The Ukraine-Russia War Is Entering a New Phase

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Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll look at the latest developments in the Ukraine. Russia war and how the battlefield may be shifting in Keeves' favor, and we'll spend a moment on the allegedly imminent deal with Iran. Then we'll spend a few minutes on toxic partisanship and the frustrating red-blue cheerleading for moral cretons like Ken Paxton and Graham Platner. And finally, not worth your time. Donald Trump, the UFC, Millie Vanilli, the Freedom 250 celebration, and despite all of that, the continued greatness of America.

I'm joined today by my dispatch colleague Jonah Goldberg and dispatch contributors David French and Mike Nelson. Let's dive right in. Mike, I want to start with you and start with some good news for a change. We have been seeing persistent reports on the Russia-Ukraine war. both in the popular press and also from military analysts, such as your former colleagues at the Institute for the Study of War, that the war is turning or maybe even has turned, that Ukraine has gained battlefield advantages, that Ukraine has built momentum, that Russia is increasingly struggling. There was a UK Intel assessment last week that Russia had lost 500,000 soldiers,

which is much higher than we had heard before. There's a financial time. Times piece out today looking at Vladimir Putin and his standing with Russians and the headline is Vladimir Putin could pay a personal price for failure in Ukraine and sort of bullish on what's happening in Ukraine. Can you tell us, Mike, if you believe these assessments, has there been some kind of a turn? Does Ukraine, in fact, have momentum, number one, and number two? If so, what does that mean? And what, if anything, can the United States do to boost Ukraine's prospects of bringing this war to an end? Well, I think one of the common threads throughout the war was that, you know, reports of Ukraine's demise have been grossly exaggerated, right? Every month or every couple weeks we hear Doug McGregor and others around him saying, you know, the collapse of Kiev is imminent and it's about to happen.

That's never been the case. From the earliest days of the war, from the initial strikes of the Russian invasion, there was a period of time, a period of weeks where the Ukrainians were on the ropes, and they were very, very realistically facing complete Russian conquest. And through a series of, number one, horrible decisions by the Russians, both tactical and operational, but also through the grit and determination of the Ukrainian fighting forces and their political leadership, they repelled that and kind of blunted the offensive and ground things to kind of a stand. So we had, you know, certain grinding campaigns like Mario Cole and other places where it was grounded at the lines that we've seen largely stagnant over the last

couple years. But as you've mentioned, you know, as reported by ISW, who's from the beginning of the war, been the greatest source of objective information about where things are. And this latest report, which is just the latest reflection of great work from George Barros and Katerina Stepanenko, who kind of run the Russia team there and have from the beginning of the war, we see that for the first time since 2023, Ukraine is starting to take back more territory than they're losing. So in aggregate, they are on the offensive. And what we've seen is Ukraine has not only through that great determination and will to maintain their independence that they've demonstrated throughout, they've also out-innovated the Russians. They've not only led the way, as we've seen,

as the world's leader on drone technology and integration into tactical operations, but also started to be able to mass forces in a way that nobody has because of the use of drones and the inability of Russians and Ukrainians to some extent to mass forces in preparation for an offensive. We've seen most of the Russian offensive operations have been very small, the platoon level, you know, raids through small objectives. And what we're saying is the Ukrainians are starting to be able to integrate in conjunction with their drone deep strikes against both ground lines of communications, C2 nodes, massing, staging areas.

They've been able to start integrating some more armor and mechanized offenses. So they're, like I said, out innovating the Russians. And if this trend continues, you know, there's hopeful, cautious optimism. If this trend continues, I think that what we're going to see is, you know, continued Ukrainian progress. Now, your question about what we can do to support the Ukrainians, I think it's important to point out that despite what many of the isolationist Ukraine haters have pointed out, we largely have not been supporting Ukraine for a period of time now. As the vice president famously said, it's his greatest accomplishment that we withdrew support from them. So the Europeans are buying American weapons to provide to the Ukrainians, but we could restart a great deal of our support, which could help make the difference in this offensive. I mean, Mike, just one thing on that, we are still providing intelligence, right? Which is, like, important. Correct. Yes. Yeah. So we, and we are still, some of the weapon systems that have been

either provided before or that the Ukrainians or the Europeans purchased on behalf of the Ukrainians still require U.S. integration so that those systems are operable. So we haven't like cut off support, but we also turned off the spigot of financial support or direct military aid, which we could restart. Yeah, David, is there any chance of the United States doing that? I would think this would be a time when Ukraine supporters among Republicans in the Senate in particular, but in Congress, might take their case to the White House, to President Trump, and say, look, this is an opportunity here. If you believe this ISW report that we've been talking about, they write at the end of their summary.

administrationist staff sort of top to bottom with people who don't like Ukraine. I mean, I would not put Marco Rubio in that category, but I would. would put a lot of the DOD sort of Trump apparatus in that category. So I don't see a lot of room for a significant political move between now and the midterms, maybe after the midterms. But also this is an interesting question. What is it that we could do right now that would be very decisive when a lot of the Ukrainian advantage has been gained through their own drone industry and their own innovation and drone tactics where we are arguably behind them. For sure.

And so we do have very high-end weapon systems like Tomahawk missiles and things like that that could be helpful for Ukraine. But we've just seen in Iran that we expended huge percentages of our high-end weapon stocks and did not achieve the ultimate desired in-state as of yet. And this is right now a situation where I don't think, even if we said, Ukraine, you get 500 Tomahawk missiles right now. Yeah. Would that be decisive?

No. No. It'd be damaging to Russia. It would not be decisive. I'm sorry, if I can just jump in with an answer to your question. One thing that Volodymyr Zelensky has been asking for is Patriot Missile Defense System. Yeah. He wrote a letter to President Trump five days ago, said, I need this. This is going to help me immediately

if you provide it. And as far as I know, what we're recording this Monday morning, 10 a.m., we haven't given a response of certainly haven't given an affirmative response to that request. And they're even wanting to manufacture Patriot missiles, which we should allow them to do, I think. And so, yeah, I do think there are weapon systems that can help. And the Patriots make a particularly big difference when it comes to countering the other high-end Russian systems.

The Patriots are not something to deal with the drone threat, the Shadi drones and all of that. These are to deal with the ballistic missiles, the hypersonic missiles. Which we've seen more of lately, the ballistic missiles. Yes, and they really matter. When I was in Kiev was when we had the Patriots intercepted the Kinsals in 2023, is the first really big test of could the Patriots do this. And it was, I'll never forget it. I was at a front row seat to the whole thing.

But I think that what is very interesting about this moment, and just to give a second, to give some context here, Russia's way of waging this war at this moment, I think, has been checked by Ukraine. and their way of waging the war was a grinding infiltration tactic sort of approach, where what they would do instead of these big armored mechanized assaults is they would try to filter troops through and ones and twos and threes and fours. And maybe 70% of them wouldn't make it through, but 30% would. And they would dig in and they would stick there.

And to the point where it got really hard to tell where there was a front line. It was more like marbling than direct line. lines. But if you got enough Russians kind of fully behind the line or infiltrating through, you would get that very incremental move. And this was something that Vladimir Putin was content with or seemed to be content with so long as the math worked, where Ukrainians inflicting too many casualties or not enough casualties stop this grinding advance. And that magic number, and Mike, correct me if I'm wrong on this, the magic number is somewhere in the rounds of 30,000 a month. If Ukraine can inflict more than 30,000 unrecoverable losses on Russia in a month,

the math no longer works for them. They just can't move forward. And if that number falls well below 30,000, the math works for Russia. If it goes above 30,000, the math doesn't work for Russia. And lately, then math hasn't been working. And then there's an additional factor here, and that Ukraine now has a medium-strike drone capability that is really able to start impacting logistics in the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. So there are lots of drone strikes now on the main roads supplying Russian forces. And Russia is supplied a lot by truck, by ground. And so they are striking these trucks now in a way that is really raising some concerns

on the Russian side that can they sustain their troops in the field. So if you have trouble sustaining your troops, you're losing more men than you're are being able to bring to the front, the math doesn't work for Vladimir Putin anymore. And he's going to have to go through an innovation cycle. And right now, the innovation cycle is favoring Ukraine. And the question is, how do you exploit it? Yeah. And an innovation cycle takes time, of course. And we haven't seen as much innovation, as you pointed out, on the Russian side as we have on the Ukrainian side, which suggests that the Russians really are in a bit of a pinch here. Jonah, David mentioned Marco Rubio earlier.

And I think on the one hand, Marco Rubio is someone who understands Vladimir Putin, understands the threat from Russia or has understood. Maybe it's a better way of putting it to be precise. I talked to one of Marco Rubio's sort of top advisors a little bit ago. And he said, I was frustrated because Marco Rubio had done things like give this interview on the tarmac. This is, I think, back in February of 2025, holding out the possibility that the United States and Russia could have new sort of revived economic relations, and that could be a way for Russia to make it through this war and finish the job. And this person said, look, Marco Rubio knows

Vladimir Putin is a bad guy. But he has been sort of on both sides of this in his public rhetoric, not wanting to say something that would piss off his boss, right, who's obviously got a much warmer view of Vladimir Putin. And Marco Rubio is worried about Iran and he's worried about Cuba and he's worried about Venezuela and he's worried about the broader Western hemisphere. Can we count on Marco Rubio to be the one person to make these arguments? And if not Marco Rubio, is anybody? Is this just a moment that we'll look back on in six months and think of as a missed opportunity? Yes. Okay, moving on. Yeah, look, I mean, like, I don't, so I agree with you that part of what's going on with Marco Rubio,

I don't want to be uncharitable to Marco Rubio insofar as I think he's better than, you know, the tall skyscraper in Kansas analogy implies because he's actually pretty good at, let's put it this way, he could pass a touring test on grown-up serious foreign policy arguments better than anybody else in this administration. He understands the arguments. He knows how to articulate them. I think there are even moments when he sincerely believes them. And the problem that we have is that he's kind of alone.

And he's also caught up in this dynamic of having to translate Trumpism to serious people in a way that doesn't piss off Trump. And that makes him just a completely not necessarily wrong and not necessarily a liar and not necessarily, you know, cynical, but it makes him an unreliable narrator about anything that comes out of this administration. And that's sort of true of everybody. But like Henry Kissinger spoke in a kind of code

where he was sort of like Alan Greenspan at the Fed, right? Like he worked hard not to say something that someone could say, oh, but you said this before, right? And I don't think in this environment, Marco Rubio can handle that particularly. And we forget that Marco Rubio is also, of the National Security Advisor at a time where the National Security Council has just been gutted.

And normally there's a healthy tension between the State Department and the National Security Council. I'm sure there are tensions now, but I just don't know how healthy they are. I mean, there might be because Marco Rubio sometimes says one thing and sometimes says another. So maybe it's a tension within Marco Rubio. Yeah, I think it might be. Internal conflicts, Jonah. Yeah.

So I just, I think part of the problem is, you know, you mentioned Cuba. but Marco Rubio has a sincere interest in Cuba. Trump has a sincere but different interest in Cuba, insofar as he is trying to, like, knock up all these wins and also change the subject from how Iran is going. And I think the same lack of preparation and foresight that went into Iran is going to go into Cuba. Different result happens.

You know, Cuba can't close the Caribbean equivalent to the Strait-Oarmuz or anything. like that. But I have no confidence of these guys have a day two strategy for Cuba. And the idea that somehow indicting the 94-year-old retired brother of the former dictator as a pretext to do a Venezuela part two kind of operation, it just highlights again how Venezuela was sui generis, but Trump likes the idea. And once he thinks an idea is successful and once he thinks it's cool, like taking the oil, which he's had in his head since in the 1980s, he doesn't let go of it. And policy has to reason backwards from that. So I think there's a lot of stuff going on now that are missed

opportunities, you know, including what was on the table. Apparently, I was reading somewhere that we had, when we were talking about Iran, the offer to take the dust. The nuclear dust, which I just hate saying that. Repatriating that to the United States was an option proposed by Iran prior to the Operation Epic Fury. Now, I don't necessarily believe that, but like they can claim it because, you know, Iran proposes things and then says, well, that's not what we meant. But it's very difficult to look at the 95 days or whatever it's been since we went to Iran and say that we were better off beforehand. And I think when it comes to Ukraine, the tragic thing is I think it has been missed opportunities since 2014. And we could have done a lot more, a lot better under Biden.

under Obama, under Trump one, and under Trump two. And we didn't, and a lot of Ukrainians died, and a lot of Russians died, and a lot more will. I mean, I think, Marco Rubio, if he still believes today what he argued as a senator about Russia and about Ukraine, you can hold us some hope that he's inside making arguments that we should help them at this moment of advantage. But I just don't have a ton of confidence that's the case. Mike, I want to jump to Iran, speaking of Marco Rubio, speaking of what the administration thought would be quick conflicts. Can you help us understand the language of this conflict? You know, on the one hand, it's a war and it's an obvious war.

On the other hand, the administration would have us believe that it's not a war. And then the president sometimes talks about it as a war. We're right now in the middle of a ceasefire, I think roughly 50 days in, to a ceasefire in which it seems as if the two sides are targeting one another with military action on a daily basis. The Iranians overnight shot missiles at U.S. troops in Kuwait that were intercepted. The U.S. has launched its own, what are being described, as low-level attacks on Iran. Is this a war or isn't it a war? Is this a ceasefire or isn't it a ceasefire?

Well, I think, as you point out, there are levels to the internal contradictions. You know, they're nested like a matrushka doll, right? So on the outset, it is a war when the president wants to pound his chest and talk about how glorious it is that we've been successful, but it's not a war when he recognizes or at least pays lip service to the war powers of the Congress and says he doesn't need to report it, that it were at a ceasefire, and so it's a pause. It's a war that has been going on since the beginning of Epic Fury, but at the same time, we've been at ceasefire for longer than we were in the conflict portions of it.

And then that ceasefire that has been officially, or at least as the president represents it on the book since April 8th, has actually conducted or had several instances of kinetic activity, as you've pointed out. I think the basic level of why we're not in a real ceasefire is we have agreed to stop our offensive operations and respond only when Iran takes offensive action, but Iran has not given us any such guarantee. They have done nothing to stop what they're intent to start. They've continued to mine the straight. They've continued to threaten international ships. shipping. They've continued to try to run the blockade. They've continued to shoot missiles and drones at our Gulf Arab allies. So in reality, all we've done is since April 8th, given Iran time to refit, re-arm, re-equip themselves, reorganize themselves. There are reports that currently they have doubled down on some of their besiege, the IRC's internal police, their besieged crackdown of dissidents. They've executed people. They've arrested people. They're continuing to reinforce their systems of power inside of the country that, you know, target any threats to regime survival. And at the end of the day, that's the most important thing to them. It's regime survival.

And they are coming out well ahead of where they started in terms of retrenching their control of the country and the region as a whole. The president, you know, has just broke before we came on here. It looks like the Iranians are withdrawing from this deal that we have been assured time and time again was right around the corner. And I think it's just the latest example of the Iranian. thumbing their nose at the president, who has said very boisterously that he is going to conduct, you know, rainfire and brimstone down on them and has done nothing since they've continued to give nothing in exchange for these continued extensions onto, quote-unquote, ceasefire. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast.

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We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. David, we keep hearing a report. I mean, it's now, it's now, would be comical if we weren't talking about it in the context of a war, almost daily reports about the imminence of this deal and different parts about it, these leaks that are about it. But one of the more persistent leaks over the past week or 10 days has been this idea that the United States is prepared to give the Iranians some $300 billion.

And how exactly that would look and what exactly it would mean, you know, open to interpretation based on sometimes conflicting leaks. But it seems to be a part of virtually every package that's discussed. Is there any scenario where we could reach some kind of a deal, a permanent ceasefire, a long-term deal, where it would be appropriate for the United States to provide Iran, especially if it's this current regime, which is basically the Iran Revolutionary Guards Corps and shadows of the old regime where we could provide them with $300 billion, and it would be a responsible end of the fighting? not with this regime.

I mean, no, you could imagine a situation where you have a Marshall plan with an allied regime, but even in that circumstances, $300 billion is a lot of money. That's an absurd amount of money, just extraordinary. And I don't think of it as real at all. I think that what you're dealing with is a president who takes carried and stick to an extreme rhetorical place. so we will destroy your civilization. Those are words that you should never hear from a president of the United States

because guess what? A president of the United States is one of only a few people in the whole world who can actually have the power, deploy the power to destroy a civilization. That's why you don't say these things. And then you turn around and say $300 billion, which is sort of the diametrically opposed reverse of that.

You know, now we're going to destroy your civilization. We're going to lavish your civilization. civilization with gifts. Yeah. That feels like an absurd carrot and absurd stick is what you're constantly dealing with. And so over time, these guys have learned how to call the bluff. They have learned how to operate within this environment of extreme over-promising in both directions.

And so, you know, what Mike just said about Iran cutting off indirect contacts with the U.S. here and this report came down in like the last hour since we've been, you know, literally, you know, since we're starting to record, that is not something that a terrified nation does. If it is thinking that we're flirting with disaster and total destruction, you don't cut off talks. This is what a nation does when it thinks it's figured out the guy, when it thinks it has the upper hand, when it thinks it has leverage. Now, it could be wrong. It could be wrong about that, but that's the approach that Iran seems to be taking, is it seems to be taking an approach like it holds the cards,

like it believes it holds the cards. And so, you know, part of this is reminiscent of the whole Gaza situation. If you remember back months ago when Trump declared total victory in Gaza, part of the whole deal was going to be this glorious rebuilding of Gaza. Remember, you were going to have the peace board, you're going to have an international lead, you know, all of these things and it was going to culminate in Gaza just being, a beautiful jewel of the Mediterranean.

And you just feel like it's rerunning the same playbook, which is, I will destroy you, but the instant I stopped destroying you, I will build this magnificent place out of your country. Neither one of the two things was on the table, and neither one of the two things I think genuinely, ultimately will end up being on the table, but under no circumstances.

There's not a universe into which an IRG, D.C. dominated government should receive anywhere close to 300, much less 30, much less $3 billion of American money. This is a country that should be sanctioned, not rewarded. And what are we doing? What are we doing? Well, I remember when Republicans and conservatives and Obama critics freaked out over $1.3 billion and the $400 million of pallets of cash, I was one of the ones freaking out. I thought it was absolutely outrageous that we would do this. And now we're talking about, you know, 300x,

at least as a negotiating point. David, back to you on that, it seems to me, you know, I think you're, the Gaza comparison, an apt one, perhaps. You could also point to tariffs where Trump, you know, is maximalist language and then he pulls it back in and there ends up being something. That's a little bit of what Trump wants.

It's not nearly as much as, as he's talking about, I wonder in this context, though, if the more desperate the president becomes, and I do think the president is desperate here. The projections that we're seeing now from people who understand oil markets a lot better than I do suggest that this is four to six months, that what we've seen in the spike in oil prices now has actually been mitigated to a certain extent because other nations and everyone has been already using their reserves. And what we hit the real crisis, it's coming. and the head of Exxon, I think, predicted $150, $160. You're talking about four, six, eight months for any kind of recovery if things were to return to or come as close to status quo ante as they could. I wonder as President Trump becomes more and more desperate.

If when he uses these kinds of language on the polls, extreme alternatives, if we don't every day inch closer and closer to one of those becoming a reality. And my concern is, you know, if you, you know, if you. can't get this deal if Iran cuts off contacts, if there are no more negotiations. He's talked about wiping out the civilization. Doesn't that become more likely on a daily basis? And I say this, of course, as somebody who I'd love to see the Iranian regime go, but worries me. I mean, you know, Steve, we're in uncharted territory here. We've just never had a war leader like this. And so a lot of this is just going to be gross speculation, to be honest. But here is my

concern. So far in this Trump second term, there is one clear check on Trump, and that's like the Dow. He doesn't like to see the Dow go down. And when the Dow goes down or when like there's extreme turbulence in the bond market, that was one of the things that led him to back away from the Liberation Day tariffs as the bond markets were signaling like, we got problems up ahead. And so he has been engaging in this long running sort of weird market. manipulation, where he just is constantly teasing a deal. He's constantly teasing all of this good stuff. And it just keeps working and working and working and working. And so the one thing that is sort of his check is right now not working to check him. Dow is over 50,000. It has been going up

throughout this quote-unquote quasi-sees fire, whatever it is. And so this sounds ridiculous to say this, but I feel like a lot of our national security strategy is being dictated by what he's able to do in the stock market and with the stock market. So we have to overlay on top of this, what if the Dow stops being manipulated or what if other external factors, economic factors, like the growth of AI and America

are not strong enough to overcome sort of the negative, the drag of oil prices, inflation, et cetera. And so that's this other wildcard. circling out there and hovering out there. And if the Dow starts to drop, does he then just pursue a deal? Whatever deal will stop the bleeding. And that's what I'm worried about from an American national security standpoint. Does he launch this war? Does real damage to the Iranian military, but doesn't have the enriched uranium, doesn't do as much damage to the missile stocks

as we thought, doesn't stop that IRGC supporting Hezbollah and Hamas accomplishes none of the key war aims. And then, because the Dow might start plummeting, reaches this accommodation with the Iranian regime that ends up making it stronger. Honestly, that is my sort of most real, what I would call the most realistic negative outcome here is a Tao-driven capitulation to the Iranian regime

that leaves us much worse off than before. the war started. Look on the bright side, David. It could be a bond market. Yeah. Oh, true. Yeah. What am I? I don't want to narrow my frame, Jonah. I thank you. Thank you. If I could real quick. So, you know, to David's point, the president is obviously and has demonstrated that he is feeling the pressure. And that's why he hasn't gone down a realistic route of reintroducing the stick to a certain expect, not destroying the civilization, but making good on any of his promises to end the ceasefire. And while we don't yet know exactly how this is going to turn out, the, you know, the auguries are trending towards some kind of deal that is going to be beneficial to the Iranians.

Secretary Pete Hegseth and others like him will point to the overwhelming tactical overmatch that we've achieved as prima facie evidence of a victory. But I think it's important to remember, like, the very nature of war, if you boil it down to kind of cynical terms or just, you know, cold hard terms, you're trading lives to achieve an outcome. Even in our most definitive victories, we traded lives to achieve our independence from Britain. We traded lives 2% of the population to keep the union together. We traded hundreds of thousands to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. So even a victory, or even a victor, rather, makes the decision, I am going to trade my military member's lives in order to achieve this outcome.

by any metric of the things that we want versus what the Iranians want, if there's financial integration of the Iranian regime to the international market and some kind of financial windfall where we pay them directly, if there's retention of their nuclear material, if there's de facto recognition that they were allowed to kill 30,000 people and get away with it and do it the next time, if there's any one or if these things, they have made the correct trade to trade a couple thousand of their IRGC

in order to advance their strategic position. So from any metric, if it trends the way it's going, this will be looked at, no matter how many people we killed, it will be looked at it as an Iranian victory. You know, the Russians lost by factors many more than the Germans did, but the German flag wasn't raised over Moscow in 1945. So this will, if things hold, if the president does not reverse course and come up with a no-kitting, realistic way that he is going to increase kinetic pressure on the Iranians and a way that he hasn't been able to before, then this is going to trend towards an Iranian victory. I agree that entirely. I think the thing I would stress is, you know, again, there could be some internal dynamic among elite factions that causes a great outcome here that we don't have visibility on.

Right. Barring that, I think when history is, their history is written on this, the colossal. error in judgment on the Trump administration's part was starting out by killing Ali Khamenei and some most of the senior leadership, right? Because what it did was you can't start as regime change war during negotiations, right? I mean like the Iranians have a perfectly defensible point of view that says that the U.S. was launched negotiations as cover for this attack, right? Now, all's fair and love and war and all that kind of stuff. But from their perspective, that was incredibly deleterious for trust. We can say that.

And so by killing the leadership in the beginning, that sent the signal. I mean, I remember talking to Ken Pollock about this day, basically the first couple days of the war. Whatever we thought Trump was up to, whatever Trump thought he was up to, whatever Pete Hegseth thought he was up to, what we did was utterly convincing to the Iranian regime that we were going to try and destroy them and have regime change. Like, you can't kill the Supreme Leader and the parents and the family of the son of the,

you know, the inheritor of it all, and 50 IRGC senior leaders and all this kind of stuff and then say, well, we're not really going for regime change. We're looking for somebody negotiate with. And so, you know, as Ken has made this point to me, you know, one of the things that, like, they never wanted to close the Strait of Hormuz. Like, that was always seen as really escalatory. But what taking out the leadership and talking about regime change did,

is it taught Iran's hardliners that closing the Straits of Hormuz does not trigger regime change. It prevents it. Mm-hmm. Right? Like, so we got the causation all backwards here. If we had started with, like, some mowing the lawn stuff, with key. room for escalatory stuff. We could have conceivably driven them

to the negotiating table about something. But instead, we started at existential, we're going to destroy you entirely and take you all out and then leave whoever survives to the mercies of the mobs of the families that you butchered and tortured. They're like, well, we got nothing to lose here.

Let's shoot all of our neighbors. You know, let's lob missiles at all of our neighbors. Let's take out the Strait of Hormuz. Let's do all these things. said that we can't do because it would be escalatory and trigger a regime change war because America started a regime change war. And the rest is sort of commentary. And so now, like, Trump doesn't want to do the crazy escalatory stuff because he's realized that, you know, like, I keep thinking of pop culture stuff where, like, the nerdy kid just refuses to say

uncle. And the bully eventually has to, like, give up because he doesn't want to murder the kid in the school yard, right? I mean, that's sort of the position Trump is in. The only options left to him are, like, maybe not civilization destroying, but closer to that, right? To turn Iran into Gaza, Trump doesn't want that. And so the Iranians just simply have longer staying power on all this, and I don't know how you fix it. And so I think we're going to give them money. I'm happy to predict it now, not happy, but I'm willing to predict it now.

We're not going to give them money. Maybe it's through some back channel. maybe it's through some fee, you know, we'll rename what the tolling thing is, but there's going to be tolling in the Strait of Hormuz of one way or another. Maybe Oman gets a cut. I don't know. Maybe we don't give them billions of dollars. But we're in this sort of Gordian knot problem, because all you have to say right now to Donald Trump to get him to back off of doing a deal is saying, oh, you're doing what Obama did. This is the Obama. This is JCPOA. And he freaks out, and we start this. We're two weeks away from a deal all over again thing. But that's not sustainable on the stock market timeline,

or on the gas price timeline. But I wonder if he doesn't get to the point for exactly the reasons that you've laid out, if he doesn't get to the point where he can't do anything that doesn't make him look like Obama. I agree. If he agrees to some kind of a deal, because the Iranians have the upper hand,

I think, in many respects on the negotiations. And then he says, he reaches his effort moment. And he just says, like, you know, because we've seen him do this in virtually every other aspect of his political career of his time in office, he reaches this point where he goes maximalist. And I think that is, you know, it's a concern.

It's a leading concern of mine. You know, I keep thinking back to that moment at the very beginning of the Iranian operation where JD Vance had a moment where somebody was asking, well, you know, why do we think that this will turn out better than other Middle East interventions? And JD Vance with just extraordinary arrogance says, well, those are stupid presidents. Right. Those are stupid presidents. Well, okay, wait a minute.

What you're beginning to see are why two different presidents took two different approaches that were not this one. So approach number one, Bush with Iraq, he's saying, we need regime change. I'm going to make it happen. In other words, I'm not going to leave it to chance. I'm not going to do shock and awe and create incentives and try to get people to rise up. Nope. regime change is just going to happen. And we're going to do it by force.

And Iraq can't stop us. follow-on insurgency can't stop us. We're just going to do it. Well, the obvious, the downsides of that, and as much as I still support the decision to go into Iraq, and I still support the Iraq war, the downsides of that approach are obvious to everybody. It is a long-term, casualty-intensive, brutal conflict that results when you decide we're going to make it happen. Well, what's the alternative to that? Well, one of the alternatives is we'll reach an agreement with an odious regime. and if you're going to do that, now you're in control of the outcome

because you can either sign the agreement or not, but to reach an agreement with an odious regime with the Obama approach, it was you're going to have to make a compromise. There's going to have to be a compromise. So in Guax Trump, he says, I want regime change without the mess or I want agreement without compromise.

Those are not the options on the table. They're not the options on the table. And so what you're starting to realize, is why previous presidents made the decisions that they made. As imperfect and as troubling as they were, agreement or invasion or agreement or the stick being used to its logical conclusion really become the only way is to sort of feel like you're in control of the outcome here. Whereas here, what they're doing is they're doing half measures on both sides

and being shocked that this is not working out. But they don't want to pay the price for either an agreement or a military victory. They don't want to pay either one of those prices. And so that's why we are where we are. And his model for success, where he thinks he learned the lesson with Venezuela, I still think is unresolved. You know, we had Gonzalez calling for elections yesterday or Saturday. We're approaching the six-month mark.

You know, the communists, you know, isn't so much as they are. The Delci Rodriguez regime is still in place. And that is the underlying framework of what is existing in Venice. Venezuela is still not acceptable to the Venezuelan people. No. That is still unresolved and that's going to cause problems that Trump has still not resolved. And everybody thinks, I mean, I think the way that the American people think about it, to the extent that they think about it at all anymore because it's really disappeared from

most of the reporting is that this was done. It was done successfully. It's over and that's a success. That's a win. I think that's the way Trump saw it. I think that's what led to his facile decision making on Iran. And I think it could be what leads to additional problems in Cuba. Yeah.

One quick last point about Trump's rhetoric, just because I've got. gotten into some friendly disagreements with some people who think that his rhetoric's always bad, so why make a big deal out of it? It's just words, right? It's just, you know, Trump's don't get so upset about the mean tweets kind of thing, right? But this is how he's conducting international diplomacy under fire, right? And I think, you know, when the biographies on Donald Trump are written, and I, God, can you imagine how many biographies are going to be written about Donald Trump over the next 20 years? I think the power of positive thinking, stuff is going to be one of the most important character Rosetta stones about Trump.

Once you look for it, like he thinks that if you say what you want the outcome to be is it makes it happen. And if you go back and you look over the last, you know, three months of this war, he keeps saying what he wants the deal to mean as if that will make. make it mean that. Yeah. And it's not working on the Iranians, and therefore it's not working. But it's amazing to watch how many Republican politicians and sort of MAGA-ink

types think, okay, this is, okay, the message has gone forth. You know, just what, a couple days ago, Newt Gingrich had this. Well, clearly Trump is Thucydides kind of thing, right? The message goes forth that, okay, this is the new talking point about how this ceasefire deal is brilliant. and everyone who can't see it is a rhino cock, squish, or whatever, and then the thing falls apart two days later. And it feels like that act, like the number of people willing to sort of leap on the

premature thing and say that this power positive thinking approach is the real thing, is dwindling by the day. I don't know how Trump responds to that when no one is willing to sort of go along with the BSPR aspect of this. and that could be bad. Reality becomes more and more difficult to deny, I think, and more and more people are waking up to this reality being really sticky. I want to spend a few minutes before we quit on just the last couple of weeks in toxic polarization.

I mean, you know, we've been polarized for a long time since before the dispatch existed. We've talked about polarization in the sort of toxic political environment a lot on this podcast. But I have to say, just looking at the past couple weeks, in particular, two examples, two races, Republicans and their behavior toward Ken Paxton and Democrats and Graham Platner. And I have to say, I feel like we've reached sort of absurd and depressing levels of toxic partisanship here. And, Jonah, I want to start with you on the Republicans and Ken Paxton. You know, you have a Republican Party that ran really tough ads against Ken Paxton earlier this spring in an effort to get John Cornyn elected to get him through a Republican primary. Brutal ads about the extent of his corruption, just how he's a moral cretan, and why he would be unfit to serve in the U.S. Senate and would possibly, maybe even likely, lose general election to a Democrat. The Republicans have now taken those ads down.

They've sort of 86th their attacks on Ken Paxton. Careful, those are fighting words. That's not murdering. That's just getting rid of them, by the way. And you now have these same Republicans who know better making either grudging endorsements of Ken Paxton. Or in some cases, actually rather effusive endorsements of Ken Paxton. And, you know, on the one hand, this is certainly not the first.

first time that we've seen this. I mean, this is sort of how politics works, right? You back your guy, you fight really hard. And then when it's over, you know, Republicans rally around the nominee. John Cornyn himself, a week before he went down to his feet in the primary, said that he would do this, that Ken Paxton is an albatross around Republicans. Naxi's horrible person. But yes, if he's, you know, if he beats me, I will endorse him. This feels like this is an extreme version of that, just because of how cretinent is. Am I wrong? Am I just looking at it through these sort of, I don't know, cynical glasses?

No, Ken Paxton's a gargoyle, right? I mean, it's like when his own wife refused to endorse Ken Paxton, you know, who sat through and voted to save him in his impeachment trial, but then had to announce that she was leaving him for biblically sound reasons was the way, I think the phrase she used, you know, like, I find it's, I don't want to steal thunder from your follow-ups on this, but like, there's a rough parallelism between Graham Platner and Ken Paxton, right? Mm-hmm.

I don't really, like, this is a point David's made for a long time, it's a point I've made for a long time. I don't really care about the arguments about, like, who's worse? The question is, who's acceptable? Yeah, totally. Right? And it's like, I mean, the analogy I always use is, like, there's a really, interesting dorm room bar conversation about who's worse Hitler or Stalin, right?

The point is, is that whoever you think wins the contest to be bad doesn't mean the other one's good, right? And this idea that, like, the only place where the parallel doesn't completely work is, is that I understand thinking that James Talarico is just like an unacceptable person for a Republican to vote for. but the idea that Susan Collins is somehow like this absolutely unacceptable freak of a candidate is something that I think Democrats are really, really unpersuasive on, but those are my priors. The simple fact is that both buys are unacceptable.

And to watch these people make these pretzell logic claims about, like, there's a prominent journalist who said on Twitter the other day, the reason why these allegations that Graham Platner is, was texting women, not his wife, and why this story is really taking hold, is it because it reaffirms the impression that he makes bad decisions? But is it really all that bad to have a senator who makes bad decisions? It's like, well, yeah. Come on, name, names. Who was it?

Who was it, Jonah? Come on. And, but, like, that's the thing is, like, this idea that somehow, once you get into this question of the most important thing is who controls Congress. You get permission structures at the Yingying to forgive anybody and everybody, anything personal. And, you know, John Cornyn, you can have your problems with him. Utterly honorable, decent guy. Carried a lot of water for Trump, carry a lot of water for Republicans. And Texas made its choice. And the expectation that everyone should now just shut up and not criticize the nominee is a sign of just pure partisan

brain rot. Right. I mean, if you're going to argue that James Talarico is some sort of existential threat, why did you nominate Ken Paxton? Right. I mean, come on. Like, stop gaslighting me here. And I know that term is completely overused, but this is an appropriate use. What it is. Yeah. It's an appropriate use. And so, you know, you're going to tell me that James Talarico is the Borg, the world destroyer, the man who's going to trans all the kids in the land. And so what we're going to do is nominate the person least apt to beat him with an R by his side and then bully everyone into coming on side. Spare me.

It's a very similar kind of ridiculous analysis to what we've seen. I thought you're going to refer to a different journalist who referred to the necessity of supporting Graham Platner to deal with, like, I think, the pure evil or the, evil of Susan Collins, who's one of only seven senators in American history

to vote to convict a president of their own party. She just voted to try to end the Iran war. Okay? Voted for some of Obama's Supreme Court nominees. Right. One of the most bipartisan senators in the last two decades. If what all

you're saying to me, if you say that we need to have Nazi tattoo, well, which by the way. How rich is it that, well, there's two times we know when he needs to cover up his Nazi tattoo. This is Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate candidate from Maine, yes. We don't want to cross the streams between Ken Paxton and Graham Platner. Right. Who may also have a Nazi tattoo? We don't know. Yeah. I mean, the best thing you can say about Ken Paxton is we don't know if he has a Nazi

tattoo. Exactly. But we do know there are two circumstances where he will hide that Nazi tattoo, and one is when he wants a Senate seat, and the other one is when he's lurking on a predatory sex app. He will make sure that his hand covers that tattoo when he's taking his towel picture. Like, what are we doing here, guys? Are you going to make an argument with a straight face to me that Graham Platner, a man with all of this baggage,

you wouldn't hire to be an assistant manager at your local fast food store, now should be on the Senate to stop the existential threat of Susan Collins. Come on. So, David, let me follow up with you first, and then I want to go to Mike, because both of you have written pieces about Graham Platner making this argument. And I would say, you know, Mike, in your piece, you identified yourself as a sort of still-never-trumper. And David, I think we can fairly assign that label to you. It's not the case that a lot of other, you know, so-called never-trumpers are doing that. I think some of them, you know, whether they're

former Republican never-trumper's, whether they're, you know, hardcore Democrats, you know, there's a spectrum on which they land. Some of them are sort of cute, sort of very soft, tacit, Graham Platner supporters, and some of them are more explicit Graham Platner supporters, making exactly the arguments you just said they were making about Susan Collins. What's the distinction here? why are you making the argument that you made in the New York Times and will include your piece in the show notes, we'll include mics as well? Why are you making the argument that you made in the New York Times where other, you know, strong Trump critics, never Trumpers, have made the opposite argument? I think that the distinction could boil down like this. Do you think Donald Trump the man is the singular threat?

Or do you think that Trumpism and which, and I'm defining this broadly, in other words, the ends justify the means partisan polarization, pure hatred, is the threat of which Trump is a symptom. And I'm in the latter camp. I think Trump is a symptom of a problem of partisan polarization and hatred, etc., that he makes worse. He's like a hacking cough that breaks a rib. He's like a symptom of the disease that makes the disease worse. But when you watch Democrats try to support Graham Platner, it's like walking through a carnival fun house version of watching Republicans talk themselves into supporting Donald Trump in 2016. And it's a lot of the same arguments, it's a lot of the same bullying,

it's a lot of the same. And you're sitting there jumping up and down going, guys, we know where this leads. This leads to corruption. Because the first thing that will happen, the first thing that will happen if Graham Platner wins is the call will go up in that left-wing progressive populist class find me more Graham Platner

because the guy that wins that's the model it's not well shoo well you know we did we we held our nose we voted for him he won we're not super happy about it but we had to do no no no no right we all know how this works yeah we know that it's It's going to be, find me more grand platiners. That's going to be the call that will go up.

That's the corruption of the party that results. And we're just watching it happen right in front of our eyes. Just like it's like it's a sequel. It's a bad sequel. Before we take an ad break, we're recording a special live episode of the dispatch podcast on Tuesday, June 23rd in New York City. And you don't want to miss it. We're bringing the roundtable together to discuss what's left of the right.

Jonah and I will be joined by dispatch contributors Megan McCartle. and Chris Steyerwalt in Manhattan to discuss the biggest news stories of the day and the evolving identity of conservatism in the Trump era and beyond. What does the war in Iran mean for Trump's coalition ahead of the midterm elections? Is MAGA still a conservative movement?

Who's the future of the Republican Party? The show starts at 7 p.m. on June 23rd in New York City. Head to the events page at 929.org. That's 929.org. purchase your tickets today. Okay, we'll be right back. Hello, this is Mary at the Department of Rejected Dreams. If you had a dream rejected, IKEA can make it possible.

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Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Mike, you had a piece, I will point out, not in the dispatch. How dare you? I only write for people, for institutions that in part are led by people named Jay Goldberg. So that's the... Perfect. Great piece in the Atlantic late last week, making a similar argument to David's on Graham Platner. or distill that argument for us and explain sort of where we are in this moment of toxic partisanship.

Well, I think what David was saying, that basically since the phrase was coined about 10 years ago, and it was very hyperbolic when Michael Anton said it then, everything has become United 93. Everything is existential and no concession can be made. We must achieve every victory. And it's not just in presidential elections, but here we saw it with people making similar arguments to support Thomas Massie in, you know, an election that was going to determine one 435th of the House of Representatives power that people were willing to go all in and support, you know, somebody who's trafficking in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

And they were willing to support him solely because he was an agitation to Trump. And I think that basically, as David just said, everything has become a symptom of this mindset that the other side, there is nothing worse than a victory to the other side. The Democrats are twisting themselves in knots. and to the point that was made that, you know, Paxson is the nominee now, but why did you nominate him? People are talking as though the primary in Maine has already happened. It has not.

He is actually not the nominee. He's just the presumptive nominee because he's holding. David Costello is still running. Janet Mills is still on the ballot. The Democrats do not have to make this mistake. Yet because they have said that he is their standard bearer in defeating, once again, the great evil of Susan Collins, that they must support him. And to do so, they're twisting themselves and not. Now, I think the judgment of someone who emblazed themselves were they obvious.

There are other people, and I saw plenty of people over the week and take issue with this, the idea that it's similar to Nazi logos. No, it's a Nazi logo. It is clearly the insignia of the SS. I think that's the high watermark. But others, as new scandals are breaking, we're seeing that they're just like, well, that's no big deal too. Well, that's no big deal too.

Well, that's no big deal too. And at the end of the day, the question is, what does Graham Platner actually have going for him? besides the fact that he, once again, is aggravating the establishment. And to David's point, if he becomes the standard bearer, then just like the progressives think they learned a lesson from the election of Zohran Mamdani, that is the new model. You go further left, you go more outrageous, you say that you adopt the principles that should be considered abhorrent to everyone. And that's extending beyond just getting a Nazi tattoo, but also his beliefs, you know,

these statements about his fellow service members, his statement. about women who were victims of sexual assault. You know, this is now adopted as standard. And I will name names. It was Jill Philippic, however you pronounce her last name, who was the one who said, yeah, sure he has bad judgment. Who cares? You know, that's good enough to be a senator.

This is a woman who has established her brand on calling out and criticizing examples of misogyny. And in that very same tweet, she said, oh, so he's engaged in light misogyny. Who cares? Everyone who's lining up behind Planner is selling out every principle they claimed they had in order to support him.

Jonah, I want to play a clip real quick. Can I play a clip and get you to react to it? And then you can respond to Mike as well. Ken Paxton is a flawed candidate. There are definitely flawed candidates in the Republican Party. But it's not just the guy with the Nazi tattoo. It's also the Hezbollah supporter in Michigan who looks like he's going to win,

who won't condemn the Ayatollah. It's the former Al-Qaeda volunteer in New Jersey. It's the woman in Texas who said Zionish should be put in concentration camps. But what's the thing is? But I will take Ken Paxton any day over a terrorist sympathizer who Democrats continue to platform. So that's my to be. Biden's day, OJ did decline to prosecute him. They had the option to go after him on that front. Look, I wish that we only had Boy Scouts in politics. I totally wish we did. But I will take Ken Paxton any day over a Hezbollah and an Iranian sympathizer.

Jonah, that's Lydia Moynihan, who's a correspondent for the New York Post. and what I'm interested in your reaction to is the framing there. Why can't she just criticize the Democrats who she objects to, the Hezboa supporter, all the people she's criticizing. I happen to agree with a lot of the things she's saying there. But then there's this compulsion to say, I'll take Ken Paxton over those people. They're not running in the same race. There's no reason to do that.

Why do you have to defend one side, one team, one color? Right. The first point is the choice. she's presenting is not a choice. It's like, it's not like

Ken Paxton's running against the Hezbollah supporter, right? Right? So like, you don't have to take Ken Paxton over the Hezbollah or his border because they're in different races.

And like, what aboutism? Drives me, like, there are legitimate forms of what aboutism, like, in legal hypotheticals. Well,

what about this case? How would you, you know, that kind of thing, right? As a game of logic, I have some tolerance for it. What drives me, I remember being on special report panel,

on Fox and Trump would do something outrageous and some Trump defender would say well what about what the New York Times did and I'm like, oh, is the New York Times, first of all, a corporeal sentient human being and second of all, is the New York Times president of the United States, right?

So much of it is just an effort to sort of distract and I am and the point I wanted to make before just very quickly is that, like, this tendency of making allowances for power is not new, right? Like, one of my more egg-headed obsessions is pointing out that the phrase from Lord Amy Acton, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is misused in the sense that in the actual context where the phrase comes from, it was a letter from friend of Amy Acton. Amy Acton and this guy named Crichton were having a correspondence, and Crichton was asking for his

advice about whether or not he should cut some of the bad popes some slack in his history of the papacy. And Amy Acton said, no, you actually have to hold them to a higher standard, not a lower standard. You can't just do this like, you know, got to break some eggs to make an omelette thing for people in power. You actually have to hold people in power to a higher standard. And so the corruption that Amy Acton is getting at, I mean, Amy Acton believed in the way we use the phrase, but what he actually meant in the actual context of the time was the way intellectuals, historians, journalists carve out new, give special dispensation to people in power for things they would never forgive from their neighbor or their colleague or their friend. And I've been obsessed with this for a very

long time. Some people might remember that I was sort of invested in the Clinton scandals. And I still remember Gloria Steinem literally arguing that presidents, that Bill Clinton, and deserves the benefit of the doubt of and the benefit of what she called the one free grope rule. And that was her phrase for it. Gloria Steinem. That's unbelievable. And I had spent the previous 10 years, Park is, you know, I went to an all-womeness college hearing about zero tolerance for this. They ran Bob Packwood, best name for a sexual abuser out there, out of the Senate. They said that sexual harassment was a zero-tolerance thing. It was all about the disproportionate power of those in power versus those without power below.

And then Bill Clinton plays Barron and the Milk Maid with an intern, and all of a sudden we invent the one free grope rule, right? So this thing is not new to politics. It just used to be that most of us were capable of saying, holy crap, that's hypocritical. And instead, the hypocrisy is now the point. And our ability to sort of pick it up has become so atrophied. and it makes people like us having this conversation seem like the weirdos rather than the normies to a lot of people.

So I had a little exchange yesterday on the Meet the Press panel with Val Demings, who's a former Democratic office holder member of Congress from Florida. And my argument in a sense was the opposite. I mean, it was the same, except for your last, except for your concluding thought, which is I think the normies look at Washington and look at this stuff and think, like, how messed up is this? Really? like you're going to defend Ken Paxton after having pointed out accurately all of the problems with Ken Paxton as a senator for months now or in some cases for years now.

And now you're going to line up with him because he's wearing a red jersey. And the same is true with Graham Platner. You're going to shrug off the Nazi tattoo guy, not even shrug him off. You're going to advocate for the Nazi tattoo guy because he's wearing a blue jersey. I think most normal Americans look at this. and either they're as frustrated as we are, or they just check out, or they're just done. I can't be bothered.

These people all suck on every side, and so I'm done. And that is, I think, where it gets very frustrating. Okay, quickly before we go, we need to spend just a moment not worth your time today on this debate that's happened sort of all around us. We didn't really engage it until Jonah you did in the G-File on Friday. And that is the controversy over the celebration of a, America's 250th. We are now seeing battles on social media about the musical performers and the

people who are quitting. You're seeing arguments. Kevin Williamson, our colleague, had a phenomenal piece about fighting in the front yard that was ostensibly about the UFC fights that are going to be taking place at the White House in the coming weeks. A very unique and terrific piece looking at that. Jonah, tell us what we should think about America's 250th and who should people be frustrated by? We should be frustrated by everybody and everything, right? Because America got into this mess collectively. And at the same time, we should not dispense blame uniformly. I think the primary thing that has been missing in a lot of this talk is you have, you know, you have a lot of Republicans, politicians, bemoaning how this has become politicized by the left and this is,

you know, this has become partisan. And you have a lot of people on the left sort of making a similar or adjacent argument. The person to blame here is, I mean, I'm sorry, I know it's predictable, it's Trump. Because there was a commission that was an actual bipartisan commission that was supposed to make decisions about celebrating 250, the 250th anniversary of America, in a nonpartisan, bipartisan kind of way, you know, a sort of C-SPAN-y, kind of nerdy, non-controversial way. And the Trump people pushed aside. So Freedom 250 is not the official thing.

I think the original organization was America 250, and it's been sidelined by, you know, a whole bunch of vendors who are like... the people who brought you the Trump phone kind of crowd, right? And so they politicize this, I think less to politicize it, at least at the outset, and more to make a profit on it. I think it's more about the corruption than it is about the partisanship. But because that crowd does not know how to do marketing and planning that isn't by its nature trying to monetize Trump superfans, it becomes partisan in the process. And so this is just a really good, we talked at the beginning about wasted opportunities. This whole ugly, stupid mess is a wasted opportunity because he only turned 250 once and we'll all be dead by the 300 anniversary.

And we took an opportunity to have a really nice national celebration of why this is an awesome country. And instead, it is going to be evidence of how this awesome country is an amazing. a really ugly, stupid place right now. And so I mostly blame Trump, but I think everybody helped get us here. David, the, you know, it's, it is sort of sad, very sad that we're having these kind of, you know, here we are six weeks before the actual anniversary. So much to celebrate. We've been running a series over the course of the past year celebrating the greatness of America and the incredible accomplishment that is 250 years of this American experiment, all of the things that,

all the good that America has done for itself and for its citizens, for the rest of the world. And yet here we are, as Jonah points out, in a fight, in a pointless, ugly fight about this crap. And there's reporting from the New York Times the other day that Donald Trump purchased between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of stock

in TKO Holding Group in March. which roughly co-insateke-O Holden-Croop is the parent company of UFC and WWE. And it coincided with his heavy promotion of this UFC fight on the White House lawn. And if you're cynical about it, and I try to be really skeptical, but not slide into cynicism, I've failing more and more lately. This is in some ways the most apt way that we could see this celebration in this moment with all of the greatness of 250 years, and then this just total shit show that we're seeing right now with the grift and the corruption and the silliness and the partisanship. Can you help me figure out which

one we should focus on more? Well, you know, I'm so glad that Jonah brought up the difference between America 250 and Freedom 250. This is something that a lot of people are missing. And I think some of the artists, you know, a bunch of artists that were announced for the Freedom 250 concert backed out of it. And Martina Berg-Bride statement was interesting because she was like, I thought I was joining something very nonpartisan, and then it turned out not to be that. So it's pretty obvious reading between the line. She was thinking, I thought this was America 250. It wasn't America 250. It was Freedom 250. And then you have, I think that we might be underestimating the negative effect of the visual transformation of the White House,

that the East Wing is now demolished. And we have this giant, like they've begun the plans for the big UFC fight. You've got all the apparatus around sort of the ring there. And it just looks monumentally tacky. And then you also have on top of that that it's UFC, which, look, I don't have anything in particular against UFC. It's not my favorite sport.

I've watched it some. But it is probably one of the most partisan-coded sports. in America right now after the head of the UFC spoke at the Republican National Convention. It'd be like Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, speaking at a political party convention. So it's most partisan coded sport right now. It's not one of the top sports in the U.S. It's a very niche sport, really, by its fandom, visual wreckage to the White House. And I think a lot of this is actually hurting Trump more than he might think that it does. It just all communicates a degree of chaos.

But I continue to have some faith that the better message will break through. And I had a great conversation with Justice Gorsuch. And he talked about how in 1976, we had a lot, this was not a good time, guys. 1976. We're two years out of Watergate. We were one year removed from the fall of Saigon. were just a few years removed from urban riots that made, you know, 2020 look like romper room. We're just recently removed from the wave of assassinations.

There was a lot of thought that America was in a state of decline. And yet, sort of the story of America was strong enough to come through to the point where the 200th still was a celebratory event. We got a lot of the same problems now at 250, sadly. The big difference is we all, we, and rather than have, having a president in Gerald Ford who is doing everything he possibly could to try to pull America together, we have a guy who's doing everything he can to pour gasoline on the fire. And the question that I have is how much does that leadership difference? How much of a difference will it make as we reflect back on 250? And I still have a lot of hope that the underlying

goodness of the American principles and the American story, which for all our flaws, we're such a better place than we were 250 years ago. That can shine through, that will shine through, but it will be in spite of and not because of the government of the United States of America. Mike, do you share David's cautious optimism? Well, yes. In terms of what we're looking at, I do share his optimism in the long term, but in terms of what we're looking at right now, first of all, I think, you know, if Millie Vanilla is saying you don't meet their threshold for integrity and that you're misrepresenting yourself, you probably need to take a step back and question things.

But, you know, taking aside the destruction or the disruption to the White House at the UFC event is going to take, taking aside that it is UFC, which, you know, it's fine, it is very popular, and there are going to be multiple ways that we can celebrate America's birthday. I think it's also important,

just, you know, transparently to point out that it's not taking place on America's birthday. It's taking place on June 14th, which is Trump's birthday. Correct, and flag day. It's flag day, the Army's birthday, the day must be. Montgomery Burns found love, all those things. But just, you know, it just coincidentally happens to be on his birthday, nominally a celebration of America's birthday. And a year ago, we can go back and remember, we had the Army's 250th birthday, a parade that ostensibly was sold as to celebrate the Army's birthday, but just coincidentally on the president's birthday. And the tell, I think, there was we didn't have a parade for the Marine Corps's 250th birthday or the Navy's 250th birthday. We only did it for.

the service that happened to land on the president's birthday, which I think kind of gives away the real answer. Now, David and I would probably agree that it was also the superior service and the only one worthy of a parade. But I think the White House had a different idea for it. Well, thank you all for joining this is a terrific conversation, and we will see you next time celebrating America's 250th.

If you like what we're doing here, please take a moment. And I mean, now, if you would, and rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. It really matters, and we hope you'll do us that favor. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from Millie Vanilli Fins. 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.

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