 Hello and welcome to the recent stream. I'm Zach Weissmuller, joined by my co-host, Liz Wolff. Today, we're going to react to some clips from the second GOP presidential debate, which took place last night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in California, a fact that we were reminded of regularly with constant invocations of Reagan's name and legacy. Here to help us make sense of what to make of the state of the GOP going into the 2024 election, is Josh Barrow, a journalist and commentator who currently co-hosts the Serious Trouble podcast with Ken White, and writes the very serious newsletter published on Substack. Josh, thank you for joining us. Hi, Zach. Thanks for having me. Hi, Liz. Before we get into the clips that all of us have chosen, I want to ask both of you, none of us here are loyal, committed GOP voters. We're also, I don't think any of us are loyal, committed Democrat voters. Independence, looking at this latest debate, what did the overall tone and substance make you feel about the current state of the GOP? Let's start with Josh. First of all, I am a Democrat, often somewhat reluctantly. I also used to be Republican quite reluctantly. I think that political parties are important vehicles for influence in the country, and it makes sense to be a member of one, even if they drive you crazy all the time. But the thing that I found remarkable about this debate is how just completely detached from reality it was. Obviously, the front-runner is not there. To the extent that the people on this stage are running for president, and that extent varies from low to no. They are running against Donald Trump, and yet the debate was structured like that they were running against each other, and it's like an argument over whether Nikki Haley or Tim Scott is the better choice to be the Republican presidential nominee, and that's not a question anybody's asking, that's not the question before anybody. A lot of it just felt very theoretical in a way that some of the 2020 Democratic debates felt, where it was arguing over exactly which flavor of single payer we're going to implement if we win this election and have a majority of four in the House of Representatives. But even more theoretical than that, because at least you could close your eyes and imagine the idea that you'd have some election that resulted in Elizabeth Warren being elected president or something like that. Whereas here, I spend no time thinking about the possibility that Tim Scott is going to be president of the United States 18 months from now. It felt like a useless exercise in certain ways. Would it feel more useful if there was a narrower group of candidates on the stage at this point? Maybe, but the main thing is they need to talk about Donald Trump more, and I don't mean that they need to talk about Donald Trump more in the sense of like they just need to talk about how awful he is, and especially I don't mean they need to talk about how awful he is in the same way that you would if you were a Democrat running in a general election. But they need to be making the case like, why should you nominate me instead of Trump? Because that is the only relevant question before Republican voters right now. They're going to vote for one of these people. They have to have decided that they're not going to vote for Trump, and you have to make that case. There were glimpses of this, and there are ways to do this without running at him from the left, and you saw Ron DeSantis making pieces of this argument and saying, we need a two-term president picking specific pieces of his record on debt and that sort of thing and criticizing them for basically not being conservative enough. But really, that's the only important argument for these candidates to be making, is why me instead of him? And it just felt like only a very small fraction of the debate was actually focused on that. What was your reaction, Liz? I am sort of stunned by how they don't know how to take the W. I keep thinking about this in relation to the DeSantis candidacy and the DeSantis campaign. And it's like, well, wait a second. You have, in my view, a pretty excellent unimpeachably good record to lean on with COVID policy in the state of Florida with executive experience. I believe he won the first time to be the governor by a pretty slim margin. But the second time, much more handily, a lot of the people who live there, perhaps you included, Zach, are very happy with his record. So I'm kind of stunned by how a lot of these Republicans don't know how to convert that legitimate leadership experience, some really good executive experience, into something that actually appeals to voters. I mean, even when questions on inflation are dangled before the slate of the candidates, they don't seem to know how to actually connect with people. I'm sorry, but this should be a relatively easy pitch. The Donald Trump question, which I think you're totally right about, Josh, that's a lot harder to figure out how they got to position themselves in relation to him. And I think we've seen a lot of missteps so far. But with a whole bunch of like issues that affect the lives and pocketbooks of everyday Americans, this should be a pretty easy thing. I mean, I think the young can playbook is actually kind of an interesting thing to look for. You know, basically when you have your opponent, this was in Virginia, the gubernatorial race, when you have your opponent saying things along the lines of like, oh, well, parents didn't really have control over what kids are taught in the classrooms. A bunch of parents respond really negatively to that regardless of partisanship. And I'm kind of surprised that COVID record inflation issues related to just absolutely horrible performance of public schools and the influence of teachers unions, which I think a lot of leftists have sort of become a little bit more aware of and a little more pissed off by lately. All of these things could be winning issues. And for whatever reason, a lot of these candidates don't seem to know how to convert their beliefs or their positions or their experience into something that's actually a really compelling pitch to voters. Yeah, I mean, speaking as someone coming to you from DeSantis land, yes, I generally am pretty happy with how things are done here in Florida, the governance, I've got some bones to pick on various approaches to trying to shape the school curriculums and so forth, but on kind of the big picture things. It's unfortunate though, that as you say, it's presented in this kind of wrapper. And I have to be mindful of the fact that I am not the audience for this Republican primary. So it's going to be in that culture war wrapper. It's going to be buried beneath calls to put troops on the Mexican border, which we'll get to soon. And then to Josh's point, I think that it has been a real problem that the orange elephant in the room is just never seems to be addressed head on. And maybe if the field gets winnowed down, that that'll change. But let's pivot into some of the clips that we've pulled to react to. The first one that Josh said he wanted to talk about was DeSantis seemingly calling for military intervention in Mexico. Let's roll that and talk about it. As commander in chief, I'm going to use the US military to go after the Mexican drug cartels. They are killing our people. And the stories that I've seen in Florida, we had an infant, 18 months, parents rented an Airbnb. And apparently the people that had rented it before were using drugs. The infant was crawling, the toddler was crawling on the carpet and ingested a fentanyl residue and died. Are we just going to sit here and let this happen, this carnage happen in our country? I am not going to do that. So I guarantee you on day one, this border is going to be a day one issue for me as president. We're going to declare it a national march. Yes, we'll build the wall. We'll do remain in Mexico, but those Mexican drug cartels are going to be treated like the foreign terrorist organizations that they are. So is that a threat to invade Mexico? Yeah, like is it a declaration of war on day one? Right, like what's the legal mechanism here? Yeah, I mean, I think you can imagine a situation and Mike Pence has had sort of more reality-based things to say about this. You could imagine a situation where you have some sort of cooperation with the Mexican government that involves deploying US military assets in Mexico with their permission. And maybe you could even pressure them in certain ways into doing that. But I don't think it's at all clear that you necessarily would succeed at that. Amlo is very much a nationalist and I think is unlikely to be keen on the idea of the US military attacking cartels inside Mexico. And if you do that without the Mexican government's permission, you have invaded Mexico. It's this really hawkish, bizarre idea that could have all sorts of negative unintended effects. And it's just sort of being thrown out there. Like it's a thing like, oh, just like send the military. And also like you can't, you'd have to send troops if you wanted to do this sort of thing. I mean, part of the problem with the fentanyl trade is because fentanyl is physically so small, the quantity of it that you need and because it's synthesized artificially, you can't just like identify sites from the sky and drop chemicals on them or bomb them or that sort of thing. If you were truly to have an effective operation like this, you would have to have a US military presence in Mexico, which would be a huge policy change. And if they're really threatening to do that without Mexico's permission, that's literally a threat to invade, which just seems crazy. And the more moderate Nikki Haley position is just send special operations there. So it would be sort of, I guess, like off the books, CIA operation or something like that. I mean, the underlying issues here are that we've got our immigration problems and then the drug war. And from my perspective, the inflow of fentanyl into the country has been a direct result of drug prohibition. Fentanyl has existed as a medication and anesthetic in hospitals, but the reason that it spilled onto the streets is because we went from an opioid epidemic to a heroin problem to now a fentanyl problem. And I think that the approach, that the discussion around decriminalization, harm reduction is, of course, completely off the table for the GOP. But there's also the question of immigration, which is brought up over and over again on that stage. And for the amount of times that Ronald Reagan was invoked, there was not a discussion of the fact that the Reagan Republicans were a much more welcoming party. I mean, Reagan at the time offered an amnesty and also basically was talking about a highway connecting Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. Like we're all, you know, we're gonna have a new North American alliance. So that is obviously far in the rear view now, but it's gotta be part of the solution, any serious solution to any of these problems is actually figuring out a way to meet the demand of the people who want to come and live and work here peacefully. Liz, what was you think? I think there's also an interesting component of this, which is very difficult to argue against because I think it effectively tugs at people's heartstrings, but like the anecdote that Dosantis cites about the 18-month-old baby who was crawling on the floor of an Arabian bee and touched fentanyl and ingested fentanyl in some way and died as a result of this. I mean, I don't know if you guys saw the daycare, the Bronx daycare, which was, this was a story I think basically last week where a two-year-old in New York City died of, I guess, ingesting fentanyl in the daycare despite having passed all of its city inspections was actually being used as a drug front. And so now the city is going after the people who were running the daycare and running the drug front as well. But it's interesting, right? Because these stories capture people's imaginations. It's kind of a little bit of a throwback to milk carton kids. And we see this moral panic surrounding kids, kids in razor blades, kids in fentanyl, kids in whatever they might be able to access. And A, I need to like sort of independently do my own research and actually verify that this anecdote exists because just because somebody said it on a debate stage does not mean it is actually grounded in fact. And two, I think it's actually probably better to bring the discussion closer to reality where like, yes, maybe every once in a while there's an anomalous absurdly terrifying story like the Bronx Daycare one or like this 18 month old in this Airbnb. But fundamentally we don't really have a country where like millions of children are ingesting fentanyl and dying each year. Like let's be very clear about what the problem is. There is an opioid crisis but I think it would actually be better to focus the conversation on the median opioid user and addict and how to get them the treatment that they need, not these outlier cases. Well, but I mean, the problem, I mean, these cases are not the typical fentanyl problem but we're having on the order of a hundred thousand drug overdose deaths that you're in the country and it's massively higher than it used to be. And it's a legitimately extremely hard policy problem. I think a much harder policy problem than the immigration issue, which I think we know what the trade-offs are and what the solutions would be. I mean, the reason we ended up with this fentanyl problem as you described, Zach, is we went through this period where the prescribing guidelines for opioids were much too lax and this seems to have been largely an honest mistake. There was a sense in medicine that basically lots of people have chronic pain and this was a safe way to treat chronic pain. And it was a huge mistake and it created this large number of people with opioid addictions and then you had that progression in the market through heroin and then fentanyl. But I think one lesson to take from that is if you had an even more permissive legal opioid policy, where it was not just that we were gonna go back to writing a lot more prescriptions but that we were going to get rid of prohibition and allow people to just go out and buy Percocet if they wanted, you would still have a tremendous number of addicts and overdose deaths and you wouldn't have two-year-old stumbling upon a block of fentanyl in the back of a daycare because it would be a legal market. But the legal market would be a source of enormous problems in the country. And so it's not like marijuana where you can just look at the costs and the benefits and say prohibition was ridiculous and you were better off with permitting this. You end up with enormous social costs regardless of which policy you choose. And I think that's part of why you end up getting this fantastical like let's invade Mexico because if there was a simpler, clearer thing to do about it, that's what they'd be proposing to do. Which is not to say that I think the Mexico thing is gonna work. It's just people get into these realms when they lack a good answer. Yeah, I agree that there's no perfect solution and that opioids are certainly a much more damaging drug when abused than something like cannabis. The problem is that shift it, cracking down on the opioids after that the offer of prescription happened then made basically what it led to is a lot of people turning to heroin. And then once that demand for heroin went up then, oh, look, it's even more efficient to just make this in a lab in China or wherever and then sneak it over the border. And so I think that there could be a more sophisticated conversation about trade-offs and accepting that there are going to be social ills but perhaps there are less damaging interventions than kind of the simplistic let's just crack down on it and see what pops up next. Regardless, the type of conversation that you guys are modeling which acknowledges some externalities and unintended consequences that arise from different policies and trace the evolution of how we got into this mess to me that's a much more interesting way to do debate. And so I really, really wish and I know this will never really happen in US politics but I wish we could move away from like 18 month old babies stumbled across a little bit of fentanyl and died and it's like the super outlier moral panicky type case and toward the types of things that you guys are talking about which I think are both extremely valid ways of approaching this, I'm sorry, but like if we actually want serious policymaking and serious people in the White House we should have the expectation that that's where the conversation happens as opposed to whatever bullshit we saw on the stage last night. Liz, you wanted to talk about the education segment where DeSantis and Nikki Haley talk about school choice and other ed reforms in South Carolina in their respective states of South Carolina and Florida. Let's roll that clip. You say school choice is the answer but South Carolina, your home state still has not enacted universal school choice and even the current expansion won't be fully implemented until 2027. Parents can't wait four years for a fix. So what would you do right now? Well in school choice isn't the only answer but I'll tell you it's not out of a lack of trying that we didn't try and get school choice in South Carolina. What I'll tell you first of all is we have to acknowledge the fact that 67% of our eighth graders are not proficient in reading or math. Over 80% of our eighth graders aren't proficient in history or civics and recently they came out and said our 12 and 13 year olds are scoring at the lowest levels they've been scoring in reading and math in decades. So the first thing we've gotta do is we've gotta make sure we catch our kids back up. We have to make sure they can read. A child that can't read by third grade is four times less likely to graduate high school. We need to do reading remediation. We need complete transparency in the classroom. No parent should ever wonder what's being said or taught to their child in the classroom. We need to make sure that we have school choice so that there's competition. We need to move all the programs from the federal government down to the states and let states decide what education looks like in their states. And we need to start building things in America again. Let's put vocational classes back in our high schools and let's get our kids building the things that we know that we can make. When we start to focus on that and really bring in that parental involvement that's when we'll start to see a difference but we've got to get parents back included. We've got to quit spending time on this DEI and CRT and instead focus on financial literacy, on digital literacy and on making sure that our kids know what they need to do to have the jobs of the next generation. Here's the deal. Our country's education system is in decline because it's focused on indoctrination, denying parents' rights. Florida represents the revival of American education. We're ranked number one in the nation in education by US News and World Report. My wife and I, we have a six, five and three year old. This is personal to us. We didn't just talk about universal school choice. We enacted universal school choice. We didn't just talk about parents' bill of rights. We enacted the parents' bill of rights. We eliminated critical race theory and we now have American civics and the Constitution in our schools in a really big way just like President Reagan asked for and is farewell address back in 1989. Florida is showing how it's done. We're standing with parents and our kids are benefiting. What struck you about that, Liz? So I think DeSantis is much more rhetorically compelling there. Hailey sort of laundry listed to a degree that I found quite obnoxious and annoying. But the substance of what she's saying is I think so important. This is really, I mean, the time is absolutely ripe for a move towards school choice. There are more people now than ever opting out of the public school system. We are seeing this sort of revolution in terms of a return to phonics-based education. For a long time, the literacy programs used in most public schools in the country for maybe the last 10 years, 15 years have not actually been preparing people to read at grade level. And so we're seeing these huge issues. All the statistics that Nikki Hailey cited are accurate. It's a huge problem and for Nikki Hailey to ground the issues with public schools in those clear stats versus culture-worth stuff, at least to me, I would much prefer to have somebody like that in charge. I think that's so important. It's actually very focused on things that affect real families. We can argue all day about whether or not Maya Kobabe's genderqueer is in school libraries or not. But fundamentally, whether or not children are literate. To me, that's one of the most fundamental jobs of public schools. And I appreciate Nikki Hailey bringing the conversation there. It does bother me though that in this moment when from the Republican perspective, teachers unions exercised so much influence over the course of the pandemic and kept schools shut for so long, they elbowed their way to the front of the vaccination lines, claiming that that would allow schools to be opened in person sooner and then kind of went back on their words. We had the hysterics and the melodramatic of them, doing all those protests, I think in Chicago and LA where they brought coffins to marches saying basically if you put us back in the classroom, if you reopen public schools, we the teachers will die on mass as a result of this. We saw horrifying behavior from teachers unions over the course of the pandemic. So you would think that this election would be where people like Rhonda Santis and people like Nikki Hailey can really make a forceful pitch and say, look, like the school library stuff is crazy. Like leftist are being a little bananas there but really more than anything, literacy is an issue. Teachers unions behaved abysmally, COVID was a disgrace, the degree to which schools were kept shut for so long. You would think they would be able to convert all of that into a really salient, compelling pitch for school choice. And I'm kind of frustrated by the fact that like, does Santis' substance isn't there but Nikki Hailey's form isn't there? I find something odd about this conversation in that, you know, they're talking about returning power to the states and then further devolving the power from the states by having universal school choice. But then they're also offering all of this prescriptive guidance about how education should work. And you know, obviously a president can have influence and if you have a regime like that, there are things that the president can do that might influence the way that schools educate and what's in curricula and how phonics is taught and that sort of thing. But ultimately, if you believe this stuff about having this much more decentralized education system with power, the federal government plays a smaller role, state and local governments effectively play a smaller role because you're gonna have school choice and vouchers and parents deciding where they're gonna send their money. Then you kind of don't get to make the decisions about, you know, is there gonna be CRT in the curriculum? You know, how are they gonna teach reading all those sorts of things? And sort of the, I think there's a tension there. It's like, do we have a bunch of top-down ideas about how education needs to work differently or are we deciding that we're not going to impose those sorts of ideas and we'll just let parents do whatever they want? Yep, I agree that the tension is there and you even hear it in DeSantis' answer where he's talking about universal school choice being implemented in Florida, which I think is a great thing, which I'm benefiting from. But at the same time, he's talking about, you know, implementing a certain civics curriculum that Ronald Reagan would have loved. And that is the tension that is unfortunately at the center of a lot of this Ed policy at the moment. I mean, Glenn Yonkin in Virginia basically ran successfully against all of the, you know, the excesses or like the drag queen story hour stuff. And that is fine if you're, and I mean, the thing is it actually worked. It activated a lot of parents who were worried about what their kids are getting exposed to in school. But then you've got people who I see as bad actors, the Chris Rufos of the world who they are not really interested in kind of the pluralistic vision of school choice that I favor, they're interested in just a takeover and sort of transmitting their values through a state run system. So I think that's something we have to be, you know, those of us who on this stream and who are listening, who are advocates of that need to be a little bit on guard against in this whole conversation. I mean, the through line with so much of this is the policies they are actually advocating for cannot really be put into effect the way that they seem to claim. I'm sorry, but like we're talking about like declaring war with Mexico. We're talking about doing all of this crazy top-down engineering of the public school system despite the fact that so much of that is state-based. It's totally untethered from reality. I just quickly note, I'm skeptical of the narrative that Glenn Yonkin won on education. Certainly he ran an education and he won, but they had a governor's election in New Jersey on the same day where the Republican candidate overperformed by even more. New Jersey is a blue state, so the Republican narrowly lost. And then the swing toward Yonkin was pretty uniform across urban, suburban, rural areas in Virginia. So it's not like it was a specific thing in these, you know, Loudoun County, Fairfax County, this handful of suburban districts where there were these curriculum disputes. I think that, you know, it was a rough environment for Democrats in 2021 politically for a number of reasons. And I think Yonkin won there. I don't really think that it was specifically about the education issue. Well, so what do you make of that gaffe then? I mean, we saw big polling upticks right after that. I guess that gaffe happened very close to the election, but like what are other explanations that you posit? I think, you know, I think there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the fact that the reopening from COVID had not gone as it was supposed to. And we were starting to have inflation problems when we were having shortages. I think it's, you know, I think it's a lot of the same issues. Look, I don't think it was great that Terry McCollough went on that debate stage and said that he didn't, I forget what the exact quote was, but you know, that education shouldn't be up to parents or whatever it was. But, you know, I just, you know, I feel like if it was really about these school board fights, I would have thought you would have seen a greater swing in the parts of the state where the school board fights were really salient, which was basically the suburbs. But, okay, so I think that that's well taken and that's an interesting theory. But the thing that I'm curious about is like, just because it was playing out in Loudoun County or what have you, doesn't mean that coal country Virginians weren't also looking at that and being like, yeah, hell yeah, like go get him. I guess, I mean, I don't like, I guess it depends how rational voters are. I mean, most of those voters are in a county where there's a school board that's not going to go in for any of this fattish stuff anyway. So it's not like they need the governor to stop their school board from doing something. I mean, it's probably like my counter to that would just be like, just because it's unlikely to happen to them doesn't mean Appalachian voters aren't riled up by that. That's fair, yeah. Yeah, no, I like your pushback on that hypothesis. So that frankly, it makes me want to dig in a little bit deeper to the polling data and sort of like do a little bit of a retrospective there. So the first clip that I wanted to talk about here was this scuffle over Ukraine where you've got DeSantis and Ramaswami on one side. And also by the way, more or less they're on, they're taking the Trump position on this issue. And then everyone else on another, let's play that. Today, the Republican party is at odds over aid to Ukraine. The price tag so far is $76 billion, but is it in our best interest to degrade Russia's military for less than 5% of what we pay annually on defense, especially when there are no US soldiers in the fight? It's in our interest to end this war and that's what I will do as president. We are not going to have a blank check. We will not have US troops and we're gonna make the Europeans do what they need to do. But they've sent money to pay bureaucrats pensions and salaries and funding small businesses halfway around the world. Meanwhile, our own country is being invaded. We don't even have control of our own territory. We have got to defend the American people before we even worry about all these other things. I will say, let's debate the fact that our national vital interest is in degrading the Russian military. By degrading the Russian military, we actually keep our homeland safer, we keep our troops at home and we all understand article five of NATO. We have to level with the American people. I thought you said something about waiting until your turn to talk, so well hello there. So at the end of the day, I'm gonna finish my, I'll be happy to debate on this. Go ahead and I'll respond. I'll look forward to this one right now. So at the end of the day, when you think about the fact that if you want to keep American troops at home, the attack on NATO territory would bring us and our troops in. We have to level with the American people on this issue. The reality is just because Putin is not an evil dictator does not mean that Ukraine is good. This is a country that has banned 11 opposition parties. A win for Russia is a win for China. That is not true. We're driving Russia. A win for Russia is a win for China. Excuse me, excuse me, but I forgot you like China, that's why you're a winner. Nope, you'll have your chance in just a moment. The hurling personal insults isn't helping. China is the real enemy and we're driving Russia further into China's arms. We need a reasonable peace plan to end this, especially if this is a country who's president just last week. Vivek, if you let Putin have Ukraine that's a green light to China to take Taiwan. Okay, so what I appreciate about this is that this is the only, it represents, I think, possibly one of the most important kind of political realignments in the past 10 years. And the fact that this is the only place that that debate is really happening, I think, is interesting and noteworthy. I mean, I think most of the Democrats seem, you know, on the same page on this, there's a majority of the Republicans on that stage also are, but then you've got this Vivek DeSantis Trump group that is skeptical of kind of what they characterize as a blank check for Ukraine. And, you know, we're all sympathetic to the Ukrainians, but we do have to take account of the fact that the U.S. is the biggest funder of Ukraine, both in terms, well, combining military and financial funding, we, you know, dwarf the next in line, which would be the EU. And as such, we play a huge role in how this all unfolds. Like we could be, the moderator set up there kind of implied that, you know, it's just a fraction of the U.S.'s military budget, which is true, but I think the bigger point is that because we are providing so much, we have a big say in how much pressure is put on people to come to the negotiating table or, you know, how long this continues on. We've got, you know, estimates of half a million military casualties on both sides, combined on both sides, 24,000 civilian casualties. So there's a high price being paid here, obviously. And I think that it's an important conversation. I think that it shouldn't just go unexamined. The second thing I just wanted to say about it is that what I don't like is how then there's always a pivot to the new enemy, which is like, okay, we can't keep writing a blank check to Ukraine because we need to send troops to Mexico or we need to amp up our pressure on China. I think that's still, that's an ongoing problem with the GOP and our politics in general, that there always has to be a real clearly defined enemy to look tough going up against. I think there's an interesting contrast here between DeSantis and Ramaswamy because I think Ramaswamy has been intentionally actually pretty vague on this. And the tone in which he talks about this is a tone that appeals to people who think that the US has been too involved in this. But really, when he says no blank check, nobody is in favor of a blank check. That can mean anything. That doesn't mean that you're not going to send any more support. It's an indication of some sort of skepticism, but there are Republicans who have been criticizing Joe Biden for not doing enough and not sending enough munitions and there have been weapons systems that Ukraine has sought that certain people in Congress would like him to send, that Biden has blocked sending. So Joe Biden is already in a position of doing some, but not all of the things that the Ukraine Hawks would like done. And I think that Ron DeSantis is leaving that option open. Whereas Ramaswamy has this sort of cockamamie idea that you can come in and impose a settlement and that one of the terms of that settlement is that you require Russia to break its alliance with China, which is both, I think something that Russia would be unlikely to overly agree to. And even if they did, you wouldn't have a good mechanism for enforcing that. You can't just like turn all of geopolitics on one meeting like that. It's this very amateurish idea that he has of how foreign policy works. And I think it glosses over the fact that this debate happens as though it's like the US government decides what the nature of this war is going to be, but it's not just that Ukraine is a sovereign country that already is not doing certain things we'd like them to do, but there's also Europe is here. And I think almost everyone agrees with Ron DeSantis that we would like the European countries to be stepping up their commitments. And to some extent, they've already been doing that. They've been increasing their defense budgets. And I think that's been a healthy shift toward Europe taking on more the responsibility for its own defense. But I think the idea that you're gonna give you part of Ukraine to Russia and get a pinky swear from Putin that he's not gonna do any more invasions and that he'll break his alliance with the Chinese. Not only will you not get that from Russia, that won't be acceptable either to Ukraine or to Europe. And therefore it won't happen. The Russians can't make that deal if the EU countries are still backing Ukraine in this fight, which they would be. So I think that what he's proposing is very unrealistic. And I also, I sort of suspect that whoever the president is policy toward Ukraine is going to change less than people are expecting that it might because we are not the sole author here. The corollary to what you're saying, of course, is the fact that affects Taiwan plan is also not so brilliant. I forget the specifics in part because they're so mind-bendingly stupid. But it's that will tell China they're not allowed to invade Taiwan until 2028 by which time we'll be able to make our own semiconductors. Yeah, it's related to like semiconductor independence. And it's like basically, you know, going from the strategic ambiguity approach now to like, I also love that he's like publicizing this entire strategy via Twitter. And so it's not like China, like he's like, oh, we'll pull the wool over their eyes by advertising like by broadcasting this all over Twitter. What? It's just this completely, it's almost like he like thinks he's like playing a board game. Like he thinks he's playing risk with people in his college dorm or something utterly brain dead like that. And it's just, it's, I think it's so clear that he's not interested in having a very serious grounded in reality conversation about this, which is especially like obnoxious given the fact that so much of Congress right now is occupied by this question of what to do about Ukraine aid. And there's these interesting sort of far right-ish dissenters in the house that are actually really making a huge stink about this. So you would think that this would be a good jumping off point for some of these people on stage to be able to more cogently, reasonably discuss whether or not that's a good strategy, what they would do as the executive. And instead Vivek is just like, oh yeah, we'll just like disallow China from doing certain things until 2028. It's like, what planet are you living in? Well, it's one where he's never going to be president. So he won't have to make good on it. Yeah, right. Well, we're on Vivek. Let's go to the next clip, which is about Vivek Ramaswamy joining TikTok after the influencer turned MMA fighter, Jake Paul, apparently talked him into it. Let's pull that. TikTok is banned on government-issued devices because of its ties to the Chinese government. Yet you joined TikTok after dinner with boxer and influencer, Jake Paul. Should the Commander-in-Chief be so easily persuaded by an influencer? So the answer is I have a radical idea for the Republican Party. We need to win elections. And part of how we win elections is reaching the next generation of young Americans where they are. So when I get into office, I've been very clear. Kids under the age of 16 should not be using addictive social media. We're only gonna ever get to declaring independence from China, which I favor, if we actually win. So while the Democrats are running rampant, reaching the next generation three to one, there's exactly one person in the Republican Party which talks a big game about reaching young people, and that's me. This is infuriating because TikTok is one of the most dangerous social media apps that we could have. And what you've got, I honestly, every time I hear you, I feel a little bit dumber for what you say. Because I can't believe it. They hear you've got a TikTok situation. What they're doing is these 150 million people are on TikTok. That means they can get your contacts, they can get your financial information, they can get your emails, they can get your text messages, they can get all of these things. China knows exactly what they're doing. And what we've seen is you've gone and you've helped China to make medicine in China, not America. You're now wanting kids to go and get on the social media that's dangerous for all of us. You and you were in business with the Chinese that gave 105 and 5 million dollars. We can't trust you. We can't trust you. We can't have TikTok in our kids' lives. This is very important, Mr. Ramashwama, you have 15 seconds. I think, excuse me, but you have 15 seconds, Mr. Ramashwama. Thank you. I think we would be better served as a Republican Party. If we're not sitting here hurling personal insults and actually have a legitimate debate about policy. You know, obviously there's several dimensions to this policy debate and some of them are stupider than others. I just find it remarkable that, you know, this has been identified as a problem by both political parties for several years at this point and there's been a lot of fighting over it. And this nonsense that they tried to do in the Trump administration, they're gonna like get a big deal for Oracle to do the server provision for TikTok, which didn't seem to address any of the problems, so it would make a whole bunch of money for Oracle. But basically, you know, the criticism here that I think is the most valid is that, you know, free speech and free markets not require you to allow an authoritarian foreign government to own and control a media entity in the United States. And in fact, we've already forced the Chinese to discourage one social platform, which was Grindr, which was acquired by a Chinese controlled company a few years ago and that was reviewed by the SIFIUS Committee in the Treasury Department and found that that was national security risk and they were forced to sell the app back to a US owner. And that, you know, that didn't interfere with people's ability to access Grindr, but it did ensure that, you know, that we were protecting this platform that contained a lot of information from Americans from being controlled by a hostile foreign entity. And I think it is a real concern that the TikTok algorithm, which is a black box, gives the Chinese government, which is unelected a lot of ability to influence the way in which information is received by Americans. I don't think we would have allowed the Soviets to do that during the Cold War. And so it seems, it feels to me like there's a relatively narrow policy area here where there's some talk of whether you could use the existing law that was used for Grindr, whether you could use that on TikTok because of some US based entities that they've already acquired, saying that, you know, TikTok is a formerly US company that was acquired, but even if it wasn't, you could have a new law and you could have a solution where you don't take TikTok away from anyone, but you make sure that it is not controlled by the Chinese government, which it seems to me like that there shouldn't even be a libertarian objection to because we're not here to protect the association rights of the Communist Chinese government. One thing I'm curious about, if you don't mind Josh. Yeah. Is like, what in your view and in the stuff that you have read, what do you think the harm caused by TikTok and TikTok's access to Americans data is? Do you mind just like going into a little bit of detail there? Because I so frequently get frustrated by this conversation, this debate, because it's like this is bad, but people infrequently expand on what specifically is bad about it. So my main concern is about the algorithm and the content that people are viewing more than it is about the user data. I think that, you know, first of all, we don't know the extent to which that they are making algorithmic choices that are promoting messages that are favorable to the Chinese government or suppressing messages that they don't like. But the other thing is that, you know, if you, when they control this platform like half of Americans are using, they can do that and flip a switch in the future and it takes years to rest control of it away from them. So I think it's worth doing, even if we haven't identified something that they are doing yet, because especially if we got into a situation, if there was a war over Taiwan, for example, where the tensions were even higher between the US and China, I don't think we'd want them having that sort of power. As for user data, I'm not that concerned about them having, you know, large volumes of data on lots of ordinary people, which is probably a very little value to the Chinese. And there are supposed to be certain privacy protections that are created by the Apple and the Google app stores. I don't have a good technological sense of how foolproof that stuff is. But, you know, you certainly, you could have specific targets of Chinese surveillance where it might be useful to have access into some relatively small number of people's phones. And I think that could be a concern. But my main concern is about TikTok as a media company rather than TikTok as a company that has user data. TikTok is like a propaganda machine that can just easily be, you know, dispensing, you know, bad information to people in the event of like a Taiwan invasion. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, let me say this, it's a legitimate concern for sure. It is important to be real precise and like dig down into the details of what it is the government would be banning. I mean, the company that, you know, there's a parent company that owns TikTok that is based in China and also runs a Chinese version of TikTok, which is much different. There's a separate company based in the US that supposedly runs the US version and they say there's a firewall. It's unclear how strong that firewall is. I would want any sort of ban on, you know, manipulation of the public through this kind of propaganda you're talking about to be pretty well proven out and something that we, the public would be able to see instead of what we tend to get, which was the law that was proposed to ban TikTok in the first place. I encourage people to go watch the stream we did on this, which was a sprawling law that would like, you know, is throwing in trying to regulate crypto and Bitcoin and like all telecommunications infrastructure. So that's kind of these things just kind of get all jammed together into this big power grab. And that's what I as a libertarian get really nervous about anytime we start regulating social media, even if it's, you know, potentially a hostile social media. So yeah, if you can prove that there's some sort of, you know, propagandizing, intentional propagandizing happening from a hostile foreign government, that's one thing. But to Liz's point, it can't be vague and has to be extremely targeted. Yeah, I wouldn't want the government regulating the algorithm. I mean, first, I don't really trust the government to do that and then also like, even if the government did impose a regulation, I don't know how we would ensure that TikTok under Chinese control was following the regulation. What I want is ultimate American control and ownership over the company. And you know, our constitution and our culture of free speech requires that, you know, that people be able to do things like, you know, decide what kind of information they want to disseminate on their media platform. I don't really, I don't want to take that out of the private sphere. I actually want to move it into the private sphere so that it's not the Chinese government, so that it's some private American entity doing that. I think it's also worth lingering on the idea that the federal government is going to regulate whether teenagers have access to social media. That seems like one of the crazier ideas that is just routinely floated out there on that stage. I mean, I think, you know, Vivek, he has it in for the young people in general, between that and his proposal to, you know, make everyone serve in some sort of civil service in order to be able to vote until their age, you know, a higher, I think age 21 or 25. He was 25, isn't that much? 25, okay. Yeah, so, you know, he's going on TikTok with Jake Paul, but I don't think he's courting the youth vote in fact he wants to outlaw it. But let's go to, you know, Liz, you wanted to talk about Doug Burgum because we are Burgum Stands here and his answer to a question about how to actually shrink government. Let's roll that one. Big government keeps getting bigger. One fifth of all new jobs this year have been created by the government, Governor Burgum. You say you want to shrink the size of government, but it has been a century since any president has done that. Why would you be any different? Well, because we've done it in North Dakota. When I took office, we shrunk the state budget general fund by 27% in the first four months I was office and all the trains still running on time. Why? Because you had a business leader that was actually there. Inside of every government job, there's 10 or 20% of mind-numbing, soul-sucking work that even the state and federal employees don't want to do and you could engineer that work out of the job. That would free up right there 20% of 2 million civilian employees. And by the way, we've got 10 million jobs open. They'd have plenty to do and they could be generating taxes instead of being paid by taxes. This is totally possible to do it if you have somebody that understands that having worked in technology for 30 years, everything we had to do was to be better, faster and cheaper the next day. That's what we can do in government. That's what we're doing in North Dakota. All right. Yeah, so I hate to be like that technocratic bitch, but what he is talking about is totally reasonable and it's kind of disturbing to me that this type of soundbite isn't heard way more often. I'm sorry, but there is just an obscene amount of government waste. The fact that we are just pouring in all kinds of states, all over the country and at the federal level, we are pouring so much money into various projects. I was just on a podcast earlier this morning talking about California's doomed rail infrastructure projects and comparing that to Brightline in Florida, which to be fair also, I believe was completed a little bit behind schedule, but it is stunning the amount of waste we have at all levels of government. And I think it is absolutely important to just kind of keep going back to that. I'm sorry, but if you were asking to fund more government programs or to fund them to a higher degree, the fundamental question that I want to ask as a taxpayer is, well, how much money have we already poured into it and have we seen the results that we expected? And if not, why? Who is to blame? Where is the drag? Where is the inefficiency here? I think it is such a bummer. I mean, look, Doug Burgum looks like a scarecrow. He looks like if Matthew McConaughey had some sort of like weird accident, like he is obviously not a super charismatic guy. He's not extremely charming. I know he's not actually going to get elected, but my God, what a bummer that somebody like Doug Burgum who was actually on the stage talking sense, attempting to just all bow his way in there to get a little bit of airtime for whatever reason, people just don't really give a shit. And that's a huge bummer to me. I think it says really sorry. It shows that we're in a very sorry state politically. The fact that he sort of decides to just consistently abstain from the culture warring and focus a little bit more on the importance of, I mean, he's the only one bringing up energy policy. I know Chris Christie actually had decent answers about like AI and tech stuff, but Doug Burgum is just consistently actually returning the conversation to questions of government efficiency. And to thinking about how we should sort of get out of the way of the private sector, to me that's what an executive ought to be doing. I will pile on with some of the Burgum appreciation because this may be the last time we see or hear from him, but one thing that I appreciate about his approach is that he is the kind of old school, like actual federal list type Republican where he'll pull the pocket constitution out and say, even though I'm against abortion, this is not something that's authorized in here. Or I think he did it again when talking about the trans issues. So I think the Republican party would do well to get back to that sort of federalism going forward. Josh, any Burgum comments while they're still available? I wasn't that impressed by this. I mean, I just found it a little vague. I'm sure that there are lots of places where there's waste that you can cut out, but it involves doing specific things. And often the reason that these things haven't been fixed before is that it's harder than it sounds to figure out, oh, this is the thing you need to get rid of. I mean, you use the bright light example and I think that there are some specific lessons to take there about rail. I mean, first of all, it helps that Florida is basically flat. They did a diesel system and they're not having to install catenary wire all over the place where they're building new rail line that basically goes through the middle of nowhere or runs down the median of a highway in Orlando. It's not going all the way downtown. It's going to a stop basically in a swamp outside the airport. And there's downsides to that. You can't really walk to anything from the station, but it does save money on land acquisition and engineering. And so there are specific lessons that you can take out of Brightline, which I think is an impressive project. But the problem is that sort of tells you certain things about how to build rail in certain places. And then you have to do that hundreds and hundreds of times over with other different areas of government. And sometimes it's going to work and sometimes it's not gonna work. Well, sure. So I mean, maybe the Brightline versus California rail example is a sub par one, but you could look at the struggles that the IRS has had with digitizing their services. And you could look at, I mean, obviously there's the most recent infusion of cash. So it's not reasonable to expect the IRS to have perfectly, you know, reformed the way they do things over the course of the last year, year and a half. But I mean, the IRS has been basically wasting money and really struggling to actually carry that out for the better part of like what a decade. And so I think you could point to like a federal agency that the executive would have much more control over in terms of appointing who is in charge of it. And you could say like, has the IRS used their money well over the last 15 years? Because we just gave them a whole crap ton more money. And so I would at least have a little bit of trepidation if I were president with attempting to figure out how we are going to appropriately audit their use of funds. And just to return to the BrightLine example for a second, Josh, isn't the fundamental difference that BrightLine is managed by a for-profit company. So they have more of an incentive to make sure that they actually turn a profit down the line. And that kind of relates to what Burgum was saying. He's saying, you know, as a tech executive, I have some understanding of the role that kind of entrepreneurship and private markets play and balancing those properly with the state as opposed to somewhere like California where you're building a rail and compromising with all these stakeholders so that the rail diverts through this one county commissioners district that it's just a completely different mindset. And perhaps that is missing from our federal government at the moment. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the BrightLine obviously is private and for-profit. There are, you know, government assistance aspects to this with bonding and that sort of thing. But no, I think it's been a very good model and they're taking it out West to build a rail line from Las Vegas to sort of the inland empire. I think there are, you know, there are limited numbers of places where that's gonna work. I mean, look, the California rail thing is a complete boondoggle and it's good money after bad and they should shut it down, even though it's gonna make people sad over there. But I don't, you know, I don't know that there would have been a viable way to build a BrightLine type project running from San Francisco to Los Angeles just because of the ways in which the engineering would have been very complicated. And again, you could have made choices like that. You're, you know, the, I think you're referencing how the line, instead of running down the median of I-5 through the middle of nowhere through Central California, it runs through all the mid-sized cities in the Central Valley and that adds tremendous expense. It doesn't add that much ridership. Doesn't it also curve up through the desert because of an LA County supervisor's political influence there? Yeah, yeah, a Republican supervisor, I would note. But the, yeah, so it's a set of political compromises that led to that outcome. But I, you know, the, just the mere, all the mountains you have to tunnel through there, I don't think you would have been able to get a purely private project to pencil in the way that it does with BrightLine. Not, it's a good model, but it's just not gonna work for everything. I think it's worth maybe not getting too caught up on the BrightLine example. One thing I think about with Doug Burgum is that, I mean, he, I believe, built a little bit of a fortune for himself based off of selling, creating an accounting software company. And then he's been in the software venture capital space since then, in addition to obviously being governor of North Dakota. And I think the interesting thing to me is just like, well, this is really useful, interesting executive experience. I could definitely see him bringing almost the venture capitalist mindset to the table in terms of thinking about like, how do we invest in a whole bunch of interesting or, you know, moonshot projects, not expecting that all of them will come to fruition, but attempting to sort of, you know, leverage, you know, where we're spending money. And I would like to see just broad strokes more of that type of mindset, that type of skill set in government. I think the fact that we are just so constantly fixated on career politicians on like the fucking Gavin Newsom's of the world versus the Doug Bergens is just such a, it's no surprise to me why we continue to be in such a sad political place when that's what we collectively prioritize and value. No, look, I agree with that. My sole objection, maybe I was too fixated on this, is that, you know, I'm just skeptical of the idea that that then leads to a 10 or 20% cut in the workforce. I just found that to be a simplistic. It's impossible, at least especially initially. One thing that would actually be good if they want to be tethered to reality, not that voters really give a shit about this, but it's like, it's not like you do all these things on day one, and it's not like you make all these massive cuts just all at once. What happens typically is you do things over the course of many years. And so I mean, the day one is such a classic political debate stage trope, but I'm really sick of it just because it strikes me as completely impossible. I guess the idea is to signal to voters, I prioritize this highly, but fundamentally, you can't prioritize seven different massive policy areas highly. You need to kind of figure out what you're about. And frankly, trying to do a whole bunch of things in a super speedy way or on day one probably leads to really, really poor implementation. And I wish voters were a little bit more sensitive to that. On this topic of cutting government, reducing the spending that my final clip was one, I picked because, A, there's a direct call out with Donald Trump, which harkens back to the beginning of our discussion. And B, there's discussion of the national debt, which I've come to view as an increasingly concerning topic, and it was at least brought up a few times here. Where's Joe Biden? He's completely missing in action from leadership. And you know who else is missing in action? Donald Trump is missing in action. He should be on this stage tonight. He owes it to you to defend his record where they added 7.8 trillion to the debt. That set the stage for the inflation that we have. We don't get any answers because Joe Biden hides in his basement and won't answer as to why he's raising the debt the way he's done. And Donald Trump be hides behind the walls of his golf clubs and won't show up here to answer questions like all the rest of us are up here to answer. He put 7 trillion on the debt. He should be in this room to answer those questions. And I wanna look at that camera right now and tell you, Donald, I know you're watching. You can't help yourself. I know you're watching, okay? And you're not here tonight, not because of polls and not because of your indictments. You're not here tonight because you're afraid of being on the stage and defending your record. You're ducking these things. And let me tell you what's gonna happen. You keep doing that. No one up here is gonna call you Donald Trump anymore. We're gonna call you Donald duck. All right. He's so proud. He's so satisfied. Yeah, let's just look at that for a second. The self-satisfaction, it's off the charts. That line is like so lame and groan-inducing and it has been in every debate clip roundup I have seen after the debate. It has achieved exactly what he intended for it to achieve. And I think he knew that it was like a total groaner and he also knew that it would be at the top of the hour in the montage on CNN every hour and it has been. I give Chris Christie credit for pure entertainment value. He's 10 out of 10 on both of these debates. That also brought this moment which you pointed, you were tweeting about this morning, Josh, that New York Times fact check was prompted by Christie's statement that Joe Biden hides in his basement. This is false. Any comments on New York Times fact checking? God, I just, I hate fact checking. Because the temptation that the fact checkers always succumb to as they go beyond factual claims and they talk about, well, this was analysis and was it good analysis? Or did this lack important context and things that are ultimately judgment calls? And I think in sort of fairness in the New York Times, they're not so much correcting the literal statement. They're not being like he's not in his basement. What they're saying is, well, they're saying Joe Biden doesn't go out and do stuff but he does go out and do stuff and he traveled to all these countries. He's like, no, when you say Joe Biden is hiding in his basement, you mean he's not out in public as much as he should be. And you mean that the White House is trying to control his public appearances in a way to minimize spontaneity and minimize the number of questions he's gonna face because they're afraid of what'll happen if he goes off script. And those are ultimately, those are not factual claims. Those are opinion. An opinion of how many interviews the president should give, how many events outside the White House he should do. There's no right or there's no fact about that. And so ultimately what this, from the New York Times is basically ultimately defending the idea that Biden is out there enough, which I think partly is a weird thing to do as a media outlet when, you know, one of the key aspects of Biden's strategy has been that he does very few interviews, many fewer interviews than presidents before him have typically done. But you know, it's not even so much about whether the Times's analysis on that is right or wrong. It's that they shouldn't be doing that analysis at all. It's a question for voters, whether they think that Joe Biden is out there as much as he should be. And that's obviously what Chris Christie was arguing about there. Yeah, I mean, the fact checking industry or complex seems to have taken a pretty big hit in credibility over the past several years. Do you think there's sort of a path back for that whole framework? Well, it's not clear to me what the usefulness of it is to begin with. I mean, I think it's, you know, people have been driven nuts over the last eight years by like people thinking things that are wrong. And you know, some of that is, you know, like cancel culture and trying to restrict opinions, but some of it is literally about things that are wrong. That like, you know, there's been a lot of prominent conspiracy theorizing and a lot of, you know, like nonsense claims about, you know, Donald Trump really won the election and that sort of thing, things that are actually incorrect. And it drives a lot of, especially liberals crazy and it just drives a lot of reporters crazy. And they're not entirely wrong about it, but just sort of like grabbing people by the shoulders and being like, I'm going to give you the real facts now is not a strategy that's working in part because the sort of people who are bothering to read the New York Times live stream about the debate are not even the audience that they really need to reach if they're trying to disabuse people of false factual notions. So I would, if I had a fact check arm at my news outlet, I would just shut it down. If you know, the most of what appears in fact checks is stuff that can just appear in a news story format. And sometimes even when you have a fact check that's really not about facts, it's, you know, it's an analysis about what the context for this ought to have been. You could repackage that as an article and often it would be an informative, interesting article and you just lose the distracting frame where you're claiming to be, you know, setting straight some fact. And to return to the policy substance of that earlier clip, you know, I appreciate that there was some mention of the climbing debts because I think it could become a very serious problem. And I am not, that being said, I'm not optimistic that anyone on that stage is pro-offering any solutions to get it under control. They're kind of just mentioning the number and then not mentioning any sort of path to reducing that either through increased revenue or, you know, cutting the programs that are responsible for, you know, or, you know, our biggest programs are entitlements that's like off the table for anyone on that stage to mention at this point. It seems DeSantis used to mention it when he was in Congress, but he's gotten hammered by Trump for those comments. And now nobody brings it up. So I'm glad it's a topic of conversation based on the policies not offered and also past performance of Republicans in office. I can't say I'm optimistic that any of them kind of have what it takes to like push forward a real agenda, bringing that under control. Nikki Haley has talked some about entitlements needing to be on the table. I mean, it's very unpopular. That's why they don't like to do it. I mean, we also, we've just gone through 30 years of persistently low interest rates and situations where there's usually slack in the labor market and the economy. And so the economic damage that comes from government deficits in certain economic situations has not really applied very much through that period. It has been more or less true that the government can borrow and spend money without causing inflation, without crowding out private sector activity. That's over. That ended with the pandemic and the economic whipsaw of the pandemic. And it's just, you know, the last time we had real deficit reduction politics was in the early 90s. There was a deficit reduction package in 1990. There was one in 1993. And then there was one in sort of 2011-12 that I think wasn't actually good for the economy at that time because we were in that slack period. But the last time where it was really like mortgage rates are too high and politicians need to talk about how we can change fiscal policy to take pressure off interest rates. So it's cheaper for people to buy a house. The last time we had that was 30 years ago. And just almost no one who was in politics then is still in politics and voters aren't used to dealing with those trade-offs. I mean, I think, you know, I don't think we're gonna have a really serious deficit reduction effort until we have some significant period of economic pain driven by those deficits, which, you know, we'll need some time with elevated interest rates and which will limit business investment because it's too expensive to expand your business because interest rates are high. You need that to be a reality for people before it becomes worthwhile for politicians and for voters to say, okay, what pain am I willing to bear in order to bring about this economy in which it will be easier to invest and grow? And I just, those conversations are never easy and they're especially hard when you haven't really had to have them for a few decades. Will people see that causation? I mean, if you go back and look at the 1992 presidential debates, they talk explicitly about it. They talk about like, you know, the like mortgage rates are high because the deficit is big. I mean, I don't know. But do you think right now that will happen again? Okay. Well, right now, no, but I think that's a conversation over the next two years. I mean, in the next two years, you know, say our, you know, country's credit rating, you know, goes down and say people sort of, this begins to be an actual reality that Congress has to reckon with, you know, two years from now or four years from now when we're doing all of this crap all over again, do you think that this will be something where we cut through the culture war and this is what we focus on or not so much? Maybe, I mean, you know, a lot of the Trump tax cuts are going to expire at the end of 2025 and that, you know, the Congress will have to pass some new law or otherwise tax cut will be a real mess after that. So that sort of creates a lever where you're gonna have to have some kind of fiscal deal there. And if control is split, then it'll have to be a bipartisan fiscal deal. But I mean, the other problem here is that we've also gone through 30 years of bipartisan consensus that you should never raise taxes on anyone who makes less than like a quarter million dollars a year. And so that makes it very difficult to draw up a balanced deficit reduction package. I mean, Democrats are very big on the idea you raise taxes on corporations and rich people. And you can raise a substantial amount of money from doing that, but not quite as substantial as a lot of Democrats seem to think, especially if they want to expand the government and not just reduce the budget deficit. And Republicans, you know, that have ever since 1990, 1990 was the last time you had a broad-based tax increase that got significant Republican votes. That was when George Bush Senior broke his No New Taxes pledge. And that sort of was the birth of Grover Norquist's pledge against raising taxes. And I think there's basically no way now to get substantial Republican votes for a revenue-raising package. So you'd have to, they'd have to have a plan that's all spending cuts. But they, I mean, they weren't even saying that they want to repeal Obamacare, which used to be an applause line within the party at this debate, let alone significant cuts in defense spending or Medicare or social security. And then now we've just talked about most of the budget. So I think that we're very far from the realistic stage of talking about what a budget actually looks like that reduces the deficit. And I think it's also telling that when Democrats had full control and passed the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which was supposed to be a deficit reduction bill, first of all, it's not even clear that it reduces the deficit at all because the tax credits for green investment looked like they're gonna be more expensive than expected. But even if- Like a lot more expensive too, not just little. Yeah. But you know, even if it came in where it was supposed to be, it was basically like they had a bunch of new revenue and they spent what five sixth of it on new spending and only a sixth of it went to deficit reduction. Like that was just like the, if to the extent Democrats are already limited in what kind of taxes they're willing to raise and then if they do that, they wanna take most of the money and spend it not reduce the deficit. And that's, you know, neither of these conversations is anywhere close to where you would need to be if you were trying to actually have real effects on economic conditions by shrinking the deficit. I feel pretty pessimistic about people's ability to see the connections here. Specifically, I don't know whether it's fair for me to extrapolate to the degree that I am, but thinking about the relationship between COVID stimulus checks and the inflation that we're currently dealing with, the fact that so many people don't seem to grok the connection, which is not to say that inflation is entirely attributable to that, but certainly we can all agree that that was, you know, a substantial part of it. The fact that people don't quite grok that relationship does not make me feel super optimistic about their ability to understand that going forward. But, you know, I am happy to stand corrected. And politics, yeah. I do fear that Josh is 100% correct that it's only once it hits a sort of, I don't know if crisis point or at least people are really feeling it that there's gonna be any change. I mean, you know, you mentioned that there was this decade or so of where it seemed that deficits didn't matter at all because interest rates were low. More than a decade, more than two decades. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, and during that time there were people who were still saying like we shouldn't let this get so out of control because then if the interest rates ever go up then we're not gonna have, you know the kind of like dry powder and that was ignored. So, you know, any sort of like prevention or preemptive measures to deal with this stuff rarely seems to come to fruition. And, you know, the GOP now is barreling towards a Trump renomination and Trump certainly seems like a zero interest in this. I mean, he loves Dutch, both government and personal and it does not seem to be, you know part of his calculus whatsoever. So I don't see how it's gonna be addressed. Yeah, no, basically it's had a smart piece on this a couple of months ago about how people aren't really thinking enough about what a Trump economic policy would look like in a second term but if he sort of reruns his first term playbook where it's like cut taxes and give people whatever they want and, you know run bigger deficits and, you know I love debt like that worked okay in the economic conditions that prevailed then it wasn't inflationary. I mean, I'm talking about the pre COVID period. You know, the economy did grow a little bit faster through that period unemployment was low basically worked fine. If you do that now, if you come in and say in these economic conditions I'm going to do what is really another stimulus if you do another on finance tax cut and then if you do what he did with the Federal Reserve and lean on them and say stop raising rates I want you to cut rates. If he has success with that or if he puts people on the Federal Reserve Board who will do what he says on that you could have a really big spike in inflation because of that. You know, if he just, you know decides that what he's gonna do is effectively send out more checks and cut rates than people the, you know excessive demand is gonna get even more excessive and you could see even higher inflation than we saw in 2022. I don't think people have really thought about that possibility and you know the bizarre political effects would have but I think that's one real economic risk of a second Trump presidency. Yeah, for sure. And you know between that kind of brings me to the final question here which is between these offerings from the GOP bench and indicted ex-president destroying them in the polls and incumbents experiencing obvious cognitive decline and then Gavin Newsom kind of weirdly lurking in the shadows. What is missing from the 2020 for presidential race for you or maybe another way to put it is what, where would you like to see this go? You know, look, I'll start with you, yeah. I'm sure I have a much more positive view on Joe Biden than the two of you do. You know, I sort of give this residency a BB plus. You know, so I'll be voting to re-elect him. I don't, he's old. He's obviously old. When people say cognitive decline, I think sometimes they're implying that he has dementia or Alzheimer's which I don't think is the case. But you know, I would rather have Joe Biden 10 years younger as president than Joe Biden right now. I don't deny that his age. You don't think he has dementia? No, no, I don't. I think that, you know, I think he's aging in a normal manner, but not in like a, you know like a clinically diagnosable manner. Well, but you know what, and a lot of the... Wait a minute, that's funny. Here's a little bit, like what do you make of his sort of inability to remember like what he's talking about and whether or not he's repeated a story two minutes ago? I mean, I, to some extent, I think Joe Biden has been like that for a lot of his political career. I mean, he was never known as a precise speaker. So I, you know, I don't the, I think, you know the even though he is out there publicly less than a lot of other presidents are, he still talks on camera a lot. And you can pick moments out of it that create certain appearances. But I think, you know, the, I think it's clear that he is running a White House that is, you know you may, you might not like what it's doing but it's broadly effective in doing what is in doing what it is setting out to do politically. So you're not sitting there waiting for Gavin Newsom to swoop in from the wings. That's just an excuse for you to talk about your recent article about Gavin Newsom. Like why is he not the savior in the situation? Well, look, I mean, Gavin's obviously gonna run in 2028 and you know, I'm sure he wakes up every morning hoping that Joe Biden has died so that he can go out there and run for president. And you know, like more than half of getting elected president is good timing. He's far from the only person who's hoping that somebody in his way will kill over dead so that he can go and become president. They're all like this. But no, I mean, Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president in 2024. The thing about Gavin is that he does nothing to bring swing voters into the Democratic Party. He's basically like it's an engineered in a lab to make MSNBC viewers happy. And his big, you know, his big attention-grabbing initiative is this proposal to create a constitutional amendment to further restrict gun rights, which is never going to happen. And if Democrats campaign on it, they will lose elections because this is an issue where salience really goes against them. And you know, they need to try to like do less that makes people think that they're gonna try to take away their guns. But what it does do is it helps Gavin Newsom build a big email list of grassroots Democratic donors who can raise money from and who he can blast emails out to if and when he eventually runs for president. And so it's a really selfish thing. He's doing something that's harmful to the Democratic Party and helpful to him. And I don't care for it. And you know, I wrote this, you know, this Gavin Newsom is gross and embarrassing piece. And I actually, I think people don't fixate enough on the personal behavior of politicians. I think that, you know, like- You mean dating the 19-year-old? Yeah, like he dated the 19-year-old when he was 39 and mayor and he had an affair with his campaign manager's wife. He was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle. I mean, it's like- I don't want to be disqualifying, right? If you look at behavior like, if there was someone in your life personally who was behaving like this, you would look negatively upon it. And I think it makes sense to apply those sorts of standards to political figures as well. To look at someone who looks like they conduct themselves in an honorable manner from day to day. And I just, I don't get that vibe from him. And I said, like, he sort of has Bill Clinton vibes for me, except that Bill Clinton is charming and Gavin doesn't have that. So I just, I think he's, I think he's totally wrong. I think California is a solid blue state being from California, adds nothing politically for the party. It's, you know, this is also Kamala Harris problem. So I, you know, I feel a lot better about some of the Midwestern governors in the party, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Piro. I mean, Pennsylvania's not technically the Midwest, but you know, the Rust Belt. I think that, you know, just who have a broader appeal and have more experience appealing to swing voters because they've had to get themselves elected in swing states. And I think that's a better asset if you're seeking the presidency. So that's where I would, you know, like to see us go after Joe Biden. I think like everybody else, I think Kamala Harris is kind of a joke. But, you know, in 2024, it's going to be a question of, you know, four more years of Biden. And yes, he will be, he'll be a really old president. Conrad Adenauer was a chancellor of West Germany until he was 87. So it's been done before. Liz, what are your, what's the best you can hope for out of 2024 here? I would really like a Peter Meyer type person, but who's like more of a straight shooter. I was reflecting as Chris Christie was talking and I found myself oddly enchanted by him. Mostly I think because I want to be like winter is approaching and I really want to like hang out in a dive bar and throwbacks and like pickleback shots and crush some beers with like a Chris Christie type straight shooter, you know, eat a slice of pizza, that type of thing. I kind of like that demeanor. I would like to marry that whole vibe with some pragmatism and actual experience. And I find Peter Meyer who was, I guess, Michigan's third congressional district representative for a bit to just be so tantalizing. I think it's really wonderful. I think efficacy should actually be prioritized. And I think being honest with people, I really, really dislike the pompousness of people like Vivek Ramaswamy and I think we even saw this a little bit with Andrew Yang. So to some degree I want pragmatism and I want honesty and I feel like there's not really anybody who represents that on stage right now. A lot of Chris Christie's policies I don't actually like. I think Nikki Haley arguably has some of the qualities that I'm looking for except that she is a Warhawk to far too great a degree that I'm comfortable with. And so I don't think that she is actually a good representative of the types of things that I want to see done. I feel now more than ever incredibly politically homeless and really frustrated by the fact that, there are so many people who identify as independent but voters out there who feel almost like what you're talking about, Josh, I understand that at the very beginning you opened this up by saying that you think political parties are important, but you were talking about how you used to be sort of Republican leaning and now you're more Democrat leaning but you're frustrated by components of both parties. And I think that's such a common sentiment. I know so many people in New York who used to be pretty hardcore Democrats and now very much feel like the left has gotten co-opted by silliness. A lot of the PC stuff has really driven them away and there's this like, it's a trope at this point, the left left me. But I would really like to see a candidate that appeals to so many of these people who feel as though their parties whether Republican or Democrat kind of abandoned them. And it's kind of stunning to me that we have so many candidates that feel not like full carbon copies of each other but a little too close for comfort. And for whatever reason, we're not actually focused on people being honest and people being effective. For me, the things I want out of a president at this point is pretty, the bar's been way lowered. There's no way I could limbo under it. It's mostly a list of don't do this thing, like don't end the world by blundering us into an unnecessary devastating war. Don't wreck the economy. Parts of that involve actually addressing the debts at some points. Don't wreck our civil society by flouting the constitutional limits imposed on you or using rhetoric that's designed to make Americans hate each other and stay the hell out of my life as much as possible and devolve power to the lowest degree that you are able to. I don't think anyone on that stage hits all four of those bullet points but there might be people who are improvements to some degree or another on both Trump and Biden across multiple of those dimensions. I hope to return this to the theme we touched on in the beginning of this conversation that the field gets whittled and that there's a bit more seriousness about kind of coping with the situation that the GOP finds itself at this moment with Trump, you know, polling over 50% but not gonna hold my breath for it. I wanna thank Josh Barrow for joining us today. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Liz. Yeah, and thanks for everyone who tuned in and listened. We will be back next Thursday, 1 p.m. We will see you there.