How Many Divisions Has the Pope?

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest. April 16th, 2026, the How Many Divisions has the Pope edition? I'm David Plotz of Citicast. I'm here in Washington, D.C., a sweltering Washington, D.C. I am joined by Emily Basil. New York Times Magazine, Yale University Law School, and historian of the Trump administration, as we will discuss later in the episode. Hello, Emily. Hello. Hello. Hello to both of you. From New York City. No, not from New York City. From Chicago, where he is doing something. John Dickerson, John has a wonderful new project. So it's a collaboration with the estate of John's favorite musical performer, his musical hero, John Prine. So John Prine left a ton of music for songs that he never finished writing. And so Prine and Arjohn had bonded when Prine was still alive about their shared love of 19th century American presidents. And the estate has asked John to write lyrics for a posthumous prime album about American presidents called Slip Through the White House Floor.

And it's really great. And John shared it like verse one of his first song. Well, Ben sat quiet in the oval room with a beard like a winter field. Grandpa's ghost in the corner chair and a terror if he wouldn't yield. It's beautiful, John. Who's that about? I'm sorry. I'm just so, I'm so touched.

I'm so touched that you spend this brain energy, or at least have Flaude spend this brain energy on it. Also, it's the sad anniversary of, uh, of John Prine's death in April 7th, 2020 was last week. So you've perhaps unwittingly accessed, you know, the spirit in the air. Anyway, I don't know which president that was. It's about Benjamin Netanyahu Harrison, obviously. Grandpa's ghost in the corner chair, his grandfather, William Henry Hans Harrison. I have a whole song.

I have a whole song about that, John. Are you going to sing? Let's sing the ball of that. John would have been amused. I'm sure I'm certainly will be. It would have been amused. Anyway, look for that on Spotify pretty soon. This week on the Gab Fest, the latest Iran showdown, including Trump's battle with his new enemy, Pope Leo.

Then we are going to talk to Emily about her extraordinary new article about the Department of Homeland Security. And how was Viktor Orban defeated and what lessons should Americans take from? the Hungarian experience. And Applebaum will tell us. Plus, we love cocktail chatter.

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There's either a ceasefire or not a ceasefire in effect in Iran, but it's certainly devolved into another situation. The United States has blockaded all ship traffic to and from Iranian ports, including the oil exports that the country needs to supply hard currency. The hard currency it needs to keep its ruined economy afloat. So the next steps in this war that is not quite a war are unclear. Will this economic squeeze compel the Iranians to negotiate a deal that is more favorable to the U.S. because it felt like last week there were JD Vance and the Iranians approach something, some aspects of a deal in their negotiations, and will this create more willingness of the Iranians to come towards the American position? Or on the contrary, will the squeeze

on the world economy from the continued shutdown of a ton of transit of necessary materials, notably oil materials, will that squeeze force Trump to accept worse terms in the U.S. to accept worse terms? and then there's the Pope. So John Dickerson, is this blockade that the president has pushed? Is this a clever strategy or desperate measure? And what is he hoping is going to happen from it? Yes, David, is the answer to your question? Well, so why is it a desperate measure? I mean, there's some desperation in it because based on the reporting we have and even what the president has said out loud, he expected the war to go faster than it did. And he didn't expect the Strait of the Formos to be a successful act of leverage on the part of the Iranian. He thought they would buckle and he thought the regime would change. So things did not happen as he predicted and now he's trying to get out of it. It seems for the moment to be a clever move. But, you know, the Chinese have said this is untenable.

There is some reporting that maybe one Chinese ship tried to press against the blockade and then turned around. There was some reporting it got through, but I think it got turned around. By the way, when you guys think of blockade, what do you think of? A row of ships in the block, actually blocking the entrance to the street, lined up. Right. Not the way it happens. Basically, they see a ship going towards there. They get them on the horn and they say, you know, ship whatever, flying, whatever flag.

This is the USS. You better stop and turn around. And they do. And if they don't, then there's like a ladder of escalation that can go through. So anyway, it's like when in the Senate, somebody says they're going to filibuster something. and all the senators said, okay, well, you're going to filibuster it. All right. So we'll just assume you've filibustered it.

So it's like we assume you're going to, you know, you've blocked this. Anyway, I just, I hadn't really thought that through. Well, I mean, if you think about, I mean, the Civil War blockade and of course, and gone with a wind, Red Butler is a gunrunner. He's a, he's breaking the blockade. And he's not Blake breaking it because there's a wall. He's breaking. He's outrunning Union ships.

That's what you do is you outrun a ship or you sneak in at night. just harder to do when you have all this technology that allows the U.S. to track whoever's coming. But you don't need a wall of ships. Okay, people, we're moving on from the wall of ships and the non-ball of ships.

Okay, so now we have a president who predicted this all wrong is kind of flailing and like a face-off between the Iranians trying to control the Strait of Hormuz and the United States trying to control it and the United States trying to kind of starve the Iranian economy and the Iranians like waiting us out because they assume that we are not going to have the tolerance and patience for the rising oil prices and other economic and diplomatic fallout. And aren't they probably right? Oh, I don't know if it's easy to predict who's right. I do note that we're not talking about civilization ending acts of destruction for the moment. So it seems that we've gotten to it. It does seem like things are, are headed towards some kind of a deal.

And the deal, you know, will be some kind of promise from the Iranians not to do something about nuclear weapons. The reporting suggests that they suggested they wouldn't do anything for five years. And the president wanted 20. And this is in the JD Vance negotiations. I mean, it could at the end come around, come down to essentially semantic language about the future nuclear program. So we don't really know where things are, except that certainly the stock market seems to think that there is warming and that some kind of deal will be reached. I mean, the S&P has basically regained everything it lost during this now nearly 50-day war.

Yeah. I think the other factor is that is the sort of domestic pressure on Republican politicians. Now, they've been extremely reluctant to do anything to constrain Trump or to associate themselves with the war. They kind of pretend the war is happening. It's like happening in another universe has nothing to do with them or their party or their president. It's just like it's a thing. It's a kind of external factor that has nothing to do with them. But of course, they're getting so much blowback.

And there's this interesting story in the Times about a Republican member of Congress who had a town hall and just was catching hell for this. And I, and there's fracturing in the Republican ranks over it. And that can go on for some period of time, but it cannot go on indefinitely. If Americans are opposed to this war and Republicans are split over this war and gas prices continue to be high because of this war and other prices continue to be high, at least partially because of this war, there will have to be some form of retrenchment by Trump. And he will, you know, he will claim whatever happens, we know he will claim victory. He will, we will have won. Yeah. But the form of that that victory takes will be interesting.

In addition to the cost of economics, I was talking to a former military leader this week who really emphasized that what's being spent in readiness. And that means both the stamina and enthusiasm of the U.S. fighting forces, which was already in some way stretched. And then also the actual ships, you know, have to be. fixed and maintained and kept up. And then the number of missiles that are being burned. I mean, during the ceasefire, that's not a problem anymore. But that there are costs here, which are not so easy to refresh, particularly if you were, if you were forced to go into another engagement.

So this person was saying they were extremely nervous if there was anything else that the military had to do because missiles, for example, you can't just stamp more of them out over a weekend. They take a long time to build. So when we think, of the costs, it's the economic pain and the destabilization to the world economy that the IMF said, even if there was peace today, is going to affect the entire rest of the year. There's also that cost to the U.S. ability to project power in the world. So there are two upcoming political dates loaning. There's May 1st, which is when the 60 days from when Trump gave notice about the war starting.

So that's when, according to the War Powers Act, Congress would need to authorize continuing hostilities. And then there's this huge budget increase for the military that the Trump administration has asked for and whether Congress is going to go along with that. Just to say that the clock is ticking on Republicans being able to ignore the politics of this. Yeah. And just go back to the math for a second. By kind of the most conservative estimates, probably there's this war will cost on the order of $100 billion, but probably it will end up costing when you consider. That's just the sort of direct cost, but the indirect cost of all the refreshment that you talked about, John, it's probably more than that. It's probably going to be a couple hundred billion dollars.

If you think about that, that's about $600 per American. I live in a, you know, I have three children. That's $2,400 for me and my three children for a war, which has, now you can say, like, okay, it's created, has it created $2,400 worth of stability for my family, of benefit for my family? It would be hard to argue that it has. It would be hard to argue that like the world is now more stable. The United States is $2,400 per family richer because of what's going on. And that's that's just, and that's not even accounting for all the gas costs that everyone's paying. The people who are getting more wealthy, by the way, are both the executives at oil companies who have seen record profits or record share increases as a result of the price of oil.

And also Bank of America announced its earnings. And all of the crazy trading that goes on up and down as people try to bet on which way this war is going, the people who are executing those trades make the money, whether the trade is to buy or to sell. So they enjoy windfalls as a result of this activity. So as you were counting up the cost to the regular American, it's also interesting to think about the people who are benefiting from this war, even if they don't intentionally mean to benefit from it. And in the oil case, I should note that some of those trades that made the CEOs of those companies so much money were booked long before the war started. So it's not like they were totally rushing in to take advantage of the war. Let's turn to the Pope for a second.

John, I'm going to go to you because he's your Pope. What's going on between the Pope and Trump and who started it? Oh, my God. Well, the Pope said basically the Pope, I mean, I guess you could say he started. it. Basically, what the Pope said was that, you know, God is not on your side when it comes to war, basically, which is, you know, articulating a moral framework against killing, which is pretty meat and potatoes for a Pope. You know, he's doing his job. That's a top five Pope line historically. Yes, exactly. I mean, that when the president threatened, I guess the precipitating event was the president promising to wipe out Iranian civilization, which the Pope said was truly unacceptable. So then the, Then the president responded by saying that the Pope was, quote, weak on crime. I mean, it is true that when Jesus says turn the other cheek, it can be considered being weak on crime.

Anyway, and then the president said he was not a fan of Pope Leo. And there was a second, just while we're on this topic, there was a second beat on this, which is JD Vance said, and I love the New York Times headline, JD Vance says the Pope should be more careful when talking about theology. So basically what the Pope said was God does not bless any conflict and to cry out to the world that whoever is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, never stands on the side of those who wielded the sword or dropped the bombs. And what he's referring to there, I think, is there's one argument which is whether, like, Christ and God think it's okay to have wars. and one rebuttaly as well, there is that which is gods and that which is Caesars and there's, you know, like the two worlds are separate. But what the Pope is saying is something slightly different, which is you can't go around claiming that God is, you know, written on these bombs, that like he's all for this.

This is yay, yay team God when you're dropping bombs, which is what Secretary Pete Hegseth has essentially done. In addition to describing the airman who was captured in the context of, of Jesus' resurrection narrative, which is also crossing a new line. It's crossing a new line because Trump is Jesus. And so is it Airman Jesus or is Trump Jesus? Oh, let's get to that. But John, I do think I do, I do, I do, look, I think it is definitely Pope's job. Pope job, top Pope job is to call for peace.

And of course, there's deep Christian history of this. On the other hand, I don't think it is, it would be historically incorrect to say, that the Catholic Church and popes have been involved in fighting and encouraging war. I mean, that certainly has been a big theme of the Catholic Church all through the Crusades are absolutely that project. Yes. I mean, fortunately, the Catholic Church is not on trial here. I mean, what you say is incredibly true.

And it's also true that not all popes have been swell. Peace knicks. and perfect avatars of Christ and, you know, as close as a human can come to be as a saint on earth. However, the book says what it says. The guy says what it says. And if you are a believer in Jesus and you talk about being a believer all day long, JD Vance has written a new book about his conversion to Catholicism. And in that book, or at least the promotional materials for it, he says, I'm a Christian

and I became a Christian because I believe that Jesus Christ's teachings are true. it ain't a stretch to say Jesus Christ's teaching teachings are that you should not kill other people, that you should not engage in war. That has nothing to do with Catholic history. It just has to do with what's in the Gospels. And if you're standing up and saying, I believe in these words, and then somebody says, hey, those words don't say what you're saying there's mean. Like, that's a problem.

The reason this matters is not just about it like an internecine Catholic, you know, um, uh, fight in the basement. it's because we've seen standards drop across a whole range of areas. And so one of the roles that a church plays and that people who profess to have faith, one of the things they say is like there are these standards and we live up to them. So this is, you know, this is another fight of a kind of fight that we've had or discussion we've had over the last, you know, 11 years. Does Catholic doctrine have room for just war theory in it?

I mean, this is not a just war. I'm not arguing that. But I feel like there's an absoluteness in the way that you're characterizing this, that then it gets confusing how you're supposed to be a world leader at all. So there are, yes, I mean, there is just war theory, which is the evolution of, you know, since like, you know, 400 AD about when leaders can engage in war. It's basically when, you know, it's when it's when it's defensive, when it's not, when it's not just like, for fun. But again, that to me is a distinction between what's being debated here. One is,

as a Christian engaged in war, there are conditions in which it is quote unquote okay. And there's quite a lot of, you know, debate about this. The other is to say, God's on your side. There are lots of things that Christians do that God is not on their side for and for which you ask forgiveness. but there's no, I don't think there's a just war doctrine. And this again, as you said, this doesn't really check the boxes in which it says, go bomb on behalf of God or Jesus. Yeah, and go bomb and obliterate a civilization on behalf of God. That's all helpful.

Precisely. Discernment, you have put your finger on the right thing. Like indiscriminate destruction, not, I don't think, in just war theory. And even if you're just threatening it, threats have their own. you know, although I don't think it would, it is not fair to say that what the United States, I do not approve of this war in Iran. It's not fair to say that this has been indiscriminate destruction. It's been quite. No, no, no, no. It's the threat the president. But the threat, yes, but I, yes, and I don't know whether. Wipe out civilization is indiscriminate. Yes, wipe out

civilization, not good. What, let's talk about the image of Jesus to close us out. Emily. Well, I mean, this is just so, okay, so Trump posts this AI slop image. He said it was created by a very beautiful artist afterward of himself as Jesus. I mean, I just... No, he was him as a doctor, Emily. It was him as a doctor. Well, right. So he posed this image, which is clearly him as Jesus. Also, it's coming out of his criticizing the Pope. He's clearly presenting himself as the godly one between the two of them. And then when people didn't like that, because it's completely blasphemous and in terrible taste, etc., etc. He then said it was doctor, which I mean, he... So I guess like, this is, I'm... I'm torn between this is all just farce and I don't know.

It's kind of funny and then also horrifying. And thinking that like really these stories that maybe he's just really losing it are true. Like there's a lot of evidence that he's just kind of losing it. And this is exhibit number, I don't know, 1903. People have been saying that from, I mean, people have been saying that about him for 10 years. But don't you think it's worse? I feel like it's worse. Well, it's worse.

Because he has more power. I mean, I think it's worse. He's not constrained. But I don't know that he, I don't know that that's evidence that he himself is more crazy. It's evidence that his craziness is able to be imposed on us and more easily and more readily and more quickly than it used to be. But I don't know that he proves. I feel like he's more detached from reality than he was. Well, as we know, the job will do that even to the sanest of brains.

But the answer to those questions lives in Donald Trump's brain because he made those calls. Like, so it's why the brain is what you say, David, is true. The stakes. are so high and this entire moment exists only in Donald Trump's brain. He made the call about both the imminence and the reason that war was necessary as a response. And so I'm not sure I think he even put it in those terms to himself. I mean, I don't really want to be dissecting what he was thinking about, but I feel like he might have gone to war without really grappling with those questions. Entirely possible. Well, based on the Swan and Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman reporting, he was given the information and just chose to believe what he wanted to believe.

Exactly. Which was that this would be quick and easy like Venezuela. And like exactly.

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Find more at Kohler.com. Emily Bazelon, the House Historian, the New York Times' House historian of the Trump administration, has another amazing oral history compiled with her colleagues, Rachel Poser and Matthew Purdy. It is a story of what has happened and is happening inside Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security. Emily, of course, has previously worked on similar projects with colleagues about the DOJ and the FBI. Emily, amazing, another amazing reporting feat from you and your colleagues. Congratulations. What was different about trying to cover DHS compared to DOJ?

and the FBI. This project felt to me slightly different, and I can't put my finger on it, but maybe you can put your finger on what felt different. Well, in the reporting, there were two things that were different. So one thing that was helpful was we were focusing on immigration. So we had an arc about enforcement and policy changes. And it's a very dramatic arc and a huge change, right? We could see this big pendulum shift from the Biden administration, especially the first three years in which the border was relatively. Permeable. Lots of people were coming into the country to Trump shutting down the border. And then I think most drastically doing very harsh enforcement inside the country in a way that we haven't seen, like maybe ever and for sure since the 1950s. So the subject was unified. And the thing that was really hard about this reporting project is that DHS is this very sprawling agency, right? It was created after September 11th. It doesn't necessarily cohere. It has like FEMA and TSA in it. And we didn't even try to cover that stuff. But even the immigration machinery is in three parts. So there's ICE.

Then there's customs and border protection, which usually operates on the border like the name says, but has become pulled into this interior enforcement, even though it operates usually under less restrictive rules. And then there's the service part of the agency for legal immigrants, which is called USCIS, citizenship and immigration services. And that's like more a kind of standard government bureaucracy. It's not people like out in the streets. And so getting our hands around all of that was hard. And then finding people who would talk about it was difficult. the Trump administration has been very successful in scaring people out of talking to the press, even if they have left the agency. We did, in the end up with something like 25 named sources, and I was grateful for that.

We also have a bunch of current officials talking in this piece, especially ICE agents and agents for Homeland Security Investigations, HSI, which is supposed to be the part of DHS that looks into big criminal enterprises, but lately is just out in the state. the streets with ice. Emily, is it fair to say that Stephen Miller is whipping the horse here, that that is the one of the strong narrative. If one strong narrative theme is Biden created this insane condition that sort of invited this and there's some, you know, amazing quotes throughout the interviews along those lines, that it's sort of Biden's mistake plus Miller's obsession leads us to our current moment. Yeah, I think that's a great synopsis. I mean, over and over again, people said, the most important event, ongoing event, is Miller setting this target of 3,000 arrests a day and a million deportations a year. They've never met it, but they've

tried really hard. And it is very different in terms of interior in the country enforcement than anything we've seen before. And we all know this, right? Like we see this in L.A. and especially in Minneapolis and Chicago, but just these raids, these sweeps, these really just kind of, you know, you know, unrestrained power of federal law enforcement. And it's all being driven from the top by this pressure for numbers. And the ICE agents who talked to us, you know, were very candid about how much that is, you know, pushing them into the direction of racial profiling, of making arrests, like even with people who turn out not to be the right target.

I mean, all the stuff that you are worried is happening, they were talking about it. And it is happening. Right. So I was counting. as I was reading the story, and it seems like that you are chronicling five significant changes in what DHS is doing. Who is being targeted? How the agency is targeting them?

How targeted people are then taken care of? Or not? How agents interact with the public and then how agents are, in fact, trained to do this job. And these are all things that have been radically reshaped by the Trump administration. and some of them, of course, more visibly, like the agents interacting with the general public is the one that has probably caused the most damage to the agency's reputation. But all of those have been radically reshaped by this administration. Yeah, totally. And, you know, it was true before over many administrations that basically you got targeted if you were a criminal in the U.S., not like you crossed the border illegally, but you committed a crime here.

That's how, in particular, President Obama deported so many people. But it remained true, you know, mostly for the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. Now there's just like a huge rise. It's like 770% rise. I don't even know how to think about how much bigger that is, right? It's like a confusing exponential rise in the number of arrests of people who have no criminal convictions. I actually would push back on that number. I mean, obviously it's a huge number. I felt like the thing that was missing that piece, or at least I skipped, is like, what does that mean in absolute terms? Because if you start from a low base, if that number is 10 and a 770 percent rises, then 77, that's 67 new people. But 67 new people in the context of thousands a day is not many. So I don't know whether 770 percent rise is a huge rise in absolute terms or it's only a huge rise in relevant. positive terms. Yeah, it's a big rise. And that's interesting. We really struggled with that line. Now I'm thinking, like, we should have put the absolute numbers in as well. And I don't have them at my fingertips. But it is a significant rise. I mean, one way to think about this is that there were fewer than 40,000 people in detention when Biden was president. And now there are more than 75,000. And so that is like a doubling almost. And you can see that. And the percentage, the, all the,

Almost all those additional people are people who did not have criminal histories, right? That's one way to think about it. I also found it actually shocking. I, that was another one. Because I was like, no, it was more like, holy shit, there were 40,000 people in detention in the Biden administration. And it is, you know, those 40,000 people, I'm sure there are, you know, there are some reasons.

And I'm not, I'm a person who believes in, in immigration enforcement in some fashion. but like 40,000 to 70, 40,000 to 80,000 is a big leap, and especially for those new 40,000 who are in there. But to me, I thought that original number was going to be like 2,000. Yeah, it's interesting. You're right that it's not. Sorry, John, go ahead. Well, I was just to remember that there, Camilla Montoya Galvez at CBS reported that of the 400,000 immigrants arrested by the immigration and customs enforcement in the first year, 14% were had, criminal had charges or criminal convictions.

And I guess the, so I think that goes some way towards answering your question, David. But the obvious context is that the president both in his first, before his first term and in this one, said that the whole point of these operations was to go after the worst of the worst. And so 14% is the worst of the worst. So it's, and the reason obviously that matters is when you make a promise and then not only are you not doing it, but the people you were going after are causing you to engage in behavior that ends up killing two Americans and maybe more and causing all this other mayhem, that adds to the picture as well. It's not just that you're not keeping a campaign promise.

You're stomping on the accelerator to do something that you said you weren't going to do. And I think also, you know, David, you were talking about the change in how the government takes care of people or fails to take care of them. And that's like the conditions in detention, which have become really more emiserated. And all of this is about, sowing fear so that people will leave on their own. Because even though this is like a pretty effective machine for making people miserable and detaining them, it's not that easy to deport millions of people. That's just like, that's hard. That takes many more resources even than we've put into it. And so the fast path to Stephen Miller's goal, which really is to make all the immigrants

leave, all the undocumented people, is to get them to just decide that it is too difficult here and that they're going to leave on their own. And that is like, you know, oh, we used to talk about, you know, when Mitt Romney coined the phrase self deportation, it was like a joke, right? Both that people would do that and also that we would try to really make that happen. And then, you know, Alabama passes a law where they like end up just emptying their own fields of agricultural workers and it's like a mess. and it just seems like you're going to kind of wreck your own economy if you really try to root out all the undocumented immigrants because, of course, they are doing a lot of work for much cheaper than people who are born in this country are usually willing to do it. But in this context, like, that really is the gold in the administration, which doesn't say to say that they're going to accomplish it. But that is the kind of North Star.

And it accounts for why things are miserable. I one thing I really liked about this story, Emily, was that you did manage to talk to people who broadly supported the president's goals. And, you know, and some of them are there's some dismayed by the ways they're being carried out. But I, but this is a very textured piece because there are people who are kind of saying, yes, we're trying to do this. This is why we're trying to do it. This is what we're trying to accomplish. Yeah, totally. I mean, look, this is DHS.

Like, this is an agency that is partly devoted to immigration enforcement. So it makes sense that when you talk to a lot of people who work there, some of them are going to support the goal. And I think there is a wrestling with the extremes on both sides of this, right? So if you just let millions of people in, that can become kind of out of control. I mean, there was this customs and border official Mark Cummins, who I talked to a lot, who was just describing what it was like when there was this huge influx of people and just the challenges of like housing and feeding everybody and how he was. spending $2 billion in a couple of years with like tons of contractors and trying so hard to partner with people, just the giant like operational challenge of the border. And so, okay, then that the border shuts.

And for customs and border patrol in a lot of ways, that's a relief. But then you unleash this like wave of, you know, like terror or certainly like lots of fear and some violence and incredible harshness inside the country. and people can see who work for ice that that is making them deeply unpopular. I mean, we had this ICE agent talk about how, you know, they were getting to play to Minneapolis and nobody wanted to go and you would like show up wheeling your wife's like girly looking suitcase and kind of pretending to be in Minneapolis for other reasons, using your personal credit card.

Like that is also not the kind of government that people want to be part of. What's the opportunity cost, Emily, of the reorientation of D.A. to immigration in this fashion. What aren't they covering? And how much worry is there about that? Well, HSI Homeland Security Investigations, which is more like FBI like agency in theory, is not doing the kind of, you know, big criminal enterprise work to the same degree as it was before because they're like all out on the streets with ice. And so, you know, people were telling us like that is making the country less safe because we're not paying attention to threats in

the same way. Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's podcast, Rethinking with Adam Grant. This episode is sponsored by Am Better Health. If you run a business or work with employers on benefits, you know the story. Group health insurance costs keep climbing, and the plans rarely fit everyone's needs. There's a newer model worth knowing about called an ICRA, which lets employers set a contribution and employees choose their own health plan based on their doctors, budget, and what actually works for them. Health care isn't a group decision, so why should

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We're now joined by the Atlantics and Applebaum to talk about the defeat of Viktor Orban in Hungary's elections. Viktor Orban was defeated by a former party ally, Péter Magyar. I hope I'm pronouncing that, right? I haven't heard it said. Magyar routed him in the general election, winning two-thirds of the seats in parliament, although only slightly more than a majority of the vote. So, Anne, let's start with kind of what comes next. What does the new government need to do to unwind the authoritarian and anti-democratic elements of Viktor Orban's Hungary?

And will they be able to do it? So, first of all, it is Peter Péter Magyar. You're right that he's a former member of Fidesh, which is Viktor Orban's party. And that means he knows and understands the political system very well. It's also been targeting him in unbelievably nasty ways for the last couple of years. And this is by way of answering your question. They sent spies into his movement. They recruited a girlfriend of his so that she made tapes of him.

They bugged his phone. They bugged lots of other people's phone. So this is a system in which the intelligence services, as well as the controlled and captured judiciary and captured bureaucracy, all have to be somehow dismantled or neutralized anyway, so that it's possible for a different political party to make decisions and have them be carried into effect. Hungary also is famous for having a group of oligarchs

who were created by the ruling party as a way of funding various things that the ruling party wants to do, and they're all still there as well, and they all have a lot of money. They control, I don't know, about 20 or 30% of the economy. The economists told me one time when I was there. And so all of that is a huge, those are huge obstacles.

It seems like Péter Magyar is going to hit some of them head on. He gave his first television interview to Hungarian state television. They have an important, you know, like most European countries, important state TV. He had not appeared on it for the previous year and a half. In other words, the main opposition leader was not allowed on state TV. And the first thing he did is he went on a program and he said to the woman who was the presenter, basically, I'm shutting you all down. You've been lying about me for a year and a half.

You made up fake stories about me. and you know, you're gone. I don't know whether that's a good tactic or a bad one. But I mean, I think he, oh, I should say the second thing he did was he also went to meet the president of Hungary, who's a, it's not an elected president. It's somebody who's chosen by the parliament. And he told the president also, by the way, you have to resign as well. So he is, I think, making clear that he's going to use his constitutional majority to make very big changes very fast. and that will probably be dismantling some of these constitutional institutions that were captured in various ways. What he's going to do about the people with money, I don't know, or the party, the Viktor Orban's political party, which has a huge amount of money and this whole network of think tanks and foundations, that's going to take a long time to unravel.

Remember that the point of Viktor Orban's political system wasn't that it was repressive in the 1984 sense, but that it sought to control outcomes and conversation through, as I said, dominating media, dominating conversation, dominating state institutions. And so picking all that apart is going to be harder. We had a similar thing happened in Poland after the 2023 election when another autocratic populist government loss. and frankly, the arguments for certainly about the courts are still going on. I mean, you know, there's still, it's still unclear like who's a legitimate judge and who's not a legitimate judge.

And we haven't solved many of the problems that were created. So, you know, so he has, he has, I mean, really dozens of institutions to think about and dozens of things to worry about. I was thinking about the courts and about Poland. Because, I mean, the judiciary in Hungary, as I understand it, took a while for Viktor Orban to, really take over, like the judges who were in place when he was initially coming into power tried to resist and then he succeeded in replacing them. And often courts are kind of slow to turn over unless you have some mechanism for getting rid of all of them at once, which of course is its own kind of quasi, maybe unconstitutional upheaval. Are there, so if Poland is still struggling

that was, I'll interrupt by saying that was exactly the problem. That was a good interruption. I was just going to ask you what, so if Poland, if Poland is still struggling. is still struggling with all of that. What are the lessons in terms of like how fast you try to move? Right? Because like maybe one of the reasons Péter Magyar made the moves you talked about with the media and the president quickly is like right now he has momentum. You could try to go in and break a lot of things, I guess, in the service of putting

the country or the democracy back together. But then there must be some sense that you can't do everything at once. And I wonder how that has played out in Poland. Actually, the lesson in Poland is that you should do as much as you can immediately before inertia sets in, before people get sick of you, before the backlash, the inevitable backlash starts. Because the Polish government was able to do quite a few things initially. And for example, they also had a very similar problem with state television.

And they took it off the air for a few days and brought in a new team and restarted it from scratch. And initially it was rather primitive. But the point was to create a state television that was neutral, that was not biased, that was not angry, was even slightly boring. And that was not that easy to do. I mean, they had planned it in advance, so they had some preparation for it. But they did have to evict the previous team.

And so that was successful. And then the decision about judges in Poland was to wait and try and do it slowly and legally and carefully, and that was probably a mistake because we're now some years down the road and they haven't fixed it. I agree that there is a potential problem down the line, which is when you try to fix unconstitutional change unconstitutionally, you immediately run into the problem of becoming the next dictator. And I'm sure it's going to be about five minutes before people start saying that that's already happened. I would give Peter Péter Magyar a little bit time, you know, give him a few months and give his team a few months. I mean, obviously,

it's not just him. There are a lot of other people involved who've been studying these problems for a long time. And let's see how it works out. Again, the problem of what you do in a political system when the rules have been broken or, you know, or when the system has been set up in such a way as to favor one particular party or particular political outcome, it's not always that easy to find the legal way to fix it or the, I don't know, the way that seems the most neutral. And as I said, I mean, in Poland, they tried to do the judge, the captured courts slowly and it wasn't very successful. So my guess is he'll try and move as fast as he can. And my guess is he'll hit a lot of obstacles. And in the Atlantic, you made the case that the law, that Viktor Orban's

laws punctures the inevitability that sort of pervaded his movement, Vladimir Putin's movement, MAGA, that basically illiberal parties are destined to old power forever because they speak for the people. Can you talk about that with respect to what lessons one can draw or where the line is where you can't draw any lessons about the relationship between what happened in Hungary and what is happening with the MAGA movement in the states? So Hungary is a special case, and it's a special case because the Hungarians, because Viktor Orban, in fact, made it into a special case. So Viktor Orban decided at some point that his form of power was only safe if he could convert lots of other governments to be like him. And he had a huge outreach program.

He had these international think tanks that sought to make contact with right-wing intellectuals all over Europe and in the United States. they had programs to bring people to Budapest. They certainly funded other think tanks. We don't know the extent of that yet. We might be about to learn more. I mean, they had a huge operation in Brussels, for example. We're going to, I assume, find out just exactly what was their relationship with the Heritage Foundation, which was also, it was significant in some way and maybe now we'll learn.

And Viktor Orban did become for, I mean, the head of heritage has said this. Steve Bannon has said this. Others have said it. become the kind of model for how you do this. You know, you win a democratic election. You win it by creating an existential crisis. You tell people that their way of life is under threat. Their society is dying. You know, if they don't vote, if you don't vote for us, you'll be wiped out. And only we can can save you and we can save you by changing the political system in order to fight off the radical left or the woke DEI people or whichever, or the migrants or the LGBT

gender people, whichever, whichever enemy you've created that's endangering your country. And that was seen as the way to win power. And it was assumed that once you won power that way, you could hold on to it forever. I was actually once at an event. It was in Rome. It was a while ago. It was just before the pandemic, in fact. and it was one of the first national conservative conferences, and Viktor Orban was there, and he was interviewed on stage.

And the interviewer literally said to him, you know, in so many words, Mr. Viktor Orban, how is it that you've managed to hold on to power for so long? And Viktor Orban had two answers. One of them is, you know, I make sure that we don't have too much criticism from the media, which, you know, the media in the back of the room laughed. But actually, he wasn't, he wasn't joking. and the other was, I made sure that I have a majority so that there are no, I'm not sharing power with any coalition parties. And so he, you know, he was very overt about how he was doing this. You know, if you control the media, if you control information, if you control as many political institutions as possible, then you won't lose and then you can rule forever.

And that was the model that people wanted to adopt in the United States. And that's what, I mean, I think Project 2025 is very influenced by that. I think Russ Vought and the idea of taking over the. American bureaucracy. I think a lot of that comes from or is inspired anyway by Viktor Orban. Actually, the American version is much more brutal and is happening much faster than anything that ever happened in Hungary. But so because of that, you know, because he made himself the symbol, then his downfall also has more symbolic significance than if he were just some right winger in, I don't know, Austria or Italy or somewhere else. Because he was the one who said

he gave people the message, you can rule forever. He also had this, as you see, said in your question, he had this sense that, or he had this message that I speak for the real Hungarians, like the real people in the countryside, the real deep Hungarians, like they, they follow me. And these lefty, liberal, whatever they are, you know, centrist, progressives, they are somehow foreign or they're, they just live in cities. They don't matter. They're a, they're a fringe. You know, they have, they have dominance that doesn't reflect their numbers. And, this election, if nothing else, shows that that wasn't true. I mean, that in a way has been clear for a long time that that's not true in Hungary, because he never won elections

by that many votes. He's just that their voting system was twisted so that the largest party had a disproportionate number of seats in parliament, which is actually what has just benefited the opposition party, Péter Magyar's party. But that also, you know, that also is now broken. I mean, was he, it turns out he wasn't, you know, speaking for the masses. You know, he's speaking for his own minority. And I mean, I think that the magic of that kind of politics also loses some of its power. So what was Péter Magyar able to do to overcome all the obstacles Viktor Orban had set up to prevent him from losing an election? What did Péter Magyar do that was effective? And also, what did he avoid doing?

The main thing he did was he really created a large, diverse, grassroots social movement. I mean, He had, he did grassroots campaigning. He had no access to media, no TV. He couldn't even get billboard space. So they ran this very ground campaign. It's a small country so you can do it. And they created local circles and groups. And he went round and around the country.

And he visited many towns and villages more than once five or six times. In the last few days of the campaign, I saw his schedule. He was going to six or seven towns every day. And that's how he, that's how he's been campaigning for the last year. So he tried to, you know, he had to fight against this, you know, very heavy propaganda that was based on a lot of fictional threats. In the last, in the campaign, Viktor Orban was trying to tell people that they were threatened by a possible invasion from Ukraine, which is, of course, insane. You know, Ukraine doesn't want to invade Hungary. It's busy fighting Russia.

But he created this boogeyman because the old threats, I guess, LGBT and migrants weren't working anymore. And so Madjerk overcame this through trying to reach as many real people as he possibly could. But also the Hungarian opposition, having learned this lesson last time when they also came pretty close to winning, they learned that they can't have, they could only have one party. So they had several parties. There was a left party. There was a green party. And all of them said, right, we're not running. We're not even putting up candidates.

We're all backing Peter Péter Magyar. And that doesn't mean they agree with every single thing that he thinks about every subject. but they understood that he was a normal European, you know, Christian Democrat, which is a, which is a center-right party, that he wasn't a puppet of Russia like Viktor Orban, that he understood fetish corruption and he wanted to fight it and that he would help take apart the system. There was this unifying thing. And I'd say the third thing, the thing that he avoided was he avoided getting caught up in culture war arguments, existential arguments. You know, he just tried not to talk about Ukraine on the campaign trail. You know, it was, you know, because he didn't want to

get into the question of, you know, is Ukraine going to invade Hungary or not and get, go down some crazy, you know, some crazy rabbit hole. I think he stayed away from anything that that could create that sense of existential threat he avoided. And he focused on the economy, schools, hospitals, and as I said, corruption, which is something that people felt pretty strongly. And as we're taping Thursday morning overnight was the largest attack by the Russians on Kiev so far this year. I think 16 are dead. A 12-year-old child is dead. What does this change in Hungary mean for NATO, for Ukraine, and for the war? It's really important for NATO and for Ukraine because Hungary was the country that was acting as a Russian puppet or a Russian proxy in Europe. So the Hungarians were voting

against European sanctions on Russia. They were voting against European money for Ukraine. They were constantly creating friction and causing slowing down all kinds of processes designed to help Ukraine. And since Europe is now really the sole backer of Ukraine, the U.S. is not helping Ukraine, except with a few defensive weapons that are being purchased by the Europeans from the United States. The U.S. is not giving Ukraine any aid at all. And so it's really, really important that Europeans stay united and have an efficient and effective way to deliver help. And Viktor Orban was the biggest problem for Europe. And we know now because of material that was leaked during the campaign that this was being done in cooperation with the Russians.

The Hungarian foreign minister would leave EU foreign affairs, council meetings, get on the phone, call Sergei Lavrov, who's the Russian foreign minister, tell him what had happened, was offering to send him documents from the EU so that he would understand what was going on in real time. I mean, all of that ends now. And Peter Madge has been really clear about that. And so that takes away a big obstacle. I mean, there may be some other effects that, again, we don't really know the extent of

Viktor Orban's support for other far right parties. We know that it existed, but we don't really know the scale. Maybe now we'll find out. But certainly he was backing a lot of other political parties. who are also pro-Russian in Europe. So the AFD in Germany is pro-Russian. The French far-right is a little weird, but is often in the past been pro-Russian.

There are pro-Russian leaders in Slovakia and the Czech Republic who also had backing and maybe money, maybe we'll discover there was money as well from Viktor Orban. And so I think that network also is weakened because Hungary was really at the center of it. You know, Viktor Orban is no longer the organizing force of the pro-Russian far right in Europe. and that will take off pressure in other countries as well as removing Hungary as this, you know,

continuous obstacle to European action. Anne Applebaum. Thanks for coming on the Gab Fest. Thank you. John Dickerson, when you were having a delicious glass of Hungarian to Kai with Ann Dickerson, what are you going to be chattering about? Oh, it's going to be light. So there's so much sadness in the world.

But there's, for many people lifting them out of their sadness. is one person, Dolly Parton. The University of Massachusetts did a survey with UGov of the 20 international luminaries and how people felt about them. And the overwhelming winner was Dolly Part? Who's second? Obama and Volodymyr Zelensky, but they were, she apparently left them in the dust by more than 50 percentage points. That must be American, survey of Americans, because I don't think anyone is.

It's true. It is American opinions. You're right. Bogota knows who Dalyport. No, it's true. But she, her net approval rating is 65%, which means only there are 5% who had an unfavorable impression of her, which I wonder if you actually pulled those 5%. Like what exactly the foundation of that 11% would be based on. You don't believe that anyone.

Exactly. I mean, it's impossible. Once again, you have put you exactly put it. What do you think? net favorability of George W. Bush was. Now. In this? Now.

Negative 12. I would have said like positive five. Emily Bazelon once again puts her finger on the metaphysical truth. Positive five is in fact exactly the case. Trump is negative 18.

Biden is negative 19. So that's really interesting because, you know, presidents get more favorable when they leave. And you could imagine Biden getting more favorable. as people are reintroduced to what they didn't like about Trump, but at least in this, and I've now overread these results in a way that you get all my licenses revoked, but nevertheless, that's intriguing. Ebaz, what is your chatter?

I am reading a book called Law on Trial. Oops, it's going to be backwards on the screen. No, no, no, no, it's not. You're backwards on the screen because you're seeing yourself as a mirror. Fun with physics. On the physics. There's the book. It's called Law on Trial. It's by Sean Ose Owusu, who is a law professor at Penn. And I'm going to go do an event with him on Monday. And I'm really taken with this book and interested in it. It's a giant critique of the legal profession, of how we teach law and law school, of how lawyers practice it in all segments, not just big law firms, but also in the nonprofit space. And, um, You know, Sean is just pointing out all these ways in which lawyers basically let themselves off the hook from reckoning with deep moral and social consequences of their work, getting caught up in like technical legal thinking as opposed to, you know, really thinking through purpose and consequences. And then the other thing in it is like the part about law school, it just makes me all the, there are many things that you learn in law school that are really old.

So one of the things he brings up is the rule against perpetuities, which is like how the thing that prevents property from being, that prevents someone from controlling how property is inherited and distributed like forever and ever in generations. It's like a thing in Downton Abbey. But like why are we still learning this and not, for example, you know, learning about current land use rules that prevent people from building housing, et cetera, et cetera. It's a kind of deep critique that's making me just think about. all of these different things. So I'm looking forward to talking about it with Sean on Monday. All right. Two chatters, one chatter. Just a quick, first a quick job announcement, which is if you are a data reporter and you want a job being a data reporter for Citicast, D.C., where we're building a whole new local newsroom and doing data work all in the

local data here in D.C., Maryland and Virginia, we've got a job open. So if you're interested, please check it out. It's going to be a great job working with an awesome team. And that data stuff is really fun. So do it. My actual chatter, I picked up a book for no apparent reason. I kind of had run out of things to read. And I had this book by SC Gwynne Empire of the Summer Moon.

Have either of you ever read it? Before you, yes, Sam was my first editor. Oh, really? Sam, I didn't know it was Sam. Sam Gwyn. Sam was not only my first editor. editor, but he's responsible for me being lifted out of being a secretary because he made me a researcher on his first book about the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Oh, well, this book, which is a book about the Comanche Nation and a leader of the Comanchees named Kwanah Parker is a freaking tour to force, amazing book about the most powerful Native American tribe and American history, which I knew nothing about. And this entire history of the rise of the Texas Rangers, the battle for Texas. Texas, this kind of three-way war between, or four-way war between Texas, the United States, Mexico, and the Comanchean nation. Totally fascinating about the kind of the arrival of horses in America and how horses change America. I'll just, just one super interesting fact. So the Comanche's go from being a tribe that has no horses to being the most accomplished horse people on the planet in about just only in less than 100 years this happens. And but one of the effects of this is that their fertility rates drop precipitously because their women and young women are riding on horses all the time and that is not great for your fertility. Raises risks of miscarriage and just like makes it difficult to hold a pregnancy. And so there's a lot of kidnapping.

There's a lot of children who end up adopted into this tribe and then end up becoming part of the tribe because they can't maintain their own fertility rates with the members of the tribe. fascinating book about a period of almost incomprehensible brutality and vitality and conflict and a world that I didn't know anything about. So great book. Oh my God. Sam Gwynn. Empire of the Summer Moon. By S.C. Gwynn, whose name is actually Sam.

And I mean, literally, like responsible for me not still answering phones on the 52nd floor or whatever floor it was. Well, good, good work. Eye for Talent and a beautiful pen, purple pen too. Listeners, you've got chatters. Please keep them coming. Please email them to us at Gapfest. At slate.com. And our listener chatter this week comes from another Sam, Sam Shannon.

Hi, Gatfest. This is Sam from Madison, Wisconsin. My chatter is on the Deep Space Network operated by NASA. It is a global array used to communicate with all the interplanetary satellites in the solar system. You can go to the DSN website and see which satellites. satellites are currently in communication with the arrays. As I'm recording this, the Spain array is communicating with the James Webb Telescope and Voyager 1 at a distance of 24.5 billion kilometers. At that distance, it takes 48 hours for a radio signal to travel the round-trip length.

The website also has a real-time map of the solar system so you can see where the exploration satellites are at any given point. It's fascinating and humbling to see humanity's ongoing adventures beyond our pale blue dot. Thanks, Gapfest. P.S. I'm hoping John Don Dickerson becomes the new judge and scorekeeper for wait, wait, don't tell me. Fingers crossed. Oh, well, that's nice. It's a new idea. Yeah, exactly.

That David, David Flaude didn't think of. Yeah. You'd be good at that, John. Nice. All right. Well, there we go. I just imagined that, actually.

It was a pleasant little reverie. Peter Sagle. Peter, if you're listening, John would be great at that. Yeah. That's all of our episode this week. We also have a bonus episode in your feed. Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzalez and why powerful men are so reckless. That is just for Slate Plus members.

So become a Slate Plus member. You get lots of great stuff for your subscription. You never have the paywall on the Slate site. You get bonus episodes of our show and other great slate shows. You also get discounts for things like our upcoming live shows, which we need to plan. We need to plan some upcoming live shows. So do that. And you can become a member by going to

To the political GabFest show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Or go to Slate.com slash GabFest Plus They want us in Providence In Providence. Let's show in Providence. That sounds fun. Like a lot of people stop me. No, seriously.

Totally. Let's go do that. Yeah. It's very near it. We can all get there. And NAN will be done to school. So there won't be any embarrassment of children. And, yeah.

Okay. That is our trip for today. The political gaffetz is produced by Nina Porzuki. Our researchers, Emily Ditto, our theme music is by They Might Be Giants, Ben Richmond, senior director for podcast Ops, Mia Lobel, EP of Slate Podcasts, Hillary Fry, editor-in-chief of Slate for Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson. I'm David O'Brien. Thanks for listening.

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