The “Hot, Hotter, Hottest” Edition
David Plotz: This Ad Free podcast is part of your Slate Plus membership. Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gabfest.
David Plotz: For July 21st, 2022. It’s the hot Hotter hottest addition. I am David Plotz of City Cast. I’m in Washington, D.C.. Emily Bazelon is, I hope, somewhere cooler and in her stead. We are so pleased to have Josie Duffy Rice Gabfest regular. She’s a writer sweltering in Atlanta. Hello, Josie.
Speaker 2: Hi. Thanks for having me.
David Plotz: And John DICKERSON is also a writer and many other things for CBS News, sweltering in New York City. Hello, John.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: Hello, heat hot.
David Plotz: That’s thunder. You Josie? Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
David Plotz: Wow.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: There’s something special about a morning thunderstorm, though, that is. We had one in New York this week, and it’s I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there is something both magical and terrifying about a morning thunderstorm.
David Plotz: This week on the Gabfest, the catastrophic heatwaves, devastating Europe and the United States and what they herald for our future. Then, did Joe Manchin destroy Joe Biden’s presidency, the Democratic agenda, and also human civilization? Is he personally responsible for the end of human civilization? We will discuss what Manchin is doing and has done this week. Then, the consequences of Dobbs. A drastic decay in health care for pregnant and miscarrying women have become evident across the country. We will talk about the confusion that the Supreme Court’s decision has unleashed across the land. Plus, we will have cocktail chatter in ministry for the future.
David Plotz: I know if guys have read this novel, it’s Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2021 novel about climate change. It begins with this horrifying scene. It’s a really epic set piece scene where a heat wave grips Central India and it drives temperatures beyond human endurance. Power fails and people who are unable to cool themselves die by the millions. It is like an unforgettably terrible image that if there’s one thing that sticks with me from that novel, it is this incredible image of this heat wave in India.
David Plotz: And the heat waves we’re seeing in Europe and the United States are obviously not like that. There are mild preview, however, of what is to come for the planet. The US infrastructure for now seems stable enough that the heat wave that is affecting 200 million of us probably will not kill too many people. It probably won’t disrupt life too much, but it will create sort of unpleasantness and misery in Europe. By contrast, 2000 people are already dead from the heat just in Spain, in Portugal alone. And kind of more alarmingly, the infrastructure that was not built for heat is in danger. So, John, this heat wave will pass like seasons come, seasons change, it will pass in Europe. Would you think there are likely to be any long term policy consequences that come out of this single event? Or if we gotten past that point and people have just kind of given up on the hope for structural.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: Change, I think there will be policy consequences in Europe. There will likely not be policy consequences in the states right now at the federal level. And it also depends on what we mean by policy consequences. I mean, in some sense, there have been policy consequences if Joe Biden is able to get his executive orders put in place to improve emergency response in urban areas to the high heat wave. That is a that’s a policy response. It’s just not one that gets at the underlying issue.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: What Biden announced on climate was all they were all mitigation measures, with the exception of some wind farm stuff. But $2 billion for infrastructures to make cooling spaces is dealing with the fire, not what caused the fire. In Europe. They are making the link between climate change and these issues more, more directly. But you see the big clash in Europe, which is less acute than we have here. But nevertheless, we see it, which is all the measures that were being taken to anticipate or deal or deal with climate change as a long term threat are running up against domestic problems.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: I think of the farmers in the Netherlands who are protesting various policies that are meant to cut emissions. And their argument is you’re killing our livelihoods. So they face the same pressures there. But there is more much more likely to be a response than here, where Biden is seeing his ambitious agenda basically shrivel you.
David Plotz: The temperatures in Europe are very high, but the United States deals with temperatures like this all the time. Dubai deals with temperatures like this all the time. Why is it so catastrophic for Europe to face this?
Speaker 2: Right. I mean, one part of it is that a lot of people in Europe don’t have air conditioning. Right. I mean, they’re sort of like this basic infrastructure issue that so many people in the US have access to that they don’t really have in Europe. And you can imagine like, you know, you hear like 130 degrees. I’m like, yeah, that’s bad. But I’ve, I’ve seen that a couple of days in my.
David Plotz: That’s a Tuesday in Atlanta.
Speaker 2: But, you know, without air conditioning and then you think about people at risk, especially elderly people and and kids like it, it’s just unbearable. My friend Madison Condon is a law professor at B.U. at Boston University. Her focus is kind of like the market’s response to climate change. And one of the things she notes is that a number of kind of financial institutions like BlackRock and Bank of England and places like that, you know, are warning. Right, that that markets are not actually pricing in climate change risks into their asset prices and to thinking about how they think about the future. And so it’s interesting to sort of think about how, like corporate America might actually be taking climate change more seriously in the long term, even if they’re not doing it particularly well yet, if markets are actually considering climate change better than our own elected officials.
David Plotz: But it is interesting that markets don’t even bother to do it. I just read this novel. In fact, I’m talking about it on Gabfest Read next month Invisible Things by Matt Johnson, which is an allegory. And it’s it’s an allegory about a colony on Jupiter. It’s not really about the US, but it is. It is about the U.S. and it’s about why we’re incapable of looking at horrors, why we are incapable of actually looking at something that is existentially horrifying in the face. When we were kids, at least when John and I were kids, we were a little bit older than you Josie we we had nuclear war hanging over us. And I did I guess I did think about that. But I feel like nuclear war actually is relatively small compared to climate change as a as an impact.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: It would look at things like electric cars. I mean, the move to electric cars is happening. The sales of electric cars are climbing sharply. Tesla is, you know, the hottest car on the market right now. All of that is a market reaction, whether people who are buying it like them because they’re cool or like them because they are not going to contribute to climate change, the is creating an opportunity.
David Plotz: I would just say that the market’s response is pretty mild compared to the the threat that the world faces. So there are companies, but BlackRock is kind of a famously liberal financial institution. It’s not famously liberal, but it’s famously progressive in how it deals with these things. It is one institution that is taking this into account and pricing it. They’re the ones that are not are much bigger and they’re many more of them.
Speaker 2: My understanding for my friend’s scholarship, please do not conclude that I’ve drawn any of these conclusions myself. But my understanding is that they are starting to kind of consider this data and incorporate it into their own long term predictions and sort of value based judgments. But that being said, like they don’t always use the right data. Often they use outdated data, their incentives are misaligned. Corporate America is thinks short term, they’re myopic. They think about like personal profit over, you know, what’s what’s best for people overall. And so in some ways, like the two goals are kind of at odds with each other.
Speaker 2: So I think it’s both good. And and I think if you are someone who’s worried about climate change like we are, it almost feels like anything is a is a gift because we’ve spent so long doing absolutely nothing, but it’s still just feels like we’re so we’re so behind in actually being willing to address the problem, much less actually addressing the problem.
David Plotz: John, to close this out, there’s this proof, Farai, about whether President Biden should declare a climate emergency that he has not yet done. What would it mean for him to declare one? Why does he keep hesitating?
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: What it would mean is it would basically allow him to bypass Congress to change some laws. Essentially, I think one of them is it has to do with export exporting U.S. oil, which and basically act more unilaterally in addressing climate change. I think they’re worried about legal challenges to that, but I’m not quite sure. And it seems like he is going to go ahead and take emergency action. So I don’t really quite know why he didn’t do it at the first first go round, but they seem to be signaling that he’s that he is going to declare a formal climate emergency.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: One other thing and maybe we’ll get to this in the in the mansion piece, but just on the question of collective action to meet long term threats, while Biden’s climate agenda is dying in Congress, Congress is nevertheless taking action on the Chips Act, which is an effort to increase U.S. production of semiconductors. That’s not that’s that’s an acute problem that’s happening right now. But that problem is getting better. And the Chips Act is. Only going to help in like five years because it takes a long time to create these chip factories. So.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: And why are they taking action? Because the lobbying is on the side of the chip manufacturers. It can also be framed as a competition against China, whereas with climate change, the lobbying money is on the side of the U.S. producers. And so we shouldn’t, you know, forget the role that that lobbying plays in keeping any U.S. response bottled up.
David Plotz: John, to hear to hear some people on the left tell it, Joe Manchin is either the worst person since Stalin, maybe just the worst second worst person after Putin on Earth. He has betrayed the Democratic Party, betrayed Joe Biden. He has also doomed the planet to Dante and hellscape for eternity because he will not step forward. To do what? How correct is this sort of hyperbolic response to what Manchin has been doing this week?
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: Well, I think specifically on the question of climate change. I think the there the argument rests on a couple of things. One he mentioned has been resistant resistant to argumentation when it comes to things like, you know, whether you can keep producing coal but do it in a cleaner way. He believes you can. The consensus of scientists is that the measures that he believes in are impractical and won’t provide the results that you want. So that’s at the very and policy level.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: The other the harshest argument is that he receives more money from a lot from fossil fuel producers than any other senator. He also has a personal interest in the stocks he owns in a coal company. So that would be another thing that that liberals argue against him, I think, because you could argue that he’s just representing the interests of his state, which, you know, would make him a a skeptic of of climate policies that would hurt his state.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: But on other issues, he it’s harder, again, for him to defend his positions, both on, for example, he doesn’t support tax increases that were a part of one of the versions of what has become of build back better. And he argues that he didn’t like the tax increases because of because inflation was high. But presumably it would be hard to find economists who would argue that lowering the deficit, which is what tax cuts, tax increases would do. That’s usually the thing you do when you want to hurt, when you want to deal with inflation is you would lower the deficit. So it’s not clear how raising taxes increases inflation. I guess his argument is when you raise taxes, you always spend more federal money. But it’s not a not a not exactly a clean argument.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: His arguments also on voting rights have been been pretty weak. His argument being that he can put a deal together with Republicans to improve voting rights is not likely, given that Republicans have benefited in a number of states from changing voting rights laws. And and Republicans in Congress are not going to undo what those states have done. Finally, the liberals don’t like what he’s doing because they don’t like the fact that Joe Biden has a very narrow margin. I mean, this is senators behave like this. It’s just that expectations were too high for what Biden might be able to get through a Senate where he has such a very, very the narrowest possible margin.
David Plotz: Is manchin of illinois Josie.
Speaker 2: I always try to keep in mind is that manchin that’s probably the best senator we’re going to get out of West Virginia. So the alternative is not like, you know, wasn’t between him and Bernie Sanders for who was going to be the next, you know, West Virginia senator. So it could be worse. But at the same time, I think he is constantly facing a battle between the likelihood of him getting re-elected and doing the right thing. And he chooses re-election every time, which is like, what’s the point to me? What is the point of having this job if you stand in the way of any real ability for the Democrat Party to make change and also for the Democratic Party to. Gain seats in the future rates of be effective to look like they’re actually getting more done.
Speaker 2: I do think like it’s worth noting that the health care provisions, this new quote, slimmed down reconciliation bill, which is not much of a reconciliation bill at all, are good. They’re important. Right. Like they matter. But the not just like his logic for rejecting important portions of the Biden policy goals, but also the way he has strung the party along and has just basically weaponized his power by extending talks for months because like he doesn’t like it insult he right. And you know and in the press or like really just kind of holding people hostage, holding the party hostage. It seems like there could be there’s a better way to approach this both in substance and procedure.
David Plotz: I guess.
David Plotz: I think that conclusion makes sense if you assume that Manchin if you assume a kind of more parliamentary system that Manchin as a Democrat has an obligation to go along with the overwhelming will of the party. I think Manchin thinks of himself as a different in a different way, as kind of in the way that senators used to think of themselves as these kind of giants who are arbiters of of what the country must do when you act independently and you act in both in the national interest and local interest and in their perceived, you know, kind of their grand theory.
David Plotz: I don’t think that if you asked Joe Manchin, he would say, oh, I’ve I’ve refused to do the right thing out of my electoral interests. I think Joe Manchin would say I have looked at the policies the Democratic Party wants to pursue, and I don’t think they are. I think they’re wrong for the country and wrong for West Virginia. And so I’m I he’s certainly supported lots of the Biden agenda. He supported overwhelmingly supported lots of the Biden agenda and voted for things like that. So they were able to get 50 votes for for some of the big bills they passed earlier. But he, you know, reached a point where he was like, I don’t want to do this. And maybe it’s cynical. Maybe it’s because he is he has he’s tied up in fossil fuels and maybe it’s because he is motivated thinking he doesn’t want to.
David Plotz: To John’s point about coal, that’s really interesting that he won’t look at what the scientists say about what’s realistic or not and that he he reaches erroneous conclusions and certainly his conclusions that are economically illiterate. This fact that he doesn’t want tax hikes because it will hurt inflation is crazy. It’s just like the opposite of truth. But that said, like, you know, I it feels to me it’s it’s really easy to pin the blame on Manchin. But this is a murder murder on the Orient Express. Like every there’s so many different forces that are killing build back better. They’re killing climate provisions killing that it’s not you know, he’s the one that’s easiest to pin it on. But it’s also that Democrats to go back failed to win majorities, bigger majorities. The structure of the Senate is totally messed up. Schumer bumbled this. Biden bumbled this. Like the Republicans. Like the Republicans. The poisonous nature of politics like you can’t get that. You can’t get a Republican vote for anything has has made it impossible.
David Plotz: So I think that the pinning the pinning so much on Manchin and mansion’s villainy and Manchin cynicism feels to me to be like it’s it’s scapegoating. It’s very fun and easy. And it’s and sure. But it really is such a larger set of of manslaughter and murders that are taking place other than this.
Speaker 2: But I would push back on the idea that he thinks he’s doing what’s best for the country and it’s best for West Virginia. I mean, it’s possible that that’s true. It’s also like it usually works that when certain things benefit people and benefit their pockets, they’re suddenly very they suddenly believe in them morally as well. And then just looking explicitly at the climate change provision like that, ability to ignore the evidence and actually not examine what is good for the country and look around and see what we’re facing and decide that the best answer is not to act. It’s hard for me to believe that that is a purely judgemental ideology, ideological decision from a from someone who has simply studied the evidence. He has an investment in this, I think, both electorally and and practically.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: David, going back to your point, I think the when you think about climate change, you know, focusing too much on Manchin has this other challenge that it poses which is that it it the politics of climate change are difficult. I mean, Jay Inslee tried to run for president on his single climate change platform, and he was, I think, the first one to get bounced out of the Democratic primary, which is also combine that with the short term, long term issue we were talking about, which is that when it comes down to the the things that have to be done to deal with climate change, it becomes more politically difficult even outside of West Virginia. All of those things are a part of the complexity of climate change is politics, which turning Joe Manchin into a villain might obscure.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: And I’d also add that on the Republican side, it’s quite true that on on climate change and other issues, it’s very hard to find any Republicans who will work with Democrats. But there are these issues where Republicans have worked with Democrats. I mean, I mentioned silicon chips, there’s infrastructure, defense spending, same sex marriage. They’re probably going to get ten votes for gun control. So it’s not totally true that they won’t vote for anything with that with Democrats.
David Plotz: I would note the headline this morning that Joe Manchin and Susan Collins seem to have a deal around reforming the Electoral Count Act and at least forestalling one of the worst possible outcomes of a presidential election. Not not to say that their reforms would fix everything that Donald Trump and his lackeys are trying to break or have broken. But it would fix some small aspect of it and would prevent some of the chaos that we saw on January 6th in Congress from happening again. And it’s an example where mansion mansions, place in the middle, enables him to get something done that people Democrats value and republicans value.
David Plotz: To Jeff s listeners, you know that we now do Gabfest reid’s Gabfest reid’s reid’s reid’s, which is our monthly. That was my attempt at being you, John. That’s our monthly special episode. We drop additional episode where one of us talks to an author of a new book that we are excited about and on July 24th. So this coming Sunday, Emily will be interviewing Vanessa Wall about this book, Forbidden City. So check it out. It’ll be in your Gabfest feed and listen to it there.
David Plotz: The Dobbs decision has created both tremendous uncertainty in the country, the certainty that Roe is gone. Abortion is now a state matter and tremendous uncertainty. The mosaic across the country. Or maybe mosaic is the wrong image. The Jackson Pollock nature of the state laws that we have is has been a recipe for chaos and ambiguity and misery for some pregnant women. And at the same time, I suspect those who oppose abortion say, oh, we are protecting the lives of unborn children are now the phrase that I’ve now hearing pre-born children, which is an extraordinary new phrase that that abortion opponents are using. So, Josie, can you talk about some of that completely predictable chaos that has emerged since this decision came out and states began taking their own action on abortion?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it falls along like two different two different spectrums. Right. The first is. That we are seeing stories like the one that has gotten a lot of attention over the past few weeks of young people in particular being suffering through pregnancy because of rape, often because of incest and not being able to access care. So there is the ten year old out of Ohio. A couple of weeks ago, I read something the other day that said one provider said she’s already taken care of three kids under the age of 12 since the Dobbs decision came down.
Speaker 2: Right. So we are seeing like children, little kids. I mean, I have a four year old and ten is like that just feels unfathomable who are being told like something bad happened to you, but let’s not make another tragedy out of it by getting an abortion, which is just so I mean, I don’t think I have to explain just how horrifying that is.
Speaker 2: The other thing we’re seeing is a surprise, surprise, a lot of Republican legislators who have enacted these laws over the years to score political points when Roe is good law, don’t actually understand how pregnancy or abortion work or what they mean. And so lots of lots of people who have had miscarriages, who have had pregnancy complications, who have gone to you know, have had ectopic pregnancies where there are still some, quote unquote, cardiac activity, even though there is no possible way the baby survives, nor that the mother survives if the topic of pregnancy continues, you are seeing their suffering be dragged out for days and weeks more than it needs to be and their health being at serious risk.
Speaker 2: I think the other thing that we’re going to see right is a lot less people willing to do this, to do abortion, any sort of abortion related work, including, you know, miscarriages. We’re going to see providers much less likely to provide that service at all. And the result is already deaths of it is going to be many more deaths of people who need help.
David Plotz: Bridget, our researcher, was telling me just before we came on that there’s a phrase in the Missouri law which says that you can you could treat a woman, you can have an abortion for someone who whose fetus is dead or dying. And that Missouri removed the word dying. It was only dead. So that you literally now cannot if you have a situation where this is a an embryo that will die, but it has not dead died yet. You can’t you cannot treat that person. It’s just crazy.
David Plotz: But John, why do you think the anti-abortion movement has felt so emboldened post jobs to push these laws that are much more draconian and without exception than laws that that they talked about before eliminating rape and incest, exceptions eliminated even protections for the life of the mother. Laws that can be used to target contraception. Why do you think that that politically that now seems doable? There’s not an incentive for bipartisanship in state legislatures. And so, like, go for what? You can grab anything you can get, grab it all. And there’s not a consequence from being for being extreme there.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: Well, looking at it from the energy of the fundraising and the energy of the anti-abortion coalition that has grown up and been so wildly successful over such a long time. You can’t build a machine like that and then just shut it off when you win. So the machine needs to keep going. Part of it is motivated by people who believe that at conception you were given a gift from God. So you have people who have who have that religious view, who don’t lose that religious view, even though which is which explains their position on rape and incest. Then you have other people who have made a career out of raising money this way and and agitating for this position. And so winning breeds more efforts to win.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: I think what will be really interesting, beyond the all of the complexities we’ve talked about already, is how far states push this question of punishing people involved in out-of-state abortions. So, for example, in Texas, Sidley Austin announced they would cover the cost of out of state travel for employees. So is Texas going to punish the law firm Sidley? Sidley Austin, which is, as I recall, a rather big one. They sent a threatening letter in the Senate letter. And so are you going to punish a big Texas law firm in that way?
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: And then obviously, also the other legal way this would work out is if is to try to keep punishing people who do who participate at all in helping with an out of state abortion. So if you were somebody who did a Web search in in the state of Mississippi to help somebody go to New Mexico. Would that make you a part of a criminal conspiracy and how that all plays out? One is just a legal question. How big can you define a conspiracy? The other is, is any firm that that operates in one of these states and provides health care presumably would be crosswise with these laws. And that brings in the economic interest which might make might change the calculus for some politicians.
Speaker 2: I think a couple of things worth remembering here. One is like when Texas passed that law, that kind of reshaped our fundamental constitutional understanding of like of standing of the, you know, legal idea of standing last year. And the Supreme Court did nothing about it. Texas politicians have not really suffered any and any political price for that. Right. This idea that there would be a major backlash against politicians who are willing to support that law, but from moderate women, for example, that hasn’t happened. We haven’t seen that. And so I think that’s part of the reason that people are willing to take the gamble right now, because in many of these conservative states, they’re not paying the price. They’re just not seeing anybody pay the price for that.
Speaker 2: I think the other the other thing that, like, keeps me up at night about this is sort of the way in which it grows surveillance culture and and and the criminalization of women and pregnant people and people who may assist pregnant people.
Speaker 2: Right. And how the fact that we had a Supreme Court that was not willing to re-enforce constitutional principles when the Texas law was passed, makes me believe they might not be willing to do the same if states do try to pass a law that they can criminalize you in Texas for getting an abortion in California, the ways in which this grows, the punishment infrastructure, but also the infrastructure of control that benefits the government in so many other ways, I think is yet another reason that Republican politicians are supporting it. I mean, in a lot it benefits them in ways beyond just pro-life votes at the ballot.
David Plotz: I think that one of the again, totally predictable consequences but really bad consequences of this is the climate of uncertainty for health care providers. Health care providers are now in a lot of states are now not sure what they can do. And because they’re not sure they’re protecting themselves, which means they’re refraining from providing the care that they wish to provide to women in distress because they’re fearful, legitimately fearful they will be targeted for lawsuit or prosecution.
David Plotz: And this goes back to something which is which I think the Texas law really got to, which is I always felt like was a trait of Donald Trump’s, which is that uncertainty is one of the biggest enemies that that the world has. That uncertainty is the enemy of regular people. Uncertainty is fear. And to create uncertainty in people and to make people feel like I don’t know where I stand, I don’t know what I can do is is a it’s just cruel because it destabilizes people. It just makes people anxious. And that’s that’s there. And to it just it’s just bad for the world because, like, it’s in some times almost better to have a very bad law, but at least a law that you understand and is clearly enforced than it is to have a situation where you just don’t even know what the law is and what could happen to you if you run afoul of it.
David Plotz: And a lot of things, characteristics of states like the Soviet Union in its bad times, it wasn’t so much that that that every law was different than the United States is law is that it was very unpredictable when and how they would be enforced. And I feel like that’s what we’ve done with teachers. That’s what we’re doing with doctors and health care professionals in around things now around abortion and maternity care, with teachers, around teaching of race, teaching of of sex, teaching of gender identity. And it’s bad, it’s bad, bad, bad.
Speaker 2: Abortion doesn’t seem like one of those issues to me where it’s sustainable on a state by state basis that like part of the reason Roe is so important was because we recognized that it was going to that there was no middle ground on this almost that there was not going to be just satisfaction with, well, let the states decide. Pro-Life activists have said this. They’ve said, we’re not done. We will not stop until there is a federal ban on abortion.
Speaker 2: And I find my in my cynical moments that much, much, much more likely right now than I find the possibility of a role like infrastructure coming back. And even if it does right, you have to build up that expertise again. You have to find doctors who can provide these services again. You have to train them. You have to you have to make abortion not only legal, but available. And I feel worried about the future, even beyond just a state. A state specific, you know, a state specific laws. I feel worried about it because I’m not sure that any state will have that right in the near future.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: The AP did a story where they looked at they took a set of figures. It was very good. I would have picked some other figures, but they basically looked at individual states and they looked at the percentage of children in poverty. The participant in the Women’s Infants, Children, Federal Assistance, basically welfare program, the rate of child abuse or neglect. Women experiencing intimate partner violence, low birth weight, women receiving no prenatal care and uninsured children in poverty. And they use those as the measure to look at health of children. And what they found, of course, was that some of the hardest places to raise and have a healthy child are the states with the strictest abortion laws.
Speaker 2: You know, if we were actually talking about not just providing a future for unborn babies. Right, but providing, you know, not only providing a future for unborn babies when they’re once they’re born, but even giving unborn babies before they’re born the best chance. There are so many other ways to do that and to make that to to help that. Then they’re then punishing women who want abortions. Ultimately, this is how we work. We punish people rather than incentivize them. Right. We punish people rather than support them for doing what they what they what we want them to do. And, you know, punishment is a really and curbs a lot of behavior.
David Plotz: Let us go to cocktail chatter. John DICKERSON, when you are having a cooling cocktail on a on a New York rooftop, a New York patio, a New York living room, what will you be chattering about with your beloveds?
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: Well, the story of the Secret Service and the text that they turned to it is it is so bonkers and so like it’s just bonkers. So here’s here’s the thing that to me. So the Secret Service was asked to give information from 24 Secret Service personnel between December seven, 2020 and January 8th, 2021, and they turned over one text. Which was a call from the US Capitol Police to the Secret Service as the Trump supporters were attacking the Capitol.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: One text. I mean, my kids don’t respond to my texts, but even they send more text than that. And it’s just amazing. And the shifting number of explanations from the Secret Service as to why they don’t have the texts from that period, because they were all erased during a. I mean, they’ve they’ve changed their. It was one point. It was they were they there was nothing relevant, which makes no sense at all.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: Second was that there was a an upgrade of the systems. And both at one point they seemed to say it was an upgraded systems and sorry, everything was deleted afterwards. But then they also said that agents were supposed to upload anything they had from that period and they just didn’t do it. It is I mean, as Stephen Colbert joked, the next explanation is going to be that the dog ate the texts.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: But then what we learn is actually back in February that a watchdog agency in the Department of Homeland Security knew about all this in February, that these texts were gone, which adds another like Cookie and didn’t tell the January six committee. I mean, I’m left only with more questions. I don’t know. It just I don’t see how they can give the answers they did in a self-respecting way in this modern world that we’re in. I mean, I can understand if this was like 1991 Josie.
David Plotz: What is your chatter.
Speaker 2: My cocktail chatter? Am I allowed to say something by my husband? Is that like.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: Yeah, I think your husband’s a.
David Plotz: Definite.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
David Plotz: If he buried him, he must be dead.
Speaker 2: He is awesome. And and and puts up with me, which, you know, is not easy. And he works for New York magazine, writes for New York Magazine and did a great interview with Larry Wilmore. And I think maybe about maybe it came out about last week. And I you know, when it’s so hard to find things that are, like, really engaging and interesting and also don’t make you super depressed, this this interview is one of them. He kind of traces his history and in television since the early 1990s, maybe the 1980s. And it’s fascinating. This is a guy who has, like played a massive role, especially in black television over the years and is still has such an influence. And the interview is really great.
David Plotz: Do you want to say your husband’s name?
Speaker 2: My husband’s name is Dick Cheney Rice. I taught him everything he knows. He won’t admit that, but it’s true.
David Plotz: My chatter quickly. I did a really fun podcast with Josh Zipes. He’s a Australian. He’s an Australian podcaster. He has a podcast called Uncomfortable Conversations, very aptly named Podcast, which is a extremely tense, direct conversation. He’s just just a really straightforward person, very funny, very smart by actual chatter, though, the thing I was thinking about, what did I want to chatter about? And what if I actually spent the last week doing and most of I’ve spent most of the last week truly watching the world track and field championships. I don’t know if you guys are fans.
David Plotz: It is the World Athletics Championships are taking place in Eugene, Oregon, and the first time these championships have ever been held in the US. And so it’s, it’s ten days or so of track and field competition and ABC and its affiliates and Peacock or have all of that going and it’s fantastic. I cannot recommend it enough.
David Plotz: I spent 4 hours the other night watching women’s high jumping. The women high jumpers are weirdos. They’re so weird. They all have these odd body manners and they’re always constantly super psychological sports. So they’re visualizing how they’re going to do their jump. And you see it in person. And they are they also have this incredible body because they’re all about like six feet tall and super angular and incredibly flexible and they’re amazing. And then there’s the the men’s shot putters who are some other entire species of person and the runners who are so beautiful just watching these people run around the track is it’s glorious. It is glorious. Listeners, you also have been sending us great chatters. You email them to us at Gabfest at Slate.com, or you tweet them to us at that site, Gabfest. And our chatter this week comes from Mark Wegner.
Speaker 4: Hello Gabfest My chatter today is about the opening earlier this month of the Archives of the Atlantic magazine. Every issue of the monthly from 1857 to present is available in a well-organized place. The archive is searchable by topic, author and date. I’m just getting started, but I’ve already found interesting articles about the assassination of James Garfield in the November 1881 issue. Hat tip to Candace Millard’s excellent destiny of the Republic for sparking my interest in him. There’s a profile of General Jeb Stuart from 1886 and an August 1939 man on the street interview with Germans convinced of Hitler’s peaceful intentions. Contemporaneous history fascinates me, and I think you’ll find it interesting, too. I love the show. Thanks for the opportunity.
Speaker 2: I’m also so excited about these archives. I just am. I’m thrilled. This is like how I like to spend my Saturday nights. I spend a lot of time on newspaper ask.com just searching old topics. So this opens up a whole new world.
David Plotz: I do this tour, I take this I lead this tour of the Civil War, fought in D.C. And one of the highlights and I have some materials, written materials, it’s there’s a battle that took place in D.C. in 1864. An Abraham Lincoln went to this battle at Harper’s Weekly. Harper’s. What we now know is Harper’s magazine covered it. And there’s a etching of Lincoln at the battle or depiction of what Lincoln would have looked like at the battle, which I show to everybody. And it’s always good for a laugh. It’s a very artistic there’s a lot of artistic liberty taken, but I love the idea. Like this thing just it’s the same form that we read today. You know, we still read magazines today and we look at it and it’s it’s meeting the same emotional and psychological intellectual need as it did 100 and 5070 years ago.
David Plotz: That is our show for today. The Gabfest is produced by senior author researcher Bridgette Dunlap. Our theme music is why they might be giants. Ben Richmond is senior director for podcast operations. Alisha Montgomery is the VP of Audio for Slate. Please follow us on Twitter at Gabfest and tweet the chatter to us there for Josie Duffy Rice, the always delightful John DICKERSON. I’m David Plotz. Thanks for listening. We’ll talk to you next week. I think Emily will be back. Hazlet. Plus, how are you? Uh, we have a a topic inspired, I think, by Bridgette about childhood and summer, and particularly what memories stick with us from childhood summer and why they’re important and what we learn from that or how that shaped us. Anyone? Anyone want to start Josie you want to start?
Speaker 2: My main memory of summer is going to visit my grandmother in Minnesota, where I would stay with her for weeks at a time. And she’s 92 now. She has Alzheimer’s. She lives here in Atlanta now. But what my one of my main things I remember is that she lived on the 20th floor of a building, and one day the elevator was out. And she must have been 60 at the time. And we climbed up those 20 flights of stairs. And this actually wasn’t particularly good memory, but it was a I do think of it all the time because I it reminds me to get in shape. My six year old grandmother took those two flights of stairs like it was nothing. And I can maybe take you right now and I’m slightly more than half that age. So yeah, that’s my main great memory of childhood.
David Plotz: I thought it was going to be she was me. She made you, sweetie. You sat on a porch, you know we did fireflies.
Speaker 2: Cream, though.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she did let us have ice cream in the morning because she said it has calcium in it. And I still live by that rule all these years later. So a real impact on my life.
David Plotz: That’s awesome.
Speaker 2: It was.
David Plotz: Very strong. Bones, you’re totally out of shape, but your bones are super strong.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Exactly.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: Darn well as a versus a broad point.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: When I wrote about my daughter going to camp, which is now I guess I wrote that ten years ago, there’s a guy, Michael Thompson, who wrote a book called Homesick and Happy about going to camp. And it had this wonderful finding in it, which I which I keep referring to in the subsequent ten years, which is that when they interviewed adults and asked them to remember a moment that was powerful in their recollection from childhood, not just in summers, but in general, that something like 70% or more of the adults said it was a memory where parents weren’t around. And so the summer has always and in the context of Camp Summers always seemed to me to be the time where, you know, you were alone and doing crazy things or just under the steam of your own imagination. And that’s how identities are formed and how strong memories are formed.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: So I just remember, you know, endless stretches of either just like goofing around in the neighborhood or being away at camps and just like all day long, just playing. I mean, until you were just wrung out from, you know, 8 hours of physical exertion and that that probably hasn’t, you know, I don’t know. When was the last time I did that? Probably not. I don’t know. 12, 13. Just a full day of that anyway. So I just remember that exertion feeling and the and the lack of parents, which in my case was often the case even when it was fall and winter, but nevertheless, it’s particularly so in summer.
David Plotz: That is so profound. John I was trying to think as I started to think about this, this prompt, I realized so many of my vivid memories of childhood are from summer and it and they don’t have my and I didn’t think about it most of them do not have my parents. And that that that that must be connected and that sense of autonomy.
David Plotz: I was thinking like there was this time when I was a teenager, probably 16 or something, and my parents were away. And I guess my maybe my brother and I were home alone for a few days and our cat got really sick and I had to take our cat to the vet and have her put down or have him put down, I should say. And as a 16 year old, like, I’d never dealt with death even, you know, on any scale. And to to do that and to have the responsibility for it was just it just sticks in my memory so strongly, being in that room with the vet and and in Hartley’s last minutes. And that was like really important. And it was really it would’ve been much, much less vivid if had I had gone with my parents or my mother had to do it or whatever it was.
Speaker 2: The other thing about that is just like now, as a parent trying to figure out what to do with my kids in the summer, it’s like, you know, just trying to work and figure out what you do for those, whatever, 12 weeks or it feels like 900 weeks.
David Plotz: To 900 weeks. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 2: It just is such a different lens on, you know, I remember being a kid that there’s nothing to do. I’m so bored and I’m like, that’s you have no idea how stressful it was for your parents. Try to figure out what to do with you for all that time.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: I think Summer gets you acquainted with the basically the Ark of Life. Summer is the first time when you’re a kid you realize you start like, Oh my God, I got all these days, I’m going to do this and this and this and then do all this stuff as we great. Oh, my God, she’ll be wonderful. And then suddenly there’s like one week left in the summer and you think, Oh, damn, what did I like? I didn’t do all the stuff, and school is going to start again and oh, there were you. What did I do? And that’s basically life.
Speaker 2: Oh, no, totally not. Uh, it’s true, though. It is true. Life is one long summer and.
Donald Trump, John Dickerson: Yeah, and at the end, you’re like, Oh, my God, I didn’t go, you know, do that cool thing I wanted to do. So there you go, huh?
David Plotz: I don’t I’m not sure I love the metaphor. I’m not sure I feel like that. I always was excited for school to start again. I was one of those kids. Oh, the other thing that I wanted it to just hearken back to in my own, really, just to record this for posterity, just so that it’s known. And also in case this person is out there, I just I’m really curious. What happened to him is that I went to sleepaway camp and I really didn’t like sleepaway camp and which is weird. I think if I went back now, I would really love it, but I went at the wrong age or something. I went I was too pubescent or something when I went. And so I was in a bunk at Camp Cabin in New Hampshire in in 1983 or 1984. And there was a bunch of Venezuelan kids who were in the camp. It was mostly like WASPy kids from Boston, New York, and then a few of us from D.C. and then in New Jersey, Bryan Schwartz and Paul Kennedy from New Jersey.
David Plotz: Shout out to you guys. I wonder what happened to you. But there was this guy who bunked above me named Oswaldo Ron Rangel. And he was such a turd, and he would he punched above me and in the middle of the night, he would take a flashlight, shine at my face and yell, maricon. Which is like a slur. In case you don’t know, it’s a Spanish slur. And it’s like, what the fuck with this guy? And it’s really stuck with me. Like, of all the people I’ve ever met in my life, this is the one person who I’m like, Why would you do this? I’m sure he’s turned into a lovely person. I’m sure as Aldo Rangel is like in the whatever they kind of Venezuelan democracy movement or something. But he was just he was so unpleasant. It was awful.
Speaker 2: That’s some important life lessons, you know, I don’t.
David Plotz: Know what it is, but it’s that it’s like so vivid. I can I can feel that light in my face right now. I can hear his voice, whereas I can’t remember anything about, you know, the entirety of my my year. Eight, eighth grade. That is all. Goodbye. Sleepless. Had a great summer.
