He never mentioned that I was going to be on the Pack podcast with him. With you, guys, it's good you keep him dark. Ask not what your country can do for you, Ask what you can do for your country. Mister garbach Off, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Rob Long and John You sitting in for Peter Robinson and James Lilacs. And today we talk about the Trump trial and more so, let's save ourselves a podcast. Since case is highly a constitutional it's resigned over by a very conflicted judge. Conflicted like I've never seen before. He refuses to take himself off the gates that it should be a miscub. Imagine what we can do next? All more years, oh more years. Welcome everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number six hundred and ninety one, and if you addle those numbers up you get the sum of sixteen I believe, which means nothing. So we're off to a great start. I'm James Lelex here in Minneapolis, beautiful, gorgeous, blue spring day, and I'm joined by Rob Law. Rob Law, that's right, me in grim and grimey Gotham. No, that's wrong. New York is beautiful in the spring and John and John you who is beautiful all year round. Welcome John, thank you. I am indeed, and I'm coming coming to you. Not from California. I escaped the Insane Asylum for a week, and I'm in Austin, Texas this week. We'll asked Peter Robinson and I spent the week together here. But Austin, of course, is a little bit of California in the heart in Texas itself, isn't it? Or is are there certain Texan elements that still predominate in a blue city? Oh? Come on, it's such a sad want to be for a place like Berkeley or Venice Peach. Yeah, it's too clean and orderly here. It's just it's like it's a disney Land version of Berkeley. There you go, there you go, Yeah, which is actually better. Actually the Distalan version of a lot of things is better exactly. And I'm coming to actually from the Karl Rove Memorial Studio. He lives there. I got a whiteboard out here and everything really. Uh well, good for Karl, good for you, good for all of us. Let's go straight to the news. Oh where did we get? Is it just me? Or I feel like I feel like J six was two weeks ago, and also that Biden has been president forever. It's really weird. It's very strange. And here we are now in the Trump trial going on. I was going up the stairs to get a cup of coffee here at the World Headquarters, and it was it was interesting. The Fox feed on the television was all about the denial of arms to Israel. The CNN feed was all about Stormy Daniel. Texts are being read in open court. I'm I'm profoundly indifferent to this particular trial. But since we get an actual lawyer guy with us here, uh, walk us through how you think this is going so far? John? John would be the actual lawyer guy. Yes, oh, I thought it was going to be Rob, but I campell well, you know, I I moonlight his lawyer. It's actually really easy. I've found in a few years Rob is going to be a pastor, a lawyer, a new surgeon, right, probably an astronaut. But exactly the same thing I found that lawyers say thing if you said the right phrases like well that in yours to you, that in yours, the that it doesn't obtain and abures, you find just just different verbs for the same stuff. These these are, these are no, these are my dinner time conversations with my wife, who is, oh yeah, and you know, and I'll be I'll look up from my from my pork jop and say, well, they don't have standing, you know, and we're actually you're talking about the neighbor who put down some sawd and encroaches on our part of the lawn. But anyway, so I can't you know, I can't look up from a pork shop in California because those are illegal unless they have free range. Right. If I started to look up from the pork shop and I look out the gaze out on my class and I see young, youthful Rob Long's face in there, I promise I will retire that very day. I will take emeritith status, take my Califry pension, and get the hell out. You know, you would be wise to do that before we get to before we to talk about but go ahead, yes, okay, let me let me talk about the trial. So uh so far right, we have not seen any facts presented in the Storm McDaniels case which have any material relevance to what he's charged with. And that's what you always do when you're weak on the law. If you're right, they say, if you're weak on the law, pound the facts, and that's what the DA is doing. Of course, they also say, if you're weak on the facts, pound the law, and if you're weak on both, pound the table. And that's coming next. Because so far you may not even remember that Trump's being charged with essentially a deliberate effort to defraud the people of New York by hiding his payments to Stormy Daniels and his bookkeeping, which was an effort, according to DA, to corrupt the twenty sixteen election. That's what they said in their opening statement. Whether Donald Trump actually had sex with Stormy Daniels, and what kind of hair, what kind of shampoo he uses, and after shavy uses, and what that whole night back in two thousand and sixty seven was about isn't really relevant? Thank god. Yeah, those are the last images I wanted rattling around my head. By the way, my mistake glanced at the newspaper. Oh my god, I don't want to know this, so min here's my question, John, is this is this a specifically egregious, unique use of the legal system to harass somebody or are we just sometimes happens with this stuff? Are we just looking it something happening to a high profile person that actually happens a lot and we should be more concerned about It does feel like prosecutorial whatever overstep. It does feel like sort of a character attack. It does. I mean, paying somebody hush money is not illegal. But my question sometimes we hear that the stories, we think, oh, they're just going after Trump, right, which is true, right? But could this be happening in courtrooms across America and we just don't know it to ordinary people who are just now in the crosshairs of a prosecutor. That is a great question, and that is the real threat of that could come out of all of this to our system of institutions and laws. So Trump, I think one reason why this hasn't hurt Trump in the polls is because maybe he's expressing a lot of the frustration people have with the justice system, the sense that prosecutors are out there picking people to go after because they just don't like them. If they are prosecutors are doing that, that is a violation of the duty of prosecutor. The greatest prosecutor, at least the person put this best in words, was Robert Jackson, who was FDR's lawyer, who became Attorney General and then became a great justice. He's a wonderful writer. He's the one who came up with the phrase the Constitution is not a suicide pact, for example. And so he said, as prosecutors, we do not prosecute people for being bad people. We don't prosecute the man. We prosecute the crime. We prosecute the conduct. And what you're seeing in the trial now is a violation of that fundamental principle of being a prosecutor. What Bragg is doing is dragging in all this in dragging him through the Muddes Stormy Daniels, because he wants to persuade the jury that Donald Trump is a bad man. He should be punished for something, even if it may not be the crimes that he's being charged with. Now, this is something prosecutor are not supposed to do. But you hear stories about this off and on, like al Capone, right being prosecuted for tax evasion. You know, right, that was the idea, get them mafia, even if they spit in the street, prosecute them for that, because we just have to go after them. That's actually an abuse of what prosecutors are supposed to be doing. And the reason why is because and this is another thing Trump is, you know, in forming the American people about something that lawyers knows that. As you pointed out, rob prosecutors have enormous discretion, yeah, and picking the cases they go after, and they're supposed to do it in the public interest. But what should be afraid of is that becomes like what happens in the Soviet Union. You know, remember a Beria Stalin's secret service chief said show me the man, and I'll show you the crime. And we're you know, starting to sound something like that. But that's the threat of all this too, that if Trump, in attacking these prosecutions, also undermines public faith in the justice system, then our law enforcement system can't work because, believe it or not, it depends on voluntary cooperation from the public. The public are the witnesses. The public are the ones who identify the crimes. They are the ones who report it to the police and the prosecutors. If the public doesn't support what prosecutors and police are doing, then our system can't work. In the end, well, I can't see Donald Trump tearing down an institution or something just to benefit him. So does something. But I would add that if there is, if there is a lack of faith in these days, it might come from the actions or the inactions of the prosecutors themselves. In every major city, we've got prosecutors who seem to say, well, okay, all right, seven felonaise, you know, okay, well you can pleate it all. Donal'll give you an ankle brick bracelet and out you go. I don't think it's Donald Trump that's going to reduce the credibility of the institutions. I think it's the actions of the institutions themselves. And Trump is just you know, revelatory in that respect. But John, Rob, do you think that the end result of this is going to be to cause indifference in the public to subsequent legal matters. I mean, this is the one they sort of open up and start with, kind of this is the one that's dominating the field, and people looking at this and you know, you mean in regards as regards Trump, Yeah, you know, they see one after the other, do it. Yeah, Well, what's going on actually is Trump has the virtue of his enemies going crazy to get them because this might be the only trial that gets to a verdict before the election. And this is by far the weakest, shabbiest one. I mean, the crimes are I mean, this should be overturned on appeal, but it would take time for it to get up on appeal. But look what's going on the other ones you've got, right, the one involved classified documents, which was just announced will probably go past the election, and that was sort of beclouded because then it turned out lots of people were taking their classified documents home, including Joe Biden. And then you had the one in Georgia, right, that which I call I think I call it with you guys before I call it the real prosecutors of Atlanta, where it's just imploded. That was also an outrageous charge. Right, the president's re election campaign is actually an organized crime operation. Right, That's what Fanny Willis claimed. And look that that one is the news there is The Georgia Appelscourt just said they are going to review whether Fanny Willis should be involved and has to accuse her or has to recuse herself. If they find she has to accuse herself, that's going to send it to a new prosecutor who could very well drop it. So the only and I've always thought we've discussed as before, the only real case that's important is prosecuting Donald Trump for insurrection on January sixth. That's the one that really matters. They've screwed that one up too. That's why I'm sitting at the Supreme Court right now on whether there's immunity for a president. I expect Trump to lose that one, but then he'll go back and he has the right to attack these charges. A newsflash, Jack Smith didn't charge Trump with insurrection. He charged him with obstructing justice by destroying documents. He charged him with trying to defraud the United States. He charged them with taking away all our voting rights by eliminating our vote for president. I don't know if you felt your voting rights go up and smoke on twenty twenty. I didn't. But none of those charges I think actually is gonna fly. So if that's the case, then you're right, James. This will be the only trial that reaches a verdict and will stick in the public's mind and is so shabbily done and so weak on the law that right it might it might benefit Trump actually that this is the case. But I guess so two questions. One sort of go back to just the ordinary citizen versus famous person ordinary citizen. I mean, I remember during the Clinton scandal and his impeachment for perjury, one of the arguments people made in defensive Clinton were saying, hey, okay, yeah, perjury in a civil case that involves a sexual romantic matter is not it's not that bad, and we don't prosecute people for it if most they get fined. And then people said no, no, here are the list of five people or ten people that the under the Clinton Department of Justice have been prosecuted. Some of them have done time, right, And so it's sort of interesting, Okay, well, citizens and the president should have the same laws, right. M So one of my fears is that we're just discovering this kind of abuse and there are ordinary people we've never heard of who have been suffering utter it for a while. The second thing is to what extent are these things going to be valuable? I seem to be the immunity case by the Supreme Court is a valuable case to bring. It's an interesting case to be decided. It is not Trump specific it actually has wider rippling implications for a president. And the second thing would be the insurrection case, which said, which you say is not has not been brought to what extent can a president who loses reelection complain and demand redress in some way? Right? I mean, even if you are Jack Smith and you and you have this, you have this urge to win. It seems like that would be a really interesting case to have heard and tried and and taking the Supreme Court. Right, we're going to change You're you're trying to push me out of my job because you just asked a poor student here a tripartheid question. Yes exactly, I'm like writing down furiously sub section three E questions Jesus, job, Jesus that pity. So are the questions too hard for you? John? So look the fundamental point I agree with. Uh. The only case it's important legally is a January sixth case. And you identified two reasons why it's the most important issue. One is, it's not just about Donald Trump. It creates incentives for all future presidents. Right, anything the Supreme Court says now about immunity, it's going to change the way future presidents act. And you could hear them talking about in oral argument. They said, well, if we guive immunity, won't presidents go off the reservation without any kind of consideration for the laws. On the other hand, if you don't give him enough of me unity, will presidents be risk averse? Will they be worrying about being sued every time they have to make a tough decision like whether to fire off a drone? Will they worry about being prosecuted for a killing innocent civilians who are nearby the military target. That is out of all this, that's the most point. The other issue that's extremely important, which you also put your finger on, is even if there's immunity or not, everyone, even Trump's lawyer conceded, and I'm sure Trump wasn't listening, so he didn't know his lawyer conceded this. Actually, Trump's lawyer didn't say presidents have absolute immunity. He said presidents only have immunity for their official actions. And so what's an unofficial action when you're president? Almost by definition, it's got to be things you do to run for reelection, right, because you're not supposed to use the power of your office to guarantee your incumbency. So that's a really important question, is, as you said, Rob, what things did Donald Trump do between the election and January sixth that were not public We're not governmental actions, but for him as a private citizen that led to some kind of insurrection or sedition. And then shouldn't he be in the same position as you know, the guy with the Viking had who I assume is a Minnesota resident and got lost on his way to the football stadium. Excuse above that giant horn, that whatever, irritating giants, and then all those five hundred people who are prosecuted. Shouldn't Trump be treated the same as that, because he's got no special immunity if that electional activity to look at this crowd, Well, did you see any picture of guy in Philadelphia? He goes, scared, No, you did not, Phildelp. He goes, you're pushing the Vikings fan in front of the cameras. Here's another Here's another point that is he does not hold up to intellectual scrutiny at all as a matter of fact, and connects two disparate things that really ought not to be linked. But yet we live in a society where images count, where we see things in broad terms, ergo. We saw the as you mentioned j six, the qunon Shannon, walking through Howling. We saw the people breaking windows, taking things, and the rest of it. Parading. We saw parading, and we have seen it. A stern responds to it. And people going to jail, lots of people going to jail. I have no problem really with people who were who broke into the capitol and did bad things going to jail. I hate that stuff. I hate it. But at the same time, we have seen across the country massive civil disobedience and fights with police and clashes and destruction of government buildings and all sorts of defacing over what does the issue even matter? But we know that we've seen it, and we're pretty much sure that none of the people involved in that, even the people that are arrested, are going to go down into the Gray Bar hotel, and just about everybody, if they're honest, knows that if all of those campus that have been taken over by clean cut young men with tiki torches and khaki pants and mega hats, that this would be a completely different situation, That there would not be the romanticism attached to youthful rebellion. But there practice, those kids with the tiki torches were saying essentially the same thing, right, right, It was just kind of different, but for but for the wrong reason. I mean, that's the great thing. That's the wonderful thing about these protest is that if you let them go long enough, eventually they slip up and they start saying June instead of Zionist. And you're seeing it all over the place. Now there's a guy on Twitter who's circulating a list of Zionist writers, so everybody can know who's on the list and tick them off accordingly. And uh, you know, yeah, they're they're they're getting around to that point now. But anyway, in terms of perception and visuals, everyone kind of kind of kind of knows this right that that they're the protesters and the like are getting a pass, you know, because it's they're on the kind of sort of right side of history, or at least they're they're following it up. So I mean, I don't know what impact that has on the on the election either. But when you bring I'm just saying this because John, when you talk about JA six and all the rest, it seems like an utter irrelevance he compared to the spasms that we've seen since and probably will see this summer when we have the conventions. Hasn't that hasn't what we've seen this last I guess month now on our campuses neutralized the idea that Trump is the agent of chaos now. I mean it just people are forgetting about the chaos of January sixth and the video when you have these campuses now erupting, and course before that you had the border crisis. I think it's hard now for the Democrats to attack Trump or introducing chaos, so and he can blame them for BLM and he can blame from the border. And now I think one other just side note about these trials is that I think it's again unintentionally good for Trump, and that because of the gag order and because he's sitting in the courtroom all day, he can't see anything stupid, Like he's like, all he's doing is coming out at the end of the trial attacking Biden for cutting off into Israel and high inflation. He only has about thirty seconds and then he disappears. This is like, maybe this's why it's been good for him, But right, all he has to do is say Biden is the one under whom the world has beingcome chaotic. It's just like nineteen sixty eight again, or it's like nineteen eighty again. The gig order is his version of campaigning from the basement right, and it's been successful for him so far. Right. But isn't it possible. I mean, I'm giving you another theory here that the even people who don't like Trump so a bunch of there's a bunch of potential Trump voters out there. He needs more people to vote for him. The voted from last time, right, and so people voted from last time you like him, they'renna vote forlimp. And the people who don't like him but are very pro Israel are very angry at Joe Biden right now. So maybe they're gonna turn to Trump and say, well, you know, Trump is a better friend to Israel than Joe Biden's. That's possible too. But isn't there a third section of people who are sort of American civil libertarian types who think we need to show the assorted mostly progressive, mostly Democrat, mostly partisan prosecutors and DOJ employees that they can't pick our president for us. That to me, I am not, as you know, a Trump fan or a Trump supporter in any way, but that is to me an important crucial signal to sin that we know these people sort of govern and administrate the justice system with our consent. But you know, I don't know. I mean, as you know, I'm a brilliant legal mind on my own, but I can't possibly fathom these arguments and make these decisions. I have to trust them to do the best job they can, in the best judgment they can, following the law. And it does seem to me that in and a lot of places they're not doing that. And if I'm an American citizen, that makes me mad. I might even just cut off my nose, spite my face and say, you don't like the guy, fine, I'm voting for him, and I'm voting for him even though I know he's mentally and emotionally unfit, even though I know he's unstable, even though I know he's not going to do any of the things he says it's going to do because he didn't do them four years ago. But I want to prove I want to prove a point to you, which is that you can't tell me who I get to vote for John while you break down and metabolize the complex carbohydrates of Rob's question there, I'd like to remind everybody else that complex caybro hydrates and metabolism are things that affect your health, and I'm here to tell you about Lumen. Yes, Luhman, you're asking what is Lumen. 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Use the coupon code ricochet checkout for one hundred dollars off and we thank the LUMAN for sponsoring this the Ricochet Podcast. Fantastic. Thank you. James did my best. All right, John, question John, John answers, Stop. I can't take the fifth against you, John. Yeah, So I would put it a little differently. I don't know how many people would vote on principle. I agree with you on the principal Rob that what you're seeing here is a replacement of the political process with the law. The laws now taking over who gets to be on the ballot or not, which used to be the job of primaries and the general election. But I read it a little differently if I were Trump anyway, if I were Republicans, this is how I would phrase the argument, is that the reason why the Supreme Court's involved, the reason why all these courts are the reason why the legal system is taking over, is because of Joe Biden's failure of statesmanship. It's Joe Biden who's decided to unleash the Justice Department on Trump. Now it's the White House that's been coordinating with these DA's. Apparently we're starting to learn to bring chart criminal charges. In the past, presidents would say, Okay, you know, we could prosecute former presidence. I'm sure Trump's not the only president who could be prosecuted. I mean, you got to read Lynden the biography Lyndon Johnson, that's going on with Robert Carrow, and it's like it's like, as a prosecutor, like there's one, there's another one, there's one we could have got, right, But presidents said, let's put even Richard Nixon put LBJ behind him, and Jerry Ford put Nixon behind him and said, we're not going to spend the presidency really relitigating the past. We've got to move forward, make decisions now on behalf of the American people on our issues that are facing us now. And Biden doesn't have the leadership to do that. Right, that vacuum of leadership is what lets the legal system fill in. If the politicians don't show statesmanship, then what happens is the legal system will fill the gap, and the legal system is worse because we go to extremes. Right, it's either Trump has immunity. Trump has no immunity. There's no compromise in the legal system the way the political system can generate a compromise. And look, even Trump, for all his faults, he showed this kind of statesmanship. Remember he didn't prosecute Hillary Clinton, right, even though his main campaigns on was locker up. I think every president obeyed this idea, and it was just stays there's nothing constitutionally that stopped them from prosecuting their predecessors. And Biden was the one who showed failure. And now it's going to unleash possibly this tip for tat retaliation now that we're going to have to live with every presidency going forward. Have we ever had that before? I mean, it does seem like American politics for at least seventy years there in the nineteenth century, late eighteenth nineteenth century was incredibly bitter and personal and evolved all sorts of things. But did it ever really? I guess we didn't have this kind of society, this sort of retigious society, thanks to all the lawyers we have now, But we had personal stuff, nasty stuff, and sort of legal vote tampering and all sorts of stuff like that, But I don't think we ever had this horizon, unbroken horizon in the future of you know, the president's lawyers and the vice residents lawyers and the challengers lawyers deciding who's going to be the president, which is what it seems like to me. Yeah, I agree, Rob, that hasn't happened before in our history. The only thing that was close was nineteen seventy six, I mean, nineteen seventy four to seventy six under Ford, right right, Ford could have allowed the prosecution of Nixon to go forward. Historians say, now Ford may well have been re elected if he had done that right, right and steady. Pardon Nixon on these grounds, get it behind us, close the chapter on that, and let's the nation, let's go forward. He barely lost his seventy six election, and it looks like it was because of Nixon's the pardon of Nixon. But that's the I think the time we came closest before. But you're right, in the nineteenth century we had vicious politics, just we're more partisan, more polemical than now. But they never resorted to this idea of I'm going after my predecess. We did not even like Lincoln did not even prosecute Jeffery S. Davis, Right, right, right, Maybe it's just the last gasp of this generation. And then when we clear the decks and in and and and a new generation arises, they will be so disgusted with this, this tenant, the tendencies that have come to define the previous political generation, that they will endeavor to do something new. I mean, really, if you look at this has got to be the last gap, because people are looking at the situation and saying, well, we got Biden, it's been around forever. We got Trump, who's been around culturally forever, and people are casting their eyes about for something new, and what do they give us? A Kennedy just just to complete the fact that we utterly run out of mom in his head. These guys in your baby boom generation that have ruined the country yet again, and you're still hanging on with your finger nails about the fall off. I am ex I am not a boomer. I'm a boomer, and I have I have absolutely nothing in common with the boomers that came before me. I am a late boomer, and I so I regard their culture as an anthema. I don't regard it as mine at all, and I don't like to be lumped together with those people. But that said, Rob has to go and so right, so if you'd like to Rob ask another you know forty seven you know minut question, it's a part question. I can I could I drop off right as John's trying to tempt me to answer it, right, I would say this, all right, you're gonna do it. You all is make lawyers. That's your job. Yes, I get paid handsomely to make, to reproduce, to make lawyers. Do we need all those lawyers? I mean, are you? I ask, are you doing a good job? I got a great story. I got a great story for you. And now since you're leaving, you can't interrupt me. This's just for the first time ever, this is awesome. No. So, Actually, when I got into Yell Law School as a senior in college, I went to the great sociologist Daniel Bell. I don't know, people don't remember who this guy is. He might have been the great last of the great big Idea of sociologists. He's the one in the nineteen sixties coined the term post industrial society because in nineteen sixty he wrote a book saying information is going to be the product the good for the economy, not manufacturing. And this guy wrote this in nineteen six. He foresaw the future. It was amazing. So I went to him, just like Rob and I said, you know, Professor Bell, I just got into law school. Should I go. Remember this is the time when Japan's eating our lunch. You know, Japan has almost no lawyers that are kicking our body economically. Shouldn't our society shift more lawyers to more productive capacities. And this is what Belle said. I've remembered it ever since, and damn if he isn't right. He said, no, we need more lawyers. Actually, America will prevail because of the lawyers. And I said, that's crazy, Professor Bell, nobody thinks that. He says, because if information and content are the future products, and they're so easy to steal, right, you can copy any book, just copy it and steal it. He said, the only societies that will actually dozoom ahead and an information economy are the ones that respect property rights over ideas. And he said the people who do that are lawyers, because otherwise nothing prevents, you know, some guy in China from stealing all of Rob's. You know, screenplays are as TV shows. But if you have a legal system that rewards investment and work in ideas intellectual property, then we will prevail. And he was he said this to me in nineteen eighty nine, so that if he wasn't that's how you look at yourself in the mirror every morning. Interesting in the way I would say that the reason we need lawyers is because the other guy has a lawyer, and that is not a reason to have a lawyer. Yeah, I mean yes, bye, see you later, good luck, go go forth and do great things. I mean, yeah, John, I see your point there. We need the good people. But you know, first of all, a it's done diddly all when it comes to China, which has managed to steal vast amounts of IP. And secondly, I would I would, I have no idea, but I would suspect that the number of people who are indeed imbued with a spirit of justice for maintenance of intellectual property rights are probably out numbered about ten to one by the people who are going to sue a website because there's a mistake in the alt text code that violates the ADA. In other words, a parasitical class you know, exists within this virtuous and I'm like, I say, I'm married to a lawyer. I know what she does. She does great work, and she does and she works on behalf of good things. But an overabundance leads to a lot of people casting about for something to do, and something to do turns out to be something to sue. So I'm kind of, you know, on the fence about that. Yeah. No, we know all those stories about plaintiff's lawyers who are going into like McDonald's and singing about the coffee being too hot, right or the story. But the coffee that's the real case in the coffee was too from what I understand, that actually was a proper case. And I don't like, you know, so come on and you're just drinking some McDonald's coffee right now, Come on, it's supposed to be too hot. Oh yeah, this is fine coffee from a bunomatic as a matter of fact, that has been so perfectly engineered in its construction that the entire vat becomes tepid within about seven minutes or so, so you have to drink it at a a tongue scalding temperature, otherwise it's going to be the quality of something you get in a Lutheran basement basement on Sunday afternoon after everyone's gone home. Well, we should probably depart here, but before we do, I want to ask you one question. Something floating out there right now says, wasn't Donald Trump impeached for not giving weapons to an ally that were legally agreed upon? And is not Joe Biden doing the same. When you see something like that, your mind immediately goes probably, and it doesn't matter because the rules are probably different, which is a pane and sad, but maybe not because this seems too convene ten. It's if you can distill the problem down to a Twitter length, maybe there's something more here. Let's pretend that I just asked you that question like Rob did, and there's seventeen questions nested inside of it. There are a lot of important points built into that, James, but the important point is that it shows how, yeah, how flimsy the first impeachment of Donald Trump was. Because in fact, if you were going to say this is something that is impeachable right withholding congressionally approved arms given to an ally, then the Israel One, I think, is a much more worthy case for impeachment because Ukraine wasn't at war then, right, Right now, we have an ally who's actually in the fight and closing in on the last redoubt of the enemy, and we're going to cut the arms off now, right, that seems to me a greater dereliction of duty. Right if you're going to say, as the Democrats said in Congress when they impeach Trump, that the charges abuse of power, dereliction of duty, harming the public interest, which is the greater offense to the public, monkeying around with Ukraine in order to get reelected, which is why Biden seems to be pulling back on arms to Israel now. But when you're with Ukraine, Ukraine is not in a shooting war at that time. They're just you know, scrimmaging as it were with the Russians along the border, skirmishing, I mean, but they're not actually suffering an invasion. Eventually, Trump does release lethal weapons to the Ukrainians. Actually Obama didn't want to send them lethal weapons versus our allies in the Middle East. The only democracy there that's actually in a shooting war. After they were attacked on October seventh, which is the greater insult to the public interest, right, and with two points about that one, the whole thing about not giving them the weapons after Congress had passed, and the rest of it. You know, if you are if you have a defense contract, acts and arrangement with the country, you're going to give them some you sell them some really high tech stuff, some really good stuff. And over the course of a week there's a revolution in the country and the previously friendly government is replaced by somebody inimicable to us who hates us and is you know, an Islamist government that wants to take apart our tools and sell them to Yeah. No, you know, maybe we don't have to fulfill that contract, you know, next. But the second point is that Biden's move doesn't seem to have placated anybody, and seems to have aggravated everybody. I mean, the people who want Gaza war to stop now are peeved that he's still even considering helping them in some other respects. And the people who you know, who see him doing what he did to placate voters who are not gonna be play capable and I see it's great nobody. Yeah, that is enough of it, right, it's the fecklessness of the entire foreign policy this administration summed up in one deft debt in one in one move, you know, tying your shoelaces together and then trying to run. It's all been this way from Afghanistan to Crane the rest of it. It's it's it's been incoherent, you know what, James, which is different. But it's like the accusations that made against Trump is you could have said up to now it was incompetence. They had a different vision we disagreed with. Maybe they believe in American declines that they're trying to pull back, but this is blatantly for electoral purposes. The reason why is because the claim is we're cutting off the arms because of worries about humanitarian worries, worries about killing civilians. Well, then why are you cutting off the arms that are for precision, right, You're cutting off the precision weapons and saying, oh no, but so it's okay if you use the more indiscriminate, violent, destructive weapons. To me, that just signals this is about you know, women, Arab winning Arabats and Michigan. But but even they ought to sy through it if Biden said, in order to playcate to the voters, I'm going to make an announcement that we are banning export of an extremely accurate sniper rifle, but we are selling them barrel bombs. I mean, I don't know how the people that's essentially the equivalent of it. Yeah, yeah, can do that. You know, everybody dunks and the Trump administration for the foreign policy, but there were two things. One, yeah, NATO want to pay more. Yes, meets your obligations. Come on, shovel it out. We're dying here, give us some more. And the Abraham Accords, which were remarkable a way of changing the paradigm in the Middle East that it existed for decades. And I don't see anything that Biden administration's work that equals that. So I mean again, do I attribute those to the diplomatic skill and intellectual precision and behind the scenes arm twisting and magnificent politics of Donald Trump. No, I don't. But there were people in the administration that got things done. And the people behind the Biden administration seem to be about twenty seven years old and spending a lot of their time on Twitter liking Dylan mulhaney videos. You know what we're gonna be done. I'm gonna let you get a head start on the line of McDonald's so you can get your mc rib if they're available now, they're probably gonna be No, they're not. They're probably gonna be thirty seven dollars a nice time they're on. You mentioned before when we were talking at the top about pork right, how did that come up? We were talking about what pork chop you said, you looked up from your pork chop, and I'm like, I gain pork chops in California because of the straight crazy pork all we have right, which of course pushes broke as they do with chickens, and it pushes the price up everywhere. So everybody, if they want to sell in this big market, has to adjust their pen size to accommodate the California law. At the grocery store the other day, there was there's a you know, this pork roll that's flavored, marinated and seasoned and the rest of it. And I always inside of the shopping I'm keenly aware of what the price fluctuations are, and they drop the price of these things a special deal from about nine dollars to four and the price of bacon also just in an absolute floor at two dollars and sixty cents for a package of bacon, which is remarkable. And since the big pork and pork and bacon producers in the country are being taken over by the Chinese smithfield being the one that really irritates me. It makes me wonder exactly what's going on there? We have some sort of overproduction? Is this are there? Is there a surge in the in the pork industry that we don't know anything about because it used to be Oh, that's a great price and I'm glad to pay for it. Now it's like, how is this impacting the Chinese domestic pork market? And I wish I didn't have to think about these things. But there you go, go have your I know I'm in I'm in Texas. I've gone to Barbiekeep Place every night here in Austin. They're awesome. We have nothing like that in California. And I noticed actually the same thing you did change, but uh, you know, the different the price differential between brief brisket and pork ribs is quite wide. Now usually they're not so different. Matter I'm going to get both. It's not a choice, but both still get them both and get different kind of sauces. I know that they'll probably frown on you if you want the mustard base, but you know it's it's still good. It's still good. I envy your goustatory culinary experiences to come and bye gosh. Anyway, thanks everybody for listening, Thanks to Luhmann for sponsoring the podcast, Thanks for ricochet dot com for just being there right And if you don't know what that is, I don't know how after six in and ninety one episodes of the podcast, but you'd best go there and find out, because that is the civil sane center, right place you've been looking for all of your life on the internet. Peter will be back with us next week. John, of course, you're always happy to be here with us, and we'll see everyone in the comments at Ricochet four point zho Ricochet join the conversation.