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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable we look at Donald Trump's obsession with passing the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility act, also known as the save act. Is this obsession part of some 4D chess play? A multi step plan to meddle in the 2026 midterms? An attempt to stay in office in 2028, or just a petty legislative tant resulting from his loss in 2020? Then we consider how the showdown between Trump and Senate Republicans may play out between now and the midterms. And finally, not worth your time. Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey and the Revival of Theater going. I'm joined today by the Dispatch's Editor in Chief Jonah Goldberg, politics editor Mike Warren and Senior Editor John McCormack. Let's dive. Gentlemen. I want to spend some time today on the SAVE act. The Save America act or whatever we're calling it now. It's gone through many different iterations, it's included many different provisions. It is now the source of what is really erupting as a major split between Donald Trump and Megaworld on the one hand and many Senate Republicans on the other. But in particular Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Donald Trump tweeted on Monday morning saying or truth socialed on Monday morning posted
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C
on social media is the easiest way to get around this problem.
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B
Yeah, and you don't want to say truth either. He truthed. No, he wrote. Someone wrote under his name John TH should not allow the United States Senate to quote leave town unquote until it passed the Save America act or far better still terminates the filibuster all caps where Republicans can then quickly pass everything they ever dreamed of. The real vote for Pedro Vibes, including a full and deep throated Save America act, the budget and the ever looming debt ceiling disaster 1929. The Democrats will do it on day one and can't believe how lucky they are they got with this Senate leadership. Remember, stupidity always brings losing and death. President DJT this post on social media came after he called out John Thune encouraged MAGA supporters to pick up the phone and call Senator Thune's office when Trump was giving a speech at a rally in Georgia last week. So let's try to make sense of this because it's pretty complicated and this is something that's been going on for a long, long time. Mike, can you tell us what is this fight about?
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D
I believe I said it internally on Slack like weeks ago. Something to the effect of like the calls for passing the Save America act will continue until Morale improves. That seems to be like Trump's approach here. He's obsessed with it and is demanding that it passes. So the surface level, the kind of substantive, what is the Save America act and why does Trump want to pass it? Why is he obsessed with it? Basically, it is a federal intrusion into the various states election laws with a sort of blanket attempt to reform some specific elements of elections from the federal level. So the big ones are a citizenship check requirement that proof of citizenship before being allowed to register to vote in the state. Most states have something like this, but there are a number of states and small number of states, but a significant states, blue states mostly, that do not require this. And so that is one of those provisions in the Save America Act. There's another one essentially allowing for federal oversight of voter rolls. The long and short of it is, you know, there is a debate to be had about the substance of some of these provisions, a debate about the, you know, the constitutionality of the federal government making those intrusions. Right. The states run elections in our country, federal elections. Right. And can make their own rules. It's in the Constitution. But of course, there have been examples, not just the Voting Rights act in the 60s, but also the Motor Voter act in, as it was called in the 1990s. There have been some of these intrusions by the federal government into, you know, sort of essentially overriding or declaring sort of something in state election law, you know, sort of overriding that, that law. So that's the substance of it and it can be debated. But I think that that truth social post that you noted here, Steve, at the top, kind of reveals Trump's game here. There are a bunch of Republicans and conservatives out there who have been arguing for the Save America Act. Back when it was passed as the SAVE act in 2024, when Joe Biden was still president.
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B
Passed by the House.
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D
Passed by the House, I should say. Yes. Not the Senate, passed by. And so this is a new version of it. What is really at work, I think what is really the goal here is the second part of what he said. Get rid of the filibuster, get rid of the Senate's rule that basically requires a 60 vote threshold, a super majority to close debate in the Senate and move on to a vote on a particular bill. And so I don't know how much we want to get into the mechanics of how the Senate works. But basically, unlike the House of Representatives, where all you need is a majority on the floor to pass something in the Senate, you have debate. It's the world's greatest deliberative body. And in order to end the debate on a measure on, on, on, on most measures, not every measure, and we can get into that too, you have to have a vote of 60 votes, or in a full Senate, 60 votes, essentially 60% of the Senate that is voting to vote to close that debate before you can then move on to. So that, I think, is really what is the ultimate goal here. I do think the president is obsessed with the Save America act and believes, I think falsely, that Republicans can only win in order to ensure that they win in the 2026 midterms and in elections here on out, that they've got to root out illegal aliens from registering to vote. And so this is the mechanism by which they can do that and then ensure that Republicans can win fair elections in their, in their mind. But I think ultimately they want to change the filibuster rules so that Trump can pass what Republicans always, you know, everything they want to pass, as he says.
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C
Can I ask everybody here just very quickly a question about that? Because, like, there's the theory, as Mike laid it out, that they believe that illegal immigrants voting in elections costs Republicans elections. There's a very, let's just say there's statistically no evidence for this, correct? I'm not saying that there aren't people who believe it, including perhaps Donald Trump. But since there is no evidence for this and yet there's such a push for it, is that really the explanation? Because that version of why they want it is actually a fairly high minded speaks well of them, right? It's saying that they believe there's a public policy problem that is unfair and undemocratic and they want to fix it. I do not believe Donald Trump has earned the benefit of the doubt that that is his primary motivation. So there are others who will say that they want the SAVE act because it allows the federal government to essentially federalize elections, play games of voting rolls and all of that, and that the real goal is to invalidate elections that Republicans lose so that they can stay in power. Now, I'm not saying that's true either, but I don't think Donald Trump has deserved the benefit of the doubt, that he should be offended by the accusation. Let's just assume that they all agree, that they all secretly know that this is not a public cause. Is it just pandering to voters and Fox News viewers, or is there an ulterior motive from Stephen Miller and Donald Trump that everyone feels like they have to go along with? Like, what is the Other ulterior motive for this is great.
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B
This is the whole podcast. Jonah, jumping to the end. What did Trump do when he, somebody was reporting his story for like a year. And then Trump went on Twitter and just tweeted it out and they're like, he just tweeted the whole thing. Jonah, you just did the whole thing.
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C
I apologize. I just, I, I, I, I'm all amped up. I just came off another podcast. I'm on all sorts of medication. So if we want to cut out me asking this.
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B
No, no, no, I don't want to. I think, look, this is in part what we want to have a discussion about. We should just jump to it. John, why don't you answer Jonah's question? What's this all about?
- [09:38]
A
Donald Trump is obsessed with the idea that there are millions and millions of illegal people voting that cost him the 2020 election and actually cost him the popular vote in 2016. So that Trump himself is obsessed with his idea. Now, what is Donald Trump's grasp on reality? To what extent does he really believe this? I don't know, but he really cares about this. And Republicans in Congress care about whatever Trump cares about. So it is an excuse for past failures. It is an excuse for their likely upcoming blowout in the 2026 elections. They'll all have an excuse. Well, if we had only passed the Save America act, we wouldn't have lost this. I don't think that there is some, you know, 3D chess to end American democracy. I think that obviously, Trump, if he, if he could, he would do that. He tried to steal election in 2020 and was thwarted. But, you know, I mean, this is a, this is a solution. In search of a real problem, our friend Stephen Richer, Dispatch contributing writer and former Arizona election official, does a great job of keeping tabs on the number of people who are actually believed to have illegally voted in states. And I'll just take a few. Stephen's got about 20 different states he's kept tabs on. Okay, so here's Georgia.
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B
These are non citizens.
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A
Well, that's two, two different categories. There is possible non citizen registrants and possible non citizen voters. Georgia, 8.2 million registered voters. 20 possible non citizens registered. 9 possible voters. Let's go down to Ohio where there is an important Senate race this year. Ohio has handed over all their voter registration data to the federal government voluntarily in their investigation, which took place in September 2012. 7.9 million registered voters, 78 possible non citizen registrants, and 9 possible non citizen voters. Now, I'll show you the biggest example of a lot of, relatively speaking, a lot of non citizen voting is New Jersey. There actually was a glitch in a system. Six thousand noncitizens who said were non citizens were marked as citizens eligible to vote in the state and 400 later did. This just came out in the news in the last couple of weeks. And listen, these are, it's, it's worth trying to make the voter rolls as clean as possible to the extent you're not creating bigger problems. But this definitely does seem to be a solution in search of a real problem. There's actually some question if this were to pass, would this actually help Democrats or Republicans? You know, we're talking about a universe of people who are, there's one study that's saying there are 21 million people who don't have a passport or a certified birth certificate or these other strict forms of ID to register vote. So they don't have those on hands. But what percentage of those people aren't already registered? We're talking about a very small universe of people. The Trump coalition relies more and more on these irregular voters who are not affluent. Affluent people are much more likely to have passports these days. So Stephen, Richard wrote another piece for us recently saying the Democrats might actually end up a little better off if this were to be, if they were to pass this law. So no, I do not think that there is some, if this were to take effect, would it lead to some, you know, invalidation of elections? I think there are other things to be worried about. There is a provision in there, I believe, that, you know, that the federal government, they can alert states to noncitizens on roles in the states are supposed to strike them from the list. So that is, that is an example of the federal government, you know, really getting intrusive here. But I, it's one, it's not going to pass because Republicans are not going to nuke the filibuster to get rid of the 60 vote threshold. There are simply too many Republicans out of the 53. You only need four to stop this and there are way more than four who are under no circumstances going to nuke the filibuster. So this is not going to happen. This is not going to pass. But Trump is obsessed with it. Again, it serves as an excuse for his, his loss of the popular vote in 2016, the actual election in 2020, and it's going to serve an excuse for when Republicans probably get blown out in November.
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B
Yeah, Jonah, let me turn part of your question back to you picking up on the point that John made there? What's your best understanding? I mean, this has been an obsession of Donald Trump's now, as Mike points out, for quite a long time. He has made the claim repeatedly. It's one of the favorite talking points. Republicans won't lose an election for 50 years if the Senate passes the Save America Act. I think that's dubious for the reasons that both John and Mike have suggested. But President Trump seems convinced or at least wants to make the argument. Mike Lee, who was at one time, I think, widely regarded as one of the upper chambers most thoughtful and serious constitutional scholars. He wrote books about constitutional history, taking on Justice Roberts on Obamacare, and was famously. I don't know whether he was famously, but Mike Lee was the Robin to Ted Cruz's Batman in the Senate fight against Obamacare back in the 2013, 2014 timeframe. And while they were often publicly sort of tied together and advancing the same arguments privately, Mike Lee was very frustrated after it became clear that Ted Cruz was pushing something that was never going to happen. They were not. Barack Obama was not going to sign something to repeal and replace Obamacare. Right. If John is correct that this is not going to happen, what is the explanation? You answer your own question. What is. Why are we doing this? Why is Donald Trump truth socialing about this? Why is he mentioning in speeches? Why did he give a primetime address talking about this stuff? I am actually a little more concerned than John appears to be, both about what's coming in the next several weeks, but also what this might mean. I don't think it's 3D chess that Donald Trump would potentially want to remain in office or cause big problems down
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C
the road or keep a majority in the House and Senate, regardless of what the actual election results are.
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B
Well, I want, I do want to get to the discussion of 2028, because there are these jokes that he keeps telling. It may not be as jokey as we think, but what's, what's your best guess? And look, I mean, let me just be clear with listeners. We're doing something we don't do a lot of here, which is speculate. We do. We usually try to look at, you know, issues and topics, things that are actually happening, provides cold, hard analysis, give our views about what's happening based on these facts. I'm asking the panelists in this instance to go beyond that because we're trying to figure out what the heck this is all about. It's weird, like what Mike Lee is doing. His obsession is bizarre. If there's no plan. Donald Trump does this sometimes. But how do you explain all this?
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C
All right, so let's put Mike Lee aside for just two seconds and stick on the Trump thing. If there is a argument that I have made more often on this podcast than any other, it is that I suck. Well, yes, but I mean, a debatable argument, it's that Trump cares more about getting the headline than the substance. Right? He wants ammo to say things are true more than he wants the facts to be true. Right. And I should have a master list of this ready. But he says to Barr, after the 2020 election, just say you're investigating abnormalities, anomalies in the election. I'll do the rest. Right. It's like when he gets the Enquirer to float that Ted Cruz's father killed Kennedy. He just needs to say, well, it's a respected paper, just said this. Right. And he has figured out, going back to his early condo salesman days, how to sort of incept an idea into the public's mind. This was his technique for a vast amount of the birther stuff. It's when Volodymyr Zelensky said he was like, just tell us you're investigating Biden, we'll do the rest. Right. And so getting the Save act argument out there, true or based on facts or not, is more important to him, both as a talking point now, but also as a contingency plan talking point should the Republicans get shellacked in 2026. And I think it's quite sinister and it's quite clever. It is a framing that benefits him to his mind no matter what. And if it gets passed, it helps because then they actually get to do substantial things. And if it doesn't pass, he gets to say, we were stabbed in the back by Thune in the establishment and all these millions of illegals voted that, you know, the same ones who, you know, deprived me of my popular vote in 2016 and stole the election in 2020 and all that kind of stuff. And I think it doesn't get a lot more complicated than that for Trump is that he looks at all of the different options and passage of the Save America act, good for him. Getting people to accept the premise of the Save America Act. Good for him. Defeat of it, good for him. Which brings me back to the Ted Cruz, Mike Lee dynamic duo thing. One of the weird things about 2013 in the shutdown fight was, and I remember saying this all the time, is it's never good to line up behind a general who wins, even if the troops lose. And that was Ted Cruz. He got to prove he was a fighter, all this kind of stuff. And he convinced Mike Lee and a few other people to go around saying that. Weirdly, you reference Robin to Ted Cruz's Batman. I know this is outside of your sphere of mass expertise, but really, the Green Lantern is the better DC comic book character, because the Green Lantern, all it took for him to win any fight was mustering enough will. If he just had enough will. That's all that mattered. And Ted Cruz and Mike Lee went around telling people that you, if you believe it strong enough, if you click your ruby red slippers hard enough together three times and say, we will repeal Obamacare, you could do it with 40 votes in the Senate. And it was just factually not true. And I think that that moment and also the entire Trump era are proof of Mike Lee's weird tendency, if you want to talk about speculation, to get caught up in hysteria, in speculative fog, about sinister forces at work, about saviors who can come in and deliver us from these Manichean forces or whatever. And he loves Donald Trump's musk at this point, and he's bought into this stuff. And it's good that you point out that Mike Lee eventually got frustrated with Cruz because it turned out he realized he was being lied to. Well, at some point, poor Mike Lee is gonna be walking out of the Kroger in Salt Lake City or something and drop all the eggs and milk in his grocery bags and like, holy crap, I was lied to about the Trump during the Trump era. So that's good for him eventually. But in the meanwhile, I just think he is. There's no politician in America I can think of, other than Trump himself, easier to diagnose of having Twitter poisoning than Mike Lee. And I don't have any other theory about the guy other than that.
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A
I mean, isn't it.
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C
You want to attack my Green Lantern thesis, don't you?
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A
No, I'm not familiar with the canon. I mean, isn't it possible that Mike Lee. I mean, one of the reasons he is. I mean, most Republicans are sucking up to Trump, but he's sucking up to him to a special degree, is that he simply would love to be named to the Supreme Court, and he wants to do everything he can to make Trump love him. And I think that, you know, I mean, if they hold onto the Senate, Mike Lee is totally a plausible Trump pick. If they've got 51 Republican senators, Mike
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B
Lee definitely would like to be appointed to the Supreme Court. Back when we the three of us, Mike and John and I were at the Weekly Standard. Mike Lee texted me about asking the Weekly Standard to get behind his efforts to become a Supreme Court justice. So he definitely wants to be a Supreme Court justice.
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C
And I know that Ted Cruz, I can report here that Ted Cruz is pushing the idea as well.
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B
Yeah. So I do think that's part of it.
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C
Although I, I mean, you think that's the all explanation. You think that's the Rosetta Stone of this, John, that it's just Mike Lee going all in on becoming a Supreme Court justice? You think this is the smart play of how to do it?
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A
No. Why? Did it helps? Yeah, I mean, I think that it helps. It helps him, sure.
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C
No, that's fair.
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A
How does a single senator in a body reviled by Trump right now, the Senate, which isn't doing anything, get on Trump's good side. He becomes the face of nuking the filibuster and passing the SAVE Act. That's Trump's total obsession right now. And Lee has placed himself right in the thick of things. So I think, yeah, if you're taking a more cynical view then that that's a factor.
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D
Can we zoom out a little bit though? And I want to take a little issue, Steve, with I think, where you're going or kind of how you're thinking about this in terms of the idea of a plan. And look, we've all been in Washington, some of us longer than others on this podcast, long enough to know that almost all of the time there is no plan or the plan never goes according to the plan, like reality often spins out because there are too many factors that the so called planners, you know, cannot control. And what I would observe and we can go back to sort of the way things happened post 2020 election and even in the run up to it. I mean, look, if it were any kind of plan, I think it would have unfurled, it would have happened in a kind of a different way. What instead we saw in 2020 was sort of a marriage, a perfect storm of a standard view among, you know, the voters, or certainly the most fervent voters of the losing side, grasping at any explanation that wasn't my side lost. You know, there must have been something and there's all kinds of groundwork that had been laid over the years, particularly by Donald Trump, you know, that Democrats were going to steal this election. And here's these ways and there might even be some small bit of merit to the way in which, you know, what do they call it? The Vote harvesting, ballot harvesting, you know, those complaints which have some legitimacy, is that really the way that we want to conduct our elections? Regardless, all of this groundwork was laid for Republicans or a certain type of Republican, a base Republican voter, to say, there's no way that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. And you marry that with Trump's just, you know, inability to admit defeat, inability to say, well, you know, I just, I just got spanked. Or it was close, but we didn't have enough. Right. Like, that's just not constitutionally something Trump could say. And his need, as Jonah just laid out to sort of grab at whatever explanation, whatever thing he can say, to kind of keep himself going, to keep himself ahead and not have to say, I lost or I made a mistake or I did something wrong. And so what I saw it was the whole sort of post 2020mess was jumping from option to option. You know, Rudy Giuliani sort of, you know, goes to court and has some other new theory. He's reaching out to others. Bill Barr won't let him do what he would like to do. Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger in Georgia won't do what he's asking them to do. He's just reaching and searching for just anything, any, any weapon that he can grab, you know, that's close at hand to achieve what he wants, which is to stay in office, to stay in power and not admit that he lost. So I view the sort of Save America act obsession as the same kind of thing. Like maybe there are other people below Trump who are sort of maneuvering and trying to find ways that they can kind of use this in order to, I don't know, say that the 2026 election, which Republicans are almost certain to lose in the House and maybe even the Senate, was invalid. But I think Trump is sort of just approaching this as a way to explain away why things are not going well for him and his party to find the scapegoats. Maybe this is a distinction without a difference because that, that can still be very dangerous. Right. I mean, it was very close in 2020 or 2021 to completely going off the rails and having a true constitutional crisis. But whether or not it was planned or whether it was just stumbling into something that could maybe a half assed, you know, way to make it work, I think that is maybe an important distinction for us to think about as we think about what could happen, you know, in the next months and the next years.
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B
Yeah. So I probably agree with a lot more of what you say. There than disagree with it. I don't think think that Donald Trump himself necessarily has a 47 part plan that he's built out in Google Docs and shared with top executives in his administration. I think he has a gut sense that anytime he loses, he's wronged because if people judged him based on the work that he's done, he would always win. And it's important to remember Trump had this same obsession after 2016, which he won. He launched a White House commission on voter fraud and paneled it. They did a bunch of work and then they didn't find voter fraud and he dissolved it and kicked the work over to the Department of Homeland Security. But Trump was routinely making claims after 2016 that somewhere between 3 and 5 million illegal immigrants voted and that that's why Hillary Clinton won California. This was investigated and it was investigated by people that Trump picked and they did not find evidence of this. So he does this all the time. I think this is much more sort of a gut reaction, a gut sense. A lot of it's backward looking. But I do think the important stuff, I think the reason Trump is as obsessed as he is, and I've talked to people over the past couple weeks who have spoken with him about it, spoken with top White House officials. You've heard Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report this in recent weeks. He is obsessed with this. This is the thing that he talks about all the time. Sometimes in the middle of the night, he talks to people about the SAVE act, about the elections and looking forward. I think he doesn't want to lose in 2026. Obviously he doesn't want the Democrats to take the House, doesn't want the Democrats to take the Senate. He worries about being impeached, he worries about being investigated. And that is part of the motivation here. But I do think that he doesn't want to leave office in 2028. Again, I can't remember if you said it, Jonah, or John, if you did. On the one hand, that feels like really irresponsible speculation. We're more than two years away claiming this guy wants to stay in office. You know, how could we possibly say that? I have not talked to Donald Trump about this. Again, it's the kind of thing we don't do very often. But there is a history here. I mean, we saw what he did after 2020. He went to great lengths, including calling Brad Raffensperger, then Secretary of State of Georgia, asking him to find 11,000 votes with not so veiled threats behind it. Said you and your lawyer could be in trouble if you can't find these 11,000 votes. He called the secretary of state of a swing state and asked him basically to flip the state. He did everything he did with Sidney Powell after the election, did what he did on January 6th. And the fact that he's been as obsessed about it as he has been tells me that this is not some idle thing. This is not Donald Trump just shrugging his shoulders and saying, I really don't want to lose in 2026. He did, we should point out, and we'll play this clip. There was a sort of redo on the White House Correspondents association dinner. The 12 and a half months ago was disrupted with an attempted assassination attempt on the president. They rescheduled it. They had it on Friday. Donald Trump gave a speech. We are going to spend no time on most of the speech. It was even for Donald Trump, incredibly stupid and boorish and really didn't work kind of on any level. But he did close the speech with sort of a suggestion that he was going to run in 2028. And while much of the speech was devoted to trolling and speeches like this, at this event in particular are often jocular and, and poking fun and trying to get the goat of. Of these journalists. I want to play what Donald Trump said and get you all to react to it.
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E
I'm pleased to announce my intention to, and this is a somewhat of a scoop, my intention to run for a fourth term as President of the United States. I will be doing that. I will be having an official. In fact, I think I have. Yeah, I won. I won three times now. I'm going to do it again. Thank you. I'm going to do it. Should be easy. I'm getting very good at running for president. No, I won three times. Did very well the second time, by the way. It's a rigged election, but we don't have to talk about it.
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B
So this has been a joke. You have Trump's most sycophantic supporters push him to do this in public. One of them was Lindsey Graham, who was constantly pushing the Trump 2028 thing. I think that was likely less because Lindsey Graham really wanted Donald Trump to run again in 2028, although who knows what Lindsey Graham wanted. But I do think, and I think you see this in Mike Lee, there's a parallel between what Mike Lee is doing and does on a regular basis, perhaps with respect to the Supreme Court, but just in general. And I think what Lindsey Graham did is that those senators have learned that the only Way to really break through to Trump to get Trump to notice. You can't just be sort of a run of the mill sycophant. You have to say the most outrageous thing that gets picked up. So Lindsey Graham amplified this. TRUMP 2028. And for those of you just listening, not watching the podcast on YouTube, Trump, in the middle of those remarks, put on a Trump 2028 hat and suggested he's going to run again in 2028. John, is it crazy to think that he really wants to run a 2028?
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A
Wants to. No, not crazy that he will, I think, yeah, maybe not crazy, but pretty crazy. He is also. I mean, listen, Trump says lots of things. So he has said elsewhere. You know, this is 2025. He said, it's pretty clear if you're the Constitution, I'm not allowed to run. It's too bad, but we have a lot of great people. He's speaking to a group of reporters. But I think it's crazy just because I take it seriously and actually think through the steps that it would take. Go look at the seven states, the battleground states that decide elections. There are several Democrats who are Secretaries of State. This is an open and shut case that the Constitution says you have two terms. He has two terms. He's ineligible to run. He would not appear on the ballot in several of these states. I think the Supreme Court would. It's an open and shut case. This is not like the insurrection question of whether that's explicitly that Congress has the authority under the 14th Amendment to decide which candidates for federal office were guilty of being involved in insurrection. This is just an open and shut case. It's a factual question, like whether someone's 35 or not. So that's just where how my mind thinks about this, that he might want to. But do I think an 82 year old Trump is going to somehow pull this off or come close to pulling this off? No. And I think that the fact that he just wouldn't appear on the ballot in the first place makes me think that this is. He's not going to actually attempt it.
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B
I mean, so I might accuse you of what in the intelligence world we would call mirror imaging using.
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A
In the intelligence world, are you admitting to be a CIA plant? Right. In the intelligent world, whoops, did I
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C
say that out loud?
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B
We in the intelligence world. No, I think what you say there is entirely logical. It would persuade, I think most people that this would be a fool's errand and therefore persuade them that it wasn't worth the effort to Even try. On the other hand, we saw, as you reported on Donald Trump call in John Eastman and walk through John Eastman's multi step proposal to remain in office after he lost in 2020. Donald Trump is not persuaded by things that might persuade more rational beings. And he need not succeed in this effort to cause a whole lot of trouble if he were to decide to undertake it. I mean, I certainly agree with you that this is black and white. There are lots of other things that are black and white. And just because Donald Trump told reporters at one point that he couldn't do it, I mean, this is not sort of like a politician in 2005 sitting down across from Tim Russert who's going to be so ashamed of his hypocrisy and having been called out on saying something different years ago that he's going to hew back to that old line. This is Donald Trump just saying, I want to do this so I can do it. No.
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E
Yeah.
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A
I mean, Trump tried to steal an election in the past, so we should not discount that. He talked about seizing voting machines back in 2020. But we should also talk about all the reasons that it was thwarted, that failed. And I think that again, Ron, running through the fact that we don't have this centralized election system, the fact that the states do run our elections is one reason this isn't going to happen. That the Supreme Court in fact, is not just some rubber stamp for Donald Trump. That I think that this is an open and shut case. And that's why I am very skeptical. Now, I'm willing to entertain other very scary scenarios of Trump again. Actually, he sees some random tweet from some influencer that there's voting irregularities in Fulton county or in Detroit or out in California and then sentence federal agents to like, seize the ballots. But again, that's crazy. That's a huge assault on American democracy. I don't know if that's worse than January 6th, but it's on that level. Let's think through the real scenarios. But I just don't see this going beyond trolling and a natural attempt to become nominated by the Republican Party in 2028 and to try and get on the ballots. I just think it's not going to happen.
- [36:05]
D
Can I say I think John is right about the reality of how it could happen. And if you game it out even a little bit further, I mean, the chaos that you're bringing up, Steve, like, yes, it's black and white, but Trump could cause chaos. I keep thinking about how much chaos this causes. The Republican Party. And that's actually not a reason to think that Trump won't do it. It actually puts a, you know, a little more weight on the. Trump will try to, to do something, try to run again in 2028 because he doesn't really care about whether chaos is in the Republican Party or not. But like, right, let's say he, you know, applies to get on the ballot in Iowa and New Hampshire and those early primary states. There's some kind of legal fight over it. Right. Goes all the way, I imagine, to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court makes that black and white ruling. But the whole time, I mean, this could get tied up for a while. What is JD Vance supposed to be doing? What are any other Republican who wants to run and has, you know, an actual legitimate claim to say, I could be the Republican nominee? I mean, if Trump does this and maybe the, ultimately the reason why he doesn't do it is because does it ultimately hurt his legacy within, within the party and within his voters, do they themselves reject this idea? But the chaos of that, I mean, I think we could be talking about like a blow. We're talking about a blowout for 2026 for Democrats, like 2028. If Trump does attempt this could be just an absolute nadir for the GOP because it will all be out in the open. It will all be so divisive and destroy the Republican Party for at least a cycle or two. I just think the ch. We haven't even begun to imagine what kind of chaos could be if he does proceed.
- [37:49]
B
All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. And we're back. If you're listening to the Dispatch podcast, let's jump in. Yeah. So Jonah, let me ask about that. On the flip side of what Mike is talking about, let's say that we get beyond the midterms. Let's say Democrats take the House, Republicans narrowly hold the Senate, and Donald Trump is trying to govern with a divided Congress, not really trying to govern at all. As soon as that election, those midterms are over, Donald Trump will really be a lame duck. Right? I mean, this happens every time you have a two term president. But the final midterms happen and everybody turns their attention to the 2028 presidential election. You'll have leaks of people who have sort of toyed with running, make very clear that they're going to run and that campaign. All of that discussion begins in early mid November of 2026. Do we expect. Let's say JD Vance decides to run, Marco Rubio decides to run. And right now the thinking is Donald Trump will choose one or the other. People are reading comments he's made about his successor pot eventually pulling down all the gold in the White House. And he said something to the effect but like Cubans, like gold. And that meaning that he really thinks that Marco Rubio is going to succeed him.
- [39:19]
D
To playing with the dolls here.
- [39:21]
E
Yeah.
- [39:23]
B
Can you imagine a scenario where Donald Trump just taps one of these guys? And I do think that there's going to be a much bigger Republican field. I think a bunch of people are going to, going to run, taps one of these candidates as his successor and then sort of steps off to the side and lets the race take shape. Isn't he going to want to be in the middle of every single thing that happens until the very last day of his presidency, at the center? I mean, if we think that that is one of the main things that motivates Donald Trump, and I do believe that's one of the main things that motivates Donald Trump, how does he maintain the center of attention if he just sort of steps off and lets the Republican primary get underway with him picking a successor?
- [40:07]
C
Well, because he's President United States. The President United States has the bully pulpit and the ability to get headlines no matter what, even lame duck ones, particularly if they have no moral ethical guardrails about, or a sense of shame about what they're willing to do to get the light on them. Plus, the pressure agrees with you, Steve, and wants Trump to stay the central issue and will constantly ask every GOP candidate, what do you think of Trump? What do you think of this?
- [40:38]
B
Let me be clear. I do not want Donald Trump to stay at the center.
- [40:42]
E
No, no, no.
- [40:42]
C
But like, but that's, but that's the incentive structure of the, of the press and like. We are now into our second decade of reporters running to every single Republican candidate in America and saying, did you see what Donald Trump posted on social media? What do you think about it? The idea that they won't do that to candidates for the presidency when they're campaigning in New Hampshire or Iowa or South Carolina, is beyond my ability to imagine. That said, I want to sort of try to answer this by answering the question that you asked to the other guys about this, which is that you were saying earlier that, you know, Trump wants to be president in 2028 or that we shouldn't discount the idea that he wants to be president in 2028. I agree with that. I also agree with John and Mike that it's just very, very, very difficult to pull it off. But there are two points I want to make. One is the obverse of the say things and float jokes thing. To get ideas out there that you're actually serious about is to say that what you're serious about was actually a joke when it turns inconvenient, right? So how many a thousand times the guy said I could end the Ukraine war in one day, deadly seriously. He said it it earnestly, he said it sincerely, I think he often said it. And then when it turned out that that was a ridiculous thing to say because his bromance with Putin was not going to translate into ending that war in a day, he said, well, of course I was being sarcastic and I was joking. Right? And this gets to the point I think is really important. We talk a lot about the phrase Schrodinger's War or Schrodinger's ceasefire, which Nikitojo started, I believe, talking about the first Iran cease fire. You know, that idea is like, you know, it goes as shortener as a cat and the cat's both alive and dead while it's in the box. And you have to open the box for it to pick a state and it's the act of observing it that makes the state stick. In other words, that in quantum physics is called superposition. And the reality is is that you are many states at once. And I think that the way to think about Trump is he says all sorts of stuff, like when he's trying out material in rallies, he says it cuz he kind of believes it, or maybe he believes it or he wants to see if the audience believes it and then if the audience believes it, he believes it. More like, I still believe that the night of the election, he didn't actually believe the election was stolen from him entirely, but he has since convinced himself of it. And I think that one of the things cuz I think Trump is in some ways a moral coward. One of the things he likes to do is float these ideas from his front porch, say, oh, it'd be a shame if something happened to that guy and then see if somebody does it for him. He puts the idea out there and sees if somebody wants to take the initiative and get in his good graces so he wears the hat. Is he joking? Yeah. If all of a sudden Todd Blanche and Steve Miller and some governors start putting that plan into operation and it looks like the joke wasn't a joke, he'll go with it. If it Looks like it doesn't work. Not gonna work. He'll back off and say, well, I was just joking, but I appreciate where they were coming from because obviously I'd be a great fourth. It'd be great to have as a fourth term president. He also, not to sound like, you know, John with his bold defenses of Mike Lee, but part of what he
- [44:00]
B
wants to start calling him maga John
- [44:02]
C
now, one of the things he wants.
- [44:04]
A
I believe I accused Mike Lee of cynicism.
- [44:05]
C
How is that a defense like that's the best defense.
- [44:08]
A
Yeah. That he's not naive and going to drop his bag of groceries in Kroger. E gads.
- [44:17]
E
Fair.
- [44:17]
C
Fair. But my point is that Trump also wants to delay the thing that you're talking about, Steve, which is not being the center of attention. And so by playing these games of like, is it going to be Vance, is it going to be Rubio making them all compete for his attention and his support delays the time when he is not the center of attention. The thing I'm sort of fascinated by is we've talked about this 10,000 times, so I don't have to repeat it in full verse. But the big reason why our politics are so screwed up is that the desire for reelection and incumbency has never changed. What's changed are the institutional forces that make it that the primaries are the threat to incumbency, not the general elections for like 80% of the country. Right. And that's why senators will suck up to Trump, because Trump's endorsement means they'll win the primary and therefore they get elected. Right. In a red district and in a blue district, you just, you, you, you become the most extreme anti Trump person and that gets you the nomination. And then you're going to get elected. Because in really blue places, Democrats get elected. In really red places, Republicans get elected. And so the primary is the only thing that matters. At the presidential level, it's different. And the idea that getting Trump's endorsement translates to winning the presidential race is just nonsense. Like it's a necessary thing to get the nomination. Perhaps. But it is maybe an albatross to win the general election. And I can see scenarios if Trump's approval rating is in the low 30s. I could see Rubio saying, let Vance have the endorsement. I'm still running. Trump's not gonna denounce me, cuz he might, you know, he might want me to be president too, as a backup plan. And then Vance has this problem of being a sitting vice president, having to run for four more years and Being the hand picked successor to Donald Trump, which I don't think necessarily if the snapshot of where the country is vis a vis Trump holds relatively intact. That doesn't help you with swing voters that, you know, how is Vance would have to get 18. Like let's say Trump is at 33% approval. He's going to get 18% of the public that hates the incumbent president but wants to pick the anointed successor and vice president of the incumbent president. That seems to me beyond J.D. vance's skill set. And so I just think that the game theory gets really, really weird once you get past the midterms for anybody on the Republican side who wants to be president.
- [46:48]
B
Yeah, I buy a lot of that scenario. I guess the place I disagree with you is the idea that Marco Rubio could sort of float in the background and that Trump isn't going to be.
- [46:56]
C
He's demanding that kind of Rubio.
- [46:59]
B
Yeah, no, I mean fair. It might be what he wants to do.
- [47:02]
C
Yeah.
- [47:03]
B
But there's no way that Trump isn't going to insist that Rubio, particularly if Rubio is still serving as Secretary of State, which is probably a question that Rubio support him. And to the, to the maximalist possible way to support him. I mean, I think if we have a scenario where Trump doesn't really try to, to remain in office, and again, I'm not convinced that we will have such a scenario, I think there's a reasonably good chance that he will want to remain in office and he'll try, even if he stands very little chance of actually doing it. I think that his motivation there is sort of the main thing and I expect that he might well blow stuff up that way. But Jonah, to your point, if he sort of tabs Vance or picks Vance and Rubio would prefer not to have to defend all of the crazy, you know, Trump at 31% or whatever he would be at that time. Trump is going to let Rubio just like sit back or distance himself from Trump in a Republican primary setting. He's going to insist that Rubio defend him to the greatest extent possible. No, probably.
- [48:10]
C
I mean, again, there's, this is the thing is like Trump often does things that are not in his political interest but are in the psychological interest. Right. And I think you're probably right about what Trump's needs would be. But I also think Rubio is good enough at talking to Trump in private and saying, look, this is where I'm coming from and you're already getting word reporting that the White House is Letting some members, some Republicans, distance themselves from Trump in order to win their elections. If Rubio makes the pitch, look, I'm your fallback guy. If I win the primaries, you know, you're. You know, you always have access and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. He could tell him a story that gives himself more room that Vance will not have. Incumbent vice presidents of sitting presidents have to defend the administration they're currently serving in in a way that Rubio, who would, if he ran, leave office before the primaries started. He cannot run for president in a primary as the sitting Secretary of state. You have to, if you're the sitting vice president. Right. You cannot withdraw from office to run for. I mean, you can, but that would be really weird to give up all the advantages of all that. So, I don't know, it just. It's very hard to game out. And I think Trump, because of all the things he says and this superpositional stuff, if he sees windows of opportunity to say, hey, look, the Republican Party can't unify, I'm here, I'm happy to stick around. And if there are people who are willing to make. Try to make that work, he might indulge it. He might test it more like, again, there is no theory about what Donald Trump might do that I would ever say, well, he wouldn't do that because he cares too much about the Constitution or the country. Right. Those are never arguments I'm gonna make. But he might not do things because he realizes they won't work.
- [50:02]
B
Mr. President, I will, in fact, keep the gold.
- [50:05]
D
Exactly.
- [50:07]
C
We'll finish the arch and we'll name it after you. We'll call it the Arch of Trump and all that kind of crap.
- [50:11]
B
Arctic Trump. Okay, Mike, before we get to not worth your time, I want to just go around quickly and bring us back to this moment and to the SAVE act and to the President's social media posting this morning, going after John Thune and those who oppose getting rid of the filibuster. There are a good number of them, as John, you pointed out. You know, by some estimates, upwards of half of the Senate Republican Conference would not support getting rid of the filibuster, even if many of them and don't believe Democratic claims that they would not get rid of it when they first have an opportunity to do it. So there's government funding that needs to be passed. There's an Iran War supplemental that needs to be passed, and the President is pushing this SAVE Act. Mike, where does this go between now
- [51:01]
D
and the midterms I mean, there are some various options. I mean, look, the White House and the House would really like for somehow the SAVE act to be the Save America Act, I should say the current iteration of it to be passed under budget reconciliation, which does not require, I don't want to get into all the weeds, but it essentially does not require a filibuster proof majority.
- [51:22]
B
It's worth a little explanation. What's the difference? One requires 60 votes, one requires 50 plus one.
- [51:28]
D
Basically correct. A simple majority is required for budget related measures to pass the Senate. And this process is called budget reconciliation. And this is a tool that has been used in the past 15 years or so in order to kind of get in other bits of legislation with plausible or implausible connections to the budget. And so the ruler on this, the sort of arbiter of whether or not something qualifies to be passed under this 50 plus one rule, is the Senate parliamentarian who is not an elected official but is appointed by the Senate majority. And he or she looks at the Roberts rules of the Senate. They're not actually Robert's Rules, but like the Senate rules, and determines whether or not something meets it or not. And I mean, I think we could be on our way to a possible showdown with the Senate parliamentarian. I mean, I just think that all the saber rattling from Trump about John Thune, like it's not just him shouting into the wind. I think the way things are, the animosity between the House Republicans and the MAGA world toward John Thune, the Senate majority, the Senate leadership, I should say even many within the Senate Republican conference, it's there, it's real. I think that J.D. vance, as the President of the Senate, could be a powerful person in a scenario where they really sort of try to overrule potentially the Senate parliamentarian. That's what I would be watching for. I think it would be a radical departure from the way that the Senate works. But I could see that being a showdown and one in which who knows what could happen after that. I mean, it could really kind of throw the whole body into chaos.
- [53:17]
B
Before we take an ad break, I want to ask you to please 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 and if you use the promo code Roundtable, you'll get one month free. 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 a lot more. Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. John, those like Mike Lee and others who are pushing the SAVE act the way that they're pushing, they, they want this to come to the floor. They want to have a big fight about this. As it stands right now, there are simply not the votes among Senate Republicans to pass this thing. How do they maneuver this is it that they think bring it to the floor? Those people who oppose the SAVE act in its current iteration will be shamed, pressured, demagogued to flip. What's their thinking? To the extent that you can hazard
- [54:35]
A
a guess, I mean, to the extent that there would be any benefit there, it would be to them. It would show who stabbed Trump in the back, who stabbed Maga in the back. And the Republicans who didn't go along with this idea of overruling the parliamentarian, nuking the filibuster, they would be the ones to blame. Then they'd have the fall guys. So that's the best I can make of it.
- [54:54]
D
By the way, Steve, we should mention Lindsey Graham here because I think Lindsey Graham is an important missing piece of the puzzle. We talked about how sycophantic he is, but I think he was also very clearly a bridge between the Senate Republicans and the President. I think his absence will be felt very strongly in any kind of showdown like what we're discussing. I think he was a key and we are now missing that key.
- [55:19]
B
No, I think that's a very good point. He was close to Donald Trump, but he was also close to John Thune and the leadership in the the Senate. We should also be clear, I think, just to emphasize the point that if this were hypothetically, let's say that they got it to the floor, J.D. vance played a role, pushed it through, overruled the Senate parliamentarian, which would cause some real constitutional chaos, potentially real challenges. There's no scenario in which the provisions of the SAVE act as currently constituted actually are implemented before the November elections. This is simply not going to happen. So there's all of this talk that this would change the way that the 2026 midterms are run. It's not going to happen. It's like fantasy land. Jonah, if you look at the time between now and November, do you have any informed speculation or uninformed speculation or wild ass guesses about what they're trying to do here?
- [56:25]
C
Let me just add on to something that Mike said before first when he said it's not Robert's Rules of Order. That's right. It is actually Riddick's Rules of Senate Procedure, named after Floyd Riddick. And I want to say that because I knew Floyd Riddick. He was the advisor to the Collegiate Model Senate, which I participated in because it allowed it got the schools to pay for you to go to Florida. And I was down for that. And he was the sweetest old Southern gentleman you can imagine. And he was the parliamentarian of the senate from like 64 to 74. And they named it Riddick's Rules of Senate Procedure after him. And he was a great guy. I don't know. I mean, again, this is one of the things, this is one of the aspects of this superpositionality point that I'm not going to let go of about Trump is that sometimes he does things because he's joking, sometimes he does things because he's serious and wants to see whether or not the universe rewards him. And sometimes he does stuff because he's a moron and just doesn't know the actual facts. Right. And I mean, Steve, you used to talk about this all the time, about how when they passed repeal of Obamacare in the House but not the Senate, they threw a big ass party on the White House lawn about how they finally repealed Obamacare because it was kind of clear he didn't know that just passing it in one half of the legislature didn't count for anything. Yet at the same time, it's possible that he just wanted the headline from having done it. There's just all these other multiple interpretations of things. And so I think that he thinks the SAVE act, it would not shock me in the slightest if he thought the SAVE act passed before the midterms, it would be implemented before the midterms. And no one has, I mean, I'm sure someone has told him that's not the case, but whether it sticks is just another matter. And he may think that, well, if we get it passed, I can then go whip the public and the GOP to make sure that it does and all that, or at least I'll have the talking point. So I don't know what's going on with that, but I think that we haven't talked about this at all. But he's been delivered with a little bit of a, I think it's kind of a false market signal with the stupidity of the DSA Democrat stuff. The poll numbers about how much Americans don't like Democrats are getting more favorable and the generic Ballot is looking less terrifying. I think that's kind of a mid summer phenomenon more than predictive of what it's going to look like in November. But I think as you get closer, it's going to be more and more clear that the Democrats are going to have a good, good election day, or at least the fear that they're going to have a good election day is going to become more and more warranted. And Trump is going to get more and more hysterical about the SAVE act and he's going to get more and more vicious about Thune, who's been put in this absolutely ridiculous position of being blamed for not being able to get it passed. When and historically, what a White House would do is go lobby. Mike Johnson has the benefit of the fact that Donald Trump is the whip of the House Republicans. He whips stuff in the House and it works. And Johnson's fine with that. It doesn't work in the Senate. And so the blame gets put on Thune. Whereas Thune said the other day, I don't have the votes, you'd think if Caroline Levitt gave this statement basically saying that, that the Senate should pass it and get rid of the filibuster and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, well, if that's how they feel, maybe they should try and go get the votes, because I don't have them. And the scapegoating of Thune, I think, will get much more intense, in part because the voices inside the GOP that Trump likes to signal, boost and bounce stuff on are more represented by the Benny Johnson crowd than the Wall Street Journal crowd or the, the National Review crowd, or never mind the dispatch crowd. And they will buy the idea that Thune is responsible for all the bad things in much the same way they did saying Mitch McConnell was responsible for all the bad things before him. And so it's going to get ugly.
- [60:42]
D
Can I just say real quick, the fact that all the superposition and Schrodinger's cat kind of talk like that quantum mechanics is the best, best mode in which to try to understand Donald Trump and our politics. Can we just marvel at that?
- [60:55]
C
I mean, look, I mean, the condo salesman metaphor works too, is like, true. He kicks the mafia on anything. The mafia thing works too. Just he says whatever he has to say in a moment, and ideally it will expand his options for the next moment. But the first point is to get him out the bad thing in the current moment. And we've seen that on display throughout the Iran war, it seems to me
- [61:17]
B
Entirely possible, maybe even likely that what you'll see, even as the Democrats are, you know, effectively nominating and electing some of these Democratic socialists who, who are truly radical crazy ideas, anti American, many of them hate the country, some of them are actually pro terrorist. At a time when you would think Republicans would be focusing on that and the president himself would be focusing on that, it seems to me possible, maybe even likely that what you will instead see over the next three months is this Republican on Republican infighting over the SAVE act, which doesn't have the votes to pass if it passed, wouldn't affect the 2026 election, is based on Donald Trump's delusions about the 2016 election, to say nothing of the 2020 election. This non problem problem of non citizen voting. And it could in fact have the effect of tanking Republican prospects even more going into 2026 because Donald Trump is Donald Trump.
- [62:24]
D
Sorry, real quick. You can see this tension, by the way, I've been listening to a lot of sort of conservative podcasts and the sort of version of talk radio now that that's happening on conservative podcast, that conversation and, and the extent to which the conversation about the radicalism of the DSA is just dominant. Right. It is a familiar mode in which sort of conservative talk radio and now podcasting can go into and it's comfortable and it's what the audience wants to hear. And yet that tension of if Donald Trump says it, then that has to change the conversation. I think you're absolutely right about that statement.
- [63:04]
E
Yeah.
- [63:04]
B
And Steve Bannon on his podcast regularly, you know, calling for the president to, if, if the SAVE act doesn't pass, to, to implement these things by executive order ice to the polls a lot. That is picking up a lot of steam in the right wing podcastosphere, if you will. Finally, not worth your time. Jonah wrote about the Odyssey in Friday's G File. I highly recommend you give it a read. We'll put it in the show notes and I thought it worth talking not so much specifically about the Odyssey, although please share your thoughts if you've seen it, but about what seems to be at least the moment this revival of moviegoing, people seem to be going back to theaters to see movies. This was not something that was predicted in the throes of COVID when people stopped getting together. We saw the increase in streaming moviegoing. It's now the case that even blockbuster films are available to watch in your living room, sometimes simultaneously with their appearance in theaters, sometimes after just a couple weeks. Are we going to see a true Revival of Moviegoing Jonah. And if so, will the Odysseys, sort of unbelievable numbers over the first couple weeks here play a significant role?
- [64:28]
C
I mean, this is very much something we talk about endlessly on this other podcast I do called Glop. We've talked about this probably 8,000 times. I've always been less pessimistic about the future of movies than some people. I think people like being physically at the movies. And Covid dealt an unbelievably brutal blow at precisely the moment that streaming had really penetrated into people's lives. And so I think it's recovering, but it's never gonna be what it was. Right. Cause just the threshold to get your ass to a theater and go to a movie is much higher because you can scratch the itch of watching stuff at home much more easily than you could in the days of four TV broadcast channels and that kind of stuff. But at the same time, I think the movie theater has been very smart about how they've dealt with this. The quality of a good movie theater now is so much better than any of the movie theaters that we went to as kids.
- [65:31]
B
Totally true.
- [65:31]
C
Reclining seats, the food is better. The technical quality particularly. Forget imax. Just a good digital theater. And the sound is so much better. Having grown up in New York City, it stinks less of weed.
- [65:46]
B
That's because the whole city smells of weed.
- [65:48]
C
Yeah, it's weird. The trade off was it no longer smells like weed in the theaters. It smells like weed when you get
- [65:53]
B
out of the theater everywhere else.
- [65:55]
C
And so I'm cautiously optimistic about this. There may be fewer theaters and they may be much more expensive, which I'm okay with. But I think that there's these other trends going on in people's lives. Like rich people are buying fewer luxuries and spending more on experiences. And I think that sort of concept scales down as well. And so movies will be more sort of event schedule things than, hey, let's just go check out a movie kind of stuff. But that's okay. And so I think they are going to be around for a while, but it's not going to be like the golden age of movies where there were just theaters everywhere and people would movies all the time.
- [66:38]
B
Mike, you have seen the Odyssey. Yes, I think you have seen it, John. Neither John nor I have. Was it the sort of magnificent experience that I've read so much about? Leaving aside the whole controversy, I think somewhat astroturfed controversy over the film itself. Is this a movie that you should see in the theaters?
- [67:02]
C
Yes.
- [67:02]
B
Versus Watching at home.
- [67:04]
D
It's funny, I had a friend text me just yesterday asking that question. The specific question is, should I see it in imax? And you know, my response was, well, you don't have to do anything in this life. But if you do want to see this, like IMAX doesn't have to be this 70 millimeter of which there are like 24 theaters in the country or something like that that are the full size. But anything that's big, premium large format, IMAX, even 70 millimeter screens would be great. Even to see it in a regular theater, it's a terrific experience. I think the specific elements of how Christopher Nolan, the director and writer and auteur of the Odyssey, the way he makes movies, it is, for instance, this is the first feature length film filmed entirely on IMAX cameras. And so that's. Which is a different process that it was filmed on location with practical effects, very minimal, if any sort of actual digital cgi. There may have been some CGI in some parts. I don't know, it's hard for me to tell. But the practicality of everything, from the shots of the burning city of Troy, in certain flashbacks in the movie, which are real buildings that are on fire and falling down around the actors. I mean, I mean filming shots on the ship on actual water, not in a giant tank with green or blue screen around it. The experience of watching all of that makes for a richer experience. And I think something that is to what Jonah was saying, it makes this movie an event movie. You have to go see it because people are saying you gotta go see it in the theater. And this is what happened with Christopher Nolan's previous movie, Oppenheimer. People were saying you've got to see it. And that was helped by sort of the inadvertent double feature element of the Barbie movie, which came out at the same time. The whole Barbenheimer phenomenon was a big hit. But look, in between those two, those two summers is kind of fallow summers for movies. I mean, movies were not doing great in 2025 in terms of ultimate box office numbers. I do think what Jonah mentioned about COVID and streaming kind of hitting at the same time and really not a death knell, but rang some warning bells for the movie theater theatrical experience. But also what was happening in the movies at the time. We had just hit the end of the kind of Marvel Cinematic Universe, that whole kind of run of movies in which cgi, everything I just described about the blue green screen kind of way of making movies inside a studio where nobody's even maybe in the same scene with each other because they're doing it all on computers. That was reaching a peak too. And I do think there's some exhaustion with that. And I don't know if the economics are there for there to be a flowering of Nolan's to make practical movies like this. He's basically the only one who can do it now. And I think I'm a little. I'm optimistic with much more caution maybe than Jonah has on the theatrical experience being something, something we're living with in 15 or 20 years.
- [70:16]
B
John, I recently went to the theater. Should surprise everybody.
- [70:20]
D
Wow.
- [70:21]
B
Do you get lost I girls to see Young Washington? I have a couple of history buff daughters and they were very excited to see Young Washington. I enjoyed it. I thought it was a good movie. I was not thrilled that they talked me somehow into sharing too big sodas and a popcorn, which was $37 for two sodas and a popcorn. John, when we were talking earlier, you said you couldn't remember the last movie you had seen in a theater. Has it come to you since? And do you plan to rush out having heard these endorsements of both Mike and Jonah of the Odyssey and seeing the need to see it it in the theater. Do you plan to run out and see it in the theater?
- [71:10]
A
I would like to. My wife and I, we have a 22 month old and a 5 month old. So, you know, getting a BabySitter to take three hours out for a movie is a bit difficult, but maybe I'll go by myself if she'll let me. I think the last movie I saw in the theater definitely was Top Maverick. It was totally worth it. I can't remember whether my wife and I saw Barbie at home or in the theater in 2023.
- [71:31]
C
Basically, same plot. Yeah, basically.
- [71:34]
A
I do think as we're talking about, you know, the quality of the sound and, you know, the picture, the thing that is really great about the theater is that there's no temptation to look at your phone. I mean, right now that you say you and your spouse, you know, the idea that you're gonna watch a movie, sit down and you get a little bit bored, one of you is gonna take out the phone and then it just makes your mind float away to, you know, some Twitter fight or something like that. So I really do like the idea of just going somewhere and having no temptation to look at my phone to watch movies. I don't know if there'll be a huge backlash to this, this idea of being just present with one thing at one time that. That will create some desire to head back to movie theaters. But in this moment, it has given me the motivation to try and find three hours to sneak off to the Odyssey by myself.
- [72:16]
D
Do it.
- [72:16]
B
Yeah, I think I'd like to do it too. You know, John, it is an option to take Twitter off your phone, and then you won't be tempted.
- [72:23]
A
I have a plastic device that I paid $60 for a little piece of plastic, and I put it on my fridge. And I can actually block access to Twitter and Facebook when I leave the house or even when I'm home for the weekend. So that is my favorite piece of new technology.
- [72:35]
B
I have no social media on my phone.
- [72:38]
D
Smart.
- [72:38]
B
No Instagram, no Twitter, nothing. Only Google News, which is interesting for its own reasons. I'm with you. I'd like to go to the theater and see the Odyssey. I'm going to try to prioritize that in the next couple weeks. Don't expect me to report back. Don't expect a detailed film review@the dispatch.com, but I. I will go.
- [72:58]
C
And just. Just so you know, the most. I think the. The most exuberant, positive reviews fall a little short. And the most exuberant criticisms are moronic. So just like. Because that's one of the things that can ruin a movie is you go in like. One of the most shocking things to me going into the movie or having seen the movie when I did with my wife in Las Vegas was, of the 20 interesting things about the movie, the controversies that were on social media don't make the list. It was just like, we heard all this crap about a black woman playing Alan O. Troy. She's in the movie for.
- [73:41]
D
For four minutes.
- [73:43]
C
That's generous. I would put it closer to three.
- [73:45]
D
Well, she plays another character as well, so that's true. Yeah, I'm adding that in there.
- [73:49]
C
Her twin. I have spoiler. Ha ha. But no, it's worth seeing. And I think there are really valid criticisms. They're just not the ones that the Jabronis were making.
- [74:00]
B
The Jabronis. All right, well, thank you for a Jabroni free podcast. Glad to have the three of you join us to speculate about what the heck is going on with the SAVE act, what's happening in 2026 and beyond. We will talk to you next time. Finally, if you want to support what we're doing here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And speaking of support, here's a shout out to a few folks who recently joined as Founding Lifetime members Colleen Dobbins, Andrew Hamilton, and Ryan Kirkby. We're glad to have you aboard. One quick note. We are ending our Founding Lifetime Membership offer at the end of August. If you're interested in supporting the Dispatch and enjoying a lifetime of Dispatch editorial goodness, please join us as a Dispatch Founding Lifetime member today. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email us@roundtabledispatch.com we read everything, even the ones from people who had no no idea what Mike Warren was talking about when he kept mentioning cgi. 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.
- [75:23]
E
Sa.