The End of Operation Epic Fury

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Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss the potential end of armed conflict with Iran as Operation Epic Fury wraps up, and the administration pauses Project Freedom, the quote-unquote humanitarian effort to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. We'll also discuss the coming end of the Trump era, looking at Normie Republicans souring on the president, his disapproval at second-term lows, but also his ability to exact revenge on Indiana state senators who defied his wishes on mid-decade redistricting. And finally, not worth your time amidst some bad news about cruises, we weigh the pros and cons of starting dispatch cruises. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleagues Jonah Goldberg and Mike Warren and dispatch contributor Megan McArdle. Let's dive in.

Welcome, everyone. After a week of warning the American public that wars take a long time to win and announcing on Sunday the launch of Project Freedom to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz starting Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went to the White House Tuesday to announce the close of Operation Epic Fury, thus theoretically ending combat with Iran and shifting to a humanitarian project freedom. But less than four hours later, President Trump announced himself on social media a pause on Project Freedom in pursuit of a deal, a peace deal, at quote, the request of Pakistan and other countries. As of this recording Thursday morning, the world is eagerly and anxiously awaiting what has been reported. reported as a one-page piece deal, reporting, suggesting that the United States has made some offers, the Iranians have made some offers, much discussion about a one-pager?

Mike Warren, you follow this stuff closely. I often turn to you to make sense of things that are hard to make sense of. Why do you do this to me? I like to, it's like it is like proverbially throwing the baby in the deep end of the pool and seeing what you can do. So I would. I, I like to, it's like, it's like proverbially throwing the baby in the deep end of the pool and seeing what you can do. So, so I, want to see you splash around a little bit on this. How do we make sense of the stuff that has just happened? So Steve, before Mike goes, I'll give Mike a second to think. This reminds me back when we were doing the special report panel on Fox all the time, how there were some stories that you would be perfectly fine. You'd often get the opening question would be the explainer question. Yeah. It's like, what's going on? You know, what happened today? And you never wanted it whenever it was

like simmering Civil War and Burkino Faso. Right. And you're always sitting there like sweating, give it to Charles Groundhammer, give it to Charles Crowderhammer. And then you just get to come in and say, well, I largely agree with Charles, but I had.

It's nice to go off the rails like three minutes in. I know. I probably have told this story before, but I was on a special report panel one night when it was sort of in the aftermath of the Greek debt crisis. and I think we had talked about Greece for a while, and then the crisis had sort of shifted, at least for a day or two, to Cyprus.

And the lead topic, as I recall, was Cypriot monetary policy? Just like, what can you do with that? And I believe I was the explainer person. Brett Baer had asked me to explain this, and I had to sort of announce that. This will surprise nobody, but I am not an expert on Cypriot monetary. Mike, I think there's a better chance you can make sense of what happened in the last few days. I do think there's actually an explanation for what's happened, and it has to do, I think, with President Trump's decision making on this, but also through the war and through his presidencies.

What, as you watched these events sort of lurching one policy choice to another, one declaration to another, what did you make? I thought a lot about a story that you and I, did together, Steve, it must have been about eight years ago, in fact, where there was essentially a need for the Trump administration to reaffirm, I can't remember the exact terminology that the actual agreement had, but this JCPOA, which was the joint agreement with the United States and Iran, signed by the Obama administration. There was essentially a deadline in that agreement where it needed to be recertified. And there was a constant question.

about at every point in the Trump administration would, something like every 90 days or something like that, where the president would need to recertify that agreement. And he was opposed to the agreement and his administration was opposed to the agreement. But it was essentially almost like a formality of continuing that agreement until the new, then new Trump administration could come up with a formal Iran policy. And there was a day. That was the deadline day in which talking points had been drafted and decision had been made that he was going to he was going to reconfirm this agreement and then he rescinded it. In fact, he heard from John Bolton, who was not yet in his White House, basically begging him not to recertify this deal. And so he went back on it, which scrambled the entire national security process.

You know, people were calling people. I mean, we were getting information that was conflicting with other. information that we were getting from other people in real time. And at the end of the day, literally at the end of that day, the president did in fact determine that he would recertify the deal. But the entire process reminded me of, you know, I was reminded of that, you know, not just watching this week and what's happened with the president's, you know, we have a deal. Now we're pausing this. Now we have this new operation. Now we're pausing that. It is the way that he sort of lurches from one decision to the other where we talk about it all the time.

Whoever is the last person to speak with him in his ear, who's over the last person in his ear, that's sort of who he goes with. And I think that there's no sort of grander explanation than that, which is, I think the president doesn't know what he wants to do in Iran. He's gotten in over his head. He's sort of confused that things have not gone the way he thought they would. And so he's lurching from decision to decision. It's the same story we've seen now for 10 years, but just in a new situation. I had the same thought. I thought about that same reporting.

And I'll just add a couple of details to make your point. As I recall, what the White House had to do was recertify that Iran was in compliance with the deal. Yes, yes. And it was just that sort of perfunctory step telling Congress, Iran is in compliance with the deal. And a lot of people in the administration, didn't want to have to recertify, but couldn't point to anything specific that said they were,

you know, out of compliance with the letter of the law, with the letter of the deal, even if they were, we think, violating the spirit of the deal. So they went back and forth. And if I recall correctly, this is testing my memory. Mine too. I believe the switch came after Steve Bannon presented Trump with an op-ed that John Bolton had written for the Hill. For the Hill, yes. printed out. He printed it out on why he printed it out on why he couldn't do this. And the entire

apparatus of the White House had been going in this direction to not certify, as I recall. And as you say, they had drafted talking points. I think they had begun distributing those talking points. And then the very same people who had drafted the talking points saying it would be a great risk to the United States national security if we recertify the Iran nuclear deal. drafted an hour later a set of talking points saying it would be a grave threat to the national security of the United States if we didn't do this and sort of walk people through it and they sent two different talking points and two different sets of briefings. I think that is an apt reminder of how so many of these decisions get made. And if you think about the history books that we'll read

about this moment, I suspect that they'll be filled with similar details. Jonah, one of the things that really jumped out at me about President Trump's statements, sort of announcing, hey, we're going back to diplomacy here. We want to have some conversations. At the top of it, he literally said in his social media post, he's doing this at the request of Pakistan and other countries. Now, after hearing the president disparaged our NATO allies, he is in a rhetorical war right now with the leaders of Germany, Spain, Italy. one-time ally in Italy, you know, sort of kicking them to the curb, criticizing them at every point when they can't. Sometimes I think with merit, I mean, I think the Spanish, the Spanist behaved poorly in the latest not act much like an ally.

But Pakistan is, at the very least, a complicated ally. Why would the President of the United States point to Pakistan? intelligent services, I think most people believe, gave safe haven to Osama bin Laden, worked with the Afghan Taliban when we were fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. So Pakistan is also, by my understanding, has a spirit, has a relationship full of the spirit of friendship and mutual cooperation with China. Very true. And that's not, that's not great, Bob, either. I don't know. I mean, this is a little bit of sort of psychoanalysis stuff. I think part of it is because Pakistan is the home of where these negotiations... Hosting the talks in Islamabad, right?

Right. So, like, it's sort of like saying back when there were negotiations in Qatar, Qatar has asked us. So I think he thinks that gives it a certain credibility. And that may be defensible at a certain level. I also think it's just cover for the fact that, you know, there's been reporting now that it was the Saudis that said, you can't do this. and said that they had closed down their airspace and wouldn't allow American forces to use, to fly, American planes to fly from Saudi to enforce this Project Freedom thing. And so, like, the and other countries are the important ones in that. But I think, you know, just sort of more broadly, Trump wants this thing to be over, right? in his whole life has been a story of, bide your time, bide your time, tell people it's going to be two weeks,

checks in the mail, all these kinds of things, until he sees an opportunity he thinks he can grab, and then he grabs it. And in the Iranians, you know, you say this for them, they are much better at negotiating than the United States and a lot of countries. And it's in their interest to drag this out, keep it up, keep the talks going,

but drag it out just enough. that because our pain points are different than their paying points. And so it's entirely possible that the Iranians said, we got something. You know, we can do a deal here. And Trump takes it, not realizing that they say that all the time. I mean, everyone keeps talking about how we had this, how hard it was to negotiate the JCPOA, which was the deal that the Obama administration made with Iran. And that was a crappy deal.

I mean, it was a bad deal, but it took a really long time to get a bad deal, because the Iranians, their posture is we keep saying no, we keep saying one more thing until the internal pressure within the American, on the American side is, well, we've been here so long, we need this so badly, we've invested so much capital in this, what's one more little concession to get this thing done? Right. And I think that's been expedited, given the circumstances with how Iran is dealing with the United States, but that's sort of the dynamic. And so I thought it was hilarious and sad and interesting where Marco Rubio said yesterday or two days ago, Operation Epic Fury is over because we've achieved all of our strategic goals. Really? I mean, I can remember

a lot of different strategic, like regime change, the nuclear program, you know, I think that was, he's saying that for domestic political consumption and legal consumption, because by saying, they think if they say Operation Epic Fury is over, they no longer are in trouble with the war powers resolution. The problem is, is that, you know, operation, I read about this in the G file yesterday, but operations are subunits of wars. And so, you know, Operation Overlord, you know, the Norman Landing, that was over in a couple days, pretty much. Didn't mean World War II was over. And we currently have a naval blockade of Iran, which is just simply an act of war. Now, I think it's smart strategy. I think we should continue it. But it's an act of war. Like, we are at war with

Iran right now. I don't, ceasefires do not end wars. The Christmas armistice in World War I did not end World War I. You know, like, we are technically still at war with North Korea. So, like, a lot of this is just going for the headlines, going for the cheap sort of legal fictions, political fictions, trying to get Trump trying to extricate himself from this in one way or the other. But this thing is not over. And I do think that if this, if the deal that we're hearing becomes reality, I think it'll

be something of a disaster. It's like Michael Scott standing up and declaring bankruptcy by saying, I declare bankruptcy. Like, it doesn't really have any force of anything other than words. Well, let's spend a minute on these objectives because as we've discussed several times on this podcast, it really has been, the objectives have not been clear, I would say, from the beginning. They have evolved. Sometimes, sometimes there are three. Sometimes there are six. That sort of depends who's talking.

the White House put a document. I was going to look for the objectives, the stated objectives, to try to just have us walk through, okay, here's one objective the White House gave us. Is it, did we in fact meet this objective? And I came upon a document the White House put out on April 1st, 2026. No April Fool's jokes, please. And it says, you know, the president has been very clear about his objectives. From day one, the objectives have been clear and unwavered. obliterate Iran's ballistic missile arsenal and production capability, annihilate its Navy, sever its support for terrorist proxies, and ensure the world's leading state sponsor of terror never acquires a nuclear weapon. Now, unfortunately, for the White House, in this document, if you go down, it quotes senior administration officials talking about the objectives and how clear they are. But again, in some cases, the examples they provide have one objective. In other cases, they have multiple objectives. It's confusing sort of even internally. But if we look at the objectives that the White House gave us, the president himself has cited, and he said this in a speech on March 2nd, President Trump did. Iran's missile capabilities, their ability to produce brand new ones, pretty good ones they make, he said, annihilating the Navy. Third, we're ensuring that the world's number one sponsor chair can never obtain a nuclear weapon, and we are limiting their ability to project force using proxies outside of the borders. If we do, if we walk down those, Megan, how many of those

is it accurate to say that we have achieved? Well, I don't think that we've made it so that they can never get nuclear weapons for starters. And I think that honestly, that is probably the thing that would most justify the war, right? If we had somehow seized Fordo, taken out the material that was there and made it really, really impossible for them to restart, simply, you know, not just because you took it, they can try to get more, but because their economy really is quite shattered. Their economy was struggling before this. And they are now in a position where we have destroyed a lot of their oil infrastructure and other infrastructure. We have blockaded them so that it's hard to get the stuff they were normally smuggling out. You could make a credible case that we had

actually prevented them from restarting their nuclear program, certainly any time in the near future. The problem with that is that, of course, we have also given them even greater incentive to get a nuke. It's the one sure-fire deterrent. And so, like, I don't think that there is any way that you can say right now that the administration has a plausible case that they've made things better. I think, you know, that calculation is different for Israel, which has I think really made a dent in Hezbollah and has made it very costly to continue the proxy wars against Israel. But for the United States, what benefit to the national interest of the United States

has been served by this exercise? I am struggling here to even make a vaguely charitable case. So I want to come back to you on the economy because I think that's pretty crucial here. And I think it does explain why we've seen some of the things we've seen over the past few days. But if you look at those, to your point, Megan, on missiles, the New York Times reports that, quote, U.S. intelligence assessments suggest that more than half of Iran's missiles and launchers have survived. That's disputed. I think other Western countries have different assessments, but that's the assessment consensus assessment, apparently of the U.S. intelligence community. On Iran's Navy, it's destroyed. Trump wins. That's, he has accomplished that objective. On nukes, again, citing the New York Times, Iran's nuclear stockpile has not been touched and there is no agreement, at least not yet, to ship it out of the the country, or to dilute it so that it cannot be easily used to manufacture weapons and on proxies. I think it's a mixed picture. But as you point out, Megan, most of the damage to the proxies came via Israel and came before this current conflict, this current war, war not war, I think we'll

call it. On the economy, you know, Jonah mentioned earlier the sort of competing pressures. It was the case that the proponents of the blockade that the U.S. imposed in the Strait of Hormuz And I agree. I think it was a, it was a, by and large, good policy decision had said at the outset that really what you needed was two or three months to fully choke off Iran's economy, which, as you point out, was tattered before this had even begun. And by most accounts, we have made progress, depending on how, you know, how, who you listen to and what assessments you believe, hundreds of millions of dollars a day are not flowing to the Iranian. economy because of the blockade. And yet, here we are, I think, because the flip side of that is the impact on the U.S. economy and the fact that we're seeing gas prices now, I filled up, we have one electric car and one big SUV. I filled up the SUV the other day, and it was $110 to fill up the SUV. And it just made me want to cry. And I think people are seeing that every time they go and fill up their cars to say nothing of the sort of downstream

inflationary effects on this. Let's say that the war ends, the war ends, I'm using air quotes for people who are not watching on YouTube, this is part of the administration's efforts to rebalance the economic consequences of this. Do you have a sense of how long it will take to return to the pre-March? one economy? Is this a matter of weeks? You just stop this and it's over and everything returns to normal sort of springs back? Or are we in for a longer and bumpy or ride? Well, I mean, that's a complicated question. The thing that people can see is the gas prices. And I have to

take a long trip to Massachusetts in a couple weeks. And I am really, really, really not looking forward to filling our smaller SUV. Possibly one could even call it a crossover. The trusty old Volkswagen Tiguan does not take like suburban level gas, but it's going to be painful because you've got to stop a few times. It will be. Yeah. But then there's other things like fertilizer and various petrochemicals. And how those things are going to ripple through the economy is, I think, harder to see. It's going to be a longer term shock in some ways more worrying, right? The United States produces a bunch of oil.

Eventually, we'll figure this out. It's a worldwide commodity, but, you know, the Straits of Hormuz is really throwing a kink in the general rule that, you know, these are fungible commodities. They just move where they're needed. But I think, you know, there's other stuff that is going to happen here that is going to be, that is going to cause secondary and tertiary effects. I don't think I've seen anyone offer a good projection of what that is. But, I mean, the gas is bad enough because energy is, fundamentally the input, you can argue that all economic growth over the last, like, I think this is an exaggeration, but there's a grain of truth here. The major piece of economic growth is just applying more energy to stuff than human muscles or animal muscles could do, and that that's the fundamental source of economic growth. So when you make that a lot more expensive, it's going to show up in your GDP, and it's going to show up in people's everyday lives.

and that is eventually going to be not only an economic problem, but a big political problem. And I think that goes back to the failure to articulate achievable goals to the American public that would justify the pain and that could be completed at a reasonable cost. And I don't think, and that in turn goes back to the failure to think things through. They're just like, I don't know, let's try it.

See what happens. Yeah, I mean, if you go back to those early days, the president really didn't make the case, as we've discussed here before, and he certainly didn't warn the country of potential difficulties, of potential challenges where he said, in effect, hey, look, this is going to be worth it because Iran is the leading state sponsor of terror. They have been sponsoring terror sometimes, you know, pounding their chest and doing it in public, many times sort of behind the scenes, and it would be good to not have that regime, have a nuclear weapon, therefore we've got to do this difficult thing. And there may be be cost. It may be difficult, but it's really important for the country's security. But I think the reason he didn't do that, Mike, is because the president really did believe, and there's been a lot of reporting on this in the two-months, two-plus months intervening. He really did believe that this was going to be like Venezuela. And he has said this in public on a couple of occasions was, you know, we were surprised that the regime didn't fall or that there was resistance here. Is it too late for

the president to make a case, sort of a retrospective case that, hey, I know this is difficult. I know these gas prices suck. But look at what we've done and try to, I think, you know, you're just going to have to massage the messaging on some of the stated objectives that they have not reached, but try to make the case that this was worth it. We needed to do this. From a civic health perspective or angle, I think it's not too late. It's never too late. late, right? If you have made a mistake, which I believe he has in not selling this, I'm not convinced that it was the right move regardless, given all the things that we've been discussing now for two and a half months about his sort of approach and lack of fitness for making

smart strategic decisions. But now that he has made this decision and he has chosen not to sell it, Yes, try to make the case to the American people. If for no other reason, then that's your job. You know, you've got to make the case that all of this blood and treasure, more treasure than blood, thankfully, that we are spending in this war, has a purpose, has a goal, has an end in mind. So from that perspective, yes, I think it is too late from a political perspective. This is just beginning to metastasize in terms of the political problems that the president and his party are facing because of, yes, this war and the way it was not sold well and the way that it is dragging on longer than he seemed to have expected. I don't know if experts in this region would have agreed that it would be something quick like he thought, but that's what the president thought. And I think that is a sort of a bigger medium term problem for him and his party that even if from this day forth, he goes out there and does what I think is likely impossible for him to do, which is to make a coherent and steady case for why this is an important thing for the United States to be doing. I still don't think it's enough because this is out there.

This is, I think we're going to talk about this later in the show. just the political problems that he and his party are having, this has been compounded by the war, and I think there's no way that you can unwind the problems that he's created. But he should still do it because that's what a president is the right thing to do. Yeah. Just one thing on the economy stuff from what Megan was talking about, you know, we could see very soon an economic crisis in Europe. that topples governments, right?

That causes really excessive political tumult. And, you know, Friedrich Merz, why no one calls them Fred Friedrich Merz, since that's the name from I Love Lucy is beyond me. But, yeah, it's so weird that people don't do that. And, you know, if someone was called Arturo Fonzarelli, you wouldn't just start calling on the Fons? Anyway, no, but Friedrich Merz said, I don't know, well, it was three weeks a month ago,

that if this doesn't change soon, we are going to have a crisis, economic crisis here on par with what COVID was. Prices, I mean, I understand that the demographic for that cares about international travel is not necessarily the majority making slice of the electorate, but even domestic travel. Jet fuel is poised to get crazy expensive. And already coach fares to Europe are getting crazy expensive. Coach fares go cross-country running get crazy expensive. You know, people, the summer driving months are coming, the summer travel months are coming.

And if they don't start getting the flow, even if they got the flow of oil out of Hormuz back to the status quo ante of February 27th, it will still take a long time for that oil to reach. It's customers. And you don't just turn on pumps once they've been turned off. Plus, we're going to see stuff like, and I know it's weird, but I keep talking about helium, but like a third of the world's helium comes out of that area, like Oman in those places, you can't make microchips without it, right? And so like the only thing sustaining the stock

market is basically the AI fab stuff. And if you start seeing huge hits to supply there, I mean, I think we're going to see rolling hits to the economy for every day that this continues. And I don't think, and I think maybe this is a place to transition to politics stuff, but I think it's getting to the point where the way Trump talks about Iran, the vibes of the way Trump talks about Iran feel really familiar to voters by now because it's so similar to the way he talks about the ballroom. It's so similar how he talks about sort of everything. And I think we're seeing a sort of grand convergence between foreign policy and domestic policy. the way he does retribution with domestic political enemies. He's now doing retribution with international allies, right? You know, like Chancellor of Germany says something mean about him, and we're pulling

5,000 troops out, right? It's then Giorgia Meloni says maybe he shouldn't attack the Pope. Because it turns out the Pope is kind of popular in Italy. And Trump attacks Maloney and says, we're going to screw with your defense posture too. And I think it's like it's getting to the point where the patterns are so are similar enough across all these different spheres. The people are just feeling like Trump is driving problems with politics, the economy, international affairs because they're all, he's the hamster in the in the in the Rube Goldberg machine, no relation, driving all of this drama. And I think that's a huge problem for him. All right.

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Megan, I want to ask you about two, I think, surface level, sort of apparent contradictions in the way that we're looking at Donald Trump as political status right now. It has been the case over the past several weeks, maybe months, that Donald Trump has been losing altitude, not doing as well.

His poll numbers have been falling. And it has a, occasioned sort of a round of speculation that Donald Trump's second term popularity and thus his second term power has peaked. And we may be at the beginning of the end of the Trump era. There was a really good piece we published last week at the dispatch from Yasha Monk, basically making this case. It was a funny sort of lead in. He said, you know, there's no sure way to be incorrect as a pundit or observer than to predict this is finally the moment where Donald Trump is going to lose power and no longer be as popular as he has been, the end of Trump.

But he then nonetheless says, there are lots of indications that this may be that moment. There's a really good column in the New York Times from our friend, Kristen Soltis Anderson, who talks about Trump's difficulties with normie Republicans. He's lost some support in MAGA. He, of course, has never had support from never Trump Republicans. But his big challenge is that Republicans who consider themselves Republicans first, rather than Trump supporters first, have, he has bled support from that group.

So at once, it looks like Donald Trump is in trouble. This may be the beginning of the end. And then there were these elections in Indiana where the president and his team targeted these state senators in Indiana who defied his wishes on doing mid-decade redistricting. I think most of them made very principled cases. I thought they were right to make the cases that they did. and there was, I think, an early sense that they might survive this, that they were willing to stick their necks out, they were willing to take the risk of potentially losing their seats, and that they might survive these pro-Trump challengers that were being put up and funded heavily out of state.

That mostly didn't happen. And the headlines that we saw coming out of Tuesday were that Donald Trump reasserts his grip on the Republican Party for Trump. I don't know if anybody's making the claim that Trump is as strong as ever. But it was seen as sort of a pushback on this idea that Trump was losing power, losing popularity. How do we make sense of all of that? I think I make sense of it the way I make sense of a lot of things in American politics right now, which is that the combination of primaries and high polarization and particularly high negative polarization, where people are less fans of you than they are terrified of the other party.

willing to do anything to keep those guys out of power. And so what that comes down to is that people are more worried about the primary than they are about the general. And they are doing things for the primary that will make them lose the general. Like what the guys in Indiana did was both principled and probably on margin, although Indiana is a quite conservative state, but on margin nonetheless better for a general election. But you can't win a general election unless you get past the primaries. And the hardest core people are the ones who vote in the primaries.

And also the hardest-cored people are more and more negatively polarized against their opponents, right? And in this, like, reactive, defiant disorder way, where anything at all that the other side likes is bad and anything at all that they disapprove of is good. And if they disapprove of child murder, then I guess I'm for it. And that's kind of where we are as a society. It's really unhealthy, but I think that's the dynamic here. Donald Trump is losing the ability to win general elections, not like it was ever that strong, right? He didn't win the popular vote in his first time, and first time around, kind of eeked it out on the second. It was fine.

He's a legitimate president. But it wasn't like a, you know, 60% blowout. It wasn't a Reagan-esque second term. It was like I did get more votes. My party did kind of slide into a narrow majority. But I think those days are gone. And I do think that his influence over the party is going to start to wane for a couple reasons. I mean, first of all, the guy's going to be 80 in a month.

Second of all, and you have to look, when you look at your future, how much longer is Donald Trump even going to be? around to direct the party and healthy enough and vigorous enough to direct the party, right? But also, I think Trump's tactics, and I think Democrats get this really wrong, because you're seeing them, like, we need to be more Trumpian. Actually, the stuff that people hate about Trump is the stuff that people hate about Trump. It's costly. The stuff people like about Trump is, like, he's good on camera, is a good showman, and he moved the party towards the center in ways I don't necessarily like.

Like, I, saying we're not going to touch Social Security or Medicare, bad policy, good politics. And everyone credits the wrong stuff. Normies never liked the meanness and the impulsivity and all the rest of it. They liked that, you know, he's a showman, he's good on camera, and he moved the party to his center. And they liked that he won elections, right? but they didn't love the stuff that the Democrats are now trying to emulate

and they're trying to emulate some of his dumbest policies, like maybe we'll have no taxes on anything. Look, I am second and none in my love of tax cuts, but first you got to cut spending. If you didn't cut spending, you didn't really cut taxes, you just raise them later. And I just think, like, it has to wane. When he's out of office,

A, there will be another person vying for the presidency. he can try to hand-enoyed that successor, but that person is not going to feel the loyalty to Trump that they used to. And also those normies, it's one thing, and I think you saw this dynamic in 2024 and also in 2016. When the party rallied around Trump, right, like when he won, the primaries, the normies wanted to rally together and beat the Democrats. And people like us were like, no, I would like to rally together and defeat Trump.

They didn't like that. They disagreed with us. But when there's another president, the Normies are going to get very angry if Donald Trump is out there trying to rile people up against the sitting president that will not go well for him.

He will not win that fight. So one way or another, we got like two and a half years to go, but he will lose his hold on the party because there is no other way it can go. I'm staking my marker and I will probably be like roundly embarrassed.

We can come back to this in two and a half years and see if I was wrong. We're going to play this clip when Donald Trump is sworn in for his third term. Right before I'm hauled off to jail. Yeah. On the giant screen in the camp.

Jonah, you know, to Megan's point there, you know, one of the things that Normie Republicans generally have not liked about Donald Trump is this retribution politics, the politics of retribution. But it's one of the favorite aspects of Donald Trump of this sort of core mega base. They might like it more than anything. They, as, as Megan said, they love it when he goes after their perceived enemies. And he made this case explicitly during the 2024 presidential election, you know, they're coming for you. I'm just in the way. And how much was that a factor in these primaries where, you know, he was able to marshal his forces? I think using some, you know, they're a significant financial advantage, which I think mattered, and I want to ask

Mike about that. But I also think just that argument, I'm going after the people who, you know, don't like me and don't like you. Was that, was that a decisive factor in these Indiana elections? I think it was a factor, right? I mean, this is always the problem with election returns, is everyone, all these people want to make them, this is the issue that won, right? When, in fact, It was multivariate for some voters. That issue was 100% motivating. And for others, it was 0% and most people somewhere in between. They spent all told, I want to say, it was something like $13.5 million on races between the ad campaigns and the flyers and the club for growth and all these things.

Total. than when they walked down the street before. And now, for the last month or whatever, two months, their faces have been on TV. This rhino defied Donald Trump to help the left, right? You know, and they're getting stopped at the supermarket and all that. And some people are saying, hey, stick to your guns. And a lot of people are saying, you know, you're betraying Trump and all that kind of thing.

And so these are low turnout elections where motivating even a small group of people can have outside effects. You know, I often make this point, I've been making this point for like 20 years about how we all like to, you know, like mainstream media loves to talk about voter suppression in the South and come up with all these things. And I'm not saying it's never,

there's never any truth to it or anything like that. But like, if you read the academic literature about voter suppression, qua voter suppression, big cities like New York are really, really, really, really cynical and bad about this stuff. teacher unions, municipal unions, public sector unions, they love to have primaries in the dead of August when no one's around because then you get these very low turnout elections where membership,

where rank and file members and affiliated allies can make up a huge share of the actual electorate. And if you would add them on a smarter time, you know, their share of the electorate would be much smaller, but they can be decisive in, you know, these kinds of things. And so, look, Trump's superpower, as all, as Megan said, has always been to screw with people in primaries. And it was the fact that he was willing to do this that I think, you know, they got a bad midterm election coming and they were willing to spend all this time and effort to take out Republicans who defied him.

I think this has like 0.0 to do with actual redistricting. and only 50% to do with retribution. The other half of it is Trump is terrified of becoming a lame duck. His aides are terrified of becoming a lame duck. And Trump thinks he can weather any storm for good reason, because he has in the past, if he has a unified GOP that is purely defined

as being about him. And people are terrified of defying him. And so sending this signal, you know, Michael Aeneen got in a lot of trouble, trouble when I wrote about this. I asked him for permission, but he had what came to be known as the Lodin doctrine, which was that in geopolitics, every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up a small, crappy little country and throw it against the wall just to show that we can, right? It was sort of like this teaching effect kind of point. And sometimes you have to make,

you know, mobsters and empires make examples of people from time to time. By Trump making an example of these very minor politicians who did the right thing in Indiana, partly because Mitch Daniels lobbied behind the scenes, it sends the signal to everybody else. Well, look, you saw what happened to those guys in Indiana. I'm not going to step out of line. And that's what Trump needs. And again, I think we tend to over as pundits,

in election watchers and students of the American scene, we tend to try to come up with these deeply complex, rational, explanations for some of Trump's behavior, when in reality, I don't think Trump sees a lot of distinctions here between getting personal retribution, having people fear him, demanding loyalty of people. These are psychological needs for him as much as they are political needs for him. And they've worked. Remember in 2018 when there was that massive wave for Democrats?

And Trump gives this press conference explaining that all of these Republicans who lost because Trump was so unpopular, lost because they didn't fully embrace Trump. Me a love. She had no love for me. Yeah, did not embrace. He just went through all these people. And it's like, did not embrace. That is his, that is his mindset.

And it's got him, 80 year olds do not change their characters. And this is the way he has navigated his life for a half century. And it applies on international stuff and applies on domestic stuff. And it applies on interpersonal stuff. And it's just, it gets a little boring to have the same analysis. of, you know, doing psychoanalysis for everything, but like, I still think it's the best way to understand the guy. Mike, how much, how much did the money matter? It was a big deal. There was, it was a sort of unbalanced war. If you look at the money, our colleague, David Drucker,

talked with a source in Indiana and told us that essentially every incumbent who was a target of Trump and Trump's political operation was outspent. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and they lost, pretty much every single one lost. I would say that that reflects a couple of things to me, which is that Trump's hold on the Republican Party, however we define what that means. It is, it remains strong and as sort of as strong as ever, I would even argue, on the political apparatus of the Republican Party.

He was able to essentially marshal resources for this effort that he cared about. And he was able to say, this is important to me. And places like the Club for Growth said, yeah, we'll jump. How high? Tell us how high, Mr. President, and spent that money. I just wonder what that's worth anymore now in 2026 as we head into those last two years of his presidency and, I guess, you know, official leadership of the Republican Party. He seems to be exerting a lot of influence still and having to spend a lot of money

to exert that influence still here in this party that he's now controlled for a decade. And we can see that that is kind of where he's able to exert his power because he's unable to exert his political power in kind of the real world, like outside of the club that he has created. That I think is important too, right? I mean, we've talked about just how bad his poll numbers are and they're bad and getting worse. And the midterm elections are looking like they're going to be a route.

people expect the Democrats to win back the House. So yes, his club remains, and he spent a lot of money and political effort and political capital to make sure that the Republican club remains the Trump Republican Club. And for what? You know, I mean, I think that's the question that maybe a lot of Republicans aren't thinking about long term here, which is what does it gain us to have a more unified party if that unity, is getting us to 40% support. That's a problem. And I don't think, so I don't think the information that we've gotten over these last two weeks from Indiana is in contradiction with what Yasha wrote for us and what Kristen Solta Sanderson wrote for the New York Times. And a lot of ways, those are kind of complementary, complimentary observations. Before we take an ad break, 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 at the dispatch.com slash join, and if you use

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Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. So those claims, I think, are no longer operative. Republicans are talking about spending $1 billion on the ballroom. It is now allegedly going to be double in size. And Republicans are making these arguments largely on security grounds after the most recent attempt on the president's life at the White House correspondence dinner. Megan, is there any validity to these arguments about security? I mean, if you look at what happened at the White House. White House correspondence dinner. We don't want that to happen to presidents. Sure. It probably is the case that security would be much more tightly held if these things took place at the White House. Is this a valid argument that, in a valid argument that justifies flipping the funding? I think it's hard for me to imagine them holding it at the ballroom for a bunch of reasons. The security would make it impossible, not impossible, but like,

You know, I get offered a ticket to the correspondence dinner every year. I didn't go this year because I was at a conference. But would I want to go through White House security to go to the White House Correspondence Dinner? I think a lot of people would not. It's also just like the optics are weird, right? We're, how would the correspondence get access to the White House ballroom, which is government property?

Would we rent it? Are we going to rent out the, just like a strange idea? The whole point is the correspondence invite the president. and not the president inviting the correspondence. It's a completely counter to the mission. Yeah, the optics of that would be very strange. I mean, fun fact, the original East Wing that is now being, has been demolished, was built to cover a bunker that was built during World War II.

So, I mean, there is some, yes, probably the security will be better. I'm sure there's a nice bunker in the basement, you know, upgraded with all the latest. Got all the fallout games now. Like, I just, I don't see this. as really being a thing about the correspondence in. What I do think it is is an excuse to do what they ought to have done all along, right? This should have been a congressionally funded effort. That is how this stuff is supposed to work.

So I guess better late than never and better, you know, if it's hypocritical and, you know, kind of a fake excuse, a pretext. I guess that's the tribute that Vice pays to virtue. And I guess I'd rather have that than no tribute at all. Where did all the Doge enthusiasts in the Republican Party go? Yeah, look, I mean, put the Doge enthusiasts aside for just two seconds. Like two weeks ago, three weeks? I can't, maybe, you know, time is a flat circle these days. But very recently, the official position of this administration and this justice department

was that Jerome Powell should go to jail for possibly the rest of his life. because of cost overruns in a construction project. And now we've got a project that we were told was going to cost taxpayers $0. We'll now cost a billion dollars. Megan is the math person on this panel. But I think I am right that even if it was a $1 increase from zero, that would be an infinite increase because all increases from zero are infinite. But a billion is a big infinite, right?

And I don't think Trump should go to jail because he lied about it. being not causing tax or any of that kind of stuff. But like the double standards here are really kind of shocking. And I just wrote this column about it, but like I think that the, the ballroom thing is an analog to the Iran war. Trump does things unilaterally for vanity as a vanity project for his own aggrandizement because he wants to say certain things. He doesn't want to go through the process where he gets allies on board or rallies public opinion or gets Congress to vote on something, whether it's a ballroom or a war, you know, in Iran. He doesn't want to do that because he thinks it's all going to work out great,

and he wants all the credit. And if he has to ask permission for people, it makes him look small, not strong like bull, if he just does it on his own. And he thought Iran was going to be like a replay of Venezuela. He thought the ballroom would just go great and be done because this is the one thing he really knows about is building stuff with gold leaf.

And then when he gets into trouble, he all of a sudden asked to ask Congress, to bail him out, to fund the thing, to, he has to go, sort of come up with these national security pretexts to justify what he has done. He moves goalposts. And I just find the whole, I'm in favor of regime jam and Iran, and I'm totally fine with the president having a ballroom with a super cool back cave underneath. That's all fine by me. But make the arguments, go through the process, have people kick the tires on the idea, make the arguments to the public, doing all this stuff unilaterally, then messing up wildly, and then attacking people

for not, you know, like going to war with Iran and then getting mad without asking for the Brits to help, and then getting mad at the Brits when they're not helping, is crazy talk. Getting mad at people for not supporting a ballroom that you said you didn't need their help with, and then all of a sudden you don't want to protect the president from assassins if you don't support this massive, you know, great Gatsby ballroom. It's just stupid and it freaks everybody out. It makes me people think this guy is not in charge. As the math person, I feel like I should, I should do a small correction. A $1 increase from zero is a $1 increase. However, in percentage terms, you could multiply zero infinity by itself, infinity times and still not get to $1. So in that sense,

that you are correct, but I felt we should specify its percentages and not absolute. This is among the many reasons we love having Megan with us on this podcast. Mike, if the president did propose a ballroom with a bat cave underneath, would Republicans go along?

Yes. What else needs to be said? Okay, good. Last word on that. Wait, can I say that real quick? It's all, it's always been a lie. And this latest lie about the national security implications of it, it's,

Like, it's just a lie. It's not true. I mean, there is, it has, one has nothing to do with the other. The president goes to all kinds of events that are not at the White House, more than he would like because he's a big homebody. But like, this has nothing, the White House correspondence dinner shooter has nothing to do with the ballroom and it's a lie. We should just be clear about it.

And in fact, we should not be surprised at all by this. has pointed out, it's the way that he has operated with the war. But it's also the way, how many stories did we hear, were we reminded of throughout the 2016 presidential election of vendors that Donald Trump did not pay on his various projects? The wall, right? The wall that Mexico was going to pay for that we ended up paying for. I mean, this is just a pattern. So the fact that anybody is surprised by this, you just, you weren't paying attention. It's what he does. That's all I I am sort of, I'm trying to picture the secret bunker with the what cave, at what point would public support, would Republicans support stop? Like, the human sacrifice altar. Would Republicans draw the line? I'm not sure. Well, when they wheel Stephen Miller into this cave in a leather onesie, you know.

Wow. That went sideways. Jonah, can you lower your, can you lower yourself, Joan? I don't even know where to go after that visual. There goes, for people who are not watching this on YouTube, Jonah is lowering yourself off the screen. You stay there. Which is the perfect, the perfect face. It's a similar device to one they used to lower Stephen Miller in his leather onesie.

He is the color of a right. strawberry, just ready for eating. Let's try to wrap this up. That's what they said to Stephen Miller.

All right. We want to do a quick round of dispatch recommends before we get to not worth your time. I will start because I have a couple of recommendations based on our discussion of politics and sort of where Trump is. I will recommend the Yasha Monk piece that I made reference to earlier. There's also a new piece that we posted on the website by David Drucker. Will MAGA come for Thomas Massie? The president once again going after one of his Republican critics. And Nick, Cotogio, our all-a-pundit friend, wrote last night on Indiana Republicans

prolonging the GOP's hostage crisis. Recommend all three of those. Mike, Warren, what do you recommend? It's sort of a different speed. We have a piece from a writer in Cleveland, Joseph Palange, I believe is how you pronounce his name. My father's conservatism. It's really a nice little essay about a different kind of conservatism, not the political kind, but the way in which he writes about his father's just approach to life

and trying to learn from the world rather than sort of bursting through like a certain president and a certain members of his cabinet, acting like you know everything when you know nothing. It's a nice little piece, and I'm glad we were in it. Megan. Mike stole my recommendation. Sorry. Thanks, Mike.

No, I love that piece because his description reminded me so much of my grandfather and who was, by the way, like an active Republican, he was an alderman, he was the chairman of the Republican County Party for Wayne County, New York for a while. But his fundamental conservatism was not about partisanship. It was about an approach to life. And it just resonated with me hugely, recommended to everyone. Jonah. So it's a very interesting piece. It's not one that you might expect for me to endorse or suggest, but John Aziz. a Palestinian writer in the UK had a really just a great piece. It has things that, you know, has some pointed criticisms for Israel.

But at the same time, as the headline says, he argues that anti-Zionism is a dead end for Palestinians. In part because it just simply prolongs the plight, the limbo of for millions of Palestinian people. and anti-Zionism, which he goes after Ezra Klein and Hasan Piker in the piece. Encouraging this kind of rhetoric gives another generation of Palestinian politicians, leaders, radicals, activists, the false sense that they're this much closer to finally destroying the Zionist entity rather than getting on with their lives and trying to figure out a way to live alongside Israel. And it empowers the people in Israel who are most hostile to the Palestinians. Good, good peace. Finally, not.

worth your time today, I want to talk about the Hanta virus and cruising. There have been stories. I'm sure most of our listeners have been following about this cruise ship that has seen a number of cases of Hanta virus sounds absolutely miserable. But I want to just ask from that very serious news story and worrisome development about cruises in general. Would you take another cruise anytime soon if this hantavirus proves even more problematic than it appears right now. And Megan, I will start with you. When my parents got divorced, my mother and sold their apartment, my mother wanted to take a little bit of money and do something nice with me and my sister. This was in 2006, and she went to a travel agent, and she booked us on a clipper ship cruise to the Greek Isles.

This was fantastic. I was going through a hideous breakup. I was also, in the uncanny valley of this kind of cruise ship. It's a very small ship. The ship itself was, it was lovely, and the, you know, cruising the ocean, the Greek aisles with sails rather than an engine, although there was an engine for when the wind died. Glorious. But I was going through a bad breakup and my parents had just gotten divorced and sold their apartment. And also on cruise ships like this, there's this weird lacuna. So there were a lot of people over the age of 50 and particularly over the age of 60. And then there were some of their grandchildren. And then there was me and my sister, who were the only people between the ages of 25 and 40 on the ship.

And so it was a little strange, but I guess under happier circumstances, I might recommend it. If you were, for example, over the age of 55, I recommend, which sadly I'm approaching now. Jonah's there. I mean, Jonah's already there. Mike, we did some cruises together. Yes. Back in the weekly standard. Putting some for work. So those are the only cruises I've ever been on, actually, were the weekly standard cruises that I attended. And I don't really have a strong desire to go cruising again.

It's just not my idea of a vacation or time off. I do have a funny, I guess, to me, cruise story. Maybe I've told it before. So the very first weekly standard cruise that I went on, I was a cub. staffer at the Weekly Standard, and there was one of those situations where there was like an extra room that they needed to fill or an extra, actually what it was, it was an extra spot at the dinner tables where we would talk with readers of the magazine. That was sort of part of the appeal, part of the sale, right, to readers was come on this cruise and you can talk with, you know,

our, you know, writers and staff, you know, people like Steve Hayes and Bill Crystal and Fred Barnes. And then sometimes they would be stuck with people like me. And so that was really why they needed me to come on this. And so it was a very last minute thing. Hey, we have an extra spot at these tables. Come. And you can, you know, and we'll really sweeten the deal. We'll give you a room that has a balcony, which not everybody was getting on staff, but they had a balcony room. It was like, wow, this is great. And I invited my then girlfriend, who is now my wife, to come along. And it was this, like, literally like a month before the cruise, we found out with this is amazing. I have I have no money to go on a vacation, so this is terrific.

And we get into the room, and it's just, it's great, you know, they've got like a bottle of champagne there for everybody. We kind of step out onto the balcony of this nice cruise ship in harbor, and the sun is going down. And we're sort of, I can't believe, you know, the luck that we have and, like, being invited to this, we didn't even know we're going to be here. And we're sort of, you know, arms around each other, you know, just young and in love and having this wonderful moment. and we can hear suddenly from a, I believe, a Royal Caribbean cruise ship, you know, one of the giant massive ones that's got like water slides and bungee jumping and all this stuff. It's also getting ready to pull out of harbor.

We could just hear from way, like maybe a mile away across a big harbor. We can just hear like as loud as possible the song, Everybody Dance Now! It just completely ruined the vibe of the moment. And why didn't you just dance? Well, we did. You know, at that point, it's like, I mean, get into it. We had our marching orders.

We knew what we had to dance. But it was like, okay, that's good. And I went on a couple more, maybe one more week of Santa Cruz, but that's about it for now. So I love cruises. I think it's such a great way to see so many different places. You can see, you know, six, seven cities that you've wanted to see, staying on the ship and visiting different ports of call. And, you know, you get to spend your day or two days. You don't have to pack up your bags after every time.

I loved the Weekly Standard Cruise. I actually learned a lot from the folks who came, enjoyed talking to them. Jonah, we have talked about doing dispatch cruises over the years. I'm for them. At the Weekly Standard, it was a nice way the magazine could sort of help supplement subscription fees and things with the money that we made on cruises. I have long been privately for doing dispatch cruises. I am now coming out in favor publicly of doing dispatch cruises. Where do you fall on that important question?

As soon as the Hantavirus story hit, he was like, now is the time to publicly come out. So, I mean, to address the actual original question, just for two seconds, as some of you know, National Review was the pioneer of this whole business model of magazines and ideological affinity groups doing these things. We were the ones did it first. It comes out historically from it was an homage to William F. Buckley's reputation as a sailor, right? That's sort of like the original spark of the idea about it. And we did so many when I was at National Review for 20 years.

We did so many cruises. I used to start joking that I worked for a right-wing cruise company that put out magazines on the side. And I thought long and heart. Look, first of all, if it's good for the dispatch, there are lots of things I don't like to do around the dispatch that I do because it's good for the dispatch. So, like, this could just add to the list. Like, this podcast. As listeners know, you took me, Steve, you made me go to a lot of meetings with politicians and I did not enjoy it. We learned a lot, though.

Yeah, I learned how much I dislike meeting with politicians. So I got to, I met a really wonderful bunch of people. on NR cruises. I've also been on some other cruises for other organizations. I think the core of my reluctance has to do with, first of all, I could go the rest of my life happily without ever going on another Caribbean cruise. I don't really like the Caribbean that much. I don't, I don't, it's not my thing. And it's hot and, and don't want to do it. But if that's what we have to do to, you know, to help the dispatch thrive, I'm open to it. I always like European cruises, more for sort of the reasons that you get at Steve is like, you know, whatever you think about

cruise food, whatever you think about, you know, having to sing for your supper every night and all that kind of stuff. Once you're off the boat, you're in Italy and that's awesome or Germany or France or whatever. That's cool. That's one of the reasons I like the riverboat cruises more. Yet sort of to more cool places without having to go to these big monstrous industrial ports first. Alaska tours are actually pretty great too because, you know, even though the tourist stuff right in the port is sort of annoying. You can get to the out the wilderness stuff is just beautiful and you can get there pretty easily. My biggest problem with the N.R. cruises was just that and it took me a long time to realize it was that the model was less about the panels and the events. It was about the

dinners because they promised that you get to sit two nights, at least two nights with or at least with two speakers at dinner time, which meant I had to be like these are people who were paying real money. They care about this. This is like the dudes who go to spring training. Florida. They liked seeing the people they saw on TV. They liked seeing the people, talking to people that they read. You can't be rude to these people. You can't be dismissive. You have to sort of be on. And so it was just draining for me more than anything else to do that much at the height of it all. But I never really had a problem with the individual people. It was just too much. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. And I think if the dispatch did it, we could figure out

how to do it for cool locations that makes sense that maybe we don't have to replicate that model right away. So I'm open to it. I look forward to you organizing it and doing all the due diligence and then me coming in and carp about it. We're going back to the Caribbean. We're going to play everybody dance now for Mike Warren and his now wife. Megan is already dancing. People who are not watching this on YouTube are really missing out. You're missing out this time.

So I will say I loved doing the, I probably did like 10 of them, maybe more. There goes too much. I probably did 10 of them. I loved them. I was able to bring my family on many of them. I thought they were great. You had these sort of unexpected moments. I remember we cruised into Cotor Montenegro, which was not a place I'd ever spent much time thinking about.

Certainly not a place that I dreamed of going. And it was absolutely beautiful, breathtakingly. beautiful. As I say, I enjoyed meeting weekly standard readers and subscribers. And I do think, particularly in a politically polarized moment, bringing people together who believe in something like what the dispatch is doing in our mission could be very useful at this time. I'm not, we're not obligating us to do it, but I thought we'd take the behind the scenes discussions and bring them out in front. So anybody who wants to see Mike Warren dance, please, please send us emails to Roundtable at the Dispatch.com.

All right. Thank you all for joining. We will see you again next time. Finally, if you like 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 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 people who wouldn't join us for a dispatch cruise.

We are genuinely interested in your thoughts. on a possible dispatch cruise. So send us a note. 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 Brown Adventure.

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