the country to understand in more visible, human terms just what this issue really looks like.” | Kevin Williamson | | 36:17 | “One of my favorite quotes from that time was Vice President Harris saying, I believe if you come, you will be stopped at the border, not like, ‘if you come, you will be stopped.’” | Grayson Loeb | | 37:43 | “It really just fell off a cliff to effectively like close to nothing. A lot of that can be attributed to the messaging.” | Grayson Loeb |

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Segment Timestamps

• Immigration Policy Failure: [00:00–39:31]
  • Media criticism, policy failure, political calculations, border reporting, Texas busing, trajectory of migrant flows.
• Susie Wiles Interviews – White House Chief of Staff: [41:24–63:48]
  • Vanity Fair interviews; reveals legal exposure, score-settling, why leakers leak (reputation management), how White House chiefs differ.
  • Notable: Susie Wiles admits U.S. objective in Venezuela is regime change; breaks with White House line.
  • Trump’s advisers rally to Wiles despite her on-record criticisms—a function of her unique relationship with Trump (“She never tries to restrain him.”)
• Road Trip Stories (“Not Worth Your Time”): [66:05–78:32]
  • Panelists reminisce about memorable road trips and favorite fast-food stops on the road.
  • Humorous anecdotes about train journeys and sleeping in cars during college travels.

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Language, Tone & Style

Throughout, the roundtable is sharp, wry, and never far from self-deprecating humor. The tone is slightly skeptical but empathetic, blending policy wonkery with real-world reporting and irreverent asides.

• Kevin Williamson is blunt and data-driven, rarely mincing words regarding the administration’s ignorance or the media’s delay in telling the full story.
• Jonah Goldberg supplies historical and conceptual context, often relating current policy to broader phenomena—group identity politics, Beltway bubble thinking, and the perils of ideological staff.
• Grayson Loeb contributes recent border reporting and offers granular, practical anecdotes to counter Washington abstraction.

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Conclusion

This episode dissects the Democratic failure on immigration policy, laying the blame at the feet of diffuse leadership, misunderstood constituencies, timid media, and ultimately, politics triumphant over policy. The subsequent sharp, candid segment on Susie Wiles’s jaw-dropping interviews adds a window into the contrasts between Trump’s and Biden’s advisory universes. The show rounds out with road trip banter, but the substance of the immigration discussion—backed by New York Times reporting, fieldwork, and historical perspective—serves as both diagnosis and warning for political actors and journalists alike.

Transcript

[Steve Hayes]

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[Kevin Williamson]

Yeah. If you don't mind, just like two minutes or maybe one minute of media criticism. First, though, please. I always talk about the New York Times, which is a newspaper I've subscribed to and quite like. But it's a great newspaper as long as it's not covering national elections or hot button social issues. And so what we've discovered about the New York Times is they can't do journalism when it comes to Biden and immigration policy, but they can do history. So they've done some history here. And that's, that's, that's good work. I thought it was a good piece.

[Steve Hayes]

Can, can we spend a minute on that? So I was going to, you're Bill. Better than I. I was going to get through the reporting and then get to that point. But let's start with that point because I think it's relevant. The critique from the riot, I saw it in the New York Post and I saw it elsewhere. You've just hinted at it, is that this was all knowable and reportable at the time.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Yes.

[Steve Hayes]

And the Times has chosen not to do it. Yeah. Read all about it in the Dispatch. I will say, let me, let me make an attempt at a defense of the Times here. The reporter, I think, said he interviewed three dozen plus dozens of Biden administration officials who are involved in policymaking on immigration or as I think the main critique will be non policymaking on immigration over those four years. And it's a lot easier to get people to talk when they're looking back on a policy than when they're in the middle of it. So if you are a top advisor to President Biden and the policy is going poorly, it can be seen as disloyal to talk on background to a reporter from the New York Times trashing your president or raising concerns about the policies as they're unfolding. And it's easier or easier maybe to justify looking back and saying, here are some things that I wish we would have done differently. Here are some things that my faction, the White House argued that didn't get done. Why is that sort of a critique of the times when it's, I think, probably easy for all of us to understand that sources were just a lot more willing to talk after the fact?

[Kevin Williamson]

Yeah, well, I think that's, that, that's certainly a fair way of looking at it. I think that one of the things you see from the story is that whether you are inside the administration or if you are in friendly media like the New York Times, and I don't think it's any breaking any news or being unfair to the New York Times to say it was friendly to the Biden administration, particularly in, in comparison with the, with, with Trump. But you can't make a president didn't listen to you if he doesn't want to listen to you. And Biden didn't want to listen to anybody on this stuff. There was someone they quoted, I believe, anonymously, who had been an ICE senior official of some kind, who said that the Biden administration didn't have a strategy because he didn't have a goal. And that seemed to me just about right. They didn't know what they wanted out of their immigration policy, so they had no way of going about getting what it was they wanted out of their immigration policy. I think that I don't want to throw around cheap allegations of racism, but one of the things where progressives, I think, particularly go wrong on this issue is this notion that there exists such a thing as Latinos and that they're this sort of monolithic group and that you can kind of lump them together. And they've all got similar attitudes about immigration and such. And one of the things I think that is politically not appreciated about that is that there are more Mexican Americans in the United States than every other Latino group put together. So in terms of Hispanic Americans, there are about 60% are Mexican Americans. They're not very much like Guatemalans or Hondurans or Nicaraguans.

[Jonah Goldberg]

They have definitely not like Cubans, definitely not like Cubans.

[Kevin Williamson]

They have a wide variety of attitudes, some of them not very nice when it comes to South American Latino people. If you want to, if you want to get an earful of, like, way worse rhetoric than you'll hear from the Trump administration about Central American immigration, like Ask some Mexicans about Guatemala, for example, they will give you an earful about that stuff. So, I mean, I say they, it's not all of them. I mean, obviously different people have different sorts of attitudes. But this idea of lumping all people from Spanish speaking backgrounds into a single political category and then on top of that, misreading what their preferences are in terms of immigration policy is foolish. People of Latino backgrounds do not have especially permissive views of immigration. And one of the reasons for that is that when it comes to illegal immigration, the one group of Americans who actually do documentably suffer wage reductions as a result of immigration, of illegal immigration are recent legal immigrants. There's a lot of econometric data on this stuff that illegals of course do push wages down, but where they push them down in the most noticeable way is for people who immigrated just slightly before them. So people who are fairly new here, and there are a lot of Spanish speaking people and Latino people with that kind of background or people like that in their families. And, and so they have a more nuanced and complex view of the economics and the sociology of it than they're generally given credit for. So the Biden administration talked and the people talking on their behalf continue to talk to the New York Times on the record or off the record, as this was a question of not wanting to lose that community as a voting bloc. And what they did was lose that community as a voting bloc and they gave Donald Trump his best numbers in the Texas border pretty much ever. Those communities are very, very different from what the assumptions seem to be about how people of Hispanic background think and act when it comes to voting on immigration. So they didn't know what they wanted, except they knew they had a political outcome they wanted and they went about pursuing that political outcome in a way that was incompetent and ignorant and I think based on maybe not having enough relationships and first hand knowledge with people from those actual backgrounds and understanding what that community really looks like. And then of course, you put Kamala Harris in charge of it, sort of notionally, which is bad for a couple of reasons. One is that she's just kind of personally incompetent and useless, but secondly, she's a Californian and the immigration situation and the kind of culture of Latino immigrants in California is just very different from the rest of the country. So she came in with a certain set of experiences and possibly assumptions that are really very California based that don't apply very well if you're in Arizona, Nevada, places like that, or places Like Fairfield County, Connecticut, which has a large Latino population, or parts of Northern Virginia that now have large Latino populations. It is very different from what you see in San Diego.

[Steve Hayes]

Yeah, Jonah, pick up on the politics question of this. I think that was for me, I've been doing this for a long time. Shouldn't be surprised that politics drives decision making in, you know, virtually every policy area. But I, I guess I was struck as I read this, you know, exhaustive piece. It really, it was a long piece. It was a deep look at this. I do think it was very well sourced. And then listened to the reporter in particular when he was interviewed on the daily because he went beyond his reporting and talked about, I think, in clearer and starker terms about this. It seems that, you know, there are two critiques to make. One, this was rudderless, there was, this was leaderless. They sort of drifted along into policy error after policy error. But two, to the extent that they did make decisions, those decisions at almost all times were driven by political considerations more than policy outcomes, desired policy outcomes. I wonder if, if you had the same impression when you read that or if you think maybe I'm overstating it.

[Jonah Goldberg]

No, I mean, so one of the things, I can't remember if it's in the piece, but it was in the daily conversation with the reporter talk about how Biden just didn't like the topic. Yeah, right. He just like his body language. It's sort of like people say this about abortion and Biden, that Biden just does not like talking about abortion. It's the vestigial Catholic in him that he knows that it's not the position he kind of wants to have and he'd rather just not talk about it. And I think that sort of came across with his immigration policies. It's funny. So on the politics side, what this reminds me of the most, and I've talked about it a bunch on my podcast, is this sort of lie agreed upon problem that you get in partisan politics. So in, in the Biden years, a lot of Republicans, they ran ads, they campaigned for president saying we have completely shut down the oil industry in the United States. We've turned off the spigot. Right? Like they literally had ads saying this and it was just a complete lie. In fact, oil production had hit an all time high. Oil and gas production hit an all time high. I'm not saying that Biden's energy policy was great. Some of the stuff he did with leases and exporting, perfectly legitimate for criticism, but it just wasn't true that we weren't pumping oil anymore. You know, it set up this thing where like Trump could actually campaign. Cuz he believed everything these people said on Fox. He could campaign saying we're gonna, we're gonna pump oil again in this country, we're gonna drill for oil again in this country, as if we weren't doing it anymore. And the Biden administration would not correct the record because its constituency wanted that to be true. And going around bragging to your own base that in fact you are pumping more oil than ever and destroying the planet through climate change, blah, blah, blah, created a real political problem for him. So it's sort of a Baptist and bootleggers kind of thing going on. And I think you got similar dynamics with immigration where the, there are a whole bunch of people. So like, this gets to the, the part of the point that Kevin was making, which I agree with him entirely about this idea that Latinos are a monolithic group. It's like talking about Europeans in the 18th century as a monolithic group. It's just ridiculous. Oh, you know, French, Germans, Hungarians, they're all the same, right? Like they're, no, they're actually in a 200 year war with each other or whatever. But part of the problem is, you know, there's this shorthand that we try to avoid here about the groups, right? This is one of these buzz phrases that has emerged on the left to describe these various activist organizations, you know, from the Sierra Club to, you know, the ACLU and all the rest that extract concept ideological concessions from Democrats that make it very hard for them to run in the general election. So like Kamala Harris promising to support federally funded sex reassignment surgery for prisoners, criminals and illegal immigrants was came from her answering a questionnaire and then defending it to the aclu. Those kinds of groups, right? Those groups have a vested interest in pretending that all Latinos are the same. And they come equipped with the lingua franca of the sort of DEI industrial complex from college campuses that want to like reduce vastly complex and heterogeneous peoples into people of color or bipocs or whatever. The thing is, and, and so Biden can't speak about immigration in a forthright way on either side of the issue because it is divisive to his own crowd. And that administration was, it was amazing how the rank and file staffers in the White House and the OEB were basically emissaries from the groups rather than loyal staffers to the President of the United States. I mean, they, they literally had a walkout protest about biden's policies on Israel. Now, I don't care. This is not a conservative versus liberal thing for me or a Republican versus Democrat thing for me. I don't care who the president is. If your staff actually protests against the boss, they should have deactivated all of their badges and made it impossible for them to get back into the building. But Biden's an old dude who, he listened like. There's a lot of reporting that whatever his grandkids said, he took to be representative of the youth. And I think when he had, you know, people of color in his office who were basically emissaries from these groups saying this is what the Latinos think or this is what the blacks think, I think he kind of sort of took it at face value and didn't see room to press at it. And when you do public policy as sort of allegories where each person in the room represents tens of millions of people, you're going to get policy wrong and you're going to get the politics wrong. And I think that's one of the things that undermined his administration broadly.

[Steve Hayes]

I mean, we should say that certainly the Biden administration wasn't unique in this problem. Right. I mean, if you think back to 2012 and the autopsy, the so called autopsy that the Republican National Committee did after Mitt Romney lost that election to Barack Obama, one of the things that that group that conducted that autopsy concluded was Republicans need to change the way that they approach the immigration question in particular because it would offend Latinos and mass. And you know, you had people like Sean Hannity, I think it was the day or two days after that election, announce that he had flipped, that he reversed his position on immigration and was now going to be for know, broader sort of immigration deals. So Republicans, and this is one area where I think Donald Trump, while I certainly have my disagreements with his immigration policies, was sort of right about a, a core thing, maybe because he was wise and had foresight, maybe by accident, but he didn't think that it would be fatal for Republicans to run on immigration the way that he ran on immigration. And Grayson, you are just back from the border. You spent some time in Yuma, I believe Yuma, Arizona and its environs. What did you see down there? And what, if anything, as you looked at these New York Times, this New York Times reporting stood out in those pieces based on your own reporting on this issue for a while, but also your most recent trip.

[Grayson Loeb]

Yeah, two quick points on the politics before I get to the trip. Jonah makes this point a lot about Biden specifically, as historically over the course of his career, being really good at finding the middle of the Democratic Party. And 2020 was a really squirrely year to try and figure out the middle of the Democratic Party on immigration. And if you want to retroactively find the single moment where you can draw somewhat of a straight line, especially with the benefit of reporting like we've discussed, from that point to the ultimate border crisis. It was in the Democratic 2020 primary debates where every single candidate raised their hand, I think, aside from Michael Bennett, Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado, to say that they would support decriminalizing border crossings. And Biden like raised his fingers kind of like he was asking a question. And then they put out a statement later saying that he was kind of against it. But you could see his indecision and the lack of a policy there. That then when you apply to administration and staffing decisions and lack of a clear plan coming from the executive flowing down, all of that was like looking back, eminently predictable. And the second point, more on the, on the media criticism front is this is kind of a little bit of the Fox News effect that we talk a lot about. But it's an illustration of how friendly media can be an administration's own worst enemy when it creates a blind spot that allows so much pressure to bubble up on an issue. And I take your point, Steve, that it's really hard to get a lot of people on the record, but broadly zooming out to more of the pundit class of folks who are just eating it by the bowlful. The idea that immigration is purely a product of push and pull factors and migrant flows. And we had a lot of pent up demand from the pandemic. And that explains why we had 250,000 people crossing in a single month and not really scrutinizing that. That was arguably one of the single most significant reasons why Trump got reelected. So those two points quickly. But yeah, going down to Yuma is a super interesting trip. It was basically like a window. I was so glad that the reporting came out in advance of this trip because it was again, re clarifying to put that lens into seeing what happened. And basically the story, Yuma is on the Mexico, Arizona, California border, like Colorado river cuts through that area. And I kind of jokingly said this on our staff meeting earlier this week. But the story is that there's no story. The story is that this was one of the hotspots during the FY fiscal year 2022 peak sector of the border. And it's basically entirely quiet, like there's no activity there. So it was 310,000 people crossing and apprehended in fiscal year 2022 in the Yuma sector. Yuma is a city of 100,000 people. They were having day after day of 1,000 rests per day, with border patrol staff for that sector being less than 1,000. I think it was like 940 was the amount of Border Patrol officers managing that 1,000 people day after day during the peak. And now it's like five arrests a day, which is like basically nothing. So it's been incredibly quiet and it's been incredibly quiet for basically the entirety of the first year of the Trump administration. It's hovered across the entire border, around 10,000 people, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less per month, crossing the entire border and being apprehended and nobody being released. So there's not a lot going on. But that's the notable fact of such a contrast. Speaking with the former border chief for that sector, speaking with the mayor, speaking with a member of the county board of supervisors. And they just felt incredibly neglected by the Biden administration during this time of where they had a crisis on their front door. And Yuma is like, I think it's like a plus 5 to plus 10, like Republican county. Like these guys are Republicans, but they're not the crazy nativist, anti immigrant guys. Like they were. The frustrations that they were expressing were most intense around the humanitarian problems, just the practical issues that they were dealing with. When you have such limited resources in your county, in your city, and hundreds of thousands of people suddenly showing up on your doorstep, it's things like the fire department getting called to take people off the border wall because they climbe up and they can't get back down the other side. Or people spamming 911 with legitimate emergencies, or sometimes they just want to get a ride into town because they crossed it like a little bit too, too, too far away. Or the hospital, there was only one hospital for this area not having enough car seats in the entire town to release migrants who gave birth in the hospital, but the hospital can't release them and their mother without a car seat. And so they've exhausted the supplies of car seats in like a 200 mile radius of the city. All of these practical things where they were just wanting any amount of attention or support from the federal government. And I think the contrast all the way up to the White House is Trump visited Yuma three times. It's a small town, but he visited it Three times during his first administration, the Biden administration didn't visit at all, even when it was orders of magnitude more of a crisis than the spike that we saw during the first Trump administration.

[Steve Hayes]

I mean, we saw these changes gradually throughout the course of the Biden administration, where for the first couple of years it was as suggest with those numbers, sort of eye popping numbers in 2022, that was a sort of a phase of this. And this comes through in the New York Times reporting where the Biden administration's position was basically, what crisis? It's like, what are you talking, there's no crisis. What are you talking about? This is all Fox News. These are these angry nativist right wingers. There's no crisis. And then gradually, gradually and then quickly they changed their position. And one of the things that changed their position was this move that Greg Abbott made Texas governor where he decided he was going to start shipping because he couldn't get mayors of Democratic cities, governors of Democratic states to take seriously the extent of the problem, the fact that there was a crisis. He decided to start shipping new crossing immigrants to these cities and other states. It was plainly a stunt. It was a political stunt. I thought it was a, I didn't love it. I mean, I thought basically using these people, you know, to make a political point was, I don't know, it just sort of offended me. But you could see how it would work. And one of the things in this, this Times story that the reporter found was inside the Biden administration, that's when they understood they were done politically. This was a disaster for them. Kevin, when we think back to that moment, Greg Abbott, was it obvious to you that this would be as effective as it turned out to be? Because it was effective and it was effective in pretty short order.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Yeah.

[Kevin Williamson]

I agree with you that I don't like using people as props in that way. But as a matter of pure political analysis, it was, it was obviously an effective stunt. I think one of the things that Abbott's shenanigans really drove home both to Americans at large and to the Biden administration, is how much this is a story about U.S. policy and not about events in Latin America. So I'm sure, as Grayson has seen and I saw, Eagle Pass and other places on the Texas border, I think people misunderstand what's happening on the border. So we see these pictures of border patrol guys on horseback running someone down or people sneaking across the river somewhere, and that happens from time to time. But you can sit there just outside Eagle Pass and people will come up in large groups, and they walk up and they're like, hey, come arrest us, please. Because they know that they can get taken in and then released and they'll get a hearing for their asylum procedures, and maybe they'll show up, maybe they won't. But when you know that you can walk up to the border and then call 911 and get a ride into town or do something else like that, then you've got pretty good incentives to go ahead and do that. And on the other hand, when you know that there's going to be a more hostile reception to illegal crossings and a more robust response to them, it creates very strong disincentives. So I think that what Abbott was. Was doing there was helping people in the rest of the country, let's put it in generous terms, helping people in the rest of the country to understand that what was happening in the southern border is within the realm of US Domestic policy to address in a very large share, not 100% of it. Obviously, there are events in South America and Central America that are beyond our control that drive displacement of people who are going to wander out. And there's just economic troubles in that part of the world and gangs and all the rest of it. When we don't have complete control, in spite of having the largest armada the world's ever seen parked off the coast of Venezuela, apparently now, which is another story. But I think that when these illegals started getting bused up to New York and places like that, it really started to come home to people in these northeastern places that we're making policy decisions that have results. Those results are human beings with faces and needs that have to be taken care of. And now they are at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City, rather than just being in Yuma or Eagle Pass or places like that. And it did make a difference. Again, it was a stunt and a stunt that I think had some inhumane assumptions and presumptions behind it. But in the broader context of things, I think it was probably useful in some ways for people in the rest of the country to understand in more visible human terms just what this issue really looks like. I mentioned Fairfield county earlier because it's interesting to me how invisible the immigration issue was for so long. So I lived in Fairfield County, Connecticut, for a long time, which has a fairly large population of a fairly recent, or had at the time a fairly large population, fairly recent arrivals. And I remember when the first billboard went up in Spanish in Norwalk, Connecticut, and people freaked out. They're like, why are there Spanish language billboards here? And you tried to explain to them because you've got 8,000 Spanish speaking people in this city or whatever and they just didn't know. There is a certain, particularly in the Northeast, once you're outside of the Southwest, there's a particular amount of insularity there where, you know, if you're in Lubbock, Texas or El Paso or something like that, there's no dividing line between Anglo and Hispanic cultures and communities. It is all part of one big border state situation with hybrid culture. In Texas for a long time, Arizona, California, the same thing. But that's not true of Massachusetts and Virginia and Connecticut and places like that where the immigration patterns there have looked more like they have in some other parts of the country with other immigrant groups like from the Caribbean, where you get these little islands of concentration that don't interact as much with the more mainstream society and that can for that reason be a little bit more invisible. So unless you are. Oh well, to take an example of that, if you look at non Latino immigrants in my part of the world, there are like a lot of Somalis in the Texas Panhandle and in West Texas and they tend to work in things like meatpacking, but if you don't work in that industry, you're not going to encounter those immigrants very much. They tend to be a fairly insular community. And that's kind of how Latinos looked in a lot of the rest of the country for a long time. So they could be present in large numbers and work in jobs and be important to particular industries and be important parts of particular communities, but still be almost invisible to people who lived five miles away or five blocks away in some cases. In some ways, weirdly enough, Donald Trump of all people had maybe some cultural advantage there in terms of his real experience with what American diversity actually looks like. Being a guy whose points of reference are New York City and South Florida, where he didn't get this illusion of a monolithic Latino culture because he knew Cubans and Venezuelans and Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who are people who all come from Spanish speaking backgrounds but don't have a lot in common culturally beyond that. They're very distinctive peoples, very distinctive cultures. Whereas Biden, coming from Delaware, I think, knew a lot of guys who ran credit card companies and things like that and people who ran very profitable PO box operations and whatever else. The major industries of Delaware are.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Speed traps.

[Kevin Williamson]

Speed traps, yes. That's an important one. And I think that people from this kind of cliched but true Democratic, high level party activist background who all went to the same 10 colleges, whose parents all went to those same 10 colleges, who all have similar incomes. They all have master's degrees, they all live in one of 30 neighborhoods in the country or grew up in one of 30 neighborhoods in the country. They've got a pretty narrow frame of reference in a lot of ways. And you see them every now and then be really surprised by like, well, there are these African American men voting for Donald Trump. How could that possibly be the case? Because everyone, every black man I knew when I was at Temple or Penn or Stanford was, was politically like me. And it's just, it's just amazing. How did this thing happen without us noticing? You get less of that, I think, in the sort of Trumpy right wing world, because they didn't all come up through a kind of cast of people who were born and educated for a particular kind of government service or political activism or into a particular set of social activist assumptions and norms. They're real estate developers and people who were car dealers and things like that and just sort of different kinds of backgrounds. So, yeah, I think that the Democrats, for all their talk about diversity, don't actually just really understand this issue very well and who the people are they're talking about.

[Steve Hayes]

And that was one of the reasons that the Biden administration eventually changed. It started to change its policies, changed its approach, was that this stunt by Greg Abbott in Texas, sending migrants throughout the country forced people to see up close what people in these border states had been seeing for a long time.

[Grayson Loeb]

Yeah, on that, on that point too. Just one more note from the border, something I didn't real is, I also found that stunt initially like, icky and did not like it. But that's exactly what a lot of these places like Yuma have to do, just closer to the border. So when you have 300,000 people coming, they're not all staying in Yuma. They have to get processed by border patrol and ice, but then they bus them out to other areas simply because they don't have the resources to house them or feed them or deal with it. So you are having this busing phenomenon happen beyond just literally the nearest town where people crossed along the border, other cities that are within driving distance of the border. So that put it in a little bit of a different context for me as well. Of like they're already doing busing. It's just where the destination is.

[Steve Hayes]

Yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Williamson]

Instead of people being sent off to Los Angeles county or Houston or whatever. They were being sent a little further afield. And I think that obviously made a difference to people's experience of the issue.

[Steve Hayes]

Grayson we saw the Biden administration make these changes, I think, in response to the politics of the moment. And gradually we saw the numbers come down. These were changes that the Biden administration, you know, initially they said it wasn't a crisis. Then they sort of acknowledged that it was a crisis. Then they made these policy changes. The numbers came down, but it was too late, I think, to change sort of the sense of the country, certainly heading into a presidential election year. What, what is your sense of the specific changes that we've seen from sort of late stage Biden administration changes to these early, you know, the first year of the Trump administration that has taken what was a flood, you know, reduced it to a stream, then it was a trickle, and now it is, as you point out, basically done. What are the policy changes that we've seen implemented, and how important are those policy changes relative just to the change in presidential rhetoric? I mean, Joe Biden in effect, said for the almost the entirety of the 2020 campaign, come, we're changing everything. And then his people offered sort of plaintive warnings in the days right before the administration where they said, hey, we don't mean that everybody can come. But nobody believed them. And then we did see these policy changes.

[Grayson Loeb]

One of my favorite quotes from that time was Vice President Harris saying, I believe if you come, you will be stopped at the border, not like, like, if you come, you will be stopped.

[Steve Hayes]

I believe.

[Grayson Loeb]

Which is just perfect.

[Steve Hayes]

Perfect. Yeah.

[Grayson Loeb]

Yeah. I'm going to try and oversimplify and recognizing exactly what Kevin said a few minutes ago, how there's a lot of factors here that affect incentives and push and pull factors for people either being pushed because of a crisis or economic insecurity or persecution, or being pulled because of the attraction of largely economic opportunity in the United States. Like, all of those factors are real. But if we want to isolate things here to try and theorize some causality across presidential administrations? So at the very end the Biden administration and the New York Times piece gets into this in the summer, it's like June 2024, they really start to clamp down on asylum and the ability of people to actually just surrender themselves and claim asylum. And once you have sufficient numbers where you can actually hold all those people, then by default, you're just releasing them. And that's basically what caused those huge flows to continue and continue. And that brought the numbers down towards the tail end. And don't quote me, but I think it was something around like 50 or 60,000 people in December of 2024 was maybe like maybe it was 69 or 70, but in that range roughly. And then as soon as you have a first full month of Trump administration, it's down to 10,000. And they did policies, they were even stricter on asylum. Basically zero asylum, zero humanitarian access to the country. But it wasn't that far down from where the Biden administration had tightened on asylum. So you could maybe attribute that drop from 70,000 people one month to 10,000 people the next month. Maybe that's this message effect. Maybe that's the idea that Trump has always been hard on the border and he's communicating this very, very aggressive message of maybe you'll be sent to an El Salvadorian gulag if you try to come across and you get sent to the wrong detention, detention center. So that's oversimplified. But in terms of we were on a downward trajectory in the very kind of waning light of the Biden administration that was much lower levels than the peak. And then it really just fell off a cliff to effectively like close to nothing. And I think a lot of that can be attributed to the messaging. And interestingly enough, I've had a lot of conversations with immigration analysts across the political spectrum. But some of the conversations I've had with people who are very sympathetic to the current administration's enforcement priorities, they note that there's an ironic dynamic that the people reinforcing the message, most of you don't want to come to the United States. You might be caught up by ICE and disappeared and really trying to deter people or change their calculation structure. It's not the administration. It's Gavin Newsom, it's Karen Bass, it's JB Pritzker. It's all of these Democrats who are to varying degrees of credibility saying this is almost Nazi esque campaign, especially the deportation campaign in the interior that is playing into the hands of the message that Stephen Miller and others want to send to people to not make the journey and to even leave if you're already here.

[Steve Hayes]

Well, there's a lot more to talk about with respect to immigration. And undoubtedly we'll be coming back to the topic. We will put the New York Times story with a gift link in the show notes as well as the daily episode that covers this. If people want to go and take that in for themselves. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. You know, you don't have to let your overpriced phone bill. Suck the joy out of holidays this year because right now all of Mint Mobile's unlimited plans are 50% off. You can get three, six or 12 months of unlimited premium wireless for 15 bucks a month. It's their best deal of the year, and it makes it real easy for you to give your expensive wireless bill the Scrooge treatment. Every Mint plan comes with high speed data and unlimited talk and text on the nation's largest 5G network. And the best part? You can keep your current phone and your number. No contracts, no nonsense, just reliable wireless for only 15 bucks a month. If I needed this product, there would be plenty of good reasons to go for it thanks to its many great features and benefits. Turn your expensive wireless present into a huge wireless savings future by switching to Mint Shop. Mint unlimited [e-mail] dispatch that's mintmobile.com dispatch Limited time offer upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for 12 months. Plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees Extra initial plan term only greater than 35 gigabytes may be slow when network is busy. Capable device required availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

[Grayson Loeb]

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[Kevin Williamson]

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[Steve Hayes]

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[Steve Hayes]

B A B-B-E-L.com Spotify rules and restrictions may apply. You know, every year when we hit December, I start thinking about everything in my work life that could be running just a little smoother. I spend a lot of time thinking about that. And honestly, payroll and HR tasks are always high on that list. I know our team spends more afternoon that I'd like to admit buried in forms, double checking tax details, tracking down onboarding documents. It's the kind of stuff that eats up your entire day before you even notice. And that's why I really appreciate what Gusto brings to the table. It gives you that that okay, we're getting our business act together this year. Feeling like starting with a clean desk and an organized inbox. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one, remote, friendly and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay, hire onboard and support your team from anywhere. And here's a big one for small businesses. Unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price. No hidden fees, no surprises. You know exactly what you're paying for, which is pretty rare in this space. It's also genuinely quick to switch to Gusto. You just transfer your existing data and get up and running fast. You don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. Try gusto [e-mail] dispatch and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free [e-mail] dispatch one more time. Gusto.com dispatch before we return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere here at the Dispatch. This week on the Remnant, the Manhattan Institute's Jesse Arm joins Jonah Goldberg to talk about the makeup of the new GOP, the future of the parties 2028 and perception versus reality in American politics. Search for the Remnant in your podcast app and hit the follow button. Now let's jump back into our conversation. I want to shift now and talk about a second big story or a couple of stories that hit Washington this week. A series of rather remarkable interviews that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles gave to Chris Whipple, who is a journalist and an historian. He's written books about the role of the chief of staff, White House chief of staff in history, good books. I read his campaign book about Trump's reelection, also a good book. And Chris Whipple sat for or conducted 11 different interviews with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who doesn't give many interviews, at least doesn't give many on the record interviews. These were on the record interviews starting, I believe, nine days before the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term and running through just a few weeks ago. And it's fair to say that she gave a series of extraordinary answers, unvarnished, honest, it seems to me, in many cases assessments of her colleagues, of her former colleagues, of the president himself. It's the kind of thing that has a lot of people in Washington, people who do what we do for a living, asking how in the world could this happen? How could she say these things and not expect that they would have the kind of repercussions that they've had or at least make the splash that they've made. But Jonah, I'll start with you. There are probably 50 different takeaways from the series of interviews in these two they publish them in two different stories in Vanity Fair that we could focus on. But I wonder, of all of the things that you read, were there, was there a story, was there a quote, was there an assessment of a colleague that stood out to you as either notable or newsworthy for policy reasons from those two articles?

[Jonah Goldberg]

Yeah, I will answer that because I do think it's legitimately a really interesting topic. I also think it's a really interesting topic to people like us. It is a very like, people denigrate phrases, you know, things like, oh, that's an inside the Beltway story. That is not synonymous with unimportant story. Right? It can be, but it's not necessarily so. I think this is actually, there's a lot of important things that we learn from this. But I start this way because, and I was actually talking to Kevin about this last night. I think in some ways this story is good for the Vanity Fair piece, is good for the administration in one specific way. The Trump's absolutely heinous and grotesque comments about Rob Reiner's murder were breaking through. This was something that a lot of even MAGA conservative types, I shouldn't say MAGA conservatives, MAGA right winger types were criticizing him for. It was something, it was the kind, they're kinds of stories that all people can have a right to an opinion on that because it's about the human condition. It's about, you know, like in this case, a drug addict kid and a father who loved him and sent him to rehab like nine times and blah, blah, you know, all this kind of stuff who had mental health problems. Everybody knows. It's sort of like everyone has the right to the opinion about Biden's age. You know, we were just talking about the previous, you know, topic. And when beltway types try to tell people they don't have a right to opinion about those kinds of issues where people can believe with their own eyes what they see or they can draw on their own experience, they get pissed off. And so anyway, that story was breaking through. Trump was defending his absolutely classless and graceless attacks on the Reiners. And then this story comes out. And I can say this just firsthand because I saw the topics I was going to talk about at CNN change in real time, right? And I'm not criticizing it. Like, you shouldn't let a story fester just to hurt a president. You know, whatever. My point is that it took all of Washington's commentariat and said, look at this thing. And they moved off of that story. And now the Reiner thing Seems like old news, and I just think it's a part of the sausage making that I don't think people necessarily appreciate. Onto the actual piece, I have a sort of. I think Susie Wallace admitting that what's going on in the Caribbean is about regime change and not the drug war could have real legal and constitutional consequences down the road. I think her admitting that, you know, she goes all. She's kind of all over the place, but she's sort of like, sure, at least there's a little retribution and, you know, like going after Letitia James.

[Kevin Williamson]

Right.

[Jonah Goldberg]

I mean, that's. Judges are going to not appreciate that. But I have a meta thing about it, and everybody on this podcast knows what I'm talking about. Us and people like us. When some policy gets rolled out, like Kevin will say, like he did a few months ago on this podcast, there's just no way South Korea is going to give over a third of its GDP and invest it in the United States of America. That's just not true. Right. Or we'll say, or like Scott Lincecombe will say, there is no way this tariff schedule that was announced on Liberation Day was seriously thought through and comprehensive and coherently crafted. We said, this is shambolic. This is ridiculous. And all of the usual cheerleaders and turd polishers of the MAGA world will say, oh, your Trump derangement system's showing. He's got a system. He knows what he's doing. This is all part of a plan. And then invariably, three months, six months, five years, it depends on what the actual topic is. Sort of like this stuff with Biden. Someone on the inside says, yeah, it's in fact totally true. We didn't know what we were doing. We didn't have a coherent policy. I tried to get the president not to do this until he could figure out exactly how to do it, but he barreled ahead anyway.

[Steve Hayes]

Right.

[Jonah Goldberg]

You know, all of these things that people with common sense who aren't drinking Kool Aid can say, I don't know all the facts, but this is obviously not a serious thing they're doing here or not being done seriously. And you get all the grief for it. And then six months later, he's like, where do I find that jackass who tweeted at me and say, I told you so, but you can't. And it. So it's a little frustrating, but that's sort of my big vibe from reading the thing.

[Steve Hayes]

Yeah, well, I mean, she's basically doing that in real time, right?

[Jonah Goldberg]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that is the great thing about it.

[Steve Hayes]

She's acknowledging all this stuff in real time. Yeah. Which is interesting. So the quote on Venezuela from Susie Wiles about the President, he wants to keep on blowing up boats until Maduro cries uncle, and people way smarter than me on that say he will. So she's effectively acknowledging that the goal of what the president is doing, at least in the medium or long term, is regime change. And that's something that the White House has basically denied repeatedly. This is all about drugs. This is all about, you know, supposedly fentanyl coming from a place that doesn't really produce fentanyl. Kevin, I wonder if you had reactions similar to Jonas or if there were other things that stood out to you.

[Kevin Williamson]

Well, I love that, you know, in what I assume was her 13th or 15th hour of interviews, Susie Wiles was saying, I'm just not someone who really seeks attention. Okie doke. You know, people who serve in administrations, they go on to different things afterward. And chief of staffs don't make a lot of money. Susie Wiles is not going to have a primetime television show after this. It's not like being even, like, press secretary, where you're kind of famous because you're in front of people. And maybe you go on to pundit career or something like that, or being a vice president, where you're going to be on a bunch of corporate boards and make a lot of money later in life. But obviously she cares about how she's going to be thought of in this role, which is why she was talking to someone who's kind of beat in life is chiefs of staff. And the thing that he writes about. And there was obviously an element of some score settling in there. You know, you don't go around Talking about how J.D. vance is a conspiracy kook unless you've got a reason to want to settle that score. And to, you know.

[Jonah Goldberg]

But Marco Rubio's super principled. I mean, that was the interesting thing. Her fellow Floridian, she was getting his back and throwing shade at J.D. anyway, I'm sorry.

[Kevin Williamson]

No, no, please. Just the idea of Marco Rubio being even a little principled is kind of hard to swallow. So, again, Jonah mentioned we were having a conversation about this last night at the very fun Dispatch holiday year end party. I sometimes wonder why people in that line of work talk to reporters at all. There's not much good can come of it. If you've got something you want to say. There are easier ways to get your message out than going to talk to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post or Vanity Fair. And if you've got stuff you don't want to get out, certainly talking to those people isn't going to help. Reporters are never your friends. I remember when I was a theater critic, someone telling me that it was just never good news when I was writing about them because my magazine I worked for, the New Criterion, wasn't big enough to move seats if I gave them a good review. But people took it seriously enough that I could hurt their reputations a little bit if I gave them a bad review. So there's nothing good was going to come out of the conversation. I tend to think, especially for Republicans, that talking to these publications is just. I'm glad they do because I'm in this business too, and I want people to talk to me and to get information, but just from a point of view of pure self preservation. I sometimes wonder why they do it. But then you have to keep in mind that people care about what their reputations are and how they're thought of among their peers and that sort of thing, which is really what she's going through, through, apparently right now. And I kind of expect that this is going to have bad repercussions for her. I mean, they're not going to, they're not going to throw her out the door the day after tomorrow because then it looks like they're reacting to the media, which they don't like to be seen as, to be perceived as, as reacting to the media in that way. But she, you know, she, she let some cats out of some bags, I think, and she was, she was not super, super careful or diplomatic or politic with some of her observations. So I'm still. Sorry, I'm still stuck on Marco Rubio being super principled in the back of my head. It's just haunting me.

[Jonah Goldberg]

I'm sorry to plant that ticking time on.

[Kevin Williamson]

It's like when you hear one of those yacht rock songs on the radio and it's stuck in your head for the rest of the day. It's just one of those annoying little brain worms that just won't go away.

[Steve Hayes]

Grayson, one of the things that we saw in response to, to this article, this series of articles, was immediately in the aftermath of the publication of these articles. You have one administration official after another, one MAGA world figure after another, less the sort of hardcore MAGA types, but the people tied into the administration in particular and the politics put out statements defending Susie Wiles on these things. What do you think accounts for that?

[Grayson Loeb]

Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not exactly sure. We Talked yesterday about RFK's tweet or, I guess, post on X in particular, just being filled with a ton of typos and grammatical errors. And you were wondering, well, maybe that was done on purpose to make it seem authentic or give the impression that it was just rushed out the door.

[Steve Hayes]

When it wasn't, that this wasn't part of some coordinated effort because that's how we would do it.

[Grayson Loeb]

One of the things, it gets at her actual position with Trump, and there's a bit of a paradox in the sense that a traditional chief of staff is a restrainer. That's kind of like the one person I think the author even quoted this from might have been Leon Panetta or some other chief of staff. The one person other than the wife or the partner of the president that can tell them just no flat. And that's obviously not the way in which Susie Wiles has approached this job. And that seems to have been the single greatest reason why she is still so close to Trump camp, is because she doesn't try to fight him on anything. So in terms of all the people rallying around her, including folks who we've had reporting, have had conflicts with her over the course of this past year.

[Steve Hayes]

And the subjects of her criticism in the p. I mean, J.D. vance put out a statement praising her after she said, he's been a conspiracy theorist for a decade.

[Grayson Loeb]

Yeah. And I have to assume that's just a product of her actually being trusted by Trump, even though being able to actually deploy that trust seems incredibly limited in what she can actually do to try and push him in one direction or another. But there does seem to be maybe that one out of every 10 or one out of every 15 decision points, when the president's tired, maybe he does just defer to her and that's like some valuable currency. You arguably saw that maybe a little bit in the fact that he gave that address last night on affordability. I think he even said that to the, the reporters that were in the room. He had suggested, like, you happy now, Susie? I did this and I did it. It was only 20 minutes long. And she was like, yeah, 20 minutes on the dot. Good job. So in the Vanity Fair interview, she said she wanted the president to talk more about kitchen table issues and less about Saudi Arabia. He then proceeded to say, well, Saudi Arabia says kitchen table issues are great in the United States. When saying, all the foreign leaders tell me that our economy is awesome. That's neither here nor there. But I have to believe it's a product that she actually does have the trust of the president. But it's nothing like the traditional chief of staff trust where you can build up the trust to tell them no. It's just you build up trust by not telling him no.

[Steve Hayes]

Yeah. And this was something that talking to people who are close to Trump in the first couple months of the administration and who had watched her closely during the campaign, she. There was never a point at which she signaled that she was going to try to constrain the president. And that is what most of his chiefs of staff in the first administration, to one degree or another, tried to do. They tried to stop him from doing some of the crazy stuff that we saw him doing. Reince Priebus tried to control him a bit, I think, with some success, but in other areas, not having some success. John Kelly famously tried to control Trump in. In matters, I think, mostly big and national security. Mark Meadows was, I think, a bit more permissive. Mick Mulvaney would, I think, weigh in selectively on occasion, not do it all the time. But Susie Wiles never made any pretense that she was going to do this. This wasn't her role. She wanted Trump to be Trump. And the author of the piece, Chris Whipple, makes that point in the course of reporting the piece like this was not. She didn't. She never saw this as her role. She said, Trump was elected again. This is what the people want. The people are going to get sort of unconstrained Trump. And I think you're right. That's one of the reasons that she has the relationship she has. That doesn't mean she hasn't tried to, you know, affect the way that he governs. She famously, during the campaign, created these barriers to Trump. For some of the people that, you know, are crazy and are in Trump's orbit, like Laura Loomer, Susie Wiles went out of her way to try to keep Laura Loomer from Donald Trump. I think having learned the lesson of the proximity of Sidney Powell, for instance, to Donald Trump, the lawyer, conspiracy theorist who pushed him. Not that he needed much pushing on the stolen election conspiracies back after he lost the 2020 election. The other thing, just a thought or two about how this happened, why this happened. As somebody who's done. I've conducted these kinds of interviews that Chris Whipple conducted. And Grayson, you and I talked about this a little bit yesterday. You know, one of the big questions was, how could she have said all these things that she said? You know, isn't she more sophisticated than to understand this? And I think, and some of this is, some of this is based on my experience, some of this is, is admittedly speculation. But he does these 11 interviews over the course of nearly a year. And my guess is he pitches her on more reporting on the role of the chief of staff. So almost a clinical, technical approach to this is how other chiefs of staff have done the work. I've written a book about this. I want to see up close what you're doing. Will you submit to these interviews? She agrees to do that, and then he builds comfort by not publishing what he's getting right away. So he does an interview with her in January 11th of January 2025. And she says, you know, I think not anything that was terribly explosive, but says things that would have been newsworthy at the time, in part because she doesn't spend much time actually talking to the media other than these, these interviews. And he doesn't publish it. So she gets more comfortable and she gives him another interview and that doesn't ever see the light of day. And she gives him another interview and another interview. And by the time you're 11 interviews in, you're saying all these things, you're being increasingly candid. None of this is, is in the, the public realm and then he publishes it all. But I think he, he was wise to use that sort of continued access to her to build that comfort level and build that confidence before, before this. We should note that she put out a statement after these stories ran and she didn't dispute any of the quotes, although actually that's not true. She disputed one. She disputed one quote, and I'm not remembering which.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Elon Musk being a ketamine user.

[Steve Hayes]

Yeah. She claimed in these interviews with Whipple that Elon Musk was a ketamine user. She said, I wouldn't have said that. I didn't say it. And then the author, Vanity Fair, played the tape of her actually saying that. But when she pushed back on the articles, aside from that specific denial, she didn't challenge any of the quotes, I think, because she understood that they had been recorded and instead said, you know, this, this was all taken out of context. This is misleading because it was taken out of context. The one final point I'll make, and happy to get any reactions from you on this. I do think the things she said in terms of policy in some cases were, were quite notable. I mean, I think the Venezuela point that, that you raised Kevin was, or maybe it was you, Jonah, was significant. She also said that the president, that Donald Trump doesn't believe that Vladimir Putin wants the fighting to end in Ukraine, which is something if you've paid even casual attention to what Donald Trump has said over the past year. He has claimed repeatedly that Vladimir, he thinks Vladimir Putin wants the fighting to end. It's a preposterous claim. Of course, if Vladimir Putin wanted the fighting to end, he could end it. So it's a silly claim. But she said that Trump doesn't really think so. And the implications of that for the negotiations that are taking place right now, I think are pretty striking, given the fact that the Trump administration seems to be willing to give away the store to get Putin to do what it wants. Anything else that that came out of these interviews that I neglected to mention?

[Kevin Williamson]

Kevin, one quick thing. Joan and I both talked about this in different contexts for a while about how much the story of the Trump administration is a story about celebrity and the power of celebrity in the world of politics. And I suspect that one of the reasons that Wiles gets so much deference from the president and maybe one of the reasons not to go into psychoanalysis here about her concern about her perception by the public is who her father was. Her father was a very, very big deal in the world of professional sports.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Pat Summerall.

[Kevin Williamson]

Yeah, Pat Summerall. And, you know, Trump, who has this kind of genetic way of looking at the world, you know, he says he judges people by their genes. I think that was even referenced in the story somewhere. Certainly, I think sees her as being, you know, part of this tradition of this guy who's, you know, professional sports figure, who's this kind of, you know, cliche alpha male in the imagination of the Trump world kind of person. But also having a father who was such a big public personality, I think must necessarily give one particular ideas about how one goes about managing one's public perception if you're in a role where there is a public facing piece to it, which she is, whether she emphasizes it or not.

[Steve Hayes]

All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. Every leap in American history has needed breakthrough energy. Ignition, liftoff.

[Kevin Williamson]

Now.

[Steve Hayes]

AI is here and Chevron is working to power it. We're aiming to develop multi gigawatt power.

[Kevin Williamson]

Plants near data centers designed with future.

[Steve Hayes]

Pathways to lower carbon intensity. AI gets the power it needs. Communities get the jobs, and the grid stays strong. Powering AI today builds America's next superpower.

[Grayson Loeb]

This is a real good story about.

[Kevin Williamson]

Bronx and his dad, Ryan, real United Airlines customers. We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he.

[Steve Hayes]

Wanted to see the flight deck and.

[Kevin Williamson]

Meet Kath and Andrew.

[Grayson Loeb]

I got to sit in the driver's seat.

[Steve Hayes]

I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.

[Kevin Williamson]

That's Andrew, a real United pilot.

[Grayson Loeb]

These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain.

[Kevin Williamson]

Allowing my son to see the flight.

[Steve Hayes]

Deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Before we go today, I want to, I want to do sort of a self indulgent, not worth your time. I am about to leave momentarily as soon as we stop recording here on a half cross country driving trip to retrieve a kid from college. It looks that I looks that I will be doing 20 to 22 hours of driving over the next 36 hours. I like road trips. I like driving generally because I can't get texts and emails. So there's time for me to think to myself, listen to my music, listen to books and podcasts. But I wonder. Two, two questions and feel free to answer either or both. Is there in your recent memory a particularly notable road trip that you have taken either because of the amount of time you've driven or because of something that happened on the road trip, number one. And number two, as you're driving along and you need to fuel up, there are limited options, especially if you want to keep going. And I rarely do anything other than drive through. Is there a go to fast food place that you frequent on these road trips? And Grayson, I'll start with you.

[Grayson Loeb]

Yeah, I'll answer both in the same answer because it kind of goes to the road trip strategy, which is maybe not so much stopping for food at all, but, but during. I can't remember if this was during 2020. I think it might have been the summer of 2021. My wife and I were taking a trip to visit my grandparents in central Illinois and we wanted to stop in Chicago for a few days first. We were living in New York at the time. And so we were in Brooklyn, leaving for Brooklyn, going to Chicago. And we made it to Chicago for dinner I think at around 7:15pm which for me was like an impressive feat of driving. And the reason why we were able to do that is because we started with a hot breakfast. I think Starbucks breakfast sandwiches. They're not great, but they're very predictable. They're like they get the job done at their steady levels.

[Steve Hayes]

Exactly right.

[Grayson Loeb]

Start with a hot breakfast, caffeinate up. But then Audrey had made a big serving of pasta salad that we put in a cooler with cans of iced coffee also in that cooler. And we only did rest stops the whole way. So it was just what was directly off the highway just for like quick stretch and use the facilities and then right back in the car to keep going. And you don't waste the time for the food. So that's kind of a non answer. But I would always like I hold out for Chipotle or Chick Fil a if it's not a Sunday. When I'm on a regular road trip.

[Kevin Williamson]

Kevin if I'm driving through West Texas or the Panhandle, I will stop at Taco Villa, which is the best fast food in the world. It's just Taco Villa. I've never even heard of Taco Villa small chain. There's. There's maybe 20 or 25 of them, something like that. They're mostly set in that part of the world. I think maybe there are some in eastern New Mexico. If you're out in that part of the world, it's a place to stop. One thing I do miss about road trips right now is that as you know, because I drove it to your house, I used to have this great Ford F250 diesel truck and it has a very large fuel tank in it. So I could drive from Dallas to our where we live now in the mountains in Virginia and only stop to fill up one time. So I could drive that truck from my house to your house, Steve, which I did, and back without stopping for, for fuel if I needed to. And it's nice to be able to do that because in the Dallas to Virginia drive is about 18 hours of driving, you know, you figure 19, 19 and a half hours if you have a couple of stops in there. And I would just do it at a stretch, you know, because it's, it's a great big rolling, you know, living room on wheels.

[Steve Hayes]

And I was going to say it's not just the gas tank that's big about that vehicle. Everything about that vehicle is.

[Kevin Williamson]

It is, it's a kind of factory monster truck. Speaking of monster, that is my. As my road monster whites or sometimes, sometimes sugar free Red Bull. I'll do that. But if you drink too many of them, then you got stops you got to build in and you know, you don't want to do that. So I try to, I try to, I try to Try to go really hard on that front. I talked with the most fun one I actually had in the last few years was we were still living in Dallas at the time, and we went to Aspen to spend some time out there, but I also had to take that trip to Ukraine in the middle of it. So I drove from Dallas to, I think Amarillo, Amarillo to Aspen, Aspen to the Denver Airport. Flew from Denver to Dallas, went to Ukraine via Poland, came back, back to Denver, and then I had a conference at Lake Tahoe. So I went from there to Lake Tahoe in the truck and then came back for the sort of southern southwestern route and got back to Dallas that way. So that was a lot of driving and a bit of flying over the course of. Of a couple of weeks, and that's crazy, but out there in the kind of, you know, Utah salt flats area where you can really open it up, you know that that truck was not a fast truck by any stretch of the imagination. But if you got it up to its top speed, you could basically watch the fuel gauge moving down. It was. It was quite something. But diesels are. Diesels are great. And I do miss that aspect of it.

[Steve Hayes]

And you don't have it anymore. You've gotten rid of that truck.

[Kevin Williamson]

No, the truck was too tall to park at some of the airports that I use in one of the train stat. And also, just like, I go to D.C. a fair bit. I'm in D.C. right now, and it's a real pain in the butt to drive, like, in cities. So I got a Corolla.

[Jonah Goldberg]

You make it sound so sad the way you say Corolla.

[Kevin Williamson]

Actually, I got the very fun Corolla. They make one. It's called the GR. It's a 300 horsepower turbocharged manual transmission. Kind of a little race car. Super fun car to drive, but. And also very easy to park.

[Steve Hayes]

Jonah, you might have done more road tripping than the rest of us combined.

[Jonah Goldberg]

I've done a lot of road tripping, so I'm going to cheat a little bit on the question. So one of the rules my wife and I have when we're doing the drive to the Pacific Northwest is, and it's been this way for, like, 20 years, is we try to practice what we call no wasted calories, which is like, you try not to, like, stop to eat just for eating sake because you're bored. And that's one of the real appeals of a lot of fast food. Is it just like, I need a break from the road. Ah, be fun to eat a big Mac. I haven't had one of those in a long time, that kind of thing, you know. And that actually is one of the things that led us to get this, this sprinter rv, which a couple of you guys have seen. It was a way to basically transport better food cross country at high speeds. And so basically it's a wine cooler in a fridge for the road. And so. But what, you know, look, I mean, part of your question is sort of just like what's your favorite fast food place?

[Kevin Williamson]

Right?

[Jonah Goldberg]

And that has, that has a dry food through. And I kind of like Kevin's answer because I, I think regional fast food chains are an underappreciated topic of conversation. I mean everyone knows about In N Out Burger, right? But that's about it for like popular knowledge. You guys know that I am a huge fan of Culver's. There's also this place. It's weird. I think there's only one of them, but it's presents like a fast food chain called Spelunkers down in central Virginia, which is fantastic. It's near Laray Caverns, which is why they call it Spelunkers. Probably the best fast food burger out there. Definitely in contention. So I'm going to cheat on the road trip part if I have to pick one. We have never once gone cross country in 20 years now where we haven't caved and gotten Culver's at least once. I really like Culvers. We also have a different issue that we have to stop to exercise dogs on a lot of our road trips. So like just doing the drive through isn't necessarily the answer, particularly if you don't want to be just passive aggressively stared at by dogs in a parked car.

[Steve Hayes]

But.

[Jonah Goldberg]

So I'm going to cheat on the road trip part. The single best road trip I ever took, bar none, was actually not in a car. It was a train ride from Prague to Istanbul when I was a very young man. And it was one of those kinds of trips that so many weird things happened that you could do like a movie with, you know.

[Kevin Williamson]

Wes Anderson, Wes.

[Jonah Goldberg]

Anderson, you know, with a Jeff Goldblum character just coming into your train car kind of thing. And I've been meaning to write it up in full forever. I was initially traveling with. We picked up some companions on the road, which gives you a sense of. It was a 30 hour train ride with a stopover in Budapest. But the guy I left Prague with was the former city manager of St. Cloud, Florida, who I did not know very well. And it was just a Wild, crazy, fun trip. And I can't do it justice here. So maybe, maybe this is all.

[Steve Hayes]

When will you be writing it up? Yes. Can we. Can we. Can I give you a deadline?

[Jonah Goldberg]

I'll tease this for the solo podcast and just do it as a whole one long story. But anyway, that would be my answer.

[Steve Hayes]

So I. That was not where I thought this was likely to be going. I did a. And I won't go into great detail about this because one of my great road trips was also on a train. It was a train across Greece. When I was in college, I was studying in Freiburg, Germany, and we were going to visit some friends who were studying in Athens, and we took a train. We took a boat from, you know, across from Italy and then took a train all the way across Greece. And with a handful of my friends, we drank the train out of beer and then talked the conductor into stopping in a town that we. Where we were not scheduled to stop so that we could go and get a few more cases of Carlsberg beer. It was memorable. My most memorable driving road trip. I mean, there's a lot of memorable ones. But the craziest one, I think is a little bit like this one that I'm going to be doing today, where I think It'll be about 22 hours of driving over 36 hours. By the time we release this, I will be, I think, halfway back, but to the D.C. area. My friends and I, when I was in college, took a road trip from Greencastle, Indiana, where I was in school, to Fort Myers, Florida, and we went there for a weekend. So it was 18 hours of driving, 36 hours in Fort Myers and 18 hours back. So for every hour we drove, we stayed in. In Fort Myers for just one hour. And it was fun and crazy going through Atlanta way too fast. High rates of speed. The six lane, just like Sherman. Empty six lane highways just like Sherman. No, but we made it and we survived.

[Jonah Goldberg]

I should have if. If train trips don't count. In college, me and two buddies, we rented a Buick Skylark and drove to Mardi Gras, but didn't have any place to stay. So the three of us slept in a Buick Skylark parked outside of a black gay bar. Four days. We did not smell good. We were. We did not have much game with the ladies.

[Steve Hayes]

Hard to imagine.

[Jonah Goldberg]

And then we drove back unbathed. We hung over.

[Steve Hayes]

I would love a. I would love a. Why don't you do a story about that one, too? Write that up for a G file. All right. A little bit off the Rails, but that's how we're ending today. Thank you all for joining us. Thanks gentlemen, for the conversation and we will talk to you next time. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And we hope you'll 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 [e-mail] join and if you use my promo code Roundtable, you'll get one month free and help me win the ongoing, deeply scientific internal debate over which Dispatch Podcast is the true flagship. And if ads aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a Premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and more. Shout out to a few folks who joined recently as Premium members Wayne Ashmore, Joe Patterson and Jerome Anderson. We're glad to have you aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email [e-mail] we read everything, even the ones from people who don't take road trips at all. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Max Miller, Victoria Holmes and Noah Hickey. We couldn't do it without you. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time It.