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3 weeks ago | 
thedispatch.com | Carl Graham |David Drucker |Michael A. McFaul |Brian M. Riedl
National missile defense is not a new idea, but in a world of expanding threats and technological advances, many argue it’s one whose time has come. There’s a case to be made that the Cold War deterrence paradigm of mutually assured destruction (MAD) is no longer valid in the face of rogue-state nuclear proliferation, and that and related systems demonstrate the potential for such defenses at achievable costs. President Donald Trump can be counted among those making that case.
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3 weeks ago | 
thedispatch.com | Grayson Logue |Cole Murphy |Brian M. Riedl |Kevin Corinth
During a campaign rally in North Carolina last August, Donald Trump accused the Biden administration of cooking employment statistics, claiming his political opponent was trying to inflate job growth numbers until after the election. The comments came after the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a sizable downward revision to its employment estimates as part of the agency’s annual benchmarking to improve the accuracy of the monthly jobs reports.
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1 month ago | 
thedispatch.com | Kevin Williamson |Brian M. Riedl |Jonah Goldberg |Chris Stirewalt
Policy Ezra Klein’s class warfare rears its utopian head. Published March 15, 2025 Scroll to the comments section Audio versions are only available to subscribers of The Dispatch. Join Today! to listen to this post.
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2 months ago | 
thedispatch.com | Grayson Logue |Nick Catoggio |Brian M. Riedl
Policy Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s new agency is a deficit reduction bait and switch. Published February 20, 2025 If you believe Elon Musk, the audit of the federal government he’s leading through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will deliver an accomplishment long thought impossible: a balanced budget.
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2 months ago | 
thedispatch.com | Kevin Williamson |Scott Lincicome |Brian M. Riedl |Charlotte Lawson
“We will not allow our workers and industries to be displaced by unfair import competition.” If that sounds like Donald Trump, that is because the Republican president and standard-bearer in 2025 is, in essence, a Democrat stuck in the 1980s—and indeed, the line comes from the Democrats’ 1980 platform. The Democrat Trump sounds like is Dick Gephardt, once a very considerable figure in American politics who ran for president twice before retiring to become a bigfoot lobbyist and consultant.
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2 months ago | 
thedispatch.com | Scott Lincicome |Michael A. McFaul |Brian M. Riedl |Nick Catoggio
Capitolism Tariffs are costly, and so is dealing with Washington. Published February 5, 2025 Well, that wasn’t fun. While most of you were, I hope, enjoying your weekends, thousands of journalists and trade dorks like me spent our “free” time Saturday and Sunday glued to our smartphones and frantically tweeting out charts in anticipation of and response to Donald Trump’s latest tariff shenanigans.
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2 months ago | 
thedispatch.com | Jonah Goldberg |David Drucker |Brian M. Riedl |Nick Catoggio
On bitcoin dragons, China, and crackpots. Published February 5, 2025 Alex Tabarrok, professor of economics at George Mason University, joins Jonah Goldberg to discuss the exceptional nature of American democratic capitalism and debate the merits of all sorts of borders. Later in the episode, Jonah gets a crash course in crypto and asks Alex about the future and ethics of AI and large language models.
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2 months ago | 
thedispatch.com | Jonah Goldberg |David Drucker |Brian M. Riedl |Nick Catoggio
Thank God for the stock market. The market is one of the only things Donald Trump can be expected to listen to—likely more than polls and certainly more than his advisers—even when he doesn’t want to hear what it’s saying.
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2 months ago | 
thedispatch.com | Brian M. Riedl |Scott Lincicome |Charlotte Lawson |Grayson Logue
Published February 5, 2025 Tens of millions of voters were driven to the polls in 2024 by anger over the economic damage wrought by the incumbent Democratic administration. While some degree of post-pandemic inflation was inevitable, President Joe Biden ignored economists’ warnings by flooding the economy with too much stimulus, runaway spending, bailouts, and red tape that pushed the inflation rate to 9 percent.
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2 months ago | 
thedispatch.com | John Mccormack |Nick Catoggio |Gary Schmitt |Brian M. Riedl
Ten years ago this month, nine conservative House Republicans, frustrated with the party’s leadership, met at the conference’s retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania, to form their own caucus. “The original working title was the Reasonable Nutjob Caucus,” recalled Mick Mulvaney, one of the founding members. “Reasonable nutjob” was “sort of a thumbing our nose that John McCain would call us a bunch of nutjobs,” Mulvaney told The Dispatch.
