What Comes Next for the War in Iran?

When you think about Crocs, you think the classic clog. But did you know there's also a canvas clog? A vegan suede clog. A coastal-inspired style. A style with studs, straps, and lots of sass. Honestly, I could keep going with the surprises. You've got to see them for yourself because there is literally a style for every kind of girl. So do your thing and head to crox.com or a store near you now. Never wonder where Tropicana got its name? The Tropic's. And every time you enjoy a glass, you're not just drinking juice. You're taking a trip. Stepping into sunshine and embarking on a flavorful journey into the tropics where ripe fruit is crafted into wildly delicious juice. And the best part? No passport required. Tropicana. Give life some juice. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes, joined today by my dispatch colleagues, national correspondent Kevin Williamson, senior editor Mike Warren, and morning dispatch reporter James Sutton. On today's roundtable, we'll discuss the latest updates on the war with Iran, including the selection of Iran's new leader, the 56-year-old son of Iran's slain former Supreme Leader, the domestic popularity of the war against Iran broadly and the possible splits within the MAGA coalition. And finally, not worth your time, how not to eat a McDonald's burger. Before we get to today's conversation, 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 the promo code roundtable, you'll get one month free. And if ads aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and much, much more. Let's dive in.

A busy few days in the war with Iran. Iran's assembly of experts has named a new leader Ayatollah Saeed Mostaba Hussein Khomeini, the son of former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the opening moments of the war. Moshtava Khomeini is 56 years old and has neither religious qualifications nor experience in government. He's a hardliner. Some U.S. analysts say he's more radical than his father, and he's very close to Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps. There are reports that he was injured during an airstrike in recent days, and he is sure to be a target in the coming days. Also, fighting continues throughout the region with Iran targeting military and infrastructure targets in the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere. And on Monday, NATO intercepted a missile said to be headed to Turkish airspace. A New York Times study of video captured of a strike near an elementary school in Iran suggests that a U.S. missile likely caused the damage, killing some 175 people, including many children. Donald Trump had suggested Iran was responsible for the strike. Oil prices have risen dramatically over the past week as Iran has choked off nearly all passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz, up 60% per barrel over the last 10 days. The national average for a gallon of gas is approaching $3.85 per gas buddy. And finally, the total U.S. troops killed in the war has risen to seven. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks for joining me. James, I want to start with you. You've been working on the morning dispatch coverage of Iran for longer than the past week, but especially intensively over the past week. Can you survey the scene and tell us where we are? We had a number of administration officials out on television over the weekend, doing the Sunday shows. You'd seen action in the region, continued even an escalation of U.S. strikes and Israeli strikes. On targets in Iran, you've seen drop off in the number of missiles that the Iranians have and drones that the Iranians have sent over the weekend. Where are we today, James, 10 days in? Where are we as an interesting question, Steve, because that would require knowing what the endpoint is, and we still don't know. I think it's better to think of what are the possibilities moving forward. Regime change in terms of the Iranian people rising up and overthrowing their government does not seem to be on the table yet. That's the sort of thing that is really hard to predict, but right now there's signs that the government is still coordinating. Then what President Trump has talked about a lot has been, he said explicitly, a Venezuela-style solution where they find someone who's like Delci Rodriguez. That, I think, because of the appointment of, I guess we could call him Ayatollah Jr., but because of the appointment of Komeni, that's kind of off the table now too, because that's saying we're going to do someone that Trump is explicitly called unacceptable.

So where we are, I think, is what if you pay close attention to administration statements, what they're circling around, which is, as Trump said, knocking the crap out of Iranian missile and defense systems, doing it for some unspecified amount of time, calling it complete surrender when they lose the ability to retaliate, and then walking away at some point. Now, I think the one thing you would add to that is... As they say, the enemy gets a vote. If we walk away and the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, then Iran is still able to retaliate against us. Everyone I've talked to has said, it's not, does Trump say eight weeks, as Heg says, say six weeks, does Israel say two weeks, whatever? It's, at what point can Iran, you know, inflict pain on the U.S. or not? James, unconditional surrender is what President Trump has said he's waiting for. That's the sort of, if you're looking for some kind of goal that the administration has set, it's that. He said that over the weekend on Air Force One. Unconditional surrender is what he wants from Iran. I don't understand quite what that means, and I thought it was interesting that a number of the administration officials who were on the Sunday shows, particularly Mike Waltz, who was on a couple of the shows, couldn't answer what that actually looks like. He just said essentially that unconditional surrender is what the president will determine. It is. How are we to interpret that particular line in the sand or threshold for when this war will be complete and we will be victorious? Unconditional surrender. What does that look like? Well, I think if you're looking at like kind of White House ology, I was struck by, I think it was Friday or Saturday. Karoline Leavitt said somebody after what is unconditional surrender. And she said, unconditional surrender is when the president deems that we've done enough damage to the Iranian that they can't retaliate. So that's one little piece of evidence. You can also point to when Ali Larijani, the current de facto leader of Iran, apologized to the UAE and other Gulf states for striking targets in their territory. Even as they continue to strike targets on their territory, Trump characterized that apology as an unconditional surrender. So. I think there's a little bit of unconditional surrender does not actually mean unconditional surrender. I mean, the last time the US fought to unconditional surrender was, you know, Germany. I guess you could sort of say the occupation of Iraq. But I guess that phrase, I mean, this gets to an issue with the entire kind of messaging of the war to the American people and the Congress is that unconditional surrender to a sort of a layman's, for layman's terms, means regime change, right? It means at least that the folks in charge are brought to a certain point where they change not just their retaliation, but something a little more. Yeah. And it seems like the administration keeps walking up to that line and then. stepping back away from it.

Yeah, I mean, unconditional surrenders means that one side the victor gets to dictate terms. And that's, you know, unless we're willing to occupy Iran, that's just clearly not going to happen. I mean, we're going to be able to dictate probably maybe some terms. You know, maybe like Iran will make some commitments to not doing nuclear stuff in the future like they were offering to potentially before. But in terms of, you know, we occupy all of Nazi Germany's, put into occupation zone, set up a new government. That's not going to happen. I mean, it's notable not even the surrender of Japan in World War II was an unconditional surrender. We allowed them to keep their emperor and things like that. So it's pretty rare in warfare, and it's certainly, it's never been accomplished short of a ground invasion. Just one small correction. I think it was President Massoud Pasechkian who apologized for the attacks on the neighbor. And Ali Larijani actually said, hey, what are we apologizing for? But that raises an interesting point. Kevin, we have seen public arguments among the leadership in Iran, that one among them. Do you have a sense from just observing what we've seen over the past several days? that the regime is any more wobbly than it was before. You know, we have reporting that the choice of the younger nominee is meant to send a message that this is still a hardline regime, that there's no sense that they're giving up. Donald Trump had said in his remarks over the past several days that he wanted to have a hand in choosing the leader. This was seen as sort of a rebuke to that. Is there any sense that... If you're looking at the regime in spite of the killing of four or five dozen of the top regime officials, that it's any wobblier today than it was when we started? Yes, the regime is wobbly in the sense of its capabilities and its ability to get things done. Obviously, it's going to be running out of ready munitions and the ability to get stuff into the air and to meet targets and that sort of thing. I don't think it's probably getting very wobbly in terms of its... commitment if only because there's no retirement plan for these guys they have been pretty awful pretty brutal repressers and torturers and killers and prisoners and that sort of thing and their life expectancy short of having the power of the state behind them, is going to be very, very short, and their lives will end very, very unpleasantly. One has to assume somewhere between kind of a Qaddafi and a Chachashku kind of finale. You know, it's the same reason that you'll see someone like Vladimir Putin who will just fight to the very, very end, because there's just no retirement plan for gangsters like that. It's, you know, it's death or victory. So we're going to have to take some steps that require us for getting down from the airplanes and off the drones, I think, to really finally dig these guys out. You know, unconditional surrender, I think we have to always keep in mind first and foremost that Donald Trump is not very smart and he's kind of a putts. And this is certainly something he saw on a video clip somewhere that sounded cool. And so he started saying it. We're not going to fight the Iranians to unconditional surrender very likely for all sorts of reasons because it would require bigger commitment, I think, than the Trump is willing to make in terms of ground troops and actually digging these guys out and doing that sort of stuff.

In terms of what the settlement will actually look like, you know, Trump has made it pretty clear that he likes the Venezuela model where we replace one group of awful thugs with a different group of awful thugs who will do what we tell them to. And certainly that would be an improvement, I suppose, from the American point of view. It wouldn't be much of an improvement from the Iranian point of view. You know, I think sometimes there was an old skid. It might have been on Saturday Night Live. I can't remember where they're doing one of these fake news shows. And it's, you know, over the weekend, an airplane went down in the Pacific, a jetliner with 335 people on board. But don't worry, there were no Americans on the plane. And that seems to be in many ways our attitude toward this stuff, that as long as we're seeing to our, not only our national interests, which is fine, but our sort of short-term, shallowly calculated national interests, which in Trump's estimate, of course, are indistinguishable from his own political and psychological interests, then we're fine with it. It's difficult to expect a very good outcome. As I've written in the past about Trump, if you want to figure out what he's going to do, just ask yourself, what would a coward do? What would a fool do? What would a very, very angry person do? And somewhere in that Venn diagram between those three polls, you will find the Trump policy. Yeah, Mike, we had a piece at The Dispatch. We'll put it in the show notes from Paul Miller, who's a professional of international relations at Georgetown, essentially making a version of the argument that Kevin just made, that people who are assigning to Trump broader strategic goals and depth of thought are really making a mistake because this is Trump just being Trump. I mean, we know that he makes decisions based on whether or not he has. gotten the Nobel Peace Prize or whether a foreign leader has said something nice to him or things like that. And if you're trying to intellectualize what Trump is doing, that's your sort of first mistake in the analysis. That's not a great paraphrase of Paul's much more sophisticated argument. But give it a read yourself. If you look at what Kevin is saying here, it seems to me that the Trump administration is sort of talking, describing the war effort. kind of in cable news terms or in television terms, when they're talking about retaliation, you know, there hasn't been a large-scale attack here in the United States. There have been some one-off attacks or what looked to be one-off attacks on embassies and foreign U.S. installations in the region, but nothing major. And there seems to be almost a sense that Iran can't do this or doesn't have the proxy forces to conduct such attacks. And I guess the thing that worries me is... We're making assumptions that because they're not doing it right now, that they won't do it ever, that they're not doing it forever. And at the same time, we are seeing them sort of exact some price, in fact, a pretty high price if you look at the markets and look at the oil markets. We have seen dramatic fluctuations, most of which it has to be said were predicted as part of any war game on... what an attack on Iranian leadership would look like. But this war is roiling the markets and, you know, raises real questions about sort of when the markets recover, if the markets recover, how do you reopen the Straits of Hormuz? The president has talked about sending in naval escorts, in effect. Where do you see sort of the case that Trump has made about a cleaner war standing 10 days in?

I mean, you say a case that has been made, and I mean, that is a very loose way of describing, I think, what's the president and the administration have done, certainly in the run-up, but even in these last several days since Operation Epic Fury began, which is, it's very much, we've said this on this podcast, an ad hoc case, and it underscores the concerns that are happening in the markets. and the price of oil, and of course, domestically, that looks like a hike in the price of gas at the gas station, is, you know, without making that sustained case that this is in American interest, which, you know, Paul Miller's piece makes a very good case. Other people at the dispatch and elsewhere have made the case that, you know, stopping Iran. in the short, medium, and in the regime change case long term, is in the American interest. But the president didn't make a case beforehand why it needed to happen now, what was happening now. And then ever since then, it's been sort of scattershot. We talked, you know, last week about Marco Rubio's comments that sort of got him tripped up about... what was happening in terms of, you know, the threat to Israel from Iran. And that's why the Americans had to strike. And it got sort of messed up on that. But the problem has been, it's been unclear. And you do have to wonder domestically if Americans would be, you know, okay with, wouldn't like it necessarily, but would sort of be understanding with some of these disruptions to, say, the oil markets or certainly the loss and, you know, There's been what about seven American service members lost at this point as we record. You know, Americans might be prepared to sort of deal with that, understand that if a case had been made. But you look at the polling on this war, except for Republicans. The war is not popular. That's very unusual for these kinds of strikes, whether they're sort of full-scale wars or targeted military strikes. They're always pretty popular at the beginning. The question is always sort of as they go on and as, you know, whether or not victory is achieved, the popularity of those military incursions and wars fluctuates. This is already starting in a poorer place politically for the president. And I just think it all comes back to the poor case that has been made or the lack of a case being made. And you have all of these follow-on effects that Americans are going, why are we doing this? Why are we having gas prices go up? What was the point of this and what is the end of this? I just keep thinking about the lack of message on this, which makes me maybe sound like a, you know, a journalist who's obsessed with the message and the words. But it actually does matter because... That's the way that Americans sort of know whether or not this is something it's worth sustaining or not. And at the moment, they don't seem to think it is. And I can't see that getting much better, you know, anytime soon.

If I could register just a small word of disagreement with the assumption that energy market prices are going to be the dispositive force in this war. And as diesel prices particularly go up, Americans will feel that because it will add transportation prices for everything that Americans buy. But you know who it's really hard to beat into submission with high oil and gas prices? The world's largest producer of oil and gas. The United States is going to do just fine with high gas prices and high oil prices. In fact, there are a number of people in places like Pennsylvania and Texas who are very much looking forward to these prices being a little high for a while because they've been quite low for a bit. Beyond this sort of narrow, you know, self-interested calculation of that from a more geopolitical point of view, it sure is nice to have a great big energy industry in your own shores that gives you a lot of choices about how you do things in the world because Germany can't do stuff like this. And Belgium can't do stuff like this. Even the United Kingdom, which has decent, you know, industry resources, has to do a whole different set of math when it comes to this stuff that the United States just doesn't have to do. And if we built out our industry even more, you know, more refineries, more export facilities, that kind of stuff, we would have even more options, even more choices, even more strategic autonomy when it comes to this sort of stuff. It's an almost unalloyed good. And we should be grateful for it. I'm not saying you got to send a thank you note to the guys at Exxon because they're going to be okay. But we should keep in mind that 1979 it didn't look like this. My first political memory is having to wait in line to buy gas with my parents and, you know, license plates with even and odd numbers and that kind of stuff on what day you could buy gasoline. We don't have that world anymore. And that's an important enormously consequential development for us as a country. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. The most annoying thing about being an entrepreneur is the endless paperwork drudgery that comes with building a new business. You wait hopefully until the day that it all goes away and it just doesn't. In fact, as your business grows and you add employees, the HR work of just keeping track of everything can become nearly all-consuming. That's why Gusto feels like such a practical tool. It helps make payroll more organized and less stressful without anyone needing to be a payroll expert. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses, and it's all in one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Gusto helps simplify payroll with automatic tax filing and unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price without hidden fees or surprises. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash dispatch and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash dispatch. One more time, gusto.com slash dispatch.

It's me, the Price Line Negotiator. We don't need the jingle twice. What about a third time? Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars. Seems like they just said it. Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app. Time to read the tagline. Fine. No one deals more deals than... Priceline. Please stop. Priceline. Touchet. Price line. Price line. Priceline. And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. So, Kevin, give us a sense of how long we might expect to see the kinds of shocks that we're seeing. Because you have seen a dramatic price in the cost of a barrel of oil. You've seen gas prices go up. And, of course, as you know, as somebody who writes as frequently and authoritatively as you do on economics, we're going to see those gas prices throughout the economy. It's not just when you go and pay at the pump. This is really throughout the economy. Everybody who ships anything is going to pay more for gas. And that's really most consequential. Yeah. And there's little reason to believe that people who adjust their prices upward quickly to respond to this will adjust their prices downward quite as quickly when things become a little easier. So isn't this something that's likely to stick with? US consumers for a while and potentially cause additional headaches for Donald Trump. Yeah, you know, not to be my old man shaking fist at sky personality here, but, you know, the best time to deal with problems like this is always 10 years ago when the problem got started. So in the same way that it's really important and consequential that we built domestic energy industry that really makes the best use of the stuff we have, it sure would have been good if we dealt with inflation in a serious way several years ago instead of just letting it drag on and on and on. And now we're going to have some inflation from an already very much inflated baseline. So gasoline prices are going up. They're up about 17 percent, as I understand it, since the war started. Diesel prices are growing up more quickly than gasoline, and diesel is more consequential because that's really the main fuel for transportation. Natural gas prices will matter mainly because they're a big fuel for generating electricity. So that can be felt throughout the marketplace very, very quickly. And there are disruptions in Qatar related to natural gas. Yeah, certainly. And we're not as independent on that stuff as we sometimes think we are because various reasons having to do with how refineries are optimized and also just the fact that oil is the global commodity and prices are what they are.

irrespective of whether you're buying gas out of West Texas, you're buying it from Venezuela or from the Middle East. So if I were really good at predicting how long these things would stay up, I'd be having this conversation off of my yacht somewhere. I thought you were going to give me, Steve, it's three months and four days, and then everything's fine. I would be the wealthiest man in the world and the dispatch would have. I would be advertising of the dispatch just to make it more profitable. But that's the real risk of this stuff, of course, is that these things are inherently unpredictable. They're inherently risky. And what you want to have going into any kind of crisis like this is lots of resources and lots of choices. That's why it's important to have the energy industry we do. And that's why it would have been important to fix inflation five or six years ago instead of waiting until the situation we're in now. And why, not to change the subject, but why it would be very, very useful if we would fix our fiscal problems before there's a real crisis. and try to do it while we've got lots of resources and lots of options and lots of choices to do this kind of stuff. So every time something comes like this comes up, I'd just like to point out there's what this looks like when you've got lots of choices and lots of ability and time to work stuff out. And then there's a very different scenario where you don't. And, you know, when the Ukraine war started, the Germans saw their heating prices in the winter go up like 300% in six weeks. Because they just have any choice about how to fuel their economy. We don't have that problem when it comes to energy, but we do have problems like that when it comes to other stuff, particularly our national fiscal situation. So solve the problems before they become crises. Kevin, I appreciate your attempt to debt bait me. He knows that any time he talks about our fiscal situation. This podcast is about to go off the rails. I can just take that and run with it. Mike, let me come back to you on this question of sort of the domestic political implications of this related to these increased energy prices potentially. You know, one of the areas where Donald Trump has lost the most ground since his election, if you look at. the polling that came out in the days after the 2024 presidential election, Trump had done best on the economy and immigration. He's lost ground on immigration, as we've discussed here before, in part because he did what he said he was going to do, and then he went well beyond it. And people are sort of asking questions about why you have ICE thugs beating up people in Minneapolis. On the other hand, on the economy, he's sort of muddled through. I would say is the description. Certainly prices have not come down the way that he promised. Period, full stop. He has not ended inflation as he claimed that he would. Having said that, the one area that has been something of a bright spot is the cost of gas, cost of a gallon gas. And it has a disproportionate effect on the way people think about what they're spending on. You know, I can be unhappy that I'm spending more on a... on a pound of ground beef or the steaks i used to buy but if gas prices are low and i'm going to fill up a couple times a week

That's fresh in my mind because you're paying careful attention to it. He risks that now if these gas prices stay high. And it really was the one bright spot for a president who's seen slippage in his numbers on managing the economy, which was the other main reason that people elected him. Is this something that makes what look like a pre? daunting and potentially difficult situation for Republicans going into the 2026 midterms potentially catastrophic? And how much would that matter in an election where there just aren't that many competitive seats? I'm thinking about this a lot. By the way, I have to imagine that every president and probably the leaders of their parties wish they could pass a law to ban the big signs that show the price of gas outside of every gas station because when they go up, you're right. It has almost a psychological effect on the way people understand how the economy is going, even if prices have been going up elsewhere in their lives. I don't think even this president could get all those signs down in time. I thought about this just this weekend. I thought if the election were in a couple of months instead of being at the end of this year, I do wonder if Democrats wouldn't just win the House, which I think is pretty likely at this point. Things can always change. I would even wonder if they could win. The Senate, and that is a hard slog for Democrats. The map is not friendly to Democrats. There's just too many seats that they have to defend. There's not a lot of purple state seats that they can pick up. Republicans are defending a lot of their own pretty strong Republican seats. But you do have to wonder, I mean, you, I'm sort of gaming out how I'm going to cover the next several months of the elections. And you do start looking at states like not just Texas, where, you know, it depends on what happens in that runoff in the Republican side between John Cornyn and Ken Paxton. But could that seat be up? It's possible you never know. But there are some other kind of surprises. There's some open seats like in Iowa where Joni Ernst, the Republican is retiring. And, you know, again, it depends on which candidate gets the nomination. But you do have to wonder if a spike in gas prices, and I take Kevin's point on this and sort of our strength as an energy independent nation, but I think the shock of a gas price spike could sort of, I don't know, break the idea that people have, as we were talking, that the economy is, we're muddling along here. It could actually sort of have the effect of having those voters who are sort of on the margin who really just do pay attention to how much. things cost and vote accordingly to say, wait a second, things actually aren't better than they were. They're not much better. They're getting worse. You add all of the disruptions to the economy that Liberation Day tariffs and all of that, you know, I think that a lot of the times has a cumulative effect.

or to mix all the metaphors as sort of a snowballing. And then all of a sudden the snowball like kind of flies off the cliff and you're actually staring at the big problem, you know, right about to come crash down on you. I think that has a major effect on how swing and marginal voters look at these things. The question for me, of course, is what happens in the next, say, six months when the sort of opinions about... how people are going to vote, are really going to sort of bake in. Again, if the election were in a couple months, I would say Democrats should be measuring the drapes, not just in the Speaker's office, but maybe in the Senate Majority Leader's Office as well. But things can really change. Things can take a turn, and they have until November, Republicans do to sort of maybe muddle the waters a little bit and say, now things aren't as bad as they might seem right now. Yeah, James, the question I have for you is, if you look historically at the level of support that these kinds of interventions have when they begin, and I'm including what we're seeing in Iran, it is a war regardless of what the administration says, and I think it's likely to be a more significant. effort along the lines of the first Gulf War, maybe not the 2003 Iraq War II, Afghanistan. This is a much bigger engagement, whether we choose to engage it at that level and send ground troops and continue to launch kinetic action over the course of several months is another question. But this is a much bigger undertaking than the smaller conflicts we've been involved in. And when you look at those big conflicts, those three that I mentioned, they have... each enjoyed support of more than 75% of the populace when they were launched. This current engagement with Iran is less than 50%. That's a huge deficit for the president to work out from under. Have you detected among Republicans a sense that... This is sort of, you know, a five alarm fire to, again, follow Mike's lead in mixing metaphors. I mean, I think it's a little still too early to tell in terms of, you know, there's not evidence yet, and I doubt there will be because it hasn't happened in any of Trump's years as president of large numbers of Republican voters breaking with him. I don't see Trump really caring that much about how Republicans do in the midterms. I mean, he only cares to the extent that it allows him to implement his agenda or not, but he's not committed to the future of the GOP. Like, you know, he... doesn't really care if John Cornyn. I mean, he probably does because he endorses John Cornyn, but that's not going to be a major check on what Trump does. I think a lot of what we're seeing are in Venezuela or Greenland or Iran. This is the president who's fully in lame duck mode, and that means he feels like he has more freedom of action, at least in foreign affairs. I do think, I don't know, Mike knows way more about politics than me, but I'm a little more.

Like, if you just look at the polling for Democrats in the Senate, which is obviously very early, the prediction market, the Kalshi odds keep creeping up for Democratic House Democratic Senate, I think that's now the most likely outcome on Kalshi, like 45%. You know, not for nothing, not only oil and gas, but most, or not most, but I think like 40% of the components for commercial fertilizer pass through the Gulf as well. In farm states, that's really important, obviously. And Democrats have done a really good job with candidate recruitment overall. So I think definitely, yes, but I also don't, I think Republicans might be resigned because I don't see what leverage they have to convince Trump to change a massive policy he's embarked on because he's worried about presidential odds in 2028. I mean, I don't think Trump is going to go to the mat or sacrifice things for JD Bans. So. No, I think that's right. Kevin, I want to get to JD Vance, Mike, and your piece from last week. Must we? But Kevin, yeah, we must. It's true that Donald Trump, he's not a party guy in the way that traditional presidents have been. He doesn't think about the strength of the party going on. He doesn't consider that, I think, as a part of his long-term legacy. But he is responsive to markets. And we saw this. Mike mentioned the quote unquote liberation day tariffs back in April. We saw the markets tumble. We saw the bond markets react badly. And the president. changed course or at least we didn't change course he's on the same trajectory but he minimized sort of the over the top tariffs that he had announced at the time he slammed on the brakes a bit in response of that slammed on the brakes is good we've got snowballs going off a cliff we're slamming on brakes we're having five alarm fires just go with it steve yeah is it possible kevin that he gets to the point where he looks around and sees his own, you know, his own approval rating was high 30s, diminish even further. The market's reacting badly. And he says, man, maybe this wasn't such a great idea. Yeah, I know he doesn't give a damn about Republicans categorically. I do think he's probably counting senators right now because he's going to get impeached again if the Democrats take the House. And while there won't be a sufficiently large and almost any conceivable, imaginable case Democratic majority in the Senate to remove him from office, I think that the psychological and political math of a majority of the Senate voting to convict you would be something that he would be. maybe attuned to. I think that Trump is essentially this is a very psychologically immature person who needs adulation. And it's hard to get adulation when people are feeling bad about their grocery bills and their financial prospects and things like that. So he doesn't care about criticism per se from any individual, except for maybe a small number of people he has some kind of level of personal respect for. But the notion of the general public giving him the Jimmy Carter treatment.

Trump told ABC News Jonathan Carl, friend of the dispatch podcast, quote, Tucker Carlson has lost his way. I knew that a long time ago, and he's not MAGA. Maga is saving our country. Maga is making our country great again. Maga is America First. And Tucker Carlson is none of those things. And Tucker Carlson is really not smart enough to understand that. Pretty tough. Pretty tough on Tucker Carlson. I'd like to know when Donald Trump knew that Tucker Carlson wasn't MAGA, that he wasn't smart because... It's a long time ago. I don't know, because in what July of 2024, Tucker Carlson was in those conversations that ended up giving Donald Trump the go-ahead to pick JD Vance over Marco Rubio, if you believe the reporting. Think you just answered your own question there, Michael, man. Well, exactly, right? So look, I think this segment of MAGA Media is important to watch it. I will say I can just, I can just say the unwillingness for Steve Bannon or his guests to go after Trump in the way that Tucker Carlson did calling this war evil and that sort of thing. I believe it is deliberate and it is a way to maintain some level of status within that world because this is a media that maybe a large number of Republican voters aren't watching. But a lot of Republican elites are paying attention to, you know, it's not the only issue on which this segment of MAGA Media has broken with Trump. And I bring up the point of vaccines and the COVID vaccine in particular. Steve Bannon was early on skepticism of the COVID vaccine, even as Donald Trump. was out there saying Operation Warpspeed was my idea, these vaccines that we got out so quickly, it was all because of me. And in fact, you should all go get the COVID vaccine that, you know, your great president got for you. At that same time, Steve Bannon was saying, don't take it. He was having guests on his show, talking about all kinds of conspiracy theories about how the vaccine was a problem. And, you know, it's not to say that Donald Trump doesn't set the agenda, but he also. you know, sticks his finger in the wind a bit. He knows what people in his coalition are saying and pays attention to it and is malleable enough to change if he sees that the winds have shifted. And it would just be something I would say we should watch closely. I'm not predicting anything, but I think it's always good to kind of pay attention to what elite media, partisan media is saying and doing on this. And right now, they are not for this war. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly. Welcome back. Now, let's return to our discussion. Let me take this conversation to something a little more specific, something that was reported late last week that on the one he had didn't surprise me because it's what we would have expected from JD Vance. On the other hand, the fact that it's being aired publicly did surprise me. New York Times and CBS News both reported that JD Vance was told the president he was personally opposed to military action.

in Iran. Again, JD Vance has been sort of an isolationist, neo-isolationist, non-interventionist. He's talked down foreign wars repeatedly. He's sort of made it a core part of his ideological presentation to the Republican Party. And yet, it's not common. to have the vice president of the United States say, at the outset of a war, make known via leaks or whatever, that he opposes what the president is doing. I don't think that's gotten nearly the kind of attention. It ought to have gotten. I covered Dick Cheney for eight years very closely in the George W. Bush administration. I wrote a... 600, I think 600 page plus biography of him. I knew. through my reporting that there were many areas in which Dick Cheney did not agree with the president of the United States. The thing I couldn't do is get Dick Cheney or anyone close enough to him to speak with great authority to tell me that. Even when I went fishing, I mean, in the second term in particular, he disagreed with some of the decisions George W. Bush made on Iran, on North Korea. And yet I would try to go get background quotes to elucidate this for weekly standard readers at the time. And basically, they would say he's just with the president, period, he's with the president. The fact that in the opening days of a military campaign like the one that we're seeing, people around JD Vance have made it known that he is not with President Donald Trump. I find very interesting. Kevin, what do you make of that? And what, if anything, does that tell us about JD Vance's relationship with Donald Trump? And, you know, I think there's a sense that he's the likely choice to be Donald Trump's successor. Does this call that into question a little bit? Yeah, I think so. Here's an observation I've made about American history, at least in the last, you know, in the post-World War II years. The people who talk about themselves or the people they admire as being these super clever Machiavellian masterminds are pretty much all dopes. And the people who actually are the Machiavellian masterminds are the people who seem a little bit dopey, like these old-fashioned boring Chamber of Commerce guys. Like Dwight Eisenhower was a sneaky SOB. Dick Cheney is a deep thinking, far-thinking, strategically sophisticated guy who gave the impression that he was just out there doing whatever the president wanted him to at all times, which, of course, I mean, he was, it was a very loyal vice president in the sense that he was mainly doing what the president wanted him to, even when he disagreed with him. There's a lot of a feeling of amateur hour about, you know, some of these guys.

It's sort of like all these, you know, maga types who are going on about being Nietzsche and Uber Minches who are 4'11 and have squeaky voices and stuff. There's a real disconnect between the rhetoric and the aspiration in the end, the facts of the case. So I think that JD Vance is someone who's gone a long way in a very short time, and his inexperience may be catching up with him just a little bit, and he's out over his skis a little bit. You know, we've seen this with people like, you know, Ted Cruz is a good example of this. You know, Ted Cruz went from being some guy who worked at a law firm who was very well known and well regarded among lawyers, and he'd been Solicitor General, Texas, and all that stuff, to being a serious presidential candidate in like four years, like a very, very short period of time. And once people start talking to you about how you could be the next president of the United States and you're this consequential, historically important figure, you start to believe that baloney. And it's really hard not to believe it. And JD Vance has been hearing really since I think he won that Senate race that, you know, he's the future of the Republican Party. He's a future president. And when you already think you're a future president and you become vice president on the ticket of a guy who. didn't care much for you and you've been very critical of. You've got to start feeling pretty smart about yourself then too. And I think it's just easy for someone like that to get big for his bridges. And I think that's what we're seeing right now where J.D. is already starting to think about his life beyond the Trump administration. On the one hand, a lot of people should be thinking about their lives beyond the Trump administration because they're not all going to get pardons. So many of these people they're going to have. you know, some real consequences in their lives after this presidency is over. But some of them, people like JD Vance, are going to want to have future political careers. And I think that's what he's thinking. I think his calculation is probably wrong on this because the people in his orbit value loyalty, above all things. And God damn, I hate always when I have to say this, but, you know, Trump's right about this. When he went out there and said, MAGA isn't Tucker Carlson and it's not Megyn Kelly, it's Trump, speaking about himself and the third person like the psycho he is. He's not wrong about that. He's right about that. And it's easy for us to make too much of people like Tucker Carlson and Megan because we live in that little media world. And, you know, I say this to someone, you know, Tucker Carlson's audience is many, many multiples the size of my readership. But it's not that big. For now. It's not that big in terms of a country of as many people as we have, as many households as we have, as many media choices as we have. I often, I haven't done this in a while, but I like to go and see whatever the most influential, you know, Fox News show is and then compare its numbers to like 15-year-old reruns of the Big Bang Theory. And, you know, Sheldon's normally winning on any given Wednesday night. James, JD Vance is thought to have a very strong following among young Republicans and conservatives, whose I think views on foreign policy and foreign wars line up more with JD Vance's. They, I think, come to some of these issues with skepticism having heard about the difficulties of the Iraq War and the Afghanistan campaign. Is that your sense as the resident young dude on this podcast? Is that your sense? And, you know,

in the sort of MAGA set, would you expect that people have ideological convictions that might drive them to continue to align with JD Vance? Or are they MAGA like other MAGA and they just want to be where President Trump is? Well, I think JD Vance definitely has a lot, especially like D.C. types, like that very weird bubble of young D.C. Republicans, he's kind of seen as the intellectual in chief. And DC wonky or journalists or think tank types love to like have that person to, you know, rally behind because, you know, he's well read. He's really intelligent. He's well educated. He's like trying to make this ideologically make sense. I don't think, though, that they're going to break with the president. And I think also the thing about the Iran War, is my thinking about this is one, just by talking to people and two, I've influenced, but there's a really good essay by that maybe we can link to in the show notes by Tanner Greer, who's a kind of foreign policy analyst, who writes about the through lines between this and the Iraq War. And he says to the extent, that this war is, because he was responding to like Pete Hegseth and other people like him, you know, in that kind of younger Maga JD Vance set, who say, oh, we're not going to make the same mistakes since the Iraq or Afghanistan war. He says to the extent that this war is about asserting American strength, it is about proving kind of your manhood in that very fundamental way. And that's like actually not that weird. I mean, we talk about, you know, you think about like Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War, too, talking about how we need, we need our generation needs their own war. To the extent to that the sort of America needs to show people whose boss impulse is still... kind of is still going on. I think that's a big part of certainly the Pete Hegseth and Trump side of driving this war, then I think there's definitely that still that young support for this. A lot of this is about optics and kind of showing, you know, this idea of American renewal and vitality, which is clearly so important to young Republicans. And again, this is very, very, very kind of gender coded, not to sound like a... a Bryn-Mar gender studies person, but I think they've been a little bit vindicated over the past couple years in a lot of ways. But so I think they will find a way to get behind it on those grounds. We always talk about Bryn-Mar gender studies people. Isn't Brenmar like the worst place to study gender? Yeah. Well, it depends on what gender, I suppose. Yeah. That's a good point. Can I say, I do wonder just in the raw politics of this, of the calculation of JD Vance to sort of get out there, Steve, and say, say through proxies or talking to members of the media that he was against this war from the beginning. I wonder what the calculation with that is. Is it a sense that...

When this war goes south, or if it goes south for Donald Trump with Republicans, he can get up there on the stage in late 27, early 2028, and say, you know, I stood by the president, but I knew that this was a bad idea. I mean, you do have to wonder if Donald Trump gives JD the same treatment he's just given Tucker Carlson, if that is the case. If he tries to sort of use this, JD Vance does, as a way to say, I'm more pure MAGA. on this because I took a stand behind the scenes and let people know through proxies that I was against it. I just, I have many reservations about the idea of JD fans as a political juggernaut. Yes. And I look at this particular calculation and think, yeah, that kind of is confirming my suspicions that he's, he's going to be a strong presidential candidate. Yeah, I mean, there is this sense. I would say it's even become sort of conventional wisdom in Washington that JD Vance is the heir apparent to Donald Trump, and he will sort of absorb Maga World. He's the de facto 28-28 Republican nominee and can't be stopped. I just don't buy it. I've never bought it. I don't think it's true. I don't think he's good at this. And I think the fact that he seems to be, or people around him seem to be making this gamble, that he can create this independence from Donald Trump, who famously values loyalty above all else. And that this is going to end up well for him, I think, is a huge strategic miscalculation by his camp. And... I think makes clear that the assumption that JD Vance is sort of on the glide path to owning the Republican Party a real question. It could turn out to look wise in retrospect if this doesn't end well. Yes. But even then, I think Donald Trump is still going to command a sizable chunk of MAGA. And if... It almost could be worse for JD Vance just in terms of his relationship with Trump if this doesn't turn out well. And JD Vance is left in a position where he's telling Donald Trump in a fact, I told you so, tensions, I think, potentially, in that relationship. He's definitely thinking, though, about Kamala Harris saying, I wouldn't have done a damn thing different. I'm paraphrasing slightly. Or not a single thing, I forget. And that definitely backfired on her. So I think, I mean, the idea of the vice president who can't. get any distance from the toxic president is very fresh in everyone's mind, right? I think it is. I agree with you. I think that he probably is thinking of that to some extent. The time to talk about those differences is, you know, six weeks before the election after you're the Republican nominee, probably not within days of the launch of the war. Yeah. Well, or, I mean, if he's thinking of something really dramatic for the future, it'd be a very high-stakes kind of bet, but if he sees himself having the opportunity six months from now to publicly break with the president.

over something where 90% of the public and a big chunk of the Republican primary base is more on his side than the president's side. And the president's looking like an attenuated increasingly out of it figure. I mean, that's a real role of the dice, but it's not impossible to see JD thinking to himself, well, how do I command the storyline? Because it's now reality television. And that would be one way to do it. That's not crazy. One way to do it. I don't know that it'll work, but that's one way to do it, as you say. We are going to move now to Not Worth Your Time, and we're going to play the audio from a video that we found and has been much discussed in sort of online circles, posted by the CEO of McDonald's, promoting the new burger. McDonald's is launching called The Big arch. So we'll play the video, or at least parts of it, and then we will talk to you on the other side about what we have just heard. Chris Kay here with, you've heard about it. Here it is, the big arch. This is something that we have tested already in Portugal, Germany, Canada. I love this product. It is so good. I'm going to do a tasting right now, but I'm going to eat this for my lunch, just so you know. So here we go. First, holy cow. God, that is a big burger. We've got a very unique kind of sesame poppy sort of bun on it. We've got two quarter pound patties, a delicious big arch sauce, and of course some lettuce. So, oh, there's so much going on with this. First of all, let's try to get this thing. I don't even know how to attack it. Got so much to it. Ooh, there's also some crispy onions on here as well. I see those kind of coming out. All right, the moment of truth. Look at the bite. That is so good. That's a big bite for a big arch. So there's a lot to say about that. And I'm going to leave it to you all. I would point out two things. He twice noted that he was going to have this for his lunch, which leads me to conclude, he's definitely not eating this for his lunch. The lady doth protest too much. Yeah, and he twice mentioned the big bite that he had just taken. The people who are watching this podcast on YouTube will have an advantage over those just listening to us. But if you could see the video of the quote-unquote big bite, that he took. You can't even tell that a bite's been taken. It doesn't look like there was any bite. It looks like, you know, if you have kids who are fussy eaters and you demand that they have a little bite of whatever it is, and they take the tiniest bite, they don't even really take a bite, they just put their lips on it to get the taste and then tell you they don't like it. I'm right in the middle of that right now. Same. Same. Same. It's like you. That's what the CEO of McDonald's did. So this guy's like a Harvard Business School guy, right? So you know he must have done like 11 takes of this. So somewhere there's a bucket where he's been spitting out these big bites like a, like a California sommelier, you know, doing a wine tasting and hacking it out.

You were saying the people watching the video have an advantage over the people just listening? I'm not sure that's true, Steve. I'm not sure I agree with that at all. They'll at least have a deeper understanding of what we've just witnessed. James, are you a McDonald's fan? If you are a McDonald's fan, do you have a favorite McDonald's? burger and will you be trying the big arch with all of the gooiness and cheese and the crispy onions and of course the pickles well as the resident californian i don't eat burgers that aren't in and out so i've never had a mcdonald's burger it's haram But you've never eaten McDonald's. You don't mean that little. I've had, well, I mean, I guess I've had the nuggets when I was a kid, but I've never had a water burger. I've never had a shake shack. I've never had a five guys. I've never had a. Those aren't McDonald's. McDonald's over billions sold. You're not one of them. I'm shocked. And how do you know how good in and out is if you've never had any of these others? Well, no, no, it's not about it being good or bad. It's just not in and out. Like I said, Haram isn't like, you know, it's pork isn't supposed, isn't like God said pork taste bad. It's God says you can't eat it. And so I was told by, I was when I left for college on the East Coast, I was told if you eat Shake Shack, you might as well not come home. But, um. Harsh writ fair. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. So no Burger King either, nothing? I've never had Burger King. I mean, I like the nuggets at McDonald's. I mean, but I really haven't had it since I was like six. Wow. I was going, Mike, I was going to go last night for the purposes of research and have a big arch so that I can talk about it with greater authority than I can. It looks okay to me. I think that seems pretty good. I mean, I don't know how it differs that much from a double quarter pound with cheese, maybe just the poppy and the sesame. But what did you make of the video? And I'm particularly interested in your insights on the non-bite bite. we saw him take. Sure. Because it really is not really even a bite. No, it's not. By the way, whenever a new Kevin Williamson column ends up in my inbox, I would say, I love this product. That's what I think of. This product. I read the first words I say, I got enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm going to read this for my lunch just so you know. It's like people who describe journalism as content. Exactly. I love this content. Look. I'm going to go anti, anti-Christ K on here and say that I think this is kind of brilliant marketing-wise. The whole thing is ridiculous. And yet here we are talking about the big arch.

this new McDonald's burger. And everybody, I mean, we should talk a little bit about how we are certainly not the first to mock and make fun of this because every single fast food CEO has come out with their own version of this where they take big, manly bites of their burger to show that they actually love their burgers. And I'm sure that they do. And I actually don't necessarily think that Chris Kay, the CEO of McDonald's, hates McDonald's burgers. I just think he's... an odd duck and you know does it does this achieve the job of one marketing this burger and making people talk about it and think about going to get one i certainly had not thought about getting one until i saw this video and it's apparently got a lot of like onion flavor and i'm a big onion guy so i'm kind of intrigued do you think he did this on purpose is this a strategic genius I don't think he made an awkward video on purpose. I just think that he's awkward. And I will say, I have also done some research on this. This is not the first video of this kind that he's done. It's only the first one that's gone viral. He has done sort of other awkward CEO sitting at the desk talking about McDonald's products or new McDonald's things. This is just the one that has gone viral. Maybe some of the wizards at the McDonald's social media team have, and marketing teams have figured out how to kind of help. boost this particular one. Maybe they knew if he didn't know that this would sort of have a virality to it. But you also, you can't predict that kind of thing. I think this actually works in its own weird way where up is down and left is right in sort of our media culture, what we thought would be a bad. And I should say, the bite is horrendously small. In an attention economy, it's getting attention. It's getting attention. That's my point. The bite is, this would not be getting the attention if he had had a normal burger bite. The fact that it's so small, the fact that he refers to it as a product, the fact that he's awkward about holding the, he doesn't even know how to hold the thing. It's... Like, Christy know him with a rifle. That's right. I mean, if you look at the criticism of it, there was an Atlantic piece that I shared with our distinguished panel here today that, you know, made the comment or repeated the comment, echo the comment that, you know, he doesn't look anything like the average McDonald's. consumer or average McDonald's customer and that's certainly true he doesn't and he doesn't look like he indulges in McDonald's food very often but i'm not sure that you would actually want to put in a video the average McDonald's customer having a bite of this burger too because i don't think that would be the likely path to getting others to want to consume this burger either No, I agree. It's like watching Jonah take a sip of scotch, you know. A sip of scotch. Well, I'm thinking I should, I mean, should I as CEO of the dispatch do a video of myself reading the product, say, a Mike Warren column? Because everybody knows I wouldn't normally do it unless I was doing it for the camera and tell people how much I love the product.

Couldn't hurt is what I think. You know, I mean, let's see if it works. Actually, do us several of them, and we'll see which one pops and goes viral. We'll get our social media team on it. That's good. You know, what I kept thinking of was that great scene in Breaking Bad, where the Madrigal International CEO in Germany is trying out the new chicken nugget dipping sauces before he kills himself. And he's just very morosely, like eating dipping and dipping. And then he just eats the nuggets with no sauce. And then he goes in the bathroom and kills himself with a heart tribulator. Like, I want to see that guy. That went dark, really fast. This was supposed to be a fun light ending to the discussion, Kevin. Jeez. Okay, well, let me bring it back. First of all, I'm a Burger King veteran. I work, though, so McDonald's can kiss my ass, of course, but Burger King all the way. Although I live in Appalachia, so it's Cookout down here and Cookout Burgers. Very good fast food burgers. Good word for cookout. Yes. Chicken nuggets are the only thing, a person over seven-year-old. is allowed to eat from McDonald's because everything else is just really, truly disgusting to put in your mouth with chicken McNuggets. You're pretty good on a road trip. You can get through with that. On a mere serious point, McDonald's is really, really good at product development. And the reason for that is because they let markets work. They introduce stuff. If it fails, it fails quickly, they take it off. And they know, unlike the geniuses who bring you things like New Coke, that they can't predict this stuff. And so they didn't know Sejuan sauce was going to be enormously popular than the make rib was going to be a cult item or any of that sort of stuff. So they'll dump this thing if it doesn't work. Play it poor choice of words. But if it does work, this guy's going to look like a genius. I agree. I agree. Well, I'm going to try it. I'm going to try it. I wouldn't normally try it. I disagree with all of you about McDonald's. Go simple at McDonald's. Just get the double cheeseburger. It's a good burger. Don't do the fancy stuff. Big Mac sauce is nasty. The double cheeseburger, just straight, simple is good. Well, thank you for this enlightening and uplifting discussion about this. We'll put the video, for those of you who are listening, we'll put the video in the show notes. For those of you who are watching on YouTube, well, I'm sorry, but we've been glad to have you anyway. Thanks, everybody. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. That really works. I would encourage you to pause right now and go subscribe to the show. 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 take many bites of massive burgers. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. No Hickey and Peter Bonavent. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.

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