Steve Hayes
[upbeat music] Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I’m Steve Hayes. On today’s roundtable, we’ll discuss the role of populism within the Democratic Party and the shocking suspension of Maine Governor Janet Mills’ Senate campaign. We’ll also discuss the Department of Justice’s indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over a picture of seashells arranged to spell eight-six-four-seven. I’m joined today by my Dispatch colleagues Jonah Goldberg, Sarah Isgur, and Dispatch contributor Meghan McArdle. Let’s dive in.
Steve Hayes
[upbeat music] Welcome, everybody. It’s very nice to have a New York Times bestseller among us. Congratulations, Sarah. Very exciting.
Sarah Isgur
Thank you. Can I just be, like, sappy for a half second here and just, like, this was a huge team effort, especially from our listeners who made all those pre-sales happen, and this wouldn’t have happened without the pre-sales and with everyone’s encouragement and all of that. So, like, yada, yada, yada. I don’t want to make Jonah cry, but thank you.
Steve Hayes
[laughs] Jonah, are you bawling? Are you tempted, tearing up, getting misty-eyed?
Jonah Goldberg
I’m just surprised she didn’t say, “I don’t want to make Jonah cry more.” But anyway.
Steve Hayes
[laughs] Well, congratulations. Big accomplishment. Very exciting. And I have used it in our conversations with prospective commercial partners and other things.
Steve Hayes
We have a New York Times bestseller on board.
Sarah Isgur
Multi-week, Steve.
Steve Hayes
SCOTUS blog. I love it. I love it.
Jonah Goldberg
Oh, where, where do you– On the second– Week two. I didn’t know this.
Sarah Isgur
Oh, I mean, I’m clinging on at number fourteen.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. It could go back up.
Steve Hayes
It matters. Yeah. It matters.
Sarah Isgur
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
Okay, enough self-indulgence. I want to start by looking at the Democratic Party and this current moment, some six months out from the twenty twenty-six midterm elections. We have spent, on this podcast, a lot of time looking at populism on the right over the past couple of years, over the past six or seven years, over the past decade predating the launch of the Dispatch, and considerably less time looking at populism on the left. But with the news this morning, we’re recording Thursday morning, about ten AM, the news this morning that incumbent Maine Governor Janet Mills has dropped out of the Democratic primary, citing her inability to compete financially. She is the incumbent governor. Because she is facing an upstart progressive populist Democrat named Graham Platner, who has sort of taken all the oxygen in the primary. He has excited the Democratic base both in Maine and across the country, despite, I think, some real problematic history with him, a Nazi tattoo, some very blunt and unkind language towards women and others. He has effectively boxed her out of the Democratic primary in Maine. And we were gonna talk about this populism on the left anyway, but Sarah, I think that’s as good a place to start as any. This feels like a really big deal that Janet Mills is dropping out of a Democratic primary in Maine because of this upstart. He portrays himself as an oyster fisherman. He was a one-time bartender at the Tune Inn in Washington, DC. What should we make of that development in particular, and help us sort of understand it in the broad sweep of where we are six months out from the midterms?
Sarah Isgur
So, there’s a few things to bake into this assessment. It’s not like they both start with the same amount of money or spend the same amount of money on their campaigns, and we have seen the sort of frontrunners run out of money actually a lot in the last twenty years, right? This is just nothing new. Scott Walker, you know, thought he was the frontrunner for the presidential nomination, and his burn rate was off the charts, so they were the first candidate to drop out in twenty sixteen, shocking everyone. It wasn’t because he didn’t have support. It’s because they spent all the money really quickly, and they thought there’d be more money coming in at a faster clip. Does that all make sense? So, like, generally speaking, the frontrunners take in a lot of money, think that they will have that rate of money coming in, spend it too quickly because they’re the frontrunner. And look, there’s some strategy to this as well. You know, if you think this is your way to win, sometimes it’s better to put all your chips in, and even if that means you go out early, so be it. It doesn’t mean that you were– had a bad strategy. It means this was the only strategy and it didn’t work. Which is all to say, you know, look at Ted Cruz’s first Senate run in twenty twelve. He was running against a frontrunner. You know, obviously Donald Trump didn’t raise nearly, like, any money compared to anyone else in the twenty sixteen Republican primary. So nothing new under the sun. I think this is actually, in many ways, a tale as old as time of a presumptive frontrunner being challenged, you know, in a primary. And if the primary is going to go this way, this is often how it looks. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s populism qua populism, or it’s anti-incumbent sentiment, or it’s, you know, the Tea Party, or this progressive populism, or whatever else it might be. That being said, this is really bad for the Democrats who have wanted to, you know, be abundance Democrats, popularism Democrats, sort of the non very online, extremewere mimicking Donald Trump Democrats. There’s a lot of Democrats who want to not just do Donald Trump for the left. They are losing a lot of these races. Mondami obviously in New York being a good example. This being probably an even better one, though it’s, you know, not, I guess, all wrapped up yet. He has to actually win the general for this to matter. But there are the counter examples. Talarico in Texas winning against Jasmine Crockett. Jasmine Crockett was the Graham Planter candidate, the Mondami candidate, and Talarico nevertheless won. Now, you can point out all the differences between Maine and Texas, and I get that, but yeah, this is a bad day for your normie Democrats.
Steve Hayes
Yeah. Megan, I mean, all of Sarah’s, I think, relevant history and context on front runners running out of money notwithstanding is true. Certainly important to think about it that way. This feels to me different maybe because we’re in this moment and acknowledging potential recency bias on my part. But, you know, Governor Mills was recruited by Chuck Schumer to come into this race because he thought she would be the strongest candidate to take on incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins. And when she got in the race, and I think sort of part of the bargain here, was that Chuck Schumer, a Senate minority leader, would bring to bear the resources that Senate minority leader can bring to help drive a campaign like this forward and just drive out these, you know, upstart sort of outside candidates before they really catch fire. That didn’t work in this instance, and Chuck Schumer, I think, looks really bad at this moment. Does this tell us more about sort of this moment in the Democratic Party and the rise of these kind of populist progressive figures like Mamdani and, you know, Bernie Sanders had a moment. Some argue he’s still having a moment. Or does it tell us more about the waning power of the establishments in both parties, the Republicans or in this case, the Democrats, or both?
Megan McArdle
Little bit of column A, a little bit of column B. Look, the reason that she’s running out of money is that she is running many points behind Graham Platner, and people have just gotten to the point where they’re like, “I could give you money, or I could change it into singles and use it to economize on Kleenex.”
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Megan McArdle
And the latter seems like the more efficient and valuable use of my political dollars. And so I think this does go back to the fact that they didn’t have a good option, right? If Janet Mills, who is seventy, is your best option, you’re in trouble. That said, I also think that the Democratic Party is clearly having a political moment, right? The progressives within the Democratic Party are clearly having a political moment. In DC, we are looking at the probable election in the Democratic primary. I am registering the Democratic Party in primary specifically to vote for a candidate. Obviously, as a journalist, I should not name which one. But we’ve got a progressive who is running on a platform of what if it were still twenty sixteen and everyone wanted to move into DC and the city was booming.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Megan McArdle
What if I had a platform that fixed all of those problems and raised taxes on the affluent a lot? And it’s going down really well with voters in the district. And I think that Democrats, like Republicans before them, are having to reckon with these candidates who are, you know, bypassing the establishment, building up a base of support through social media and the rest of it, and it is going to be a problem for them in the some of the same ways that it’s a problem for Republicans. I mean, leaving aside my personal feelings about populism. The thing is that their policy platforms, like Trump’s, have these, like, big ideas. Graham Platner’s big idea is Medicare for all. And there’s a lot of billionaire wealth taxes running around. Even though this is currently in the process of severely harming California’s tax base, not stopping other people from saying, “But what if we did it too?” And those policies, you know, I think you are gonna get people who storm in. Mamdani, the good news is that at the state and local level, they have balanced budget requirements, and so they can’t kind of go full YOLO the way Trump has.
Megan McArdle
But I think you are gonna see pressure on these candidates to storm in and do some of these things that they don’t actually have the fiscal run room to do that would be incredibly harmful to the state’s economy. And even where they are constrained from doing that, the temptation will then be to a la Trumpian executive orders, do a lot of culture war stuff on things like public safety. That’s an easy win they can give their voters, but n- but a really bad move for their city or state.
Steve Hayes
Jonah, if you look at places beyond Maine, candidates beyond Graham Platner, there is a Democratic socialist who has surprisingly sprung to the lead of the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary, Francesca Hong. She too is, has embraced Medicare for all, public option, free universal healthcare, free universal schooling. I mean, free universal everything. I’m using air quotes around free. If you look at the Michigan Senate race, the candidate of the moment is Abdul El-Sayed, who ran for governor in twenty eighteen, lost to Gretchen Whitmer, and is undoubtedly having a moment, has now gotten to the point where he is leading or tied in several recent polls. There’s a really interesting piece in Slate this week where this Slate writer went and spent time with El-Sayed in Michigan and at these campaign rallies. He went to a rally where there were other candidates and describes sort of El-Sayed’s reception at these things where he’s treated as a rock star. The Detroit Free Press writes, “The energy and enthusiasm he generated created a charge like electricity that hung around after he left the stage.” And this Slate reporter says that caught El-Sayed off guard. He hadn’t seen this. And the quote from El-Sayed is, “In twenty eighteen, we did not-… get nearly that reception. There are very few moments in your life where everything you’ve done for the last few years comes to a head. We built this campaign with people who don’t necessarily show up like that, so to see it resonate here, I’ll never forget.” And he talks about this being this progressive populist moment. This isn’t isolated in Maine. It does seem to be something bigger going on. To what do you attribute this rise in sort of progressive populism, and are those two things the same at this point, or do they merely overlap?
Jonah Goldberg
So, I mean, a, a few things going on. One, when you say, “Are these two things the same,” which two things?
Steve Hayes
Progressivism and populism.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay. So first of all, just Graham Platner is actually a better example of the point I wanna make than Sayed ’cause it, Michigan is weird, and you have, uh, or is distinct in a certain way.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
I think that the anti-Israel or charges of antisemitism stuff is, it’s kind of like a shibboleth for Democratic progressives these days. I don’t think everybody who’s voting for Graham Platner is antisemitic or even thinks or think that Graham Platner is antisemitic, that thinks that the Nazi tattoo thing is necessarily revealing of his true beliefs about Jews or Israel or anything like that. Sort of like in 2016,
Jonah Goldberg
some of the stuff that Trump said, lots of Trump supporters disagreed with on the substance, but the fact that he was willing to say it m- signaled that he was willing to defy the norms of the establishment, to put his thumb in the eye of the mainstream media. You know, um, you know, the Muslim ban thing, I think a lot of people thought… I mean, there were some people who really liked it, but there were a lot of people who were just like, “Look, if he’s willing to say that, that means he’s not gonna, like, grow in office and betray us on immigration the way a lot of other Republicans will,” right? And I think the sad thing for Israel and for Jews essentially in this country is that on parts of the progressive left and parts of the sort of new right, saying stuff that arouses, that, that, that invites charges of antisemitism is a shortcut to success because it signals to large numbers of people who aren’t necessarily bigoted, but nonetheless signals to a large number of people that you are a certain flavor of anti-establishment person, and that’s a real problem. More broadly, look, I mean, I think, you know, we had an editorial meeting where I had repeated this point that Tyler Harper had made on my podcast about how the weird thing is that the centrists are the vibes people this year, and the populists are the ones who actually have policies. And, like, he likes the policies more than I do, obviously, but even he’s like, “Look, you’re perfectly reasonable to criticize some of these, you know, left-wing populist positions, but at least they’re positions,” right? I mean, Medicare for All is a policy proposal. Meanwhile, the stuff that you get from the normie centrists in the Democratic Party is just, “Normie centrism is good,” and, “Stop Trump.” And you don’t get a lot of, like, you know, you get a lot of, “Trust me, I have experience,” but no explanation of what that experience is actually gonna get you in terms of policy stuff. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders and the Bernie affiliated, they have, I would argue, very bad policy proposals, but they’re things that voters can sink their teeth into and say, “That sounds good to me,” and like, “That sounds like a serious plan.” Anyway, on the editorial call, we were talking about this, and someone asked, “So when you’re talking about populists on the left, who are you talking about?” And it was a good question, and I spent a little time and since then trying to figure out who I’m talking about. And the weird thing is that the populists of the left, if we’re gonna use that word, they don’t look like normal populists if you’re talking about the, the broad sweep of American history. They’re not William Jennings Bryan people, right? They’re not 1930s factory workers or the bonus army types. What they are is wildly over-educated,
Jonah Goldberg
sort of struggling young people, huge percent, according to the Pew surveys and whatnot. They are heavily into public sector unions,
Jonah Goldberg
heavily college and advanced degree types, heavily in debt, sort of struggling, you know, people who feel like the system is supposed to reward them more
Jonah Goldberg
for going to school, doing the right things, and they have a certain amount of status class anxiety, as maybe Richard Hofstetter would put it. And in, in a weird way, what they look like to me
Jonah Goldberg
is French people.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs] And who… What I mean by that is, like, if you look at, like, those Yellow Vest riots and all that kind of stuff, if you look at the politics of France, it’s a lot of public sector funded, you know, civil service unionized people who have certain expectations about their entitlements, about the programs, about cost of living adjustments, and all of these kinds of things. They’re highly educated. They’re very articulate. And I mean, I remember, what, 15 years ago, Megan, you know, wrote about how, you know, Washington journalists tend to define rich as the people just, like, 10% above their highest income in the field of journalism.
Sarah Isgur
Not TV journalism, though. I think that we do-
Jonah Goldberg
True
Sarah Isgur
… define the… But print journalism, yes.
Jonah Goldberg
Right. Uh, yeah. I mean, like, Bret Baier is rich. But mere grubby Washington Post and LA Times columnists, we are the stuff of the soil.
Sarah Isgur
The proletariat.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Sarah Isgur
Look, Jonah couldn’t even afford, like, a real shirt today. I mean, that’s like-
Jonah Goldberg
That’s right. [laughs] Today.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
And, um, so anyway, if we’re gonna do clothes I can’t afford, we need to remember that Donald Trump made my life miserable by telling NBC News that I couldn’t afford to, I didn’t know how to buy pants.
Sarah Isgur
I know. And, and I mean, what, fact check.
Jonah Goldberg
I am a work in progress, Sarah. I’ve gotten so much better at pants buying than I was 10 years ago.
Sarah Isgur
Yeah, you, you can do it online now. I don’t know if you’re aware. It’s-
Jonah Goldberg
Trust me, I know, but you have no idea how many pants I send back because, like-
Sarah Isgur
Really?
Jonah Goldberg
… I did it wrong. Anyway, and so it-
Sarah Isgur
You want the ones with two legs.
Steve Hayes
Of all the things Donald Trump was wrong about in that campaign [laughs]-
Steve Hayes
… I’m not sure that really counts.
Jonah Goldberg
It’s not… It, it, I agree with you, it’s not top 10. Anyway, the sociology of left-wing populism is very interesting because it’s more of a middle class-Educated entitlement group than you normally would think. And I think if you’re looking at politics has changed over the last twenty years, it– the populist
Jonah Goldberg
movement on the left became very online with the netroots, which is a term from the mists of the past at this point, but really came around in two thousand and four and at the dawn of sort of mass uptake of the internet, and the Howard Dean sort of moment, and sort of netroots nation and netroots conferences became kind of like a parallel Democratic Party. And even though that specific– those specific institutions and organizations have melted into the broader sort of political environment, I think that orientation of being extremely online comment section bro types informs a lot of the flavor of what democratic populism looks like these days.
Steve Hayes
Is it your view that I would argue that it’s been the case for a while, depending on when we wanna start this, and I think you can go back to sort of the rise of Barack Obama, that the center of gravity in the Democratic Party has been with the progressives-
Jonah Goldberg
For sure
Steve Hayes
… and that the Democratic establishment has increasingly been elbowed out. This feels like that on the next level. And again, it’s early. We’re six months out from these elections. The people who are sort of rising now haven’t won these elections.
Jonah Goldberg
So can I, can I push back? Can I make a really q-quick point on that? I think one of the problems that we get when we do punditry about a lot of this stuff is, and we’ve seen it on the right now for fifteen years,
Jonah Goldberg
there is a confusion that happens with sort of ideologically extreme or activated people that thinks being part of the establishment is an ideological position. So we heard for the first– for the last fifteen years that Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, John Boehner, t- even Tom DeLay, and all those guys were, because they were the establishment, that they were Rockefeller Republicans and RINO squishes, when in fact, the leadership of Congress in the last twenty years is more right-wing than it has been in American history. Like Paul Ryan was more conservative as conservatism was defined until twenty fifteen. Even John Boehner. Certainly Mike Johnson, right? M- you hear all these people talking about Mike Johnson and e-even better examples, John Thune. All of these crazy populous guys are talking about how they’re sellouts and they’re RINOs and they’re squishes and they’re moderates because they actually have to make decisions in leadership, and we– and populous tend to impose ideological flavoring to assembly respon- people in responsible positions because those people actually have to compromise with reality. We’re seeing the same thing these days on the Democratic side, where AOC and Bernie Sanders talk about establishment Democrats as if they’re complete sellouts, moderates, squishes, go-along to get along types, when in fact, Nancy Pelosi was very left-wing. You know, Hakeem Jeffries is a very left of center guy. But when you’re the head of a party, you actually have to be cognizant that there are people running on your label, on your ticket in places where you can’t be giving ammunition to the other party to run against them. And-
Jonah Goldberg
… and so I don’t think that… I, I just think there’s a real problem when you get a lot of punditry in this stuff about how, oh, it’s the ideologically extreme populists versus the centrist moderates. The only reason people are calling them centrist moderates is ’cause these people actually have responsibilities, but if you actually look at their agendas, they’re pretty left-wing or right-wing, depending on who we’re talking about.
Steve Hayes
You’re getting exactly to the distinction that I wanted to ask you about. So it seems to me, and we’re gonna deal in generalities here, and undoubtedly there’ll be some oversimplification here. But if you look at the rise of populism attendant with Donald Trump over the past decade plus, it seems to me that on the right, this populism has been characterized in many ways by its non-ideological qualities. Donald Trump was not
Steve Hayes
sort of a m-more right-wing version or more conservative version of what we had come to understand as conservatism from sort of Reagan on. This was not sort of movement conservatism, and Donald Trump was its purest form. This was Donald Trump coming in and saying things that totally contradicted what we had come to regard as movement conservative, challenged it in many ways, and I would argue, adopted some of the sort of ideological positions of the left, whether you’re talking about tariffs, trade policies, other things. And on the left, it seems to me this populist movement, such as it is,
Steve Hayes
h-has a much more sort of ideologically inflected character to it. Is that way oversimplifying, or do you buy the basic thesis that the populism on the right has been either non-ideological in the form of Trump and the MAGA movement, or less ideological, and the populism on the left that we’re looking at today, and I would argue, you know, Bernie Sanders was very nearly the Democratic nominee in twenty twenty. If Joe Biden hadn’t won South Carolina and stalled his momentum, I think it was likely, and we saw Democratic establishment figures sort of making, starting to make the arguments on behalf of Bernie Sanders’ socialism. Is that a fair distinction, Jonah, or is it oversimplified?
Jonah Goldberg
No, I think it’s– Look, I think it’s a fair distinction. We saw with Trump, the key argument from a lot of people for Trump in twenty sixteen was, “But he fights,” right?
Sarah Isgur
Yeah, but okay, is Trump a cop-out for this one? ‘Cause I agree, Trump is non-ideological, and it’s very easy to say, therefore, the right is ni- non-ideological. But there are lots of populists on the right who I think are just as ideological as the populists-
Jonah Goldberg
For sure
Sarah Isgur
… on the left. They’ve tried to co-opt Trump into that populism. They’ve suc- The ideological populism. They’ve succeeded at times. They’ve failed at times.
Steve Hayes
What does that look like, and who do you mean?
Sarah Isgur
Oren Cass.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Sarah Isgur
Right? Heck-
Jonah Goldberg
A lot of the Claremont guys.
Sarah Isgur
Yeah. I’ll even put Joe Rogan in there to some extent. Joe Rogan isn’t just vibes. He’s talking about realPolicy ideas when he’s talking about politics. That’s not what he does all the time, obviously. But they are talking about a nationalist, anti-immigration, you know, big immigration restriction policy, the foreign policy changes that they want. Those are real populist ideological things that they’re bringing to the table. Again, Donald Trump doesn’t always adopt them all because he’s not ideological. But I think if you’re gonna compare it to the left, you have to compare it to the people who are talking the most because they don’t have a Donald Trump figure yet. And if they did, that Donald Trump figure may tell their ideological left to, like, go pound sand from time to time.
Megan McArdle
It’s interesting that you’re, the people you’re naming on the right are not politicians.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Megan McArdle
And the people doing this on the left are politicians.
Sarah Isgur
Yeah, interesting.
Megan McArdle
Like, I would say that the politicians on the right are fellow travelers. The ones on the left, like, they’re coming out of places like the DSA, which is a political party, not like a think tank.
Jonah Goldberg
Democratic Socialist of America, yeah.
Sarah Isgur
Yeah, like do I think Turning Point is an ideological group? No, I don’t. And like-
Sarah Isgur
… is that the equivalent of DSA, which is ideological? Yes. I think I do agree largely with your point, but there’s still ideologues on the right.
Megan McArdle
No, there are absolutely ideologues on the right. And I, but I think the interesting thing about what’s happening on the left,
Megan McArdle
and sp- m- I think more specifically on the left than on the right, is that one reason that this is happening is w- that reality is so dispiriting, right?
Jonah Goldberg
Reality does suck. Wait, wait.
Jonah Goldberg
You’re the host of a podcast called Reasonably Optimistic. That sounds to me very pessimistic. [laughs]
Megan McArdle
No, the world is great. I’ve been walking around Chicago this week. It’s beautiful.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Megan McArdle
It’s spring. It’s a wonderful city. No, political reality is dispiriting.
Jonah Goldberg
I do not disagree.
Megan McArdle
And what I mean is this, is that if you were, 10 years ago, if you were a candidate on, in either party and you were an establish- a reasonably establishment candidate, you could run on some fairly big things, whatever that is, big tax cuts, big n- you know, Green New Deal, that sort of thing. Maybe you wouldn’t go full AOC or full Paul Ryan, but you had a lot of options on your agenda. Those options, if you were anyone vaguely sane in politics, you realize are gone.
Megan McArdle
Our debt is no longer effectively zero interest rate, that we are now running a deficit of 6, 7% a year. Our interest costs are now higher than our spending on Medicare or defense. And so those things are gonna constrain any politician. You’re not gonna come in and do Medicare for All. Honestly, I was talking to some Democrats la- at a conference I was at last weekend, and I was like, “Why do you guys wanna win in 2028? If I were you-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Megan McArdle
… I would be hiding under the bed being like, ‘Please let the other party deal with the Social Security stuff that is going to hit in that period.'” And because of that, the establishment just doesn’t have a lot of big stuff. The people who are totally disconnected from reality, on the other hand, can be like, to quote P.J. O’Rourke, “Government will make you taller, smarter, and get the chickweed out of your hair.”
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Megan McArdle
We’re gonna do Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, and we’re gonna, like, make… We’re gonna pay for all of it with this teeny-tiny tax on billionaires. I mean, it’s not teeny-tiny for, from the billionaire perspective. It does not raise a lot of money. Whatever their pet economists say, it is not gonna raise anything like the money that they propose. And that dynamic, I think, is driving part of this. The establishment doesn’t have an answer because what the government actually has to do right now is figure out how to pay for itself. And it’s been really interesting watching Zohran Mamdani be the first of these progressive politicians to crash into reality. He had all these big plans about all the money he was gonna spend and all the taxes he was gonna hike and all the free stuff he was gonna give away, and then it turns out that no, actually, he’s just gonna spend his time trying to figure out how to cover his $5 billion deficit.
Jonah Goldberg
Good, good luck with that. I, I just want, one, yeah, one, one last point. I take Sarah’s pushback to… The point is well taken. I would say one of the places to look on the right about whether the populism is policy oriented or not is the fact that the demographic that supports Trump on Iran more than any other are self-declared MAGA Republicans. And the just plain Republicans are much softer in support, but still support because Republicans still support Trump, you know, to a high degree, but it drops off, like, like 20, 30 points from, like, self-described MAGA Republicans. And Trump has basically been right when he says, “I am MAGA.” And so one of the interesting things about the Iran war is that it has exposed, I mean, I’m kind of a broken record on this, the people who want MAGA to be a much more ideologically flavored in, you know, tinged thing, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, you know, now Megyn Kelly on her journey. They break with Trump on this for a supposedly policy related reason, and it reveals that they actually don’t speak for large numbers of actual voters. And if you’re gonna talk about populism, you act- the whole point of populism is large numbers of people, right? It can’t just be the people who say things. It’s gotta be what moves people. The second point I’d just make is that, you know, I’ve been beating up on populism for 25 years now. Populism is always a lie, and that’s the problem with analyzing it seriously in that whether it’s good populism or bad populism or whether such a thing exists as good populism, we can have those arguments, but at the end of the day, populism is always a claim that the populists are speaking for the people.
Jonah Goldberg
And the reality is they’re only speaking for a fraction of the people, and the people who disagree with them are also the people, right? I mean, it’s like New York City is also America, and people say, “Well, I’m from real America.” Well, like, New York City is the most populated city in America. Lots of Americans live there too. And the populists wanna speak as if their preference for a demographic, either defined ethnically-economically or some other way or regionally are the authentic real people, and there is a, there are a lot of stolen ideological premises in that that I think we tend to sort of overlook because a lot of journalists, particularly when it comes to left-wing populism, buy the argument that the people saying they’re with the people are actually speaking for the people, and the other people who are against them are the elites, and it’s all a BS framework for understanding politics.
Sarah Isgur
Small point that I don’t know if I’ll make well, but it’s in my head, so let me try to remove it out the mouth. When we are comparing the right and the left movements right now, there is an asymmetry, and that is that the right has Donald Trump, who has won two presidential elections and is the head of that movement where they see him able to win things and accumulate power for them. The left does not have that equivalent thing, and so, yeah, this is the part that’s gonna be hard to explain, I guess. I think that both sides– Like, I think the left would have adopted Donald Trump or a Donald Trump figure if they had one. They’re doing ideology right now ’cause they don’t have one, but they think that’s the way to get the power to win the elections. The right would adopt the ideology if they thought that was the way to win the elections, i.e., everything that we’re seeing is downstream from a desire to get the power to win the elections,
Sarah Isgur
if that makes sense, and therefore, I think they are completely symmetrical in all of the important ways. It’s just that they’re in asymmetrical places right now because obviously one has to have won the White House, and the other one didn’t.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Sarah Isgur
And so the left, feeling very high and mighty that Donald Trump could, a Donald Trump, could never take over their party in this populist moment, has just been obviously untrue time and time again. The Hasan Piker thing is a great example. Like, no, no, no, they’re more than willing to trade virtue and principle and character to win. So was the right. And so in some ways, I guess this conversation is, like, sort of, huh, pointless to me or whatever word you wanna use because it’s all– We’re just talking about the tools that each side is using to try to win an election like the bear that sticks the stick down into the anthill to pull up the ants. Like, one side has one kind of stick. The other side has a different kind of stick, but it’s all about getting all those ants to be on the stick so that you can eat the ants, and the ants in this case are voters.
Jonah Goldberg
Monkeys do that, not bears, but anyway.
Sarah Isgur
Sorry, you’re right, monkeys. I meant monkeys.
Steve Hayes
If you think this is pointless, wait till we get to Not Worth Your Time, Sarah. So I wanna pick up on something that Jonah said and Sarah followed up on and then ask sort of one final big-picture question, and then we need to eighty-six this topic and get to Trump and retribution and Jim Comey. So I would say, Jonah, to your point about Trump and Iran, in a sense, that makes my point that this is non-ideological.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Steve Hayes
Trump is making these sort of ad hoc decisions. Is there any doubt in your mind that the MAGA, the core MAGA base that is with him on his decision to attack Iran would have been with him on his decision not to attack Iran if he had made precisely the opposite decisions that he made in this case? And if that’s true, there isn’t any real sort of ideological cohesion on, uh, certainly on that issue. But I would argue on these broader issues as well, and to go back to Sarah’s initial point on this-
Sarah Isgur
Because they’re in power. I guess that’s my point, right? Like, if they weren’t in power, they would seem more ideologically cohesive on an ideology. But as long as Trump is in power, they will take the power over the ideology, so they will be for whatever Donald Trump says.
Sarah Isgur
It doesn’t mean that they couldn’t pretend to be ideological or that they wouldn’t look ideological if Donald Trump weren’t in power.
Steve Hayes
I mean, I think that’s more true of Republican office holders than it probably is of Republican rank and file voters. But either way, I accept the argument.
Sarah Isgur
I don’t know. They said they were all America first, and then we, you know, attack Iran, and now they’re all like, “Yeah, that’s good too.”
Steve Hayes
They think it’s America first. They think this is the way-
Steve Hayes
… because Trump told them. I mean, look, we’ve talked about the polls in the past where voters, MAGA voters are given a description of a healthcare policy that’s, you know, super– It’s basically Obamacare, right? And they’re all for it on the descriptors, on the policy, or they all oppose it on the descriptors on the policy, and then they’re told that Trump is for it, and then they, most of them flip. But to go back to Sarah’s point on Oren Cass and Joe Rogan, the people that she mentioned as sort of the drivers of populism on the right, this is the point I really want to, us to address quickly because we have to move on. It seems to me that the net result of this populist moment over the past fifteen years from the, uh, what I would consider to be largely non-ideological populism on the right to this very ideological populism on the left has been to pull the debate to the left because Trump is this populist pragmatist willing to adopt center-left lefty positions. I mean, look at Oren Cass. I mean, Oren Cass is somebody, the, the leader of a group called American Compass. He’s very strongly in favor of industrial policy, wants government, more government intervention in the economy in all these different ways. He’s a leading advisor to Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance. His ideas have influenced Donald Trump and the Trump administration. He’s taken loads of money from left-wing nonprofits to sort of make the arguments that he’s making that are, I think, left-wing arguments. When you look at what’s happening on the populist right, it’s the case that in many cases they’re adopting the arguments of the left. If you look at the case of what’s happening on the populist left, they are pulling the Democratic Party, including the abundance Democrats who emerged a year ago, further to the left. So the net result of the past decade of populism is a country that where the debate has shifted in a rather pronounced way, I would argue, to the left.Jonah, do you buy that?
Jonah Goldberg
Yes.
Steve Hayes
[laughs] Okay, good.
Jonah Goldberg
You want it-
Steve Hayes
Meghan, do you buy that? [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
You want it to be quick. Yeah. [laughs]
Steve Hayes
I could see you trying to come b- Yes, but-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I know
Steve Hayes
… these are all the ways Steve’s wrong.
Megan McArdle
Economically, it’s pushed them… They’ve traded… The Republican Party has moved farther right socially and farther left economically.
Steve Hayes
I buy that.
Megan McArdle
And I think that has been the trade. And in fact, that was rational because the quadrant of socially liberal, fiscally conservative, smallest number of voters-
Steve Hayes
Right, right
Megan McArdle
… in American politics, and the economically liberal, socially conservative quadrant was neglected by both parties. That oversight has now been corrected.
Sarah Isgur
So Steve, I think the most interesting, like, time machine hypothetical of our current politics is if you could go back in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, and if Democrats, if there had been a Democratic Party… I mean, if there had been a Republican Party, Donald Trump wouldn’t have been the nominee. But again, Jonah and I’s, like, political parties have died several decades ago, and now we just have these, like, ghosts wandering around that claim to be Democrats or Republican, but that doesn’t actually mean anything aside from I wear red and you wear blue. If there had been a cohesive Democratic Party in the aftermath of the 2016 election, I absolutely believe they could have co-opted Donald Trump and made all sorts of fascinating deals with Donald Trump as a Republican president because he wanted to be popular, he wanted to be part of the li- elites. It is their rejection of him, the Russia investigation, the, you know, first and second impeachments, it’s all this feeling, like, that they hate him that creates this current moment. I think there was really a moment there where Donald Trump was the Schrödinger’s cat of presidents. We did not know what kind of president he was going to be in December of 2016.
Steve Hayes
I think that’s fair. If there’s another thing that characterizes the Republican Party over the past decade, it’s the politics of retribution, and we have seen that on display in a pretty significant way over the past several weeks, most especially the indictment earlier this week of James Brian Comey Jr.
Steve Hayes
And I’ll read from count one of the indictment. “James Brian Comey Jr. did knowingly and willfully make a threat to take the life of and to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States in that he publicly posted a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram, which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out, quote, ‘8647,’ unquote, which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.” Sarah, is this a serious case?
Sarah Isgur
Oh, serious case? Like a legal case? No. It is the opposite of a serious legal case. You know that for a few reasons. One, there’s binding Supreme Court precedent in a case called Watts about a guy joining the military and making a, quote-unquote, “threat” against Lyndon Baines Johnson. And the Supreme Court basically said, “No, it, it’s gonna be the same policy basically as our incitement case law.” There has to be imminence. There has to be, like, the actual practical ability to do the thing you’re saying. Like, you can’t… You can spout off and say all sorts of things, and it is still protected by the First Amendment. Now by the way, these are the same arguments I was making with all the incitement stuff about Donald Trump on January 6th. So, you know, if you’re listening out there and are like, “Yeah, totally, this wasn’t a real threat,” then guess what? The same person who’s telling you that also thought that the idea that Donald Trump could be charged with incitement for January 6th was also not fitting in any sort of Supreme Court precedent. But anyway, First Amendment for me and not for thee. It’s not a serious legal case. You also know it because the prosecutor that they have on the case became a federal prosecutor on Monday.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Sarah Isgur
Truly, he was sworn in on Monday. He had previously been a special assistant United States attorney, meaning that he was not, you know, a, a full-blown AUSA. He was doing Social Security cases. And this is not to make fun of this guy or say he’s a bad lawyer or anything like that. I’m not saying any of that. What I’m saying is if the administration thought this were a case that they actually wanted to win, that they thought was important, that they thought was serious,
Sarah Isgur
th- they have, like, thousands of other people to pick from who are the best of the best. They have been there for a long time. They have enormous experience with, you know, criminal jury trials, things like that. But that’s not who they picked.
Jonah Goldberg
Would those people have taken this case? I mean, wouldn’t you have had a bunch of resignations from people saying, “I’m not bringing this”?
Sarah Isgur
Then fine, you make them resign.
Jonah Goldberg
No, no, I mean, I, I mean this-
Jonah Goldberg
… I don’t… That’s not a criticism. My point is just, like-
Jonah Goldberg
… I assume that’s the case, right?
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Steve Hayes
I mean, we’ve seen that in the case against John Brennan, right?
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah.
Megan McArdle
You would like, like, more than three days to prepare your case before you file the indictment? Just, I, like, I don’t know. I, like, I’m not a lawyer.
Sarah Isgur
To be fair, I think it was, like, a, a day and a half. So that’s not what this case is about. They’re not trying to get a conviction. The point is the press release. We’ve seen this over and over again. That was the case with the Southern Poverty Law Center. That’s the case with the law firms. That’s the case with the universities. These are press release indictments. Of course, that does enormous damage both culturally and politically. It does chill speech and people’s activities and thinking twice about criticizing their government. I hate that. You know, whether a law firm will take on a client, that should not be a political choice. And by the way, I’m not Pollyanna-ish. Law firms were thinking about that long before this, but this has put it into stark contrast. It also, and maybe this is in a good way or at least we can talk about the trade-offs-When the Department of Justice files an indictment and you know you have a 98% chance of being convicted, you plead out because DOJ doesn’t bring cases that they lose.
Sarah Isgur
And so it made the system quite efficient in that sense. If you now believe that DOJ has a, I don’t know, 60, 70% chance of winning,
Sarah Isgur
you’re going to push that case to a jury trial a lot more often. Our federal system right now could not actually do that many jury trials. We don’t have the resources for that. And so I think it will be very interesting moving forward. Now, this is a point that I’ve made before. I’m borrowing from Lindsay Chervinsky’s book on John Adams. Joan and I are co-presidents of the Lindsay Chervinsky fan club/ you know, stalkers, and her point was that nothing George Washington did mattered until John Adams did it a second time, that you have to have repeated something for it to be a norm in American politics. Now, that of course were good norms that were being repeated by John Adams. Here, I don’t think a lot of what Donald Trump’s doing to the Department of Justice,
Sarah Isgur
of course it matters, but bear with me. I don’t think it matters a lot until the next administration repeats it. If they repeat it, it is a norm in American politics, and the Department of Justice and the rule of law and all the things that we’re talking about are badly damaged or cease to exist in a meaningfully American way as we have practiced them. If, however, the next administration comes in and does the opposite, and actually does the opposite, not just says they’re doing the opposite like the Biden administration did after the first Trump administration, but actually through word and deed refuses to repeat what Donald Trump has done,
Sarah Isgur
then I think this will just be a sad chapter that we can close the book on. I don’t think we are already at some point of catastrophe.
Steve Hayes
Meghan, do you think that’s likely that the next administration will come and do this? I mean, we just talked about how we’re in this sort of push-and-pull populist moment in, in politics. I would love to be reasonably optimistic about the likelihood that will happen. I’m not.
Megan McArdle
Look, I– This is a hard question, and I think a lot of it is gonna come down to do the Democrats let Trump leave?
Megan McArdle
And do they just say, “He’s not gonna be president again. It is not worth going after him”? They did not do that in 2020. I… And look, to be clear, I understand the emotional reasons that they did not do that. I was extremely upset on January 6th.
Megan McArdle
I wanted him impeached, removed from office, prosecuted, and barred from ever running again, right? This is not, like, I’m not saying that Donald Trump’s just a normal guy and they just like, you know, poor Donald Trump. That said, I mean, I think, Sarah, you might’ve made the point to me that it did actually clog up– It became a problem for the DC crime rate because so many AUSAs were assigned to prosecuting January 6th prosecu- protesters. And while I do think that the most serious should’ve been prosecuted, there was probably a line where you could say, “Eh, you know, yeah, you shouldn’t have wandered into the Capitol, but you didn’t destroy anything. You didn’t hurt anyone. You weren’t part of the, like-”
Sarah Isgur
It’s at least a trade-off, right? You’re gonna spend all these resources to go after the person you just described instead of the guy who just brought a gun into a 7-Eleven down the block.
Megan McArdle
Right. But I think the case against Donald Trump, while I am morally clear on what Donald Trump did, I think it was always going to be harder to prove that what he did was legally illegal, and that that made it maybe not a great idea to go after him. I think some of the other cases, same thing, and some of the cases were just spurious. Right? The New York cases in particular con- they were just prosecutors who went out and literally declared that what they were gonna do was find anything they could prosecute him on, or in the case of Letitia James, who’s the New York State AG, it wasn’t a prosecution, it was a civil case, but same difference. And then they did. And here’s the thing. The number of progressive law professors and lawyers and so forth that I saw defending these absolutely outrageous, like, I’ve got a bunch– I’ve got an expired misdemeanor.
Megan McArdle
But here, through the magic of-
Megan McArdle
… funny words, I have turned this into 31 felonies. The number of people who defended that, they were like, “Yeah, you know, it’s a harder call.” You think it’s not a hard call. I’m sorry. If the situation had been reversed and this were Joe Biden, 0% of you would be arguing that maybe we should prosecute him. I don’t know. There’s actually, there’s probably one weirdo out there who would. But everyone else was just engaging in motivated reasoning, and it was phenomenally destructive. And so I think for all– Look, the grift in the Trump administration is incredible, and yet I think that the wise thing to do is going to be for the Democratic establishment, such as it is, to form a consensus that nope, we’re done. You can prosecute the lower level people if you catch them doing corrupt things. We’re gonna let the Trump family go. Not because they deserve it or they’re above the law, but because it’s like a, you know, red cape with a bull.
Megan McArdle
The Democratic Party is not going to prevent it, be able to prevent itself, unless it just takes a hard line, from cutting a lot of corners, making some sleazy decisions in order to get him
Megan McArdle
because they want him so bad. And I, I understand, guys. I get it. You’re justified. He’s a terrible president. He has violated all sorts of norms. He has degraded his office, but he’s gonna be 82. He’s not gonna be able to run again, and it is better to let this walk than to establish any kind of legal precedent of like, oh, well, we just bent the law ju- just a little bit. You’ll hardly notice. It’s just like a little dent. It’s right above the fender. You really have to look hard to see it. No, ’cause if you do that, as I s- I agree with Sarah, then it’s a norm.
Sarah Isgur
Will you cut down all the trees to get to the devil himself?
Megan McArdle
Yep. No, I would not. No, sir.
Jonah Goldberg
So, on January 6th, I’m with everybody else, it was a horrendous thing. The problem, and I don’t necessarily think Megan disagrees with me, but, you know, she said it would be difficult to do a legal case about January 6th against Donald Trump. And no offense to Sarah,
Jonah Goldberg
but who gives a rat’s ass about the legal case? It was impeachable. He sh- like I, I defend Mitch McConnell on a thousand different things, ’cause I think a lot of criticisms of Mitch McConnell are stupid. But the massive mistake, the grave error of his life, was having it set up to remove, to, to convict in the Senate Donald Trump, and he chickened out for partisan reasons. I bet you if you gave him truth s- serum now, he would regret it.
Sarah Isgur
He didn’t think it mattered. He thought that Donald Trump was politically dead, so why take the political cost of any of your guys?
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Megan McArdle
I think this is actually a really good example of why Democrats should forebear.
Megan McArdle
Because what you do is you s- like once it’s, once the process has taken over, you start convincing yourself, like, “Oh, I can, I can just do this little thing,” right?
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Megan McArdle
Mitch McConnell had a very clear obligation to the US Constitution, and he abdicated it-
Jonah Goldberg
I ag- I agree entirely
Megan McArdle
… in order-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
Megan McArdle
… for political advantage. And, like, don’t do it. Just don’t, don’t go there.
Jonah Goldberg
So that’s the precedent that’s already been broken, right? I mean, to, to the Turvienski point about it’s not a norm until it’s repeated. For all intents and purposes, impeachment is a dead letter in a constitutional order at this point. It’s just really hard to do, which is why I, you know, I am not a big amend the Constitution guy. We gotta do something about the pardon power, because if you can’t impeach and remove a president, and you can’t f- plausibly threaten to impeach and r- remove a president, we’re screwed. Because that’s, abuse of pardon power was one of the things James Madison explicitly said was impeachable. And one of the things that lawyers, again, no offense to Sarah, the, the TV pundit cla- lawyer class has so ruined the conversation about… Sarah’s holding up a book.
Sarah Isgur
This is, this is page 332 of this New York Times bestseller of proposed amendments. Number three, make it easier to convict public officials on articles of impeachment to rebalance the separation of powers between Congress and the executive, and what follows is actual language to do so. So take up-
Jonah Goldberg
That’s great
Sarah Isgur
… the cause, Jonah.
Jonah Goldberg
But the p- my point is that the way we talk about impeachment is we talk about it as if it was a criminal trial.
Jonah Goldberg
And it’s not a criminal trial. It’s a political trial. It’s explicitly a political trial. You can’t be sent to prison by a, a removal from office in an impeachment Senate hearing, right? It is merely whether or not you should be fired. And then there’s a question about what the law can do with you after you’ve been kicked out. We’ve completely ruined people’s understanding of that. We’re, “No one’s above the law or below the law.” The law has nothing to do with it. And without the, the threat of impeachment, all sorts of things that check a president are out the window. And Biden abused the pi- pardon power. Congress pr- you know, like whatever you think about the Clinton impeachment, the fact that the l- we had two more impeachments for Trump, we’re probably gonna have a third, and that they become performative show trial, political show trial things rather than actual, you know, serious questions about con- the constitutional order. That is already messing up the system in enormous ways, and is going to be, I think, a norm that is, makes the next Democratic president exceed the boundaries that he’s supposed to work within in terms of the presidency in all sorts of ways that are hard to predict in a straight line, but they’re coming.
Jonah Goldberg
Oh, and one last thing. 86 does just, the, I just gotta be clear about it. 86 does not mean murder.
Steve Hayes
Yeah, so we’re gonna get there. We’re gonna get there. Give me a second. Let me just make an observation and then sort of a, a bit of pushback. I mean, surely there is a gap between,
Steve Hayes
you know, the next administration, I think all of us are assuming [laughs] it’s gonna be a Democratic administration, by the way that we’re talking to it right now, will come in and sort of do what Trump has done, which could make these things, to your point, Sarah, your John Adams point, norms. And I think we’re correct in warning against that. But surely there’s a huge gap between coming in and doing the kinds of things that Donald Trump has done, these retributive, just taking these retributive justice measures or attempting these retributive justice measures, and actually prosecuting people for real crimes. And Megan, I take your point about sort of you don’t wanna dwell in the past, you’re gonna kick up more dust, people are gonna be increasingly angry. But isn’t it also important, for the sake of the rule of law, to actually prosecute people for actual crimes in the way that they, if you could prove that they’ve committed them?
Sarah Isgur
That’s the New York case against Donald Trump, right? Like they said, like-
Steve Hayes
No, that is not
Sarah Isgur
… look, there’s an actual crime
Steve Hayes
… It’s the opposite of that.
Sarah Isgur
But they thought it was, right? People convince themselves that if they can find something in a criminal statute, in the federal code or whatever, that therefore there’s an actual crime, and that this needs to be done to uphold the rule of law.
Steve Hayes
Yeah. No, but I’m, I’m making basically the opposite point. I accept your description, Megan’s description. It’s the same description I have given in the past about the New York case. It was bogus, it shouldn’t have happened, all of the various ways it was stretched and unseemly, I buy it all. What I’m talking about are sort of actual crimes, real crimes that are prosecutable that you can do this. So that’s sort of point number one is-
Sarah Isgur
But haven’t Democrats proven that they’re not able to tell the difference-
Sarah Isgur
… when it comes to the high emotion of Donald Trump and the people who work for Donald Trump?
Sarah Isgur
Because again, they not only brought that case, they got convictions in that case.
Megan McArdle
And everyone used it in their campaigns.
Megan McArdle
31 felonies.
Steve Hayes
Mm-hmm. So should they not, they should not actually, if there are real crimes that serious people can identify, they should just avoid doing it because of appearances that it’ll look like the New York case in the past?
Sarah Isgur
You’re gonna have to give me an example of a, quote, “real crime.”
Steve Hayes
Well, so first of all, I think there will be many to choose from, unfortunately, I think given what we’ve seen over the course of the first two years of the Trump administration. But I would point to somebody like-A Jon Ossoff, who’s running for re-election in Georgia, relatively moderate Democrat. For why this is unlikely to happen, why what Megan laid out is unlikely to happen, I mean, Ossoff is running on prosecuting the Trump administration on crimes, and he’s doing this in a purple state as a relatively moderate guy who knows he needs to win independents and Republicans, and he’s making the promise. You know, if you’re frustrated by the corruption that you’re seeing splashed on the front pages of newspapers every day of the Trump administration, you should know that when we Democrats are elected to Congress, w- when I have another term, we are gonna go after them and hold them accountable for the crimes that they are committing right now. He’s running on this. So I think the likelihood that they’re gonna not actually take this step is very slim.
Sarah Isgur
I see this as two bundles of sticks. One bundle of sticks is you can get the real crimes, but you’re also gonna get the not real crimes, and, like, you have to take those together, or everyone gets away with it. And if I have to pick between those two, I’m picking everyone gets away with it because of the norm problem, because I’m unwilling to tolerate the prosecutions for press releases and punishment stick in that other bundle of sticks. And I know, Steve, you wanna just, like, take out your real crime stick from that bundle.
Steve Hayes
[laughs] God kill me.
Sarah Isgur
But I don’t think you can.
Steve Hayes
There’s not just one real crime stick. I think there’s gonna be a lot of real crime sticks.
Sarah Isgur
If you have to pick between the two bundles of sticks, they come together, which bundle are you willing to pick? Because I think that’s the realistic choice that you’re facing.
Megan McArdle
Yeah, I think a Democratic president is gonna have to make it extremely clear that we’re not doing this, that no one’s doing this, that if you do this, I will make your life unpleasant. I will support primary challengers. Do not do this to every, like, down ticket AG, DA. And that’s the only way it’s gonna work because otherwise you’re gonna get the fake crimes.
Steve Hayes
Can a Democratic presidential candidate get elected on that? “Hey, I’m running-
Steve Hayes
“I’m running and I’m not gonna go after Donald Trump on anything.”
Sarah Isgur
No, you don’t run on it. When you win-
Megan McArdle
You just– Yeah.
Steve Hayes
So you lie to the voters.
Sarah Isgur
What’s the line from The West Wing? “They’ll like us when we win,” said Josh Lyman.
Sarah Isgur
Or maybe Toby.
Megan McArdle
But also the voters, I don’t actually think the voters are hungry to see Trump prosecuted.
Megan McArdle
I think, like, four Democratic primary voters are, and everyone else just wants to get on with their life and close that chapter.
Sarah Isgur
And have their gas be less expensive and their groceries less expensive-
Sarah Isgur
… and have some healthcare that they were promised. Yeah. Would they also like Trump to be prosecuted? Maybe, but they’d like all those other things first.
Steve Hayes
Yeah, I’m not sure. I’m not sure I buy that. So speaking of, this is sort of the perfect setup for our wonderful Not Worth Your Time. Speaking of norms and 86, Jonah, you strenuously objected to the definition of 86 that the court is using, uh, the grand jury is using in going after James Comey, where it’s taken as a given that 86 means we are going to kill the president. That is the basic assumption underlying count one from this grand jury. 86 does not mean that. Do you have ideas about what 86 means and where it comes from? Because I do.
Jonah Goldberg
So this is our Not Worth Your Time, just like what does 86 mean?
Steve Hayes
So we’re sort of, like, collapsing into a Not Worth Your Time. So yes, give me your definition before we get to the formal Not Worth Your Time.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay.
Steve Hayes
And then I will introduce the Not Worth Your Time.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay, ’cause I feel like you’re setting us up for some sort of little kid joke about-
Steve Hayes
It’s not a joke
Jonah Goldberg
… eight hating six because seven ate nine. Anyway, okay, so 86 I grew up understanding meant you were cut off at a bar or you were not to be served anymore. And one of the reasons why I know this is not because I was cut off at bars when I was a 10-year-old or whatever, like I– But I grew up watching Get Smart, and Get– Maxwell Smart in Get Smart was Agent 86, and that was the joke, right? I mean, that was like what Mel Brooks– Was it Buck Henry? That was a funny name. Instead of 007, it’s Agent 86, right? And if that meant a s-kill– elite assassin, it would’ve come through more in the show, I feel. And I never really worked in the food and beverage industry, but I know people who did, and they’re like, people would say, “Oh yeah, we had to 86 him.” I mean, that, that’s the way I’ve always heard the term. And, and Comey, you know, what is, what is the actual text of the thing say? He says, “Interesting shells,” right? Like-
Steve Hayes
And the shells spelled out on the beach eight six four seven.
Jonah Goldberg
Right. And, like, even if that was the person who put the shells down meant to murder Trump, Comey can, uh, still Comey can just be like, even if he thought it meant murder Trump, saying, “Interesting shells,” is not saying, “Go murder Trump.” It’s like, you could have posted a picture of someone having put up graffiti saying, “Murder Trump,” and you say, “Interesting graffiti,” right? That’s still not calling for Trump to be [chuckles] murdered. So anyway, I think it’s just incredibly stupid.
Sarah Isgur
By the way, you can say, “I agree with this graffiti.”
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Sarah Isgur
You can, I mean, you can say all sorts of things, and we’re still not even close-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
Sarah Isgur
… to the criminal line of what’s not protected by the First Amendment.
Jonah Goldberg
Right.
Sarah Isgur
BT dubs.
Steve Hayes
Let’s just say James Comey is extraordinarily annoying. It was such a stupid post unworthy of, like, a preteen jab. Foolish to do in every respect. So I think, and I am not objective about this, I think the term 86, and probably you’ve heard this or read this, especially Jonah and Megan, since you are native New Yorkers,
Steve Hayes
comes from Chumley’s in the West Village, which was a bar that was opened by an anti-prohibition activist named Lee Chumley, who used it as a speakeasy.And the bar had doors on two different streets, two different sides. One of those doors was 86 Bedford Street. And the story goes, and it’s been reported by The New Yorker, it’s in this book that I do not have but really want to have about the history of bars in New York City, great bars in New York City by a woman named Jeff Klein. The Chumley’s story goes as follows
Jonah Goldberg
A woman named Jeff Klein?
Steve Hayes
A woman named Jeff Klein wrote this-
Sarah Isgur
A boy named Sue.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay
Steve Hayes
… this book. It covers a lot of my old hangouts e- when I lived in New York City, so I’m particularly-
Jonah Goldberg
All the places you got 86’d from?
Steve Hayes
… interested. Yeah. So here is how it’s described in The New Yorker, famous for its fact-checking. “The rich history of Chumley’s precedes its latest iteration.” Its latest iteration, it is now a steakhouse. “Opened during Prohibition in 1922 by the activist Lee Chumley, the bar was a reliable place to get a stiff drink for writers including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and Dylan Thomas. It even has its own contribution to the lexicon as the birthplace of the term ’86’d,’ derived from the back door at 86 Bedford Street, through which patrons were advised to skedaddle when the police were en route.” So what they would do is they would get a tip from either a sympathetic cop who knew that there was a potential bust or from somebody else, and they would then allow the police in sort of one door, shoo the patrons out another door, throw sawdust, and I think bleach was the old story. I think that’s the origin of the term “86’d.” So my question, dear panelists, Chumley’s was my favorite, one of my two favorite hangouts for the year that I lived in New York City. I had a friend, Dave Chase, was a buddy of mine from college, from undergrad, lived right around the corner. We spent a lot of time and a fair amount of money at Chumley’s, which at that point, this is late ’90s, early aughts, had become a firefighter hangout, and it was a great classic New York City bar. And we got to the point where people knew us when, you know, occasionally when we walked in, a bartender might recognize us when we pulled up to the bar. Did you all have a place, either a restaurant or a bar, where you were a regular, where people knew what your order was, whether it was a drink, whether it was food, some place maybe not quite to the level of Norm’s, speaking of Norm’s, like Norm on Cheers, where everybody called your name when you walked in, but a place that you were a regular? And if you did,
Steve Hayes
what was it and what did you get? And I’ll start with you, Megan.
Megan McArdle
My regular place was Katja’s Deli
Megan McArdle
in, it was actually in Philadelphia.
Megan McArdle
And my regular order was a roast beef on rye with butter and salt and pepper.
Megan McArdle
I loved that sandwich so much. The, the roast beef was really good. It was so lean and rare. It got to the point where, like, I would walk in the door, and there would be a line. There was almost always a line. And by the time I got to the counter, he would just hand me the sandwich that he had been making as the other-
Steve Hayes
So good
Megan McArdle
… you know, like, yeah. It was so good. And the knish that I would get with it, oh, those were the days, man.
Jonah Goldberg
Sarah, did you ever have such a place?
Sarah Isgur
When I was four years old-
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Sarah Isgur
… my mother would walk me from preschool over to the soda shop. This is in downtown Richmond, Texas, which had a population of about 2,000 people. It has the, like, noon horn, you know. This is where Santa Anna marched to be defeated at San Jacinto, which is many, many miles away, but you know, you gotta get there somehow. And I would walk in, sit down on the stool, which was difficult for a four-year-old to get up on, and I would say, “I’ll have my usual.”
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Sarah Isgur
And one day I turned to my mother and said, “What’s a usual?”
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Sarah Isgur
My usual was a grilled cheese.
Steve Hayes
Beautiful.
Steve Hayes
Jonah, did you have such a place?
Jonah Goldberg
Not where anyone would call out my name or anything. Two places. One, growing up in New York City in the 1980s, before the drinking age went to 21, it was 18 or 19, whatever, and so starting about ninth or tenth grade, we would go to this bar with fake IDs up by Columbia. Megan might know it, Cannon’s. And-
Megan McArdle
I feel like Alec Guinness. Ah, that’s a name I haven’t heard-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah
Megan McArdle
… in a long time.
Jonah Goldberg
So that was our big hangout, and then it became a thing where for 15, 20 years after college, me and my friends from high school would meet there on the night before Thanksgiving and make bad decisions. And then in 1990s in Washington, D.C., some of you may recall the Toledo Lounge in Adams Morgan, which was created by Stephanie Abajay, who I dated for about 30 seconds, but was a good friend of mine, and her sister, Mary, and they grew up in bars in Toledo. And at one point, Stephanie, I tried to help her get a book contract, wanted to write a memoir called My Life Behind Bars, and it was…
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
And the Toledo Lounge was definitely my hangout throughout much of the 1990s, and they, and there, if I walked in, they would yell, “Jonah,” because I, I usually knew the bartender, whoever was working there, and the waitstaff and that kind of thing, and other poor decisions were made there.
Steve Hayes
So that’s very funny because the Toledo Lounge was also my hangout-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
Steve Hayes
… in the early 1990s, as we’ve discussed, for reasons totally unrelated to why it was your hangout. And Cannon’s, as it happens, I can’t remember if I’ve told you this. Maybe I’ve told you this.
Jonah Goldberg
I think we’ve talked about Cannon’s, yeah.
Steve Hayes
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
‘Cause you went to Columbia Journalism School and wasted all that money. [laughs]
Steve Hayes
I went to Columbia Journalism School, and Cannon’s was on 110th and Broadway. And one of the assignments that I had from this class, it was a, a criticism class taught by this wonderful woman since passed, who was a critic, movie critic for a variety of places, was to go to write about a place. And Cannon’s was a dive. I mean, it was a-
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm
Steve Hayes
… divey dive, like a total-
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, they were serving high school kids.
Steve Hayes
Shit hole.
Jonah Goldberg
I mean, like how great could it have been? [laughs]
Steve Hayes
Yeah. So I decided to go to Cannon’s and write about Cannon’s as a place and do this as a description exercise at, like, 9:00 AM on a Sunday.
Steve Hayes
And it was the hardest of hardcore people, either folks who had s- you know, were still there from the night before or took, t- left for a short amount of time and came back, or people who decided on Sunday morning that 9:00 AM was the time to go to the bar. And it was-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I remember talking to you.
Steve Hayes
Yeah.
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Steve Hayes
I thoroughly enjoyed writing that piece. I don’t think I still have it around, but good for us to have places like that.
Megan McArdle
Our bar was a, in high school, was a bar called Mr. O’s.
Jonah Goldberg
Oh, I know Mr. O’s.
Megan McArdle
Oh, yeah.
Steve Hayes
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, yeah.
Megan McArdle
Remember Mr. O’s?
Sarah Isgur
This is feeling very New York-y.
Megan McArdle
Yeah. Well, in New York, there were a lot of places where-
Jonah Goldberg
By which you mean cool.
Megan McArdle
Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Megan McArdle
Where if you were tall enough to put your money on the bar, you were old enough to drink as far as they were concerned.
Steve Hayes
Yeah. Yeah. [laughs]
Megan McArdle
And Mr. O’s was one of them. And I remember being there, and, like, the patrons were making fun of us for being, like, drunk high school losers, and one of my friends just looked at me and was like, “You’re drinking in a high school bar. What are you…”
Steve Hayes
[laughs]
Megan McArdle
Like, it was someone who’s over 21. [laughs]
Sarah Isgur
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
Whose life is going wrong here?
Steve Hayes
Pretty g- pretty g- pretty good comeback.
Megan McArdle
Exactly.
Steve Hayes
Pretty good comeback. All right. Well, we will resume our discussion next time with further conversation about norms of a different variety. Thanks, all, for joining. Congrats again, Sarah. We’ll see you next time. [upbeat music] If you like what we’re doing here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And as always, if you’ve got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us roundtable@thedispatch.com. We read everything, even the ones from people who’ve never had a regular place. That’s gonna do it for today’s show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time. [upbeat music]