They asked me every year to go out and remind them that it's okay for
different parts of the country to be different. Ask not what your country can
do for you and what you can do for your country. I want you
to listen to me. I'm gonna say this again. I did not have
a sexual relations for that woman. I put him in. It's the Ricorshe
podcast with Rob Long and Charles was a C. W. Cook sitting in
for Peter Robinson. I'm James Lylyax. Today we doked our old friend and
the McCarthy about now you know what the law. So let's have ourselves a
podcast. Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number six hundred and
ninety five. I'm James Lylyx in a beautiful sunny summer day in Minneapolis.
Rob Long is in New York and we're joininged by Charles C. W.
Cook in Florida. God's Country, the place where freedom still claims high every
day. Well, so here we stand. General's welcome. Is there some
recent development of DeSantis versus Disney, Because I'm absolutely fascinated in the way that
Disney has morphed its public image, at least amongst the people who you think
we're most inclined to love it because it's you know, it's Americana, it's
the rest of it. But now it's just sort of one of those things
that I hear Disney, and I actually recoil a little because I don't know
what they've done next. How long have you got? We have about six
hours here before my meter runs out, so I'll just lean back and let
you go. Well, this is an interesting topic, and I have a
much more nuanced view of it than I'm accused of having, in that I
did not like what was clearly a retaliatory move by DeSantis and was sold as
a retaliatory move unless it was being defended. But I also thought that DeSantis
was going to win, which he has. I thought he was going to
win a pr battle, which he has. I thought he was going to
win the election, which he did. And I thought he was going to
beat Disney, which has come to fruition. In concert with that, Disney's
decisions as a company in recent years have been utterly baffling. And it's not
just some of the more obvious work stuff. It's the total lack of creativity
in their movies. And I am a big Disney fan. I grew up
in the golden age of Disney. I live two hours from Disney World and
we take the kids there a lot. And that's the one part of their
offering that is still magnificent. People like to pretend it's gone downhill. Hasn't
really, But we were the sort of family that would say, if there's
a new Disney movie, we'll take the kids. You wouldn't even watch the
trailer, they wouldn't read reviews, you would just go to it. And
we've stopped doing it because they're just producing garbage. So yeah, it's an
odd thing that's happened where they have immolated creatively. They have taken on the
governor of Florida on an issue that they were likely to lose. I mean,
DeSantis was right on the merits the circle. Don't say gaybill is a
good law. It's not about that. It doesn't prevent people from saying gay.
It's not how it's been described. Well, you've just said it,
and you're in Florida, so no one has. We don't hear the jet
booted to your door yet, and they decided to take him on. I
thought, and I continue to believe that the move was targeted and retalitory,
and I just don't want governments to do that. I don't think that it
is illegal in this case because it was a special dispensation, But I don't
like it, and I wrote that and I continue to believe that. But
look, he won this. He was always going to win this because Disney
got special treatment. They took him on on an issue where he was right
politically and popular politically. And the behavior that they then engaged in which they
tried to sneak in or these bizarre provisions in the law without Florida seeing it,
and it was just never gonna work. So I'm I'm nuanced. I'm
I'm I Thinks's behavior was retired in a way I don't like. But I
think Disney's conduct has just been inexplicable. Rob, you're in the entertainment industry.
Before we get to the yes issues of the day, are we right
to Charles and I in talking about the diminution of Disney's status as a cultural
force or is this just echo chamber bubble think nonsense and they're really actually incredibly
powerful still are driving the culture? Well? No, I mean, I
don't I think that's true here here's my beef with conservatives. They they tend
to reason from a bad quarter and say, see, it's all dying,
you're gonna get, you're gonna pay, You're gonna go down. I mean,
when when the Chucker Carlson fans found that Kittucker had been canceled, they
were convinced that Fox News would collapse in of course two Disney actually has a
pretty good quarter this year, I mean compared to its its competitors in the
enter him business. The stupid fight they got into with the governor of Florida
about you know, who is going to run the county that they kind of
had this strange, medieval kind of feudal control over it was, you know,
they call it an own goal is the dumbest thing ever, right,
I mean, they should have been tiptoeing around every Florida state bureaucrat and elected
official for the past fifty years, because you know, when anybody opened up
the books there thought, wait a minute, is there another part of America
where a company that isn't even resident there controls so much? And you know
that this stuff hadn't happened since well actually since Florida in the twenties probably since
Tampa. So those are two different things. The creative trophy, yeah,
probably, but I think I think that happens to Disney all the time cycles
and that is the truth for any creative enterprise. There is absolutely no way
to go from strength to strength to strength in a creative enterprise without running out
of gas. Well before we moved to the important issues of the day,
I will disagree with you on that one because I think if it was just
Disney going through some troughs, yes, you have those periods where your old
animators go out, the new batch hasn't got their feet yet, and you
have a couple of bad products. But we have a very large organization here
that consists of Disney, Disney Animation, Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm.
And in every single one of these that they've gathered into their arms, they
have ruined. They've ruined them, and the people who just used to lap
up their products and love them, well, you can't, you can't you
no, No, that's wrong, that's incorrect. You can't say that.
Somehow Bob Iger and Bob Shapik decided to ruin Marvel. Marvel was a basically
independently run company creatively for your Marvel. I'm not arguing that Marvel is garbage,
but of course it is now, but it might come back. And
same thing with Disney. Looked everybody hated Disney in the seventies. Disney was
almost sold for like one hundred dollars in the seventies, and it came back
creatively. But the biggest mistake they made in Pixar was they fired Elasador because
he hugged too many people. And they're going to pay the price for that.
Creative enterprises are cyclical, and if you if you, if you create
a kind of a straw man corporate argument, I think you're just you're you're
you're just not accurately describing soy, maybe inaccurately describing what is a coincidence that
the nayder of these cycles all appear in the time that they've been under Disney,
and well they got bigger. But the name, I mean, is
anything worse than Jarje r Binks. Disney had nothing to do with jarge oar
Binks. But Rob, I think the argument is slightly different than that,
And I obviously deferred to you a great knowledge, but I don't think the
argument is that Bob Eiger and Bob Tape. It came in and from the
top down they said, we are now work and all of our properties will
be ruined. Ha ha ha. I think that the argument is that Disney,
like a lot of institutions at the moment, and has proven itself incapable
of getting out of the pit. That it's dug because it has far too
many people working at it who have bizarre views about the world that do not
map properly onto the consumer base. And like at say The New York Times,
where all of the older editors who are more small l liberal and they're
thinking, are terrified of all of the twenty and thirty year olds on slack.
So in the creative departments of the various companies that make up the Disney
Corporation, you have people who have an agenda that is not the agenda that
Disney had in the nineteen nineties, which was make great movies, and they
have not yet proven capable of getting out of that. And in that way,
it's analogous to some of these investment companies that are actually making less money
and making bad decisions because for a while they were seduced by this ESG stuff
where they would say, well, that coal mine is actually very profitable,
or that gun company is very profitable, but we will not invest in them
because we think that it's morally wrong. That's starting to turn around, but
until it does, you end up losing. Right. I just want to
say this because I'm responding to Rob was jar Jar binks great? No?
It wasn't. Were the where the prequels that fantastic? No lucasfilms, of
course made mistakes. What I'm talking about is this explosion of slop that's come
out of the out of the Star Wars world in the last couple of years,
and so it's one show after the other hit and miss stuff. The
New Accolyte show was absolutely dreadful and saturated with identity politics. But if you
liked did you like Mandalorian? Yeah? I like some Mandalorian. Okay,
So look, I'm just telling you that you are reasoning making a giant let
Lai, which I probably agree with, by the way, But based on
the current creative drought that every studio is feeling, including Warner Brothers and you
know the the Here's what I would argue. There is the employee base of
of the of the Disney Corporation is no more woke now than it was ten
or fifth teen years ago. Trust me, I was there. The difference
is it's huge now. All of these companies are too big. You cannot
manage nimbly a creative enterprise when it's this large. You end up just being
an HR company. And that is ultimately where Disney failed because they and and
and to its credit, Netflix did not because they found themselves having to do
all sorts of corporate things, not for their customer but for their employees because
they have tens of thousands of them now they just fired about eight thousand of
them. So there's a smaller company now. And all of these companies,
like what's going to happen to Paramount, is going to happen at Disney,
Paramounts go about to be busted up. Disney's not going to be busted up
by a purchaser, but it's going to start shedding assets. And when it
does, magically, because these are how is how this stuff work, the
creative will get better. And it won't because they got more conservative. It's
just because they started thinking about the customer more, which happens when you have
fewer employees to worry about. But I got news for you. Everybody in
the entertainment industry, all the creator are weirdos, and they are all weirdo,
lefty kind of crazies. And that is what you want when you have
a creative company comes you just don't want them to be in charge of it.
No, no, no, no, no no no no. You
don't no, you don't. You don't. You don't necessarily need and require
weird lefto crazies in your artistic department. Disney was able to put together a
you know, a zeitgeist in the thirties and the forties, the fifties which
reflected the America of the times. It was not the product of people who
were you know, quasi Marxist urging and the over blow of America. But
they were libertines at the time. Even then. There are stories of those
of what those animators would get up to at night. My office was in
the old animation building, trust right. There were old people there who could
tell you stories that would curl your hair. But that's fine. I don't
doubt that. But they didn't put it into the work. It was not
something that was not something that was necessarily part of the culture. In the
I mean, yes, you had to hide it. That was the whole
thing about the time, is that you had to hide your libertine repressive things
and have your firehouse five is where everybody did the square to answer and then
went off the corner and you know, did Benz a dream and screwed?
I get that, but that doesn't manifest itself in the work. But I
have a question about this because I find the argument that you just made pretty
persuasive. But the one thing that I wonder is this I'm not I'm going
to be very clear about this saying Disney needs to be more conservative. So
if the argument that we're supposedly making here is Disney is too left wing,
that's not what I'm saying. The stultifying HR style or priate environment that you
just described is bad for weirdos on the left to agree. The sort of
creative people who end up creating the Ford Motor Company, or Tesla and SpaceX,
or the early Disney and Looney Choose cartoons and all of that. They
might be left wing, that they disproportionately are, but the thing that defines
them is that they're weird, and so their politics are all over the place,
and personal habits are all over the place. And one of the things
that worries me about our cultural moment is that those people, irrespective of whether
they're left or right wing, are sort of unwelcome. I mean, that's
the HR is in the modern era designed to destroy and remove those people.
And I, and perhaps I'm wrong, but I have a suspicion that there
are far too many people at Disney who are HR compliant and therefore a lot
less creative than they need to be absolutely true, one percent true. I
would say that the hrification of the national business just whatever name anything has been
a destructive force, but especially the creative business. And I would say this
even and I know, I mean, I would get in massive trouble if
anybody who's liberal ever listened to this in show business, which of course they
would never do because they might encounter different ideas. There is almost no way,
I would say, there's no way to run a vibrant, successful,
creative, innovative enterprise in an HR compliant slash woke slash new age employment practice
way. John Lassiter was a big left He is a big lefty, kind
of a crackpot lefty. If I recall it, correctly make great, great
movies. Some of the best movies really ever made came from Pixar. I
really do believe that. I mean Toy Story, the Toy Story Trilogy is
actually a masterpiece, an American masterpiece, of of of everything, and the
first being everybody says the first eleven minutes up are more powerful than half the
movies made that year. So he's response for a lot of great things.
But he's nuts and his politics wouldn't fit on this podcast by any means.
But I don't know how you run a company that's supposed to be creative and
enforce these things. And I think people are discovering that now. I hope
they're discovering that now. Well. Ideological and you know, worldview conformity leads
to a decreased mental metabolic rate in the creativity of any organization because there's no
friction and there's no effort, there's no work. Everybody knows what everybody believes,
so the metabolism doesn't have to spin up and consume. And speaking of
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podcast or old friend Anny McCarthy. Can't have him on here enough. See
Institute and a contributing editor there, as well as with Fox News. What's
so funny? We just can't. I mean, you know, in an
ideal world, we'd never have to have Andy because there wouldn't be weird trials
that make us upset, or you know, questions of his Islamic terrorism that
needs your expertise from the days. But here we are, here we are
again. All right. So you wrote a piece earlier this week it's the
charge, not the charges, and you said a couple of things. One,
the New York jury ultimately found Trump guilty first stealing the twenty sixteen election.
I guess he did that with the twenty seventeen actions. And two you
predict that they're likely to give them time in the Great Bar Hotel because of
the severity of what they eruliously you say, found him guilty for. All
right, explain you think he's going to jail. No, I think he's
going to be sentenced to jail. I don't think he's going to jail.
But I do think, James, that the fact, if it is a
fact, that he won't be put in custody right away, increases Judge Merchon's
incentive to impose a prison term, because it's how is it, It's no
loss to him. He's not actually going to interfere anymore than he already has
in the election, because I think Trump will stay on his present release conditions
pending appeal, which will take probably close to the year to play out.
But in the meantime, march On can pose as a hero for all the
people who he seems to want to please by imposing a prison sense. It's
not like he's gonna it's not like the result of it is that, you
know, someone's going to slap cuffs on Trump and will be led away to
Attica or Rikers. Andy. First of all, congratulations. Have you ever
had this much juicy material in your entire career as a writer a journalist?
Have you ever really, I mean, wake up every day, you must
wake up every day just think, oh my god, I just got to
dig in. This is gonna be great. I'm actually a little weary at
this point. You know. Look, I thought that I thought the I
wrote a book about Russia Gate when I had more energy, because that was
kind of an embarrassment of riches too, and it let me do what I
used to like to do as a prosecutor, which was kind of build the
case and try to figure out sort of, I mean, your biggest everybody,
he has to figure out what they're good at. And what I thought
I did well as a prosecutor was take stuff that was sometimes unwieldy and complicated
and try to boil it down to something that you could explain to twelve people
in a way that could hang there you had on So I enjoyed doing that.
And but there is you know, he's laughing when James introduced me,
because even my mom recognizes that if I'm getting a lot of air time,
that means it's really bad for the country, you know, and that you're
a syndicator. I have a reverse indicator's precisely right, so that you know,
I think that it look it should weigh on all of us what's happening
here because and I must say it was poignant at the end of the trial
last week, because I got to spend time with a lot of people who
had similar experience to me, including people who had grown up in the justice
system years ago, and it's I think we all had a kind of a
like they know not what they do kind of feeling about it, which has
nothing to do with Trump. It's just I think people don't appreciate how much
the loss of this system as what it was is going to cost the society.
And you know, we're really only in the early rounds of it.
So yes, I get up every day and think, you know, there's
interesting, challenging, juicy legal issues to deal with, but I'm also chagrined
by what it all means in the way it's all being applied. So I
got a couple questions and then a thought experiment, and so if anybody wants
to jump in before my thought experiment felt great with Franks. For question is
how much trouble is Merchant going to be during the appeals process for his jury
instructions? Well, I mean it's a very political system. I mean politics
is kind of baked in the cake of the system. I come from an
appointed system, you know, the federal system. All of the judges are
appointed, all of the US attorneys are appointed, and at least in theory,
they have to go through a Senate vetting process where they have to at
least pay lip service to the idea that you're not going to use your authority
against your political enemies or politicize it in any way. And they may not
be honest about it. But the fact that they have to take that position
at least says something. Whereas New York is an elective system, even at
the judicial level, most of the trial judges are elected. And I don't
think you know this is this Rob is much more of a cultural issue,
I think than a legal issue. But when I was a young prosecutor and
Bob Morgenthal was the elected District Attorney of Manhattan for like quarter of a century.
In those days, if you took the position that elect me as the
state prosecutor and I will use the power of the office against our political enemies,
that would have been seen as disqualifying. Now they take that position and
they win in a landslide, which to me is not a legal problem.
That's more of a cultural thing. Right. So this is a long winded
way of getting around to you a question. But the thing is, I
don't think Merchand will be in trouble with the appellate court, like in terms
of his career. Will he get reversed? You know? I think it's
judges. The judging in the trial level of the New York courts can be
appallingly bad, and it's not unusual for those guys to get reversed. In
fact, I think Judge edgarn has already been reversed a few times in the
civil fraud case, so I expect he'll eventually be reversed. But I think
career wise, it's not going to hurt them all that much. In fact,
when I was a kid, they had a judge in the Bronx whose
name was Bruce Wright, and in the New York Post he would he would
be featured on the front page occasionally as Turnham Loose Bruce. He was like
the only judge that anybody knew the name of in New York. But he
got elected every time he was up because people knew his name, you know.
So I don't know that. I don't know how much it's going to
hurt him. Then my next question is just on the process here. I
mean, how irritated, angry or indifferent do you think Jack Smith and even
Fanny Willis are Right now, there are pending cases against Trump, and I
note that they should be all be looked at separately. But you know,
in my I mean, I'm clearly a child, but I they're all kind
of the same thing in my head, and I can't believe that I'm that
different from most Americans that think, you know, you really made made me
think about it. I think actually the Georgia stuff does. I am actually
concerned as an American citizen about a president who lost an election who was working
the levers to try stay in power. I am actually concerned in general about
the sloppiness that we treat, the incredible laxity we treat foreign former presidents,
whether when where they're stealing documents, right, Biden or Trump. So these
are issues I think need to be adjudicated. I don't think they're going to
be because I think this stupid at Manhattanda mess it up for these other two
guys. And I may be wrong. What do you think I think Smith
and Willis have themselves to blame as much as they can blame. Now,
let's remember, in terms of whatever indictment in the colloquial sense that you want
to lay on Alvin Bragg, who I am no fan of, he was
willing to step aside for the federal authorities. The only reason that that case,
which was originally scheduled for March twenty fifth, Bragg said that he would
step aside to let Smith go. Of Smith was going to go on March
fourth, which is what they were hoping in Washington. And the only reason
that the Bragg case got tried first is because the Smith case got derailed.
And I think Smith was foolish if he thought that he was going to be
able to push a case against the former president who has constitutional status and rights
and privileges. If he thought he was just going to be able to bang
that thing to trial and it was not going to be a problem, that
was very foolish thought on his part. But I think Rob where he really
drops the ball is in the Florida case, because I'm convinced he could have
gotten the Florida case to trial if he hadn't felt the need to lard thirty
six classified information counts in an indictment that already had eight obstruction counts, because
the eight obstruction counts give him fifty years or more of prison exposure. So
it's not like they're not representative of the seriousness of the offense. But the
good thing about them is it's a very easy case. But most people,
most people can understand that anybody who lied to a grand jury would be prosecuted.
And this is the most important thing you wouldn't have to have all this
litigation under the Classified Information Procedures Act, which is very complicated because in the
obstruction case, the only issue is do the documents bear physical classification markings,
not what they substantially say, Whereas if you prosecute them for classified information violations,
then the defender gets to play the game that everybody plays in classified information
litigation, where they come in and say, well, I can't get a
fair trial unless I can put this classified information in that's helpful to me,
and then you have to litigate all that stuff prior to trial. So I
think if he had done that case, and I think Bill Barras said this
too, it I think he's right about this. If he had done just
like a kind of a fast and nasty obstruction case rather than this elaborate classified
information thing, he could have gotten a trial already. And the INDU,
well, it's a I think it's a pretty slam dunk case. They got
a grand jury subpoena, they represented that they were turning over all the documents
and they didn't. You know, That's all she wrote right on the doc
on the January sixth case. I still think I'm not in the large category
of people who think that there's no way that case gets to trial now prior
to the election, because it seemed to me watching the oral argument that Trump's
lawyers gave a lot of ground in terms of stuff that's charging the indictment that
can't conceivably be covered by immunity. And if Smith is willing to do something
he has up till now shown no inclination to do, which is to the
Supreme Court sends the case back with some guide line saying here's how you figure
out what's immune and what's not. If Smith goes to Judge chuck it,
it says, you know what, forget that we're willing to go to trial
just on the stuff that they said was not covered by immunity, and I'll
leave the rest of my case on the cutting room floor. I think you
could get to trial because you'd be talking about the false elector's scheme and the
I think the false statement that they made or allegedly made in the in the
Atlanta case, you know, they filed something in court that had false information
in it, that they have texts that show they know it was false information
about voting data. You know, for Smith, that's a home game,
you know, in Washington with Judge Chuck in, even if it's on a
slip down case and he only wants to get the guy convicted, right,
I mean, it shouldn't matter to him that, you know, whether he
gets to present his whole war and peace of the case or if he just
gets to, you know, have two or three felonies that he can,
even if it's slimmed down, he can get to trial and get Trump convicted
on. That's exactly what he's looking to do. So I'm not satisfied that
that won't happen. As to the fanny thing that anything is. That was
just a foolishly charged case. That's not a rico. It's moronic. There
were there was significant misbehavior there, but to do it as a rico,
what it wasn't a rico and then have the clown show down there with the
affair with the other prosecutor and end up in the Court of Appeals, which
is where they are now, which means the trial court can't act on it.
I don't see how that case can get to trial, but I still
think Smith could, So I know, you guys want to jump in.
So it's really not a case that Trump is so smart that everyone else is
so dumb. Well, you know, there's there's no heroes here, and
it's not a it's not a it's not a mensa meeting on either side.
Okay, you go here, you go, decline of empire. So let's
assume that there are no other trials before Donald Trump would be sworn in as
president. If he wins the election in November and becomes president for a second
time on January twentieth next year, can he essentially delay at least until the
end of his presidency all the prosecutions because two of them are federal and he
would be the head of the federal executive branch, and one of them is
a state. But they've become real problems about the prospect of certainly punishing a
president. I was told by Dan McLaughlin that in the early Republic, North
Carolina and prisoned a Supreme Court justice on a state charge. I think it
was seventeen ninety one, but that was the last time that happened. That's
really not any president. So is it the case as many people say that
if Trump does win, and of course that the brag debacle helps, and
this will be deeply ironic that Trump gets away with it. Charlie, I
would just say that, during as I understand it, during the War of
eighteen twelve, when Jackson had martial law in I think it was New Orleans,
a judge tried to issue a writ of habeas corpus to him, and
Jackson had four soldiers march the judge out of the city's limits. So we
do have this wonderful tradition for Andrew Jackson. But you know, look,
I think the other thing that we have to factor into this. I think
on the state stuff, it's easy because what the Trump Justice Department would do
would be going too the courts of New York, probably the federal courts and
try to make an argument that, based on the supremacy clause, the execution
of his sentence has to be postponed until after his turn, and I think
he'd have a chance of winning on that. The federal stuff is the wild
card, because, first of all, I think in the next January sixth,
if we assume that Trump wins, the Supreme Court case on the insurrection
clause only said that the states can't invoke it, didn't say Congress can't.
So you're going to get Democrats in Congress who are going to try to not
seek Trump on January six, because he's an insurrectionist to start with. And
then assuming you get by that, as I understand the way the map works,
the Democrats have a very good chance of taking back the House, and
no matter what happens in the Senate, it'll be close. So if Trump
dismisses the cases against himself or orders the Justice Department to dismiss the cases,
I think that the House would impeach him the first week overdoing that, and
he might there might not be the boat votes to remove him. On the
other hand, don't think that this is not crossing Trump's mind as he thinks
about who to pick his vice president, because I think he worries that if
he picked somebody that we all liked as vice president, the Senate might have
less enthusiasm for defending him when he gets in. Peace to this, at
least one one of the four people on the national ballot would be somebody that
the majority of Americans could live with. Right, that'd be good, But
so at the other and the other wild card here is and I wonder what
you guys think of this. It seems to me that Democrats, especially in
the Senate Judiciary Committee, would make it a condition of confirming a Trump Attorney
general, or at least try to that he not or she not dismiss the
indictments against him. And I don't know how that would play out. I
mean, Trump could still order them to be to be dismissed, but he
might have to do it himself. You know, I don't know even the
mechanics of you would do that. He would try, I think right after
he got elected and right after he took office, to have the Justice Department
fire Jack Smith and dismissed the cases. But I don't know how easy that's
going to be between the Democratic agitation in the House, the difficulty of getting
an attorney general confirmed, and the other thing I think we should bear in
mind is the Flynn precedent. Remember the Justice Department tried to dismiss the case
against General Flynn and Judge Sullivan wouldn't do it. Now, I think Judge
Sullivan was totally lawless, but he managed to get away with what he was
doing. This should be, by the way, this is a unilateral executive
branch call whether to whether to go ahead with the prosecution or not. But
the way the statutes written, the court can interfere with it. Judge Sullivan
certainly did that in the Flynn case. He got away with it because Trump
was up against the time for leaving office, so he basically had the only
way he could guarantee that Flynn wouldn't get prosecuted was to pardon them. So
in the game of chicken, in the end, he pardoned them. But
I could see I could easily see Judge Chucken doing what Judge Sullivan did and
say, you know, I'm not dismissing the indictment. You know you haven't
shown good cause to dismiss it. And the Trump Justice Department would go in
and say, that's not your call, that's not our call. You can't
force us to dismiss the case. But that ended up in a lot of
litigation, including I think two trips to the DC circuit connection with Flynn,
So that could play out for a long time. And if I understand what
you're saying here, twenty twenty five January post inauguration, instead of the country
sitting down, our leaders are elected leaders sitting down to discuss the nation's problems
of debt, of military reinforcement, border security. Instead of doing that,
the Democrats might actually engage in a series of constitutional crises and laws and impeachments
and the rest to get rid of Donald Trump. Is is that what we're
looking at. I mean, I'm stunned that they would do that, But
perhaps they're doing that so that we can clear Trump from the table and forge
a new America with President Tom Cotton. Or are you saying there's that that
they're The number of arrows they have in they're quiver are going to be infinite
and going to be drawn every single day the moment Trump is back in office.
Yeah. I mean, you guys, there is good or better than
I am of reading this stuff. I just think the the the Democrats are
so in the thrall of this fringy base which punches way way above its way.
I think most people in the country are stunned at how much influence these
clowns have. But you know, they say jump and these guys say how
high. I haven't seen any of it, And the thing that animates them
the most is Trump. So I don't I don't see that going away anytime.
So any I'm going to ask you some political stuff put on your you
know, political hat looks like trends and polls in certainly swing states like Virginia
seem like they're trending towards Trump. So you're you're in the Biden White House,
and you know, in the twenty five or thirty minutes where he's fully
there, why wouldn't he just figure out a way to pardon Trump? Say,
look, people are going to have their chance to speak in November.
Let's let it. Let's let them decide. Let's just end all this nonsense
now and have an actual campaign, and then cross his fingers in hope that
his son Hunter actually does time, because then he can say, all you
guys complaining about how the system's rigged, my son is in prison, My
opponent is here on the stage with me. I mean, am I just?
I mean, when I be fired? I think I'd be fired if
I would give that advice to the sitting president right now at political advice,
Well, yeah, I would already have been fired because I made exactly this
suggestion, including specifically I think it would serve Biden well to pardon Trump at
least on the classified information counts in Florida, because you know, if the
if the difference between the two cases. Is one guy obstructed the other guy
didn't then try him for obstruction, you know, but I don't think.
I think for the same reason that we just discussed that as a non starter
in democratic politics, I just don't think they can do it. And the
other thing is, I think I think Charlie and I are in the same
place on this in terms of the assessment of the election. I've always been
I'm not saying Charlie's been a Trump can't win guy. I've been a Trump
can't win guy. From the story to Charlie, he may give him like
a little bit more chance of winning than I do, but I don't.
I wouldn't think I was wrong. I Greeglis who said that with such certainty
that everybody going forward should know that we thought that and that we're probably wrong.
And I still think that, So I tell you, Okay, yeah,
So I think I think phase two has started. And what I always
saw and I've been saying this for a couple of years now, so this
is not like new but I've always thought that it was going to be in
their interest to make him look like a winner for a certain period of time,
which is what helped him get the nomination, the fact that the charges
galvanized the base, and part of that is he has to look like a
winner. So he was always going to enjoy some good polling. But there
was a certain point in time when think when the switch was going to be
thrown, These cases were going to come up in court, there were going
to be convictions, and there's going to be googabs of political money behind messaging
that not only focuses on the stuff that he's on trial for, and again
and again and again on the January sixth stuff, which which actually does no
matter what the MAGA people think, the January or six stuff is very upsetting
to people in the country. And our friend Jim Garritty has pointed out a
number of times Trump says some crazy ass stuff on that truth social that the
country hasn't heard yet. But I mean, you could, you know,
rob the ads right themselves right about what you know, the crazy stuff that
this guy has said. Yeah, but I guess, I guess. Here's
my My calculation is that usually an a traditional campaign at this point is that
eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen percent undecided in the middle and they just
haven't made up their mind and there, we call them low information voters.
We either we either insult them or sometimes we smell them save the low information
they're just out of it, or we say, no, these are great
and good Americans and they're just not paying attention to this nonsense circus until after
Labor Day. All that stuff that's been true in the past. But it
feels to me that the fourteen to fifteen percent in the middle, maybe it's
more now, I should probably closer to twenty. I hate both of these
guys with an incandescent biblical rage, and so the the election is really going
to be about giving you one extra reason to maybe told your nose and vote
for the guy that you hate a little less. And to me it feels
like, I, I mean, I'm just maybe I'm just I'm using this
as your mind now, my therapist, But I feel like Trump has been
mistreated by a system and it's not okay for me. And it's more not
okay for me than all the other horrible, you know, impotent, irrelevant,
mentally emotionally unfit things there are about Trump, and I don't think that
I'm alone. How much of that rob though, is because the brag case
went first, would you have felt different, maybe if it's in Florida.
Yeah, But on the politics of it, Andy, that's an interesting irony
because, as you've pointed out, the fact that this case, when first,
does taint the others, and in my view, does mean that if
Trump were to win and then to shut down the two federal cases, he
would probably get away with it politically, now constitutionally, in my estimation,
he absolutely should so called get away with it because he's headed the executive branch,
and if the president can't decide what the executive branch does, then we
don't have a democratically elected president. The idea that the Department of Justice and
the FBI and so one of these free floating fourth branches of government is absurd,
But politically there'd be a cost, and the ultimate cost of that would
be, as you say, that he were impeached. But if I were
guessing, and I'm of the view as you said, that Trump can't win,
so I'm not downplaying the damage that this stuff does to him. But
if I were guessing, given that the process of prosecuting Donald Trump has now
been tainted in a way that it has by Alvin Bragg, I could absolutely
see a scenario in which Trump wins, comes in and then says, well,
obviously, I'm shutting down Joe Biden's investigations into me. I'm shutting down
the one where I I'm accused of holding classified documents because he did it and
so did Hillary. That would be his argument. It's not entirely true.
There's an obstruction side of it, but that would be his argument. Most
people don't know that. And I'm shutting down the January sixth stuff because the
Democrats also have spent a lot of time denying elections, including the twenty sixteen
election, and I was targeted for Russia Gate and all of that. Now,
I'm not saying that would be honest. I'm not saying that the Brad
case and these cases are equivalent. I don't think they are. But I
actually suspect that if he'd won, he might get away with that. Yeah.
No, I think that's right. And the other thing that I think,
just to add on to that, that I think if I was wrong
about something in assessing this whole thing, the most wrong I've been has been
about how terrible Biden is. I mean, I just think you can't,
like you watched the clips of what of his performance in France yesterday, and
it seems like I certainly didn't anticipate. I anticipated that he would be a
terrible president and have terrible policies that would hurt the country. But you can't
help but notice, no matter what you think of Trump, that he's operating
in terms of functionality at a much higher level than Biden is. And that's
on display every day. I don't know what the effect of that is going
to be on people raw animal spirits, yes, compared to maybe crazy and
wild and saying strange things, but compared to Biden. We have a day
where we try to figure out whether or not he was trying to sit down
or whether actually he was voiding his bowel. And that's a completely reasonable thing
to perhaps wonder. But you know, you're absolutely right, be fair.
I have that problem too, No, I don't what is correct, And
what you were saying is gregor by people. How people hating January sixth.
I hated January sixth. I wanted everybody who went in there and did something
on a desk, or stole something or walked around, you know, to
face the logical consequence, the legal consequences of what they did. But on
the other hand, what you have is a government that seems to be intent
on taking this Grammar hero walk through there, charging her with parading and putting
her in the can. And at the same time, these are the intangibles.
At the same time the government, and again I'm talking about different branches,
localities, whatever. We'll take somebody who blocks an abortion clinic and put
them in jail for two years, But the people who block the streets or
the highways, protesting oil or Palestine or this or that, or crashing into
a building and occupying it get nothing, nothing whatsoever. Now it's more complex
than that, but that's the feeling that people take away from this. Just
as we're told every single day that inflation is not a problem, groceries actually
aren't more expensive, the economy is doing great, you're not paying more,
when people know and feel that that's just simply not the case. So when
you sense these two tiers of what we're being told for our own good,
which goes against the evidence of our lying eyes, that's where the particulars don't
matter. People don't want to be people even forget what Trump did in the
way last year of COVID completely because this set of stuff we got now isn't
working, and it's lying to us this seemingly more compassment. This guy with
more energy is probably on our side and says the right things about this,
that and the other. And you know, if you want to drill down
to what people feel about particular issues and say, yeah, but I think
at the end it comes down to that same sort of vague. I'm throwing
my lot in with this guy because he's not that guy, and there's something
we can get out of this. I mean, it's same thing we engage
in every four years, I suppose. But that's that's my take and I'm
sticking to it. Yeah. Look, I think it's hard for us to
get in the shoes of the voter that we're talking about because we're immersed in
this stuff all the time, and we're trying to gauge what's the likely behavior
of people who tune into politics shortly before elections, if at all. But
I guess in the end it's going to be what animates them most. And
Trump's best shot is that the the couple of years right before COVID, when
the economy was doing much better and when people, you know, people's day
to day lives and budgets went much further given what they were taking home.
That period of time is not ancient history. It's it's fresh enough that that
people remember it. And I guess the question is, is there something about
Trump who is the most recognizable person in the world, and who's people who's
who's people's attitudes about him are pretty settled. Is there something about him that's
so detestable that it outweighs the the economic factor for those people who really don't
tune in until prior to the election. I don't know. Part of the
part of my problem with both these guys is they seem really small. They
seem much smaller than the job, and the world seems much more big and
complicated than either of these two men can wrap around their head. For whatever
reason, one is adult and the other is preoccupied with his own weird neuroses.
Have we ever been in this position, I mean, in your life?
Have we ever been in a position where where, I mean, I
know, people have always said, listen, I would vote for you know,
a rock over they have a guy, But have we ever really been
in a position where there's that much consensus among the voter? It seems like
Poles definitely say that, and that little consensus in our national sort of media
organs. I mean, we all know who everybody in Fox Music can vote
for. We all know who everybody MSNBC's going to vote for. We all
know who everybody in New York Times is going to vote for. But there
are a bunch of people in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Georgia and Virginia and Arizona
and Nevada who I hate both these guys. Well, this seems almost worse.
If you want some numbers, I have some numbers. Yeah, But
this is the first time in the history of polling that both candidates have been
disliked by the public, that both candidates have elicited the response I wish that
guy weren't running. That's one number. Second number, seventy eight to eighty
five percent of Americans think Joe Biden's too old to be president. So,
for reference, rob the approval rating of Social Security, the most popular program
in America, is seventy six percent. So the contention third rail of American
politics, by the way, right, So the contention that Joe Biden is
too old to be president is agreed upon by more people than favor social security.
If you go back in time, the last presidential candidate who even registered
on the scale in that way was Bob Dole in nineteen ninety six, and
a number of Americans who thought he was too old to be president was right
before that. The last time anyone worried about it was Franklin Rosevelt nineteen forty
four. Now this is a bit difficult to pause because we didn't have polling
in quite the same way. Also, the press covered up a lot of
it, and we're in the middle of World War Two, and so people
were reluctant to say it out loud, but there was it seems some worry
about his being too old, although not enough to kick him out of the
White House is extraordinary. And then with Trump, you've got all the new
bits. I mean, he is a convicted fell and I think he was
railroaded in that case, but he is one that's never happened before. But
Trump is in an unusual position in that he's actually now fondly remembered by about
fifty five to fifty six percent of the country. They like it. They
don't like him, but they liked it when he was president. They think
to go back well, they think that America, and I'll say the America
that coincided with his being president, and it's important to say that because presidents
are on avatars or popes, but the America that coincided with his being president,
and they seem to have forgotten that COVID was part of that was good.
We were at peace, and we were prosperous, and one and a
half percent inflation and so on. These are all really unusual things. And
then the final point is we've actually not since the late nineteenth century ever had
a president who won then lost in the run again. So the whole thing,
as you say, is just absolutely bizarre. But to me, the
number that just blows my mind is that Biden is tool and if you push
people on it, a majority of them think he'll die in a second term.
Yeah, it's not just that they think that he's too old, that's
a supermajority right up in the seventies. But a majority think that he'll die
or have to step down because he's infirm. No one has ever thought that
of a president in the modern era, except perhaps FDR and very weird circumstances.
No one has ever thought that before. And we just don't know what
they're going to do when they do. Think it so andy, here's my
question, and I know you gotta run, but I so in times like
the political volatility, we've been living through a very volatile period about thirty years.
Right, house changes hands all the time, didn't do it for fifty
years, and then suddenly it did it every two practically, And that's okay,
Right, we're America. We know we used to kind of crazy,
you know, smash mouth politics too. Like everybody says, you know,
Trump's outrageous, but like, I don't know. Those nineteenth century pamphlets were
pretty mean too, okay, But we always had a judiciary that was kind
of the backstop. It's like, well, you know, you know most
Americans think, okay, yeah, I know, they're unelected nine judges and
black negliges and that's kind of weird. But ah, I'm glad they're there.
Like that's our house of lords in a way. Right. What happens
to us when we don't have that faith brings us back to the beginning of
the conversation and why people are so despondent last week. I think rob that
the judiciary hasn't changed so much as prosecutorial discretion, and the old ground rules
about like don't do to the other side what you don't want to have done
to you have changed. I mean, yes, there is more of a
sense because of the way the law schools have been through the last century that
the law is a tool for implementing you know, progressive social change, and
judges are more apt to push that. Although the Supreme Court, the post
Scalia Supreme Court, has imposed a discipline on the judiciary that didn't exist in
the nineteen fifties, sixties and seventies, and that's been a really good thing.
But I think in the legal culture that the terrible thing that's happened is,
you know, these weren't this wasn't stuff that was written down, but
there were norms about who you charged and under what circumstances. You know,
Bill Barr talks about, you know how no one's above the law, but
if you're going to prosecute a president, it's got to be what he calls
a meat and potatoes crime, right, one that everybody can understand, they
can wrap their brain around, and importantly they unders they can understand that if
I did this, I would be prosecuted for this, and whatever a meat
and potatoes crime is. This thing that happened in Manhattan last week is the
opposite of that. It was like something that was bespoke for for Trump.
Well, it was a possible burger, it was lab growing. You could
say yeah, but I don't. I would just say I don't think it's
I don't think that it's so much that the judiciary is slipping because there's still
decent checks on the judiciary. What there's not checks on because Congress can't rain
this in anymore. And the administrative state, I think causes Congress's muscles to
atrophy for what it for, what we need it there for, which is
to rain in executive excess. And therefore you now have rampant executive exc and
Charlie and I talked about this yesterday. But I think the other thing we
need to come to grips with is philosophically progressive simply think it's legitimate and fine
to use the powers at their disposal to push the ball up the field for
their cause, including to to punish their political enemies. And that's a again,
that's a cultural thing more than a legal thing. Well, what's going
to happen is they'll probably say we need a Supreme Court justice from every state
in the Union, and the same people who want to abolish the Senate because
it's you know, puts New York at the same level it is North Dakota
will be perfectly fine with this idea, and we'll have fifty Supreme Court justices
voting on whether or not something is or is not constitutional. Can't wait anyway,
can't wait till we have you on next time, Andy, although I'm
sure it'll be after a slew of bad news, but you know, maybe
of the is something, something that will happen which is legally good, happens
and moveless, and we'll have you on. Then we'll just all be happy
and yeah, holy hands and singing tunes like the rabbits in a Disney cartoon
from nineteen thirty four. So thanks for joining us, Andy. We'll see
you on television, on the web, here there and otherwise. And take
it easy, my friend. Thanks guys, have a great weekend, you
too, See you soon. Well, we're about to leave here, but
before we do, because we don't want to go on and on, we
could lots to talk about this. Love. The sounds of our own voices.
You can't shut us up, but we should probably leave by noting that
we had a D Day anniversary, and I wondered if you guys had any
thoughts anything that My contribution to this, which of course should be minimal because
I had nothing to do with it except for living in the wonderful world that
was granted and gifted to us by these men, was to explain why in
World War Two movies and cartoons and in the movie The Longest Day, you
hear this note bump bum bump bum, you hear this motif bump bump bump
bum. What does it mean? How is that tied to the culture at
the time, and when are we going to forget it? Because people are
going to watch that movie twenty thirty years from now and will not immediately grasp
why that rhythm bump bump bum appears in the movie. Anyway, I'll have
to listen to my dinner podcast coming on Saturday to Sunday in order to figure
that out. If you don't already know what, you would probably do so
briefly, I don't thoughts, you don't know, well, I'm not going
to say here, you'll have to listen to That was a great tease.
Yeah, Yeah, that's me as I So question is will we ever forget
it? Will we ever forget what it means? No, you're gonna have
to have somebody completely. You'll have to have somebody to explain it. It's
it's you know, there are these things that the culture that everybody knows,
and then everybody who knew them knows them eyes And I've been trying to research.
For example, there's a radio show that was in the in the US
and the forties late or late stages of the war called Victory FOB, and
the ads seem to assume that everybody knew what FOB stood for. I don't.
I had to research, and I had to figure out by thinking backwards,
it's some sort of nautical shipping term that everybody got at the time.
And all of these, you know, the words, the phrases, the
references, the acronyms, the little little yeah deals of history, all of
that I've said over and over. I would give anything, not to find
a lost manuscript from the twenties, thirties and forties, not to find a
lost Therber story, you know, or something like that. I would just
like to know kind of what all the gum tasted like what the theaters smelled
like when you walked into them, what an automat smelled like, actually,
when you did with the street. You know, the sound of the streets
in the nineteen twenties, the particular timber of the car horns. We don't
know the sound of a gramophone spilling out of a window in radio, all
of that stuff. Unless somebody writes it down and nails it down. It's
very hard to rebuild history from that. So we're left with the bones.
We're always left with the bones, and there's out History is full everyday life
is full of like the little tiny fishbones you were always afraid of catching in
your throat when you were a kid. That made up the body. The
corpus of the times. We don't know them, so you have to remember,
and you have to research, and you have to keep reminding people.
Anyway. Yeah, I also think the physicality of it too, just the
idea that you had to take all these people, You had to land them
on a beach in a boat. You had to invent and then then and
they had to feed them. You had to make sure that they could be
taken care of a place to sleep. That night. You had to make
sure that we had confused the enemy enough so they weren't entirely sure where we
were going to land. They knew we were going to land. There's nowhere
right the constellation of efforts and sheer brain power that had to go into it
before the Brown power before then, it all came down to the individual acts
of bravery by individual young men who were, most of them born thousands of
miles away. It's just kind of astonishing, it is to think of what
what we're capable of doing when we believe that there's nothing else, that there's
nothing else to be done, right, Logistics Logistics is is yeah, right?
Imagine if you were the guys who were tasked with working on the dummy
army that they were setting up so that they thought that they were coming over
at KLA, how would you feel about that? How would you feel having
been there done your part. Somebody pointed out yesterday, you know, had
tip to the guys who knocked over Rome twenty four hours before D Day.
You know, he had a day in the sun of getting into Rome before
the attention shift. And again, I was looking at a newspaper a few
days after the after D day, because it was a touch and go fraught
thing. I mean it was in retrospect we think, well, they landed
and they won. Now they had to fight. And there were newsreels that
were playing twenty four to seven downtown that the guy could walk out of his
flophouse at three o'clock in the morning with a snoot full and find himself sprawled
in a theater in the middle of the you know, the of a June
day watching the war on the big screen days after it had happened. Yeah,
it just a fast time. I knew we got a run back.
Can I just so recovering because had one interesting story. A Lionel chet one
great great writer and director, did a great movie called Hanoi. Hilton,
wonderful guy. He tells a really funny story. He was pitching a World
War two movie once to a room full of studio execs, and it's about
a Canadian regiment on D Day and they had to evade the heavily fortified German
some German fort on the coast and it was all a diversion to Nazi forces
away from the actual invasion at Omaha Beach. So it was a suicide mission.
But it was a crucial suicide mission, and everyone on that boat knew
it. They knew that this mission was designed to result in catastrophic actual and
that they were not going to probably be able to take that fort, and
they were not expected to, and they still did it. And I've heard
him give this pitch. The pitch is insane. I mean, you're leaning
forward. It is. If you're not in tears at the end of this,
I'm telling you, maybe fifteen sixteen seventy minute pitch, you're not alive.
It's amazing. It's a crazy story. So he pitches this thing and
he winds it up, and the executives are like, oh, we love
this, we love this. But one question, who's the enemy here?
And chat On's like, well, you know it's Hitler, right, Like,
oh yeah, obviously Hitler, Yes, yes, yes, But who's
the real enemy, because what they wanted was him to say, well,
it's obviously the bloodthirsty American General Dwight Eisenhower who was sending these poor Canadians to
die. But like, but it's it's Hitler, that's all. It's just
the Hitler is not That's it. It's really simple. They're they're the enemy,
and we try to kill them, and it's more complicated than you think,
and there's this ex act of bravery that's and they didn't get it.
They couldn't accept the fact that there wasn't a real enemy. So you know,
we started we started out the podcast talking about Disney movies. Charles,
did you watch Boys in the Boat? Yes, I've had the feeling.
We've talked about this. I think we did. Dejah. Oh. I
love the fact that it's such it's such a simple throwback of a movie that
Hitler is in it, and they make it feel mad in the way,
in the way the movies of the forties and the cartoons used to do.
I just loved it, and people in the theater loved it too. It's
like, yeah, we hate that guy and we're making them out where,
we're pissing them off because we're yank and we're good at this, which reminds
me. Will end with this, Charles. The United States beat Pakistan at
cricket. Yes, And from what I understand, our team isn't even professional
cricketers now. They're all Silicon Valley, the guys who like who like to
think. And I've watched cricket. I've sat down with the cricket you know,
enthusiast, and who's who's guided me through all of these things in these
tickets that'll last for six weeks. So I'm I'm really happy that the Yanks
that that we did it, and you must be happy as well, this
being your adopted in beloved country. Absolutely, I do love cricket. I
love baseball as well. I watch a lot more baseball. I've watched the
Yankees beat up on the Minnesota Twins. Incidentally, James, in the last
few days, well, we've enjoyed talking to you that podcast number six hundred
and ninety five in Minneapolis, home of the Twins. My spirit having drained
now completely from my existence and my enthusiasm gone for the podcast. I must
yes, Charles, I know, I know, I know you're right,
go on, go on, but you would lie. I do love cricket.
I mean, this is a remarkable thing is that cricket is a Victorian
game, which is one reason it's so slow. As you say, test
cricket can take twenty five days of playing and still be a tie, which
is one reason it didn't take in America. But it's not just a Victorian
game. It's an imperial game. And so if you look through the list,
it's Pakistan, India, the west is Australia, New Zealand, England.
You know, it is a Victorian British empire. And so it's very
jarring to see on a piece of paper the United States beat Pakistan at cricket.
No, this is crossing the streets. This is wrong, this is
mad libs. But it did happen, which is really great in America,
but I think it must be intensely embarrassing in Pakistan, because the Americans are
all celebrating ironically, they're all saying, ah, We're the great Americans.
Whatever we do, we win. But in Pakistan, where this is an
enormously popular sport, it must be to be driving people a dispat the tender
feelings of the people of that nation are not exactly prime concerns for me.
At this point. I'm going to live in our cultural imperialism here and our
willingness to just take this on as a lark and beat them. That's great.
Who cares? Yay go usp All right? As I said, this
was Podcast six to ninety five. We thank you very much for listening.
We thank Anny McCarthy. We thank Luman for sponsoring this. Support them and
you support us. We advise everybody to go to ricochet dot com and take
a look and join so you can get to the member feed. What's that
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it's the community been looking for all your days on the web, the same
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better than Twitter, people you know, friends you meet. I love it.
I'm handing there this afternoon. I'll be there tomorrow on Saturday to discuss
old time radio and songs of the weekend and the rest of the things.
Because it's not all politics. Life isn't all politics as a matter of that's
for sure. Most of life is not. And you were all the happier
for it. Thanks everybody, Thank you Rob, thank you Charlie. And
we'll see everybody in the comments, said Ricochet four point zero. Next week,
Fellas Ricochet join the conversation.