He Is a Sucking Black Hole of Disaster (with Megan McArdle)

Welcome to Begg to differ, the Bulwark’s weekly roundtable discussion featuring a simple conversation across the political spectrum from center left to center right. I’m Sonny Bunch culture editor at The Bulwark, and I’m sitting in for Mona Chair in this week. Joining me are regulars Bill Galston of The Bookings Institution and The Wall Street Journal, Linda Chavez of The Niscanet Center, and David Linker who writes eyes on the right on Substack. Our special guest is Meghan Ricardo calling this for the Washington Post, and you could normally find me hosting the podcast, the Woolworths to Hollywood, and across the movie aisle. First up, let’s try to unpack everything going on with the DOJ and Donald Trump.

If the Department of Justice’s filing is to be believed they not only had good reason to search Mar a Lago, they also found what they were looking for. And if Donald Trump’s truth social account is TV, you believed? Well, they not only had good reason to search Marlago, they also seemed to have found what they were looking for. I have been of the opinion for a while now that the my boxes theory of the case as opposed to the he’s selling secrets to the Russians theory of the case is the best one. Basically, Trump thought they were his boxes and like a toddler who doesn’t wanna return his point of the box just pestilently refused to do so.

Linda, am I weirdly giving him too much credit by suggesting he’s just being a stubborn elf as is his want? And should it really change the DOJ’s calculus at all?

Well, exactly. I guess, I think that latter point is the relevant one. Look, I’ve been convinced from the beginning that Kim Jong Un’s love letters were in forty five’s desk, and apparently, they found three items in his two desks I think he goes in there every morning. He reads the love letter. He reminds himself that he was once the most powerful man in the world, and that makes him feel better.

What the other stuff was doing there? I don’t know. I do think that everything that we have read suggests that Trump just was chaotic that he had no rhyme or reason for some of his actions. I mean, there were descriptions of him taking material to the White House residence, he would throw things in a box and it didn’t much matter what it was. I mean, it might be the little White House briefing that comes out every morning with newspaper clips plus whatever secret information happened to be in his daily presidential briefing plus who knows what else.

And and he’d carry it back and forth. Sometimes he took it with him on foreign trips, which is extraordinarily dangerous, if in fact, he was taking SCI and other classified material at the highest level. At the end of the day, as with all things in Washington, in. It is not gonna be the crime itself, but the cover up that’s going to get him. It was that affirmation to the Justice Department was signed by Donald Trump’s lawyers that said we have returned all material.

We have done a diligent search of Mar a Lago. And you now have everything. This was a letter written to the national archives and to the Justice Department and I think that is what’s gonna do him in because clearly when they found material in his office, boxes of material plus these random pieces of compartmentalized in intelligence that were in his various desk doors. The fact that they lied about it, either he lied to his lawyers or his lawyers lie to the Department of Justice. And that’s gonna be, I think, what does he mean.

Can

we just drill down on the potential the lawyers lying to the DOJ because I think that’s really interesting. And I saw somebody, you know, talking somewhere about how the worst possible thing that could happen to Donald Trump is have his lawyers on this stand basically testifying against him. And

we’ve already seen that. I mean, they’ve done that. We’ve already had these White House lawyers testify against the January sixth hearing. Presumably, they have done the same thing before the grand jury. So we’ve seen that already, and I think that is deeply damaging.

But of course, now we’re talking about not White House officials who, you know, are Republican, but they’re more establishment Republican. We’re talking about, you know, a farmer OAN on air personality who’s one of his lawyers. And whether they will go down with him or not, I don’t know how much damage they can do. I think that’s I don’t know. It’s up in the air.

Howard Bauchner:

Meghan, what do you make of all this? Where do do you think things stand just on a political level? Oh,

on a political level, I think that it is look, I say this as a mainstream media sellout and a never shopper. But, like, it is time for the party to do what it needed to do six years ago and band together and get rid of this guy. It is never gonna end the whole Republican strategy of, like, we don’t wanna cross his voters. They love him. We’ll just keep quiet.

And we’re gonna hope that eventually he goes away. He’s not going away. He’s not going to stop having scandals. It’s gonna be endless. He is a sucking black hole of disaster that is going to pull the party in everything if they don’t just finally decide It’s time.

The best time to do this was six years ago, and the second best time is now. We have to stop making excuses for

it. We

have to stop pretending it’s not happening because he is already damaging the party before this happened. He has been intervening in actions? And because his single issue litmus test is how much do you love Donald Trump? How modestly are you willing to proclaim his lives back in twenty twenty election? Which is selecting for week and inexperienced candidates who are not doing well and alienating moderate voters.

He has already been harming the party. The whole idea of Trump magic that can help the party and when elections, it’s not working. The party needs to get rid of him and unite behind a different candidate I have opinions about who that should be. But, you know, that’s the party’s decision.

As

long as they make excuses for him, as long as they keep standing silent, well, this happens, is going to continue wrecking the party from inside? The

party is kind of hostage to the voters. Right? This is the JBL theory of the the Republican Party at this is that we’re getting more Donald Trump because that’s what Republican voters want. I

don’t think that that’s quite right. So I think he has a devoted fan base, obviously. Right? But then there’s a lot of other voters who would be just as happy with the DeSantis or a younger candidate, and indeed anyone else who is a Republican, they just don’t want it to be a liberal. The problem is he’s helping elect Democrats.

And so for those voters, it is better to get rid of him. Now, does this risk a party split? Absolutely. But It’s coming at some point because he is optimizing the party, not for winning elections, but for advertising the ego of one Donald j Trump. And by the time he finally exits after the Republicans have waited another five or ten years for him to basically by sideline by old age.

Is that party gonna be capable of winning elections at all?

Is it

gonna be capable of holding together in the absence of the centrifugal force of Donald Trump? Are skeptical? So even though I think there are high costs to doing this, and it does mean alienating some of his voters at least temporarily, I think it’s better to risk the party split now, and then start rebuilding immediately than it is to wait and see what happens five or ten years down the road after you have further damaged the Republican brand. Further cemented his hold, further elevated people whose main criteria is not they’re good for the party, good at winning elections, or good at doing anything in office, but just that they flatter Donald Trump. I don’t actually think that this is a kind of undemocratic move because remember he never got a majority of voters in the primary in twenty sixteen.

It isn’t that they all were just waiting for Donald Trump to come rescue him from the establishment. It is that he has a faction in the party but not. The only faction in the party, and the other factions have basically let him win by default by refusing to unite behind someone else.

Yeah. No, I think that’s that’s about right. Damon, does any of what went down this week alter your thinking or change your calculus about the relative dangers of prosecuting versus not prosecuting Trump?

No, not really. I’m the resident, especially with Mona, not here. The resident, I don’t prosecute Trump faction here on the podcast. You know, in fact, I would say, to the extent that the moral law go chapter in Trump’s legal saga ends up fastening onto obstruction of justice as a primary charge. I’m even more convinced that it’s not gonna happen.

I do not believe that the attorney general who was appointed by a president of the other party is going to indict the former Republican president over obstructing justice with no other precipitating crime. Because he will always be able to say, of course, I was obstructing justice. I didn’t do anything wrong. I was trying to defend myself against this. Horrible overreach of the federal authorities just as all the rest of you good law abiding Americans would do.

That would be his defense, and I actually think it would be pretty successful in court. So I if there isn’t an underlying egregious violation of Federal law that they are absolutely certain they can convict him on. They aren’t going to I mean, in that case, they could add obstruction to that list. But they’re not gonna just go at him for obstruction of justice over these documents if there is no underlying, again, bull’s eye, crime. It can’t just be Yeah.

I think this is relatively strong. We can go after him. I mean, you know, one dimension of this issue that I hadn’t talked about much up until now that some people were debating this week that I think is significant is think about what’s going to happen when it comes to like jury selection for such a trial? Like, are you gonna, like, ask people who they voted for? And then if you voted for Trump, that’s forty seven percent of the country.

Are they automatically excluded. They can’t really be. Certainly, Trump’s lawyers would never go for that. And then can we believe that in the tank Trump voters are persuadable that in and of itself is kind of mini version of the general problem writ large, which I keep hammering on about, which is that this is a political problem. And to the extent that we try to solve it in the legal arena, we end up tripped up all over the place.

So, no, I haven’t really been convinced of anything beyond what I’ve thought since roughly June twenty fifteen, if not back to when I was a teenager growing up in the New York area, which is this is a bad guy. So that’s about where I remain, I guess. But Damon,

aren’t you excited for a months long debate on Twitter about the pros and cons of jury nullification. Can’t you imagine the discourse and how much fun that would be?

Oh, yes. The the the mean tweets in every direction would be extremely entertaining. Absolutely.

No. I

mean, I think it is interesting. You would definitely have to come up with some sort of system to exclude actual voters. You just have to get, like, the least involved people on the planet to be on the jury, and that’s always what you want from a jury. What but, you

know, strangely, that is exactly right because when we talk about, you know, what about the moderate voters? Well, the moderate voters tend to be the least informed among us. And I guess, is that really a jury of our peers. Don’t know about that. Certainly, it isn’t my peers sitting on Twitter all day, but that makes me weird.

Yes.

Well, we we don’t want a bunch of Twitter people on any jury, really. I as somebody who was on Twitter all day long, please exclude us from the juries. Bill, how do you think this is gonna all play out? I mean, this does it does seem to be ramping up, you know, Andy McCarthy and NROs talking about how there could easily be an indictment. I don’t think you said definitely.

It seems like folks are kind of coming around to the idea that he is gonna be charged with something. Do you see that happening?

I have as the listeners, at least the faithful ones, no, come around to the view that he’s likely to be charged and furthermore than he probably should be, Damon and I had an exchange on that a week or two ago, but I do think ultimately the problem is a political problem. And I’d like to take Meghan

up under

proposition. It is the case that Trump was a plurality and not a majority winner.

But on

the other hand, there’s no one close to him in the esteem of the Republican electorate as it’s now constituted. Donald Trump got to be the party’s nominee and then the president of the United States and then the party’s nominee again because he understood better than anyone else what the new Republican Party was really about what the tea party people really cared about as opposed to what the Paul Lyons of this world thought they cared about. And they are now glued to him.

I

don’t

see that bomb breaking down. I don’t even see it weakening very much in the past eighteen months. So, yes, it is true that he won the nomination in twenty sixteen because the rest of the party couldn’t unite. On the other hand, I’d post the following question, who could beat him in a one on one competition? For the Republican nomination.

And

who would be willing to take the plunge

at the cost of permanently alienating Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters. I don’t think, frankly, I may be proved wrong about this that wrong DeSantis would be willing to take the plunge. When he knows that if he waits, the nomination will fall into his hand like an overwrite apple falling from the tree. So I think that as long as the Republican base wants what it wants, Donald Trump is the Republican party’s in electable fate. And the only way to prevent him from reoccupying the Oval Office is to defeat him in the general election.

Meghan, do you wanna a respond to that because I I’m kind of of the same opinion. I mean, I I I think Ron DeSantis faced with the prospect of having to get into a knock down drag out fight with Donald Trump just says and maybe I’ll wait till next time. Well,

soon, here is the counterpoint to that. I think that’s a real risk. Right? I’m I think that’s correct. Right?

I think the revolving party might be damned. But Let’s think this through. Right? Why do people run for precedent when they do, even when the odds don’t necessarily look great? Like, nitpick on the twenty twelve.

Well, because you actually have a pretty narrow window of kind of notoriety. One, DeSantis, if he waits, Is there any guarantee that if Trump loses in twenty twenty four, he’s not gonna run again in twenty twenty

eight? Yeah.

Waiting may just mean that you have to wait another or twelve years, at which point Ron DeSantis is not gonna be looking like the fresh hot candidate for doing this. He is in a kind of a strikefully iron as hot moment. He has had a lot of success fighting woke capital at Disney going against woke schools, and that will necessarily be true in four years. He won’t necessarily have the best argument to take to the voting public even if Trump decides not to run, which he might well again. I think the real problem the party has is not the wrong desantises or the Glenn Youngens or whoever your preferred person to take on Donald Trump

is. I

think

the issue is that it has to be one person and it can’t just be

that. What

they need to do is come on the scene with a lot of early endorsements.

And

a lot of promises that other people are gonna campaign for them. And that is what’s not happening. What’s not happening is that the rest of party would just like someone to take Donald Trump out for they all hate him. They all understand the damage she’s doing to the country and to the party. With the exception of, like, some of the super mega types, they do get it actually.

They know he didn’t win the twenty twenty election. They know that it’s gross. And they know what alienates Margaret voters.

But they want

someone else to do it. They’re hoping for a Nasdaq’s machine. Well, guys, when is it gonna happen? And how much more damage is he gonna do first? And so I think, actually, there is a rational case for the party in a way that it has not been able to do for six years.

Just looking at this and saying, my god, this is gonna go on and off. He’s gonna get indicted and convicted, and he would try to run from jail. And we’re going down with him and just saying, okay. We all hang together or most assured we we shall hang separately and actually just going in on this is the one guy that is the best chance probably to Santos. And we’re all going in behind him.

The donors are rallying behind him. We are campaigning for him. Everyone who is not as super chunky guy is just going to bite the bullet. Understand his voters will be mad and do it anyway. Understand there may be a party split but also understand that if they don’t do this, it just gets worse, that they will go down with him in future elections, and that the task of rebuilding the party gets harder and harder, the longer his sticky little fingers rise.

Bill,

any any wrap

up thoughts here before we move on? On one

hand, Meghan has just given a wonderful argument in favor of Chris Christie running for the presidential nomination in twenty twelve. And no doubt, That would have been a better course of action than the one he adopted. But Trump, I think, is in a unique position. And if the people who so fervently support him at the grassroots level were going to desert him I think we would have seen some signs of that already, and I’ve searched high and low, and I haven’t seen them yet. It could still happen.

Second point, I think Meghan is presupposing a medical miracle that is a spinal transplant.

For the

Republican Party, and why would people who’ve been so gutless for so long suddenly develop a collective will, which brings me to my third point.

When we’re

talking about the Republican Party or for that matter of the Democratic Party,

Are we

engaged in a kind of a metaphysical reification of an entity that doesn’t exist? We used to have parties

Now

what we have is legal shells within which individual entrepreneurs buy for advancement. We don’t really have effective central nervous systems and parties anymore. I suppose under sufficiently dire circumstances, one could be developed but where is it? And how can it develop under these circumstances?

Fourth and final point,

against the Trump forever. Scenario. I do not believe that a political party that has nominated a candidate three times in a row, only to see him lose in the second and third round is going to renomidate him a fourth time.

I think

if Trump can be kept out of the White House in twenty twenty four the problem will gradually fix itself, and the Republican Party will then be faced with a choice between minority status and a real change of

direction. Now fingers crossed on that

one. Could I

just jump in with an alternative point of view in terms of what the Republican Party needs? Bill suggested Spine. I think what could substitute for Spine would be a super ambitious politician who sees twenty twenty four as his or her opportunity. And one person who comes to mind who might be willing to do it. She doesn’t

have a

whole lot else going for her right now in terms of political ambition. Is Nikki Haley. And she was careful to sort of somewhat distance herself from Trump. And she is clearly one of the most ambitious politicians out there. And if you could find somebody like a Nikki Haley, and if you know, Mitch McConnell and others in the Republican Party who wanna save the party and hope to have, you know, some influence in the future her were to galvanize around her.

I don’t know what you could do about Ronan McDaniel at the R and C, but, you know, I could see if one person who was super ambitious and was willing to take on Donald Trump were able to clear the field, I could see him losing. It’s

entirely possible. I mean, I’m slightly skeptical that she would be able to rally, you know, all the disparate parts of the anti Trump faction that remains of the GOP around her. But again, anything would be better.

Alright.

Student loans still in the news. They’re gonna be in the news for some time. Bill, you’ve written about the legality and the limits of president Biden’s order here. I have a two part question. One, Is there a danger of overreach and and the the whole thing just being rejected by the court saying, nah, get out of here.

We’re not we’re not doing this. And two, the second question here is why might the change to the percentage of income allowed to be charged to people who take out student loans be a bigger issue overall than the actual death forgiveness in

question. Two

excellent questions, Sunny. I hope my answers measure up to them. First of all, there is a substantial question. As to whether what the president has done will be sustained by the courts. There’s also interestingly a threshold quest as to whether who if anyone is going to have standing to challenge it.

There’s been a very interesting discussion in the law schools about the standing question, and it’s not clear to me that the attorneys general or anyone else will be able to show the kind of concrete and specific harm that getting standing to sue the federal government requires. Stay tuned. It is a close question. And no doubt will be fiercely argued. With regard to your second question, I have I have some history on this question because designing and getting past the original what was then called the income contingent loan repayment system was one of my assignments in the Clinton administration.

And I’ve continued to follow this entire dimension of federal loan policy with great interest.

And

I can tell you that rational federal student loan buyers would choose the new and much more generous system of income related monthly payments. Because the system has been altered in a number of different ways to the advantage of borrowers. First, by the five percent cap, on the percentage of monthly income that can be charged by the federal government Secondly, a change in the definition of income because it’s not all income. It is quote unquote discretionary income. Which means income after accounting for basic expenses on the Biden order has increased the amount of so called basic expenditures to thirty thousand dollars a year, which means it’s if you start off with a salary of fifty thousand dollars a year, which is roughly average for people graduating with BAs.

The loan repayment base is twenty thousand, not fifty thousand. And the odds are considerable that you will never repay your loans even after twenty years and that a substantial portion of it will be forgiven after that period. And third, For many borrowers with relatively low balances, the repayment period has been cut from twenty years to ten years. Which pretty much guarantees that they will not repay the principal. And after ten years of paying interest, the balance will be forgiven, the Penn Warton study making plausible behavioral assumptions suggests that the cost of that feature of the Biden plan alone could be half a trillion dollars over the next ten years.

If so, it would be the single most significant feature of the entire program and all of the debate about ten thousand dollars forgiveness would pale did significance. Yeah. I mean,

that’s an enormous amount of money. And just to clarify for folks, you know, when we’re talking about basic expenditures, what does that encompass? I mean, I assume rent and others. But, like,

what what is that actually taking into account? It’s taking into account things like rent, home heating, food, basic transportation, etcetera. So all the things you need to live and to work. Mhmm. And the new definition is now two hundred and twenty five percent of the federal poverty level will be excluded from the category of discretionary income.

That works out to about fifteen dollars an hour, thirty thousand dollars a year if you’re working full time. And when you consider the fact that the average starting salary if you get out of community college is about thirty three thousand dollars a year, you’ll be repaying your loan on a base of three thousand dollars for college graduate. As I said, you’ll be repaying on a base of about twenty on half but in either case, it’s a back of the envelope calculation that you’re not gonna end up repaying your loan.

It would take a long time. Linda, what do you think the best case outcome here in the the whole student loan situation is? Because it’s really complex I mean, the politics on this are very, very complicated, especially if the courts get involved.

Howard Bauchner: Well,

I think that’s right, and I’m sorry to hear Bill, who might respect very much on these matters, suggests that it would be very difficult to find someone but standing to be able to go into court on this. I mean, my preferred outcome would be that this thing would be knocked down altogether. I think it’s just a terrible idea. It’s backward looking instead of forward looking. If we wanna be investing in education and I’m all for that, we ought to be investing forward.

We ought to be encouraging, as I’ve said before on this show, more people to go into some of the trades.

You know, one

of the big problems it seems in all of this student debt is a lot of the for profit trade schools were big offenders in basically giving training that was worthless, now not all of them, but some of them. And so this doesn’t deal with that. This doesn’t in any way deal with the rising cost of higher education, which is frankly the biggest problem. I mean, the fact that you’ve had the cost of college tuition vastly exceeding the inflation rate over the years. It was possible as we’ve discussed on the show before for people in my generation, bills generation, to be able to afford to go to college by working and paying for it.

You know, I have a little bit of loans. I think I have less than a thousand dollars in total in loans, but mostly I was able to pay by working and paying for tuition at a university state university that was reasonable. So My preferred outcome is that somehow this thing gets struck down and that the Biden administration comes back with a different plan. And frankly, you know, from everything we’re reading behind the scenes of the various talks that went on, Biden himself was not terribly enthusiastic about this. He made a promise during the campaign.

They hope that was gonna energize young voters, and of course, president Biden is not doing well with young voters now, but it’s not clear to me that even those young voters that he hopes to appeal to are jumping up and down for joy with this debt forgiveness. So I just think it was a bad bad policy and not necessarily good politics

either. David and I have I

wanted to jump to you for a second because I agree with Linda one hundred percent on just the policy point of it all. But I I am I’m curious about the politics of it because it really does feel like Joe Biden has set a very delicate trap for the Republicans here in which they are being forced to come out against money for people. You never want to be the politician who says no, no money for people. I don’t want to give money to the people.

Right? Well,

you know, usually that is the way things go, but who are the people? Who exactly are we talking about? Here. And one of the underlying structural changes that has been going on in American politics over the last generation is that The Democratic party is increasingly becoming the party of college graduates, and the Republicans are becoming the party of those who don’t at least graduate from college. Maybe some of them go or they go to to Europe programs or something.

But in general, that is one of the major fisher separating the two parties in our moment, and I as someone who very much has very hopeful feelings for the fate of the Democratic Party in the current political environment with the danger posed by the populist Republican Party I’m worried that this will simply feed a narrative that what Democrats are doing here is channeling a kind of gift to its voters who in the scheme of their entire earning potential throughout their lives are gonna actually do quite well and don’t really need a boost to the tune of roughly half a trillion dollars. That this is something I mean, it’s not all of them. Maybe other kinds of means testing could have been done. But in fact, this program seems to have gone somewhat in the other direction by including graduate programs, law degrees, and things where their earning potential is going to be among the very highest in the society. And so the idea that, I mean, no one likes to struggle to pay off student loans.

And I agree there are all kinds of structural problems with higher edgy and incredible tuition inflation. But as any economist would tell you, setting up this kind of a program is is almost tailor made to make those problems worse by convincing schools. Well, hey, we can charge anything we want. In the end, though, people won’t even have to pay this stuff off. It’s actually of the taxpayers are gonna pay for it in the end.

So there’s no incentive to keep the cost down to lower tuition. And similarly, the same kind of moral hazard problem with people who are deciding whether to go to school and which school to go to and really how much people are going to be on the hook to repay these debts. And, frankly, the way Bill, I think, very helpfully, explains it in his column and here on the podcast, implies that, well, moral hazard is actually built into the thing. It’s encouraging it. You have all kinds of reasons to assume that if this stands court challenge, And of course, if Democrats remain empowered to keep it from getting rescinded or something, we’re looking at a future in which there’s gonna be a hell of a lot more debt forgiveness coming up.

So what’s the incentive to be prudent when it comes to deciding where to go and how much to spend? So in general, I you know, the the initial polls seem to be showing that people like this plan that might be the case. I’m skeptical. Most people understand what’s in it yet, and of course, we haven’t had much time for Republicans to refine an effective political argument against it. So In general, I’m brewing skittish, and as I said last time quickly on the pod, I think this was bad on about eight levels, but none of them are the worst thing in the world.

So in the end, not good, but I don’t get super worked up about it. I just kind of scratched my head and wonder exactly what’s going on in the Democratic Party when it comes to this felt need to placate certain factions within the coalition, especially the kind of Elizabeth Warren voter highly educated college graduate who is carrying a bunch of debt for an English degree somewhere. I guess I’ll stop there, but those are my general fucked on the matter at this

point. Oh, Meghan, I wanna ask you to drill down a little bit on something Damon said here because you wrote earlier this week the problem with unforgiveness is that in all likelihood, it’s just gonna make all of these problems worse. It’s not gonna do anything to, you know, keep down costs, etcetera, etcetera. But I’m skeptical. I mean, what could possibly go wrong by cutting checks to people and then doing nothing to change the behaviors of the institutions?

That have encouraged these people to rack up all the debt in the first place. I don’t see how could that possibly backfire? Oh, yeah.

How do I

count the ways? I mean, for starters, there’s just the fact that we’re spending what? Half a trillion dollars, maybe a trillion dollars, who knows, all of these changes. But I think fifty incentives are obviously terrible. And I think that they are, in fact, there’s a continuation of a cycle that we have been undergoing for quite some time, which is that, you know, the student loan program was originally actually established because of sputnik.

American legislators were afraid that were falling behind the Russians and we needed more stendage and that was what it was originally for. Well, over time, it expands. But it’s not actually a big deal for most people until really the nineties to two thousands.

And

that is because colleges realize, you know, the kind of theory behind student loans is sound. You allow students look, you’re gonna make more money when you graduate. So let’s move a little of that income forward so you can pay your tuition. Everyone’s better off. Right?

You get to invest in yourself. You can pay it

back. Well,

the thing is what colleges realize is if you move that income forward, you can pay more. And so they start

jacking up

tuition.

And also, by the way, doing a lot more price discrimination. And so when you now look at how the college process works for people who are not going to necessarily like a super elite school, there’s a huge amount of, like, bidding wars for financial aid. The actual sticker price is very different depending on what kind of student you are.

Not just do

you help the school get its US news and we’ll report rankings up, but also are you a boy? Because your boys wanna go to college, so there’s a kind of implicit affirmative action for them and a lot of schools now because girls don’t like to

be in

college by themselves. You know, since all these

weird bidding wars

that go on, so the published wish in praise often there’s very little resemblance to what students are paying. So we look

at this

and we

say, oh

my gosh, this is terrible.

College tuition

prices have gone up. Students are struggling. I know. Let’s do income based repayment. Because that’ll make it easier for them.

Well, it does make it easier. And what else does that do? It makes them more willing to borrow? Because they know there’s gonna be a cap. And in in some cases,

in

that rooming,

not

someone who I usually agree with, but wrote a good post talking about the ways in which, like, law schools, for example, can gain this.

They know that if you’re gonna

go into public service, they might as well jack up solution because you’re not gonna pay it anyway. It’s all gonna be forgiven after ten years. And so the student doesn’t care. And in fact, when I borrow some money for living expenses, why don’t I have a good time when I’m in law school? I’m not, you know, I’m capped at whatever the ten percent five percent whenever the number is, they get set.

But we

keep changing the incentives to make it easier to borrow money. And then the price and apology keeps going up. And we keep doing the same thing, trying to get a different result. This is, like, trying to quit smoking with switching to unfiltered cigarettes. It’s a terrible, terrible plan.

And I think when you add in the forgiveness, the students going forward are gonna get the now lower caps on

income based repayment. But

they’re gonna look at people who graduated basically this year or earlier and say, hey, those people got the lower rates, but they also got ten thousand dollars worth of forgiveness And hey, look, tuition is going up as schools move to capitalize on the easier borrowing. Don’t I deserve forgiveness too? So I think the cost ultimately is gonna be even higher than it now looks, both because this is actually gonna contribute to tuition going up as it has in the past.

But also

because it’s gonna push further forgiveness

in the future. I

think it’s just a terrible, terrible policy. The best you can say about it really is that it seems to be blatantly illegal.

And there don’t seem to

be any lawyers outside of the administration who really think that this is actually even vaguely within the remit of the law that they’re using. To excuse this. And so if someone can find standing the suit, probably a cord starts it down, and that’s the end

of it. Yeah.

Always a nice best case scenario. Yeah.

It’s not great. Right? I mean, it’s basically it’s the administration getting some temporary electoral support. And then

if this goes,

say, all the way to the Supreme Court, And the supreme court quite rightly strikes it down because the law that they used was not intended for anything like this purpose. Then the Biden administration’s gonna go back and say c bad conservative status instead of c bad b for passing a law

that I

knew did well, which is not for kind of exploiting a law in a way that I knew Dan well, it was not intended

to be used.

Yeah. I mean,

that’s the thing here. It’s not even pass a law. It’s just like add decree. Yeah. I I really know.

Alright. The

Pennsylvania senate race is heating up and getting kind of ugly after weeks of devastating meme warfare by the Federman campaign, the OZ campaign is hit back, making fun of John Federman’s stroke. And then suggesting he was incapable of debating because of it, there are a couple of different angles here. One is that, look, there are certain things that are okay to mock. Right? Like carpet bagging.

Nobody likes a carpet bagger. We can all make fun of them. And there are certain things that are not okay to mock that should be off limits. For example, health concerns and having a stroke. You know, it’s funny that doctor Oz is a New Jerseyian and Federman can get snooky to say that she’s waiting for him to come back to the shore.

It is not funny that Federman’s brain issues leave him unable to deal with crowded auditory settings. Like, these are very basic elements of comedy. And yet, I can’t help but think, Linda, that the odds campaign’s attacks here are at least a little more important in terms of the job of actually being a senator. Like, if Federman really can’t communicate with people, if he’s having trouble in big crowded settings, if he isn’t on the top of his game mentally, does he actually have any business being in the

senate? Well, I

think that’s the reason that Oz is doing it. Look, Oz is right now running a bit behind in the race, and I think he desperately wants to move forward. Federman, interestingly, I think in some ways, has benefited by being off the campaign trial. He is much to the left. And I think that he’s not necessarily the best person to win that race Obviously, he won the primary, but Pennsylvania is a purple state.

It’s a swing state. So I think that OS is doing what he thinks he needs to do. And it’s not as if at least Republicans are not used to candidates mocking the disabled Donald Trump certainly did it with the New York Times reporter who was disabled during the campaign. Everybody gas and thought that was gonna be the end of his campaign as they did so many other times and it turned out not to be. But you raise an important point in terms of Veterans’ ability to be able to communicate he has been loathed to actually be out there on the campaign trail, and I don’t blame him, and he is recovering from a major stroke.

This was not one of those little minor strokes that, you know, you can go about your day and not necessarily even notice. This was a major stroke. And he is still unable to process words. He still has trouble getting his thoughts out, and I think his energy is not where it would be. And that does raise questions about, well, okay, how good a representative is he going to be in the United States Senate if he’s still having those problem.

So Oz is going with what he has. You know, Oz himself is not a very appealing candidate. And therefore, it’s not as if he can run a positive campaign. And so he’s going negative and he’s going added in a crude sort of disgusting way by mocking the severity of mister Peterman’s stroke. But on the other hand, he is planting in the minds of the voters.

Look, maybe this guy’s not up to

the job. Damon,

you know, me more fair. It’s it’s a major part of politics today, right, at least in terms of shaping the narrative. Do you see any similarities or at least kind of similar type behavior between what’s going on, between odds and Federman, and what the White House did when it essentially just started saying to every Republican out there who opposed the student loan measure. Oh, look at this PPP loan you took out. Look at this PPP loan that your business took out.

You know? And also, I’m just curious, you’re a Pennsylvania resident. Right? I I wanna get your take on how this is all playing out

out there.

Well, to take those in, I guess, reverse orders since the first one is a little more impressionistic just based on being a resident here in Pennsylvania. It has been very entertaining the way things have unfolded over the last couple of months since Federman and Oz won their primaries The campaign has been sort of frozen because first, Federman was incapable of campaigning at all and there was a kind of hush right after the primaries were over. And then it kind of got up and going, and it was entirely one-sided. OZ is really an in-depth candidate. You know, carpetbagging is a a story in American tradition, and it always gets some traction when the other side pearls it at the carpet bagger.

But usually, the story goes that the carpet bagging is about someone who moves to a new low location and then runs for office for whatever the declared reason is, I would be good here. And, yes, I’m not from here, but I wanna represent you now. And, you know, that can always be criticized. But in this case, it’s not even clear Oz has even moved to Pennsylvania. At all.

He appears to still live in New Jersey. He owns many homes and most of them are not in Pennsylvania. And it’s never been clear why he’s even running. He just decided at some point he wanted to be in politics and here was an open Senate seat was kinda near where he lived, so he decided to launch a campaign. So, Federman’s been coming at him with these meme wars, I guess, to transition to your second question.

And it’s been fun to watch because it’s been all directed so far until quite recently with Federman against Oz mocking him for his Mansion in New Jersey, and he says Credite, instead of veggie plate. And so very kind of sort of light touch, slightly mean, but light touch populous zinger sort of being shot toward us and us has been very inept in his attempt to respond to them until now when he’s finally kind of stepped up to trying to best Federman at the Memoirs, but it’s about this very kind of grave issue of Federman’s competency and his health. And in that respect, it has turned ugly, but I, you know, I will have to say it’s, first of

all,

not surprising

that Oz would take this particular turn on this issue because one way he can try to increase enthusiasm among Republican voters who aren’t thrilled with him is to be a jerk, which is, you know, one of Trump’s big transformations that he’s effectuated in the Republican Party is kind of animating the jerk vote, people who really aren’t very nice and you know, sort of like being jerky to the other candidate, the other party. And so this is I think probably designed in part to get those voters to say, hey, Oz can fight to like Trump. Yeah. Give it

to him.

The end result, though, I think, is a very real ish you. I mean, the very fact that we’re even talking about the results of the stroke on Federman’s ability to serve an office is a function of this attack this week, so it might not have been nice. But this is something that’s been kind of going on in the background first Federman wasn’t doing any public events for weeks and weeks. Then he said he would be back out in July, then he didn’t show up on the Campan Trail till the very end of July, then it turned out that when he does do an event, he never speaks for more than about ten minutes and it’s sometimes halting. And yet there were not a lot of mainstream journalistic stories about this fact.

And now we’re talking about it because Oz has put it on the agenda with these kind of sleazy attacks and nasty attacks. So in the end, I do think that is a perfectly legitimate issue to raise. I think It does seem to be getting Democrats very animated. He does represent one possible strategic future for the Democratic party that the Republicans have every reason to be worried about, namely a guy who on policy is, as Linda said, a progressive and on the left, but whose manner of way of speaking, of dressing, of just carrying himself screams working class average guy. That combination of things could be very formidable.

So I’m not surprised that the gloves have come off at this relatively late

date. Meghan, as

a fellow Twitter addict, I’m addicted to Twitter. I see you on there probably more than either of us would want us to be on there. How much do you think that this is just localized to, like, Twitter spat that all of the journalists who are on Twitter love and love to talk about? And how much is actually impacting the real world?

Look, I think it’s a problem. I thought about this and what everyone did decorously mention that, like, if you run a campaign trail, Joe Biden looked really frail and he sometimes confused people’s names or gave answers that didn’t seem to make sense. And no one said anything because it

was unkind. And

I think what Oz has done is force us to talk about the fact that he may be cognitively fine inside, you know, past the speech problems. But nonetheless, the speech problems are real, the auditory processing problems are real, and that is something the voters shouldn’t be considering. Now, does that mean that he’s not gonna win? No. We’ve had real cases of, reportedly, I can’t bash for this personally, but, like, real cases of senators would would seem to be pretty advanced dementia, who just kept getting returned by voters and everyone kind of complained about it.

We probably shouldn’t do that. I think that you don’t have to make fun

of people

in that condition because it’s not funny, but it probably shouldn’t take kind of shock value to push that past our kind of niceness felt there is an ask Is this person capable of doing this job right now? And I think, unfortunately, maybe it does. You know, maybe the only way that we can talk about whether someone who has recently had a stroke should in fact be in office is for his opponent to say something really terrible so that we can talk about it if I talk about his opponent.

No, it’s

tricky. I mean, Bill, I I I can’t help but feel that this is one of these, like, just politics aint beanbag sort of thing. Right? Like politics is nasty. It can get ugly.

And this is an important seat and an important race. And odds are it was gonna get ugly sooner rather than later. I mean, do you think that either of these sides can or should unilaterally disarm in the race or should they even?

Well, the

arms race analogy I think is a good one. Because once you’re off and running, with this sort of politics unless you can negotiate a mutual stand down.

Neither candidate

can afford to move first. And unilaterally disorder. It just doesn’t work that way and rationally speaking, it can’t work that way. But let me move for just a minute from the politics of the situation to the actual substance of what’s at stake. People I know very well, have been stroke victims.

And one

of the things that I’ve noticed is that if you took a snapshot of them two or three months out, you’d be led to the conclusion that they would never again be able to do. Many of the things that they

used to.

But the recovery continues. And so a reasonable voter in Pennsylvania would ask not only whether John Federman is capable of serving

now,

But whether

he’s likely to be capable of serving in six months or nine months from now, medically, I think that’s the right quest and the snapshot approach is the wrong approach. And then a reasonable Pennsylvania voter might ask

Well, based

on what I’ve learned about John Federman over these many years when he’s been in public life in Pennsylvania,

based

on what I’ve learned from his indefatical travels, which have taken him as far as I can tell to just about everywhere in his state. Given the fact that he knows the state very well, and the guy who’s running against him certainly doesn’t and shows no signs of being a fast learner. All things considered who is more likely to represent me more accurately, more faithfully, more knowledgefully, So it is not clear to me that the fitness to serve issue cuts in favor of doctor Oz and in favor of John Federman even if he is in an impaired state now and may suffer, we don’t know, some longer lasting impairments.

He certainly

doesn’t suffer from dementia. And as a as a previous participant this discussion pointed out, That hasn’t always been a bar to elective office. I’m old enough to remember strong Thurman. And there may be some current instances as well. I’m not recommending dementia as a qualification for public office, but I am saying that stroke victims are not dementia victims, and their trajectory is up.

Victor’s trajectory is down. And it is perfectly reasonable to cast a vote for John Feller than even under these circumstances.

I I

mean, I think that’s totally fair point. Like, it’s a disease he’s trying to recover from it. Things could very well be better now. And, you know, if you don’t wanna vote for Dr. Oz, who could blame you, because he’s, you know, kind of a silly person.

Alright. Instead of highlights

and lowlights,

Linda asked if we might do some cultural stuff since I am the Bulwark’s resident movie nerd, and the culture editor, and all that. And I am happy to oblige. So let’s try new segments. Just for this week. What are you watching this weekend?

A long Labor Day weekend coming up lots of time to fill? Linda, what are you watching? Well,

I am watching a fabulous series on Apple Plus with one of my very favorite and I think one of the best living actors, Gary Old man, is called slow horses. It has a star studded cast. It’s got Kristen Scott Thomas in it. It has a Jonathan Price in it and a young up and coming actor Jack Loaden. It’s all about MI five and slow horses is the name given to a bunch of MI five wash outs, who instead of being separated from the service in England had been sent out to a place they called Slough House, which apparently is named for a exarb of London far out, and there they’re supposed to not get into too much trouble and basically are just farmed out to do nothing.

Well, they end up doing a great deal. It is a very fast paced series It opens with one of the best openings I’ve seen outside of a in terms of a thriller, outside of a a born movie with lots of action and it’s just really a good watch I recommended. It has one season that has been completed. Apparently, the second season is going to come out this year, and they’ve already signed up for a third and fourth and slow horses comes from a series of books written by Nick Herron, a two thousand ten series called The Slow House series.

I believe

one of the producers on the show is Graham Yost, who also did justify — Yes. Correct. — you

like justified,

and I did like justified, I strongly recommend checking out slow horses, which I have also enjoyed. It’s a fun show on Apple TV plus people should check it out. Damon, you’ve been revisiting some classics. Right? Well a classic, and it’s

a little weird to pronounce something from only within the last decade of classic. But in this case, I do think

it fits. Sometime

over this last summer, my son was kind of bored and asking, you know, what what can I do on these evenings when I don’t have anything to do? And I suggested he take a look at ad men.

And he

began watching it and watched I think he’s about five seasons in by now, and he’s absolutely loved and we’ve spent a lot of time this summer talking about it, but it’s been long enough since I’ve seen it that my wife and I started re watching it ourselves and it really really holds up in every way. I mean, everyone when it was on talked about all of the things that are great about at the acting directing set design. But especially the hits me now, the script writing, which not so much about plot because not a huge amount happens on the show. Just about a series of ad agencies in New York City during the nineteen sixties, but the writing relating to character and especially viewing psychology, kind of timeless human psychology, as well as very American psyche, and especially the dimension of americanism that has to do with the myth of getting a new life. Is it possible to live your life thinking that it’s always possible to start over, to break free from one’s past and begin again anew with, of course, as most people probably know or or have heard.

That’s the kind of ongoing drama of the main character, Don Draper, in the show, and is endless efforts to get a new life and how that plays into the theme of the show about advertising and dreaming up new fantasy possibilities and trying to make them real in the world. This opens up all kinds of cultural and psychological puzzles that the show explores with a great deal of eloquence and depth. So it remains very good and hopefully when we’re even more than barely a decade out from it, people will continue to recognize how good it is. Strong, recommend on that one as

well, mad men, great show. Meghan, I I happen to do a show with your lesser half Peter Stuartman here at The Bulwark. Have you been enjoying the new Game of Thrones? What else are you watching?

We have, of course, been enjoying the new Game of Thrones. I mean, I think it’s good. I don’t think it’s as good as the

original. In part

because

the source material is not as exciting as the original. Right? The source material was a fully developed story the source material for this is more like a weird kind

of

just history, like, a kind of companion volume to get my throws. And it’s a bit thinner, and therefore, I think, a little bit less kind of interesting. Also, because the stakes in Game of Thrones were like, the world is ending. And

the states of

this are like, maybe this person will

get to

be queen instead of that person. Somewhat similar states. Also, we’re going to see three thousand years of longing this weekend, which I’m excited

for, but can’t

tell you anything about. And, of course, we’re gonna be at the name of Lord of the Rings because we are huge nerds. So, yeah, a lot going on in the next suit or in household, systematically. Televisionistically. What is the television word for some Televisionally?

Televisionally. Yeah. And I mean, it’s I think it’s you know, we just finished at our console and Ozark I think Ozark stuck the landing. Surprisingly, I think better console was a better series overall, but Ozark stuck their landing better. But, you know, it’s been a pretty good year, televiscially, and systematically for our household.

Yeah.

Bill, any Labor Day recommendations for us? Yeah. Two. First, a long running and quite well known French show called Leburo, you know, which is about the French Secret Service. It’s wonderfully well done.

I will not go on at length about it. I’m also watching a new show called The Last Days of Tommy Gray starring Samuel L. Jackson. One of my absolute all time favorite actors who is terrific as usual,

but

there’s a revelatory young actress in the show as well. Her name is Dominique Fischbeck, and I’m ashamed to acknowledge that I hadn’t heard of her previously but she is fantastic. And I’ve learned by doing a little research after I started watching her that she is no flash in the pan. You know, she’s been nominated for a number of acting awards over the past decade as won a couple and is someone whose name will become, I suspect, very well known over the next decade.

Tell

me, gray, I believe, is on Apple TV plus. Is that right? That is correct. Yes. And where is Laburo?

Well, I

thought it was on Netflix. Is

it on Netflix? Okay. Sure. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No.

I thought it was on Netflix and maybe it once was, but I was forced to subscribe to Sundance now in order to be able to watch it. But unlike many of these forced investments, it’s been worth the money so far. Okay. Good stuff. There

are so

many different streaming options out there. This is a thing I go on about at length. People are tired of hearing me talk about it. My suggestion would be to check out the new Ron Howard movie thirteen lives, which is streaming on Prime Video now. Starz V Go Mortensen and Colin Farrell.

It’s about the rescue of the Thai soccer team from the flooded cave. A few years back, imagine it’s like Apollo thirteen, right, except instead of in space, it’s underground. And in again, instead of space, it’s drowning. It’s just There there are lots of very terrifying and involving being underground and underwater and claustrophobia kicking in. But it’s very good.

It’s very good. It makes the Ron Howard promise of, like, we’re gonna put everybody in a lot of danger, but don’t worry. You know that this story turns out, well, so everything’s gonna be okay. So check that out if you have a chance. This weekend.

That’ll be it for today. Thank you to Megan Mercado in the panel for joining me. Thank you to our listeners. Our producer is Katie Cooper, our engineer and editor is Joe Armstrong. I’m on and will thankfully be back next week.

You won’t have to put it up with me again. I hope you guys have fun.

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