I’m Sorry, That’s Classified

Welcome to Bags to differ. The Bulwark weekly round table discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right I’m Mona Charron, syndicated columnist and policy editor of Bulwark, and I’m joined by one of our regulars, Damon Linker, Author of the Substack newsletter, eyes on the right. Bill Johnston and Linda Chavez are off this week, but we are happy to welcome back to Bulwark’s Kathy Young. And our special guest this week is David Griess, who is COO of the Law Fair Institute, former CIA Officer, and the Clinton and George W.

Bush administrations and author of several books. Welcome, one and all. David, I’m particularly glad we were able to nab you for this week’s podcast because you are someone who certainly knows your way around security matters and classified documents. You were in charge of briefing the attorney general on intelligence matters, I believe, and you had a role in preparing the president’s daily breaks, the PDB. Right?

Mona, I need you wherever I go because that’s a pretty good summary. Yes. I did brief a president’s daily brief to primarily the attorney general and the FBI director for a time in the Georgia W Bush years, and those were John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller. And then also took it into the White House a few times for the National Security Advisor. And her deputy.

But yes, I definitely have a lot of thoughts about classified documents and how reporting is showing that they were handled.

Okay. So let’s start there. There’s been a lot of talk about the espionage act. Because that was one of the laws that was mentioned in the search warrant that might have been violated. Now, you’ve said to Chuck Todd, so I’d like you to just elaborate on that a little bit that this doesn’t necessarily mean that they believe former president Trump was a spy.

Right.

Far from it, the espionage act, and by the way, Mona, not nice of you to listen in on my conversations with Chuck like that.

No worries safe, David. No worries safe.

The espionage act is poorly named. Yes, it was designed back when it was passed around a hundred years ago to deal with issues that could be related to espionage. But essentially it has to do with the handling and retention of national defense information. And that may have nothing to do with handing it to a spy for a foreign power or even intending to do so. Some of the clauses include things like willfully retaining information and failing to return national security information that is in your possession.

So, yes, the espionage act unfortunately raises a lot of connotations are not necessarily borne out by

all of its provisions? Howard Bauchner: So there has been probably a record setting amount of fatuous argumentation about this since the news broke. So you’ve heard, for example, people saying, well, farm president Trump declassified all of these materials automatically when he took them out of the Oval Office. Therefore, No problem. Even John Bolton has pushed back on that, but let’s hear your push back on that particular one.

Yeah,

that’s a hard one because the declassification process is not airtight. It is for people like me when I was at CIA of something were to be declassified by someone at a higher pay grade than me, there is a process to go through that involves vetting the information checking for the impact on sources and methods, and then getting all of that filtered through the system. Because it is the information contained within a document that is classified. It is not technically the piece of paper itself. So the president could have a copy of an intelligence report.

And he wants to declassify the information within it. Well, the other copies of that document, electronic or physical need to be declassified as well. And there’s the rub because if the president did have a standing order, which no one around him has come out and said that they know about But if the president did have a standing order that anything he took to the residence in the White House was declassified, then there would be a trickle down effect that many many people would be aware of of the many documents that elsewhere in the system would be marked as declassified. Without evidence of that and without any evidence of such an actual order being put into practice, then it’s the declassification Dog that simply didn’t bark.

So I worked in an administration admittedly in the dark ages, but the Reagan administration. And here’s why this struck me as just kind of nonsensical. This notion of waving a magic wand and declassifying. The whole point of the classification system is that it says who has access to these documents and under what circumstances. So there are some things that are so classified.

You can only at them in certain situations, in certain rooms, and, you know, those are, like, the special what they call it, the special

Which relaxes program.

Right. And other things are confidential and then there’s top secret and so on and so forth. But the fact is the whole point of having those layers of classification is that it tells you if you’re eligible to even have access to the material. Right. And so if nobody knows that something has been declassified, then what’s the point?

Right? I mean, the whole thing is supposed to be a guide to who can see what?

It really is. And there are separate issues that can be discussed in the future about are too many documents classified or are the levels applied evenly across similar agencies and departments. Those are all valid conversations to enable good government. But that’s Not really the issue here. The issue here is about the president’s classification and inherent declassification Authority.

And when or if he practiced it, There’s a separate issue, which I’ll mention in a moment. But on the classification issue alone, there is still some uncertainty. We know when it comes to national defense information as opposed to nuclear information, which is governed somewhat separately, that the president does have wide latitude due to his commander in chief role for classifying and therefore declassifying information. But he still has to tell someone he’s doing it. It’s not something that he can think and it automatically happens.

And as a former president, you can say, well, this is what I meant to do when I was president. So that’s that side. Some part of me is really struggling with all of this discussion over classified information, however, because as of January twentieth, twenty twenty one when Donald Trump was no longer president but private citizen, all of these government records, whether classified or not, were subject to the Presidential Records Act, and they are the government property, really the property of the US people in the stewardship of the US government. And Donald Trump shouldn’t have had any of them at all, whether they were things like personal notes about Macron that appeared to be in this set of documents or whether they were top secret documents, those are all the property of the US government, and he was essentially holding on to stolen property. Howard Bauchner:

Right. So what’s your best sense of what Trump was thinking. I know this is a hard game to play, but look, you can rush to the most dire conclusions and say, oh, he took the CIA’s evaluation of the state of the Iranian nuclear program and he’s gonna sell it to the Saudi. For billions of dollars. But isn’t it a lot more likely that he’s just an overgrown infant and he’s saying, this is mine.

You can’t have it. I I want it. What what what’s your analysis? What do you think? I

can’t disagree with that as the prominent, probably even the primary explanation that makes sense given what we know. Listen, it’s hard to get inside anyone else’s head. It’s particularly dangerous. To try to get inside Donald Trump’s head, but we have plenty of evidence over several years of him saying or doing things and then post hoc coming up with the explanation to make it seem like three-dimensional chess when instead it was just a gut reaction, a narcissistic instinct. That seems to me the most likely that it was, oh, these are things I care about their mind.

I take them. It wasn’t a calculated process. But I have very low confidence in that because I am not inside his head, so I don’t really know what the issue there is. We also have the issue Mona is we don’t know that this is fully about Donald Trump, that we probably know that the president was not personally boxing up papers from various offices around the Oval Office. That’s something most presidents don’t do, and Donald Trump seems particularly unlikely to a betting one doing the manual labor like that.

So who were the people around him that at his order or interpreting what they thought were his directives? We’re putting these papers into the boxes to go to the president’s residence instead of going into the documents being processed by the national archives. It’s quite possible that the affidavit and the other material is actually looking primarily at other people who the course of the investigation showed were responsible for the movement of these papers, and Donald Trump may not be the absolute central figure.

Damon, I’m going to bring you in here. Do you think that the Department of Justice had any alternative after having engaged in back and forth negotiations with the former president over many months, more than a year, and then finally issuing pina, which was flouted. Do you think I had them any alternative to just going and getting this stuff?

Probably not. Although we don’t know for sure because of the affidavit that was approved for the search, has not been made public. We’re in a bit of a battle over that right now with the justice department saying that it really wouldn’t be a good idea to release this to the public and Trump demanding and other Republicans also on his side demanding that the information being released. And actually, as of Thursday afternoon, federal judges ruled that a redacted version of the affidavit will have to be released. So it looks like we’re all gonna find out at least some version of it.

You know, it’ll be a Rorseshack test. Again, it’ll be kind of like the Mueller report redacted. And one side will see one thing and the other side will see another, but at least I’m confident that my side will be able to read it and come to a conclusion. But based on the circumstantial evidence around this, it looks very much like what was going on is exactly what you and David priests have been talking about that Trump left the White House with boxes full of documents that were not his to take and have in his possession. They were also appears to be some evidence that they were not on ever any kind of strict guidance.

I mean, if I were working for the SGU or some other foreign intelligence service. The first thing I would have done as soon as Trump left offices, make sure I put a couple of people working there at Mar a Lago as his new maid so that I could, you know, take a look at some of those things. Or as a new member of the club. Well, sure. I mean, there Right.

I

mean, it’s Buy your way into Mar a Lago with two hundred grand. No problem.

Absolutely. All kinds of ways in there. Talk about a soft target. So given that fact and that it appears that the justice department had tried to do this in a a little bit more seemingly way and were rebuffed. He wasn’t complying with requests to return the documents.

At a certain point, this is not quite the same thing as, like, wow, should Trump be indicted or prosecuted over the his role in January sixth? That’s a kind a traditional question and it involves all kinds of prosecutorial discretion. But the question of, well, this guy who is no longer president is sitting with boxes and boxes of classified documents, unguarded in his private home, eventually, you know, after he’s rebuffed you enough times, you probably do just have to go in there and take

them back. What else

are you gonna do? I mean, you ask a couple times and if he doesn’t comply, you gotta go get the stuff. I mean, it seems pretty clear to me, but what do I?

Cathy, the Republicans are now saying that this is all part of the woke FBI’s bias against conservatives against Trump, which is really kind of hilarious.

Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, there’s always debates about exactly what the word woke means. I’ve never before heard of used in reference to you know, collecting classified documents that are improperly being stored in somebody’s house. I mean, that’s a new one.

You know? Yeah. Yeah. But there’s no

limit to the pretzels that these people will twist themselves into to defend their great leader. Yeah.

And of course, you know that if this was a Democrat, oh my god,

you know this would be like, well, we told you all along that they hate America. Exactly. But so this was also the week in which Liz Cheney was defeated for reelection by thirty seven points in Wyoming and something that she obviously knew would happen if she did the right thing and stood up to Trump. And ever since the beginning of the January six hearing. She has become the voice of conscience, the voice of the alternative reality of what a Republican party could be.

I just want to play a quick clip from her concession speech, which was really a ringing call to patriotism this was at the end. This

is a fight for all of us together. I’m a conservative republican. I believe deeply in the principles and the ideals on which my party was founded. I love its history and I love what our party has stood for, but I love my country more. So I ask you tonight to join me.

As we leave here, let us resolve that we will stand together. Republicans, Democrats, and independents against those who would destroy our Republic. They are angry and they are determined, but they have not seen anything like the power of Americans united in defense of our constitution and committed to the cause of freedom. There is no greater power on this earth. And with God’s help, we will.

Prevail. Thank you all. God bless you. God bless Wyoming. God bless United States of America.

Thank you guys.

Kind

of stirring stuff, Kathy. The sort of thing that some of us in the never Trump movement were hoping to find somewhere on the Republican side for a very long time. So what do you think the rise of Cheney as the anti Trump leader represents? I

do think that it’s very inspiring. Whatever else one may agree or disagree about with regard to Liz Cheney, And, of course, one can point to the irony of, you know, the Democrats who demonize Duchini and you know, didn’t really like Liz Cheney at all until recently now being all admiring. And of course, there’s some political opportunism on the part some of our democratic funds. But I think a lot of people really do feel a genuine admiration for someone who cannot just rise of a partnership, but really by the party in the way that she has. And I mean, I think that it’s pretty clear that the way she’s been treated by the Republican party is complete shameful.

I really don’t think you can even question that even though people certainly do. And You know, I love these arguments that, oh, it actually has nothing to do with her opposition to Trump, but I would adjust it. She stopped listening to the photos and what I mean. And, you know, I sort of thought yesterday of using this analogy, I’m winter. I thought it was too inflammatory and then one of my followers used it that it’s a little bit like the argument that the civil war had nothing to do with slavery.

We’re just about the states rights. And of course, the immediate question that arises as, you know, states rights to do what? Yes. And of course, here we have the same question. You know, she stopped listening.

To the voters and why y’all being about what exactly? Because as you know, if you look at the rest of our voting record, it’s actually extremely conservative. Due to the consternation of some of her Democratic fans. She welcomed the dog’s decision that overturned the right to abortion. I mean, she has really not gone question, you know, from their public point of view.

She hasn’t remained consistent. You know, she has not moved away from any of her previous views, you know, for, again, whether or not one agrees with those. But I think, you know, it’s it’s really admirable integrity, and I think The other argument from the sort of anti anti Trump crowd that I think is really kind of deeply, deeply disingenuous, is Well, you know, it’s not really just that she doesn’t endorse the big lie about the election stuff. It’s that she, you know, actively work to help the democrats and got in this committee that excludes Republicans and, of course, it does exclude Republicans, you know, where it’s the Republicans who decided that they were not gonna participate. So, you know, that’s like the the guy who kills parents and complaints about being an orphan, you know.

It’s really they’re doing. And the other comment that I saw from someone from that crowd is that, oh, you know, this is a committee that tries to equate all Republicans and conservatives with the January sixth drivers, I don’t even know where they get that. I mean, I haven’t seen that from the committee. Have you? No.

Of course not. And, you know, I mean, this is just ridiculous stuff to try to pin on Liz Cheney that, you know, oh, it’s not really just that she’s against the big clients that she’s smearing all Republicans. No. No. No.

It’s that, you know, she wants to hold Trump accountable. And, yeah, I think it’s true that Republicans like say, you know, Brian Kemp, who has not endorsed the election theft lie, but who have been sort of low key and haven’t really pushed for holding Trump accountable for everything that happened after the two thousand twenty election. Yeah. You know, they’re gonna let that pass, and you can sort of get away with that. But if you’re actually pushing for holding Trump accountable, you know, Trump and Trump led, like, Liz Cheney, you’re gonna pay the price, you’re gonna be ostracized, and you’re gonna be essentially, you know, unpersonned by the Republican party.

And that’s what’s happened. And I think, again, I think this really is, you know, not to sound pompous, but this really is a profound courage. Utterly.

You know, the contrary case that proves that it really isn’t about whether you lost touch with your voters or you failed to criticize the democrats enough and that’s why the voters rejected you. I mean, there were ten Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in the House of those four chose not to stand for reelection. And one of them who did was Peter Meyer, who was defeated in a primary and Peter Meyer voted for impeachment, but then scurrying into the tall grass and tried to play at very low key, never said anything more about Trump and Trumpism, and he too was defeated. Okay? So the notion that it’s only because she wouldn’t shut up about it.

You know? That’s no. That’s that’s not right. It’s that if you transgress against the god king, you’re gonna pay price, you’re gonna be punished. And she showed that she was willing to pay any price that she was willing to give up her leadership position.

She was the third ranking Republican in house. She gave that up. And she was willing even to give up her seat. And by the way, she chose to take it to the voters. She chose to make them vote against her.

Right? She could have just — Oh, yeah. — backed down. But I find it interesting that knowing what was gonna happen, in a way, she’s really sort of forcing people pull to look in the mirror. And I just have tremendous admiration for her.

Mona, there’s

one aspect of this that I do find alarming and it fits into a larger trend that we’ve seen, I think over quite a long period of time, but especially in the Trump era, which is whenever somebody stands up and does something that we used to regard as required for public service, but now seems extraordinarily courageous, which is speaking the truth regardless of what your party thinks. We immediately start talking about a presidential run. And it’s not just politicians who speak up with courage. I remember because I’m old enough. Michael Avanati, when he was a lawyer pursuing cases against Donald Trump, people were promoting him to run for president against Trump.

I think that’s really unfair to Liz Cheney. I think, first of all, you are projecting onto her that that is a motive for doing this, which I have not seen reporting to fully suggest. Number two, you’re suggesting that anybody who does anything you like at any level should be president. Now maybe Liz Cheney is qualified for the presidency for various reasons. I’m not saying that is not true.

I am saying the very fact of standing up, speaking the truth at some level, whether it’s the school board, whether it’s the US House of Representatives, or otherwise, does not necessarily qualify you to run for president, and we should stop trying to throw everyone into the next presidential race just because they impress us with something. It’s

so true. It’s this aspect of the presidency where people just worship the office and worship the people who hold the office and that isn’t healthy in a democracy. And I’m the guy who

wrote two books about the presidency. So if anybody here familiarizes the presidency, it’s this guy, David, but I do find it alarming that we automatically assume or push people to run for this office just because they’ve done something impressive. And

by the way, if she does run for president, again, it will not be for her own advertisement because she knows she can’t win as a Republican. It would be just to prevent the dire possibility of another Trump term. And with that, let’s turn to our next topic.

So the

Democrats November prospects are looking better. Five thirty eight now says that the Democrats are slightly favored to hold the senate. We have seen some interesting polling on the so called generic poll, although you have to look at that with care because even if the democrats have a slight advantage, it’s a little bit unreliable in predicting Democratic success. But Damon, what do you make of this change? Do you think it’s all about the poor candidates that Trump helped to get nominations?

Or something more? How do you analyze this? There are a lot

of factors. One is certainly Trump’s picks, especially when it comes to the senate. I mean, I think the number of bad choices that we have there, I mean, Hershel Walker, is just a walking, crashing disaster, and and he’s very much a Trump person. I’m from Pennsylvania and this Fenderman OZ race is just really something. I mean, it’s it’s very strange because, like, the policy never comes up.

All it is is Federman coming up with kind of zingers to make fun of things that Oz says that make no sense and kind of he’s constantly sticking his foot in his mouth. So it’s like a contentless Twitter meme contest. But according to the polls, it looks like Federman is is killing Oz. He’s up more than ten points. Now, I I do wanna add as a caveat as I go through some of these other Trump candidates that Senate polling has been really abysmal in recent cycles, like lots and lots of polling this far out showing Democrats doing significantly better than they end up doing.

So it would not surprise me if this ends up being much narrower. And even if the Republicans eke out you know, a fifty one percent majority. It’s possible. But it is true that four months ago, it looked like it was gonna be a clean sweep or Republicans could pick up fifty three, fifty four even. Now it looks evenly matched.

So who knows? But then there’s a who else do we have here to get back to the list? You got Vance. I assume Vance is gonna win in Ohio, but if he’s gonna win in Ohio, you would expect occasionally there to be a poll showing him leading and really he’s not. He’s usually down five or six against Ryan out there.

Masters in Arizona isn’t doing very well. He seems to be quite a bit behind Mark Kelley. So these are all people in, if not, direct Trump strong picks. They’re either Trump or Peter Thielpicks and very much in that quadrant of the party. So that is weighing things down.

But the other thing is that Biden has had a few good weeks here and, you know, those of us who watch politics closely gonna test, it’s been about a year since he had a good week. That’s So, you know, because it was exactly a year ago that things began to really go off a cliff for him with the problems with the withdrawal from Afghanistan and he never really recovered after that. He’s still low, his approvals hovering around forty percent, but Less than a month ago, he was at about thirty seven. So what I take that to mean is that at about a month or two ago, Biden was becoming so unpopular that he was actually losing Democrats, not just independents. I think with the passage of the inflation bill that actually is more of climate bill with lots of other things thrown in.

That actually buoyed the spirits of a lot of Democrats, and I think he’s winning some of those back. So maybe he’ll go up a bit more forty one, forty two percent. By historic standards, that would still point to a pretty big wipeout for Democrats in the midterms. But we do have this question of uncoupling, decoupling that people talk about whether it might be the case that because of the specifics of this race with Trump being reinserted into the news, scaring crats about Republicans kind of reminding them yet again. Oh, yeah.

This party has kind of gone crazy. We can’t trust them with anything. Combined with the Dobbs decision and women being highly motivated to vote in a way that it may not otherwise have been. You put all that together, the Trump picks, the good weeks of news for Biden, and then decoupling because of these other issues. And maybe this time will actually defy the recent trend, which is at least since Bill Clinton’s first midterm in ninety four, and then Obama’s first midterm in two thousand ten has been for the Democrats to get a real shlacking in the first midterm.

Maybe this time that we’re gonna defy that, that would be a really tremendous bit of good news. And at the moment, things are looking much better than I would have predicted. Just a couple of months

ago. Kathy,

I’m going to come to you on the fallout from the Dobbs decision. Because it seems that there is evidence now of huge surges in registration by women, not just as we saw in Kansas, but in a number of key swing states and particularly in states that have Republican legislatures, To set this up, let’s just listen to an ad that’s being run. There are a lot of these. This is the one that’s being run against Tudor Dixon, who is the Republican nominee Trump chosen for governor of Michigan. If you take

Tudor Dixon at her word when it comes to outline abortion, She’s told us exactly who she is.

Are you for the exemptions for rape and incest? I am not. You said no exception. So, at once, you would be like a fourteen year old who, let’s say, is a victim of abuse by an uncle. Yeah.

You’re you’re saying you can’t carry that. Both sections for rape and incest. What about how for the mother? No exception.

Tudor, Dixon, that’s not acceptable for Michigan. So,

Kathy. Yeah. Wow. And those kinds of ads, as I’d mentioned, are being run all across the country. Sometimes unfairly, by the way, even against O’Dea in Colorado, who is pro choice.

So, what’s your analysis? Is this going to be a big factor? I

think so. I mean, we live in a very unpredictable time. Do I need to tell you that so, you know, at the same time, I think that a lot of signs point to a Dobbs backlash, helping the democrats in a fairly major way in a number of states. And I think that Republicans have really set themselves up for this one. And honestly, just going back to the decision itself and cannot really litigate that now.

But I think a lot of people are gonna think back to this and think that John Roberts was really onto something when he won the court to just uphold the Mississippi law that would essentially allow the states to ban abortions at fifteen weeks and not mess with the rail framework beyond that. Because, you know, I think that that would have really diffused the situation in many ways. Because then there wouldn’t

have been this question of whether you could have, for example, a law that didn’t permit abortions for any reason and that allowed for no exceptions. Yeah.

We’re at any stage of the pregnancy. And the other thing that really strikes me as interesting is that the statement that we just heard from Tutor Dixon, which is basically no exceptions whatsoever, which I think is an even more hard line position than the Catholic church to explore example. Right? Because they do allow exceptions for a life of the mother. Mhmm.

And I mean, do you think that that’s a sincere Shanna, or do you think that there is that there has been fewer laughing. So that’s the only one you think. Right. I’m sorry. I think that you’re really you know, I think we both know this.

There has been a lot of pressure in certain quarters of the Republican Party for people to really outdo each other in taking as hard line a position as you possibly can, like, maybe short of advocating the death penalty for women who have abortions. But, you know, other than that, as pretty much anything goes, Yeah. It’s like there’s this race to see who can be the most, you know, badass Republican on the issue of abortion. And I think no one has really apparently given much thought to how this is gonna play with the electorate once it’s actually possible to enact all of these pronouncements and to look. And, you know, once this becomes something more than just abstract rather.

Right? You can, you know, throw around at will knowing that no one is gonna hold you to it, really. That’s

exactly right. I mean, that actually harkens back to the original row decision, which took this out of the hands of legislature’s fifty years ago. And therefore, it permitted, frankly, both sides to get more and more radical. Now, I think the Republicans have gone much further than the Democrats when it comes to trying to implement laws that are radical. But some Democratic activists opposed any kind of limitations on abortions for any reason.

You know, they’re opposed to limiting sex selection abortions. So there are radicals on both sides, and Roe permitted that, gave scope for that kind of radicalism. But what you don’t see is in states that are democratic controlled, you don’t see them moving to advance this kind of legislation, whereas the Republicans are.

Right. And I think a lot of the things that have been happening since Dobbs, and it’s like all of these nightmares coming true where we have, you know, young girls who have been raped or sexually abused. Like, most recently, we have this case in Florida. Which you may have heard about, where the court has denied the sixteen year old girl, the ability to have an abortion. She’s about ten weeks pregnant.

And it’s kinda fascinating that their reasoning is that she is not sufficiently mature to choose to have an abortion. But ultimately mature enough to be a mom. So, you know, that is kind of richly ironic. In all of these cases where we where we now have women talking about situations where their health was an issue and there were

delays

in allowing them to have a medically necessary abortion that may have caused complications. There have been a couple of studies looking at what’s happened in Texas. Since they have the hard beat law. So, you know, these are I think people are starting to see that these are real issues. And

it implicates other freedoms. So since so many people now, the majority of women who terminate pregnancies do so with pills, rather than trips to clinics. So the certain states now are looking to criminalize the obtaining of this kinds of medication. So that’s problematic. And then there’s the question of attempting to limit women’s ability to travel outside of the state to get an abortion.

Rider shutdown websites that offer advice on how to do that. So we’re gonna have all sorts of issues. So

this is turning into a real hornet’s nest. Yeah. And I think we’re gonna have first

amendment litigation. I mean, this is really only beginning. Exactly.

Exactly. That gets

very ugly before it gets any better. So I’m gonna

turn to David. Now David, some people could also say that, look, you don’t need to look further than the local gas station to understand why the Democrats prospects are looking a little brighter. I mean, we have had falling gas prices for something like, I don’t know, fifty days or something like that. And now the average price is below four dollars a gallon around the country. So That also is helpful.

Of course, you don’t wanna pin your hopes on that because the price of gas is, it isn’t anything that’s within the control of the government. And prices go up, prices go down. Howard Bauchner: Yeah, I have two thoughts on this from

my former life is at PhD in political science. And One of them is about the frame of reference and the reference point. And the other one is about, you know, us in the analyst class and a lesson in humility. So first on the reference point is it doesn’t necessarily matter inherently

what the

situation is on let’s say gas price or the number of inflation or the number related to unemployment. What matters is whether voters think that it’s getting better or worse. And that depends on the reference point. Our gas prices better than they were three months ago, I believe they are. Where are they compared to a year ago or five years ago?

That is more of a factor for voters in the short term than the long term. Generally, but we still don’t know. Will voters go to the polls in November saying, I’m still paying too much for gas? Or will they go saying, wow, gas prices really are down from sometime in June or July. And I don’t think we have a good sense of what the reference point is for most voters because most pollsters don’t ask it that

way. The second

point is one of humility. I recall a conversation, I wanna say it was just over a year ago with Charlie on our sibling podcast, the bold podcast. Yes. And we were talking about how this bumbling of the withdrawal in Afghanistan was contributing to the, you know, mid cycle election that would be a disaster next year for Joe Biden in the House and Senate. And I remember cautioning a little bit of humility because that’s a long time away.

And I’m old enough to remember the George h w Bush poll numbers going into his reelection bid in nineteen ninety two when a year out from the election he was in the stratosphere in the poles. And then the reference points changed. And people were suddenly talking about their perception that the economy was getting worse even though in the weeks before the election data was coming out in nineteen ninety two that showed that actually we were coming out of it. That’s not what people cared about. They didn’t care about the polling a year before.

They didn’t care about the issues that everybody was talking about a year before. They cared about their perceptions. Right now. So that’s a way of saying, let’s all go in a time machine, go back six months, a year, certainly a year and a half. And be a little bit more humble about our predictions for what’s gonna happen in November twenty two because now in the waning weeks of August and during September, now is a good time to actually start talking about what’s happening in November for the election because we’re closer to the reference points for most voters.

Right.

Just your thoughts on one other thing though — Sure. — usually in a midterm election, the voters are passing judgment on the incumbent president. And the fact that Trump has come roaring back, I said, on a different podcast. He’s come back like herpes, but that’s actually good for Democrats. Because the more Trump is in the news.

Right? I mean, that really shifts the the frame of reference. Yeah. Based

on approval, disapproval numbers, based on the lack a palpable lack of excitement for Joe Biden’s presidency despite some significant legislation. If it’s solely a referendum on Joe Biden, that’s bad news for Joe Biden. Even though he’s not head to head against Trump in these races, there are actual homo sapiens running against each other for house seats and senate seats. You’re still going to have the fact that if Trump is in the news, it’s bringing back people’s thoughts about, well, I’d rather vote against Trump then vote against Biden. And if that affects even a relatively small number of voters in a few of these places that Damon teed up, that’s gonna make a difference for the composition of the senate.

And I would argue it even would make a difference in some close house races even though there are many fewer of those than there were decades Alright. Thank

you for that. We’ll turn now to our third topic, which is

for a nice

change because we can be kind of depressing and dark on this podcast. I

want to talk a

little bit about things that government is doing right.

David, I’m gonna

tee this first one up to you. It’s the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, announced that her agency had made, this is a pretty dramatic, pretty public mistakes regarding its handling of COVID, and she wants to see major reforms. And I think that’s kind of refreshing. What about you? Oh, yeah.

Absolutely.

That’s great. I mean, I I spend a lot of time reading policy want types on both the center left hand and center right. And pretty much everyone agrees that the public health response to COVID was not great. When Trump was still the president, it was very easy to just blame Trump his incompetent White House and all the people he brought in with the administration and hired that they didn’t know what they were doing, even though we had kind of long termers like Fauci in there, there was

a very

easy slippage from, oh, well, of course, it’s not good because Trump’s in charge. Well, it’s been a long time since Trump’s been in the White House and the Biden administration’s been in there, and a lot of the clubs have continued, including into the whole monkeypox episode more recently, where the response with a public health threat that is much narrower and less deadly is still nonetheless has been kind of similarly hand handed. And so a lot of people who look at the self closely are just repeating the same things. Like, we’re seeing the same problem, messaging issues, very delayed in response, not really leading the messaging to the country, kind of being overly concerned with trying to anticipate the way the American people will respond to everything the public health professionals say rather than just giving people, the facts, an unwillingness to admit the need for humility about what people are saying. It’s as if the public health professionals they second guessed themselves trying to be social psychologists.

Like, well, these are the facts, but if I say those facts, then I’m worried that people will receive it in a wrong way. Why better actually come out and say this other thing or instead of admitting that this is tentative and we’ll be back in a month or two, when we have more information. They instead sound on the first announcement as if this is draconian law handed down by the gods. And then when they have to do a reversal, they then delay because they know that it’ll be a bit of a scandal that they reverse themselves, it’s just a mess. And so to hear the person in charge of the CDC come out and admit that there have been mistakes and to set out an agenda to fix it is well, on the one hand, exactly what you would expect if the country were being run well and yet we’re surprised because it hasn’t been as much as well run as we would have liked.

So three chairs for doing what one would expect from a functional country with high state capacity. And let’s see more of it. Let’s see what these reforms actually amount to, but bravo, very good.

Thank you. David, two, three years ago, this country led by Donald Trump was flirting with the idea of withdrawing from NATO. But today, the aid that has been flowing to Ukraine from the United States has been really quite astounding. Between forty five billion and fifty four billion depending on how you measure it because some of that is foreign aid, not military aid, and so forth. But in any event, Relative to the size of the economy, the US contribution to Ukraine ranks forth, which is only behind Estonia Latvia and Poland, who are kind of frontline states.

So do you agree with me that this is a cause for pride and celebration?

It

is a cause for some pride. I do think that it also reflects the courage and the priorities of places like Estonia, which have been exceedingly impressive and morally leading in a way that countries like Germany have decidedly not. Is it enough? Well, when you look at the percentage of GDP as a factor, that is very important, especially when you’re looking at a country like Estonia, which has a rather smaller GDP than the United States of America. But you also can understand that the larger the country, perhaps the larger ability to have a higher percentage of GDP.

So the United States being fourth, yes, that’s a matter of pride but it also points out the fact that given how we all grew up as America as the leader of the free world, that perhaps it’s odd that Estonia is the leader of the free world in this respect. On the theme of good government, that we were just talking about. I think it’s also interesting in the Estonian context that something that escaped a lot of people’s radar in the last twenty four hours is after announcing that they’re tearing down all Soviet era monuments, Estonia faced distributed denial of service attacks on its public and private targets in the widest cyber attack pattern since two thousand seven when the country was attacked quite severely on the cyber front. And that is a real tribute to the Estonian government and the Estonian people. They already had advanced digitization of their country.

They already had cyber education efforts in place in two thousand seven, but they really expanded those and sped them up. And I think Estonia, both on the Ukraine front and on the preparedness front, is really showing America what it can do if it puts its mind to it, and if people come together around some common sense solutions, as we’ve seen with some legislation during the past year.

Kathy, I

want to turn to you first on the regulatory action, the FDA. Announced this past week that they are going to permit hearing aids to be sold over the counter. Finally, cause your celebration? Oh,

absolutely. Yeah. Because this is one of the Let’s hear from our libertarian. You know, I’m really I’m not Dutch from our libertarian. I mean, I certainly don’t think that everything should be sold over the counter.

There is certainly room for prescriptions. On the other hand, this is one of those the areas where I think we definitely have had excessive regulation. I think that there’s also a, you know, and this sort of brings it back to the Dobbs related issues. I think, you know, birth control pills definitely should be available without a prescription. Agree

a hundred percent. So,

you know, I I think we should we should be seeing more of this. No question about it. So that’s that’s a good thing. And

actually, I should say this is a bipartisan thing. I think the movement toward this began in the Obama administration was pursued under the Trump administration and then the Biden administration finally did it. So, Mona, let me let me come in

to ask. Can anyone tell me what the original motivation for making this a prescription only device was because I can understand requiring prescriptions for opioids. I think that’s an easy one mentally to get to even if someone who’s not a pharmaceutical expert. What was the original rationale for requiring a prescription for a hearing aid? Yeah.

So, David, I don’t know the answer, but my cynical side would say it’s probably the industry. You

know, it may go back to the times when maybe, you know, people had to be much more sort of individually fitted for hearing aids. I don’t know. I think may just be a sort of outdated practice that has been left behind by medicine. But many times when

there’s a government regulation and you dig into it, you find that there’s an interest group that benefits — Oh, very

likely. Yeah. —

yes. So it could be the doctors, it could be the hearing aid companies, who knows? As it is, this is likely to reduce prices dramatically. Some hearing aids can cost up to five thousand dollars for two hearing aids and the price is likely to be reduced to a thousand dollars. So it’s a big win.

For the

American people, thirty million of whom have trouble here. Okay. And I will just add the one other thing about things going right is that the reform of the electoral account act is on track. It will probably be done in the lame duck session. So that’s another big sigh of relief.

So at least we have some things in this world that are going right. Okay. Now we come to our final segment, highlight and lowlights of the week. I’m gonna go to you first David Priest. Well, that

is very

kind of you. I wanna highlight a former colleague of mine at the CIA who left some years ago as I did, and is now the director for the center for climate and security. And this is Erin Sikorsky. And I encourage everyone to follow her on Twitter at Erin Sikorsky and and read some of her writing because she is really, really good at analyzing the intersection of climate change, regardless of what you think about mitigation strategies or its magnitude, It has an effect on national security and she is very good about highlighting what those intersections are. She has in the last few weeks than building up a thread on Twitter where she talks about governments around the world deploying their militaries more than ever before to battle climate driven wildfires around the world.

And she gave herself the noble task of updating the thread with news as it came in from various countries. And I don’t know how she does anything else on her job now because she’s up to thirty tweets in just a few weeks. Of all of the places around the world from Spain to Algeria to of course the United States where there have been deployments obviously, interfacing with military and local authorities as well. But where military, usually the domain of core, hard national security interests are being used to address some climate induced wildfires and it’s just a fascinating thread to watch to see across different types of governments, to see across different regions, to see across different philosophies and cultures, just how much this is an issue that increasingly nations are turning to armed forces to help address. Thank you, Kathy Young.

So

I have a highlight and a low light that are both related to the stabbing of Simon Rusty, which of course was just a horrible attack. The highlight for me is that Pan America is doing an event to honor Selwyn Rusty by having a reading from his works by a variety of writers on the steps of the New York public library. And that’s a kind of brave thing to do because, obviously, after the attack, one could have concerns that there could be acts of violence targeting this event as well — Right. — but they’re doing this and kudos to them. The low light also related to Rajdi is that the American conservative run a piece of basically making the same build argument that Pat Buchanan once made that well, You know, of course, it wasn’t nice to actually stab the guy, but, you know, really?

Yeah. Yeah. You’re just not supposed to insult me. Feelings and Yeah. That was pretty much it.

And I think that qualifies as a low light. Definitely.

Agreed. Agreed. Damon

Linker, Well, compared

to that, my selection of a low light this week is a bit of a triviality, at least so far, but it still annoyed me. So I’m gonna note it anyway. And that is the person named Andrew Yang, who, as you may remember, ran for the Democratic nomination for president in twenty twenty didn’t get very far. Maybe a little further than people would have expected up there on stage without a tie, but he didn’t become the nominee. And then he ran for mayor in New York City, and that didn’t work out either.

Now he’s formed what he wants to be a third party to

compete

for the presidency called the forward party. I am not a big fan of third parties. I think they almost always don’t work out and often end up having consequences. Is that run kind of at cross purposes to their ideological positioning. You know, the typical thing where, like, in a left wing third party ends up hurting by dividing the left wing vote and then you end up with a conservative in the White House or vice versa.

But in this case, that might not be the case exactly because the forward party is a centrist party, but not only is it a centrist party, it’s a kind of empty set centrist party. It appears to stand for nothing at all except a kind of vague, empty positioning in the middle And this really came to light in an appearance where Andrew Yang was on CNN talking to Jim Acosta several days ago. And, you know, they tried to get into the nitty gritty about, well, where does this new party stand on various issues? And Yang was kind of steadfastly refusing to take any stand at all. And then it came to the question of, well, what’s this forward party stance on abortion?

Are you in favor of restricting it. It’ll open access to abortion, limiting it at some point, and exactly where, you know, the kinds of questions that any politician at this moment has to answer. And his answer was effectively, ah, we’re in favor of going forward, not left or right. It was just gobbling good. As he said, this is a quote, I personally think that women’s reproductive rights are fundamental human rights, but the forward party has not left or right, but forward stance on even the most divisive and contentious issues to which Acosta responded you’re gonna have to come up with policy positions at some point.

So it’s sort of like a lighthearted, low light. There’s a lot of really bad stuff going on in the world. This isn’t the worst thing one could imagine. But I sort of feel a little bit like my friend, Andrew Yang, why don’t you go do something else with your life and continue to monkey around in our politics. I don’t think you’re making a net positive contribution at this

point. So I’m probably

gonna get the reference wrong, but I I seem to recall that in the wonderful history of platitudes, Warren Harding once was addressing a crowd and said, my friends, the future lies before us.

And the past behind. Yeah. And the past behind. Maybe

the forward party. It’s looking to be the Warren Harding. Well, anyway. Okay. Well, thank you for that.

Well, I would like to highlight a piece that ran in The Wall Street Journal called the American Academy of Pediatrics dubious transgender science. By Dr. Julia Mason and Lior Sapir, it takes to task the American Academy of Pediatrics because they are being very anti scientific. They are ignoring evidence from other advanced countries who are backing away from the automatic gender affirming care model that is popular at the moment for kids who present as transgender. And this is question of a herd, you know, sort of a galloping herd that is not being attentive to the possibility that they’re getting it wrong and that kids who have this problem or present this way need psychotherapy.

They need careful evaluation. They need to be seen for quite a while before the decision is made to give these life altering drugs, these beauty blockers and cross sex hormones with irreversible consequences. And I keep coming back to this every few months, but this is going to be potentially one of the worst medical scandals that we’ve ever seen when a lot of these d transitioners begin to sue for having not received proper care and having not received careful evaluation, but having been rushed into surgery and hormones. Not

to

say it’s wrong for everybody. But it isn’t right for everybody either. That is it for this week. I want to thank David Priest and I want to thank Kathy Young for sitting in. I want to thank our producer, Kate Cooper and our sound engineer, Joe Armstrong, and of course, all our listeners, and we will be back next week as every week.

You’re worried about the

economy. Inflation is high. Your paycheck doesn’t cover as much as it used to, and we live under the threat of a looming recession. And sure, you’re doing okay, but you could be doing better. The afford anything podcast

explains the economy and the market detailing how to make wise choices on the way you spend and invest. Afford anything talks about

how to avoid common pitfalls, how to refine your mental models, and how to think about how to think. Make smarter choices and build a better life. Afford anything wherever you listen.