How Many Divisions Has the Pope?

Hello and welcome to the Slate political Gavfest.

April 16th, 2026, the how many divisions has the Pope edition?

I'm David Plotz, CityCast, I'm here in Washington, you see a sweltering Washington DC.

I am joined by Emily Bazzo.

I'm New York Times Magazine, Yale University Law School, and historian of the Trump administration

as we will discuss later in the episode.

Hello Emily.

Hello, hello, hello to both of you.

From New York to no, not from New York City, from Chicago, where he is doing something.

John Dickerson, John has a wonderful new project.

So it's a collaboration with the estate of John's favorite musical performer, his musical hero,

John Prime.

So John Prime left a ton of music for songs that he never finished writing.

And so Prime and our John had bonded when Prime was still alive about their shared love

of 19th century American presidents.

And the estate has asked John to write lyrics for a posthumous prime album about American

presidents called Slip Through the White House Floor.

And it's really great.

John shared it like verse one of his first song.

Well Ben sat quiet in the oval room with a beard like a winter field.

Grandpa's ghost in the corner chair and a tariff he wouldn't yield.

It's beautiful, John.

Who's that about?

I'm sorry.

I'm just so touched.

I'm so touched that you spend this brain energy or at least have blood spend the

brain energy on it.

Also it was it's the sad anniversary of John Prime's death in April 7th, 2020 was last

week.

So you've perhaps unwittingly accessed the spirit in the air.

Anyway, I don't know which president that was.

That Ben Ben Harrison obviously.

Grandpa's ghost in the corner chair, his grandfather.

We have Henry Hans Harrison.

I have a whole song.

I'm all about that.

Are you going to sing?

Let's sing.

John.

John would have been amused.

I'm sure I'm certainly will be.

It would have been amused.

Anyway, look for that in on Spotify pretty soon.

This week on the Gap Fest, the latest Iran showdown including Trump's battle with his new

enemy, Pope Leo, then we are going to talk to Emily about her extraordinary new article

about the Department of Homeland Security and how was Victor Orbán defeated and what

lessons should Americans take from the Hungarian experience and Applebound will tell us.

Plus we'll have cocktail chatter.

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There's either a ceasefire or not a ceasefire in effect in Iran, but it's certainly devolved

into another situation.

The United States has blockaded all ship traffic to and from Iranian ports, including the oil

exports that the country needs to supply hard currency.

The hard currency needs to keep its room economy afloat.

So the next steps in this war that is not quite a war are unclear.

Will this economic squeeze compel the Iranians to negotiate a deal that is more favorable

to the US?

Because it felt like last week there were JD Vance and the Iranians approached something,

some aspects of a deal in their negotiations.

And will this create more willingness of the Iranians to come towards the American position?

Or on the contrary, will the squeeze on the world economy from the continued shutdown

of a ton of transit of necessary materials, notably oil materials?

Will that squeeze force Trump to accept worse terms in the US to accept worse terms?

And then there's the Pope.

So John Dickerson, is this blockade that the president has put, is this a clever strategy

or desperate measure?

And what is he hoping is going to happen from it?

Yes, David, is the answer to your question?

So why is it a desperate measure?

I mean, there's some desperation in it because based on the reporting we have,

and even what the president has said, how loud he expected the war to go faster than it did.

And he didn't expect the straight of the form to be a successful act of leverage

on the part of the Iranians.

He thought they would buckle and he thought the regime would change.

So things did not happen as he predicted, and now he's trying to get out of it.

It seems for the moment to be a clever move.

But the Chinese have said this is untenable.

There is some reporting that maybe one Chinese ship tried to press against the blockade

and then turned around.

There's some reporting it got through, but I think it got turned around.

By the way, do you guys think of blockade?

What do you think of?

A row of ships in the block actually blocking the entrance to the straight line?

Yes, I know.

Right, not the way it happens.

Basically, they see a ship going towards there.

They get them on the horn and they say ship whatever flying, whatever flag.

This is the USS.

You better stop and turn around.

And they do.

And if they don't, then there's a ladder of escalation that can go through.

So anyway, it's like when they, when in the Senate, somebody says they're going to

filibuster something and all the senators say, okay, well, you're going to filibuster

at art.

So we'll just assume you filibustered it.

So it's like, we assume you're going to, you know, you've blocked this.

Anyway, I just, I hadn't really thought that through.

I mean, if you think about, I mean, the Civil War blockade and of course, and gone with

a wind, Red Butler is a gun runner.

He's a, he's breaking a blockade and he's not breaking it because there's a wall.

He's breaking, he's out running union ships.

That's what you do is you outrun a ship or you sneak in at night, just hard, harder to

do when you have all this technology that allows the US to track whoever's coming.

But you don't need a wall of ships.

Okay, people, we're moving on from the wall.

Yeah.

And the not all ships do.

Okay.

So now we have a president who predicted this all wrong is kind of flailing and like a face

off between the Iranians trying to control the state of her moves and the United States

trying to control it and the United States trying to kind of starve the Iranian economy

and the Iranians like waiting us out because they assume that we are not going to have the

tolerance and patience for the rising oil prices and other economic and diplomatic fall

out and aren't they probably right?

Oh, I don't know if it's easy to predict who's right.

I do note that we're not, we're not talking about civilization ending acts of destruction

for the moment.

So it seems that we've gotten to it.

It does seem like things are headed towards some kind of a deal and the deal, you know,

will be some kind of promise from the Iranians not to do something about nuclear weapons.

The reporting suggests that they suggested they wouldn't do anything for five years and

the president wanted 20 and this is in the JD Vance negotiations.

I mean, it could at the end come around, come down to essentially semantic language about

the future nuclear program.

So we don't really know where things are except that certainly the stock market seems to

think that there is warming and that some kind of deal will be reached.

I mean, the S&P has basically regained everything at last during this now nearly 50 day

war.

Yeah.

I think the other factor is that is the sort of domestic pressure on Republican politicians.

Now they've been extremely reluctant to do anything to constrain Trump or to associate

themselves with the war.

They kind of pretend the war is happening.

It's like happening in another universe is nothing to do with them or they're with their

party or their president.

It's just like it's a thing.

It's a kind of external factor that has nothing to do with them.

But of course they're getting so much blowback and there's this interesting story in the

Times about a Republican member of Congress who had a town hall and just was catching hell

for this.

And there's fracturing and the Republican ranks over it and that can go on for some

period of time.

And that can not go on indefinitely.

If Americans are opposed to this war and Republicans are split over this war and gas prices

continue to be high because of this war and other prices continue to be high at least

partially because of this war, there will have to be some form of retrenchment by Trump

and he will claim whatever happens, we know he will claim victory.

He will.

Yeah, he knows.

But the form of that victory takes will be interesting.

In addition to the cost of economics, I was talking to a former military leader this

week who really emphasized that what's being spent in readiness and that means both the

stamina and enthusiasm of the U.S. fighting forces and which was already in some ways stretched.

And then also the actual ships have to be fixed and maintained and kept up and then

the number of missiles that are being burned during the ceasefire, that's not a problem

anymore.

But there are costs here which are not so easy to refresh, particularly if you were forced

to go into another engagement.

So this person was saying they were extremely nervous if there was anything else that the

military had to do because missiles for example, you can't just stamp more of them out over

a weekend, they take a long time to build.

So when we think of the costs, it's the economic pain and the destabilization to the world economy

that the IMF said, even if there was peace today, it's going to affect the entire rest

of the year.

There's also that cost to the U.S. ability to project power in the world.

So there are two upcoming political dates looning.

There's May 1st which is when the 60 days from when Trump gave notice about the war

starting.

So that's when, according to the War Powers Act, Congress would need to authorize continuing

hostilities.

And then there's this huge budget increase for the military that the Trump administration

has asked for and whether Congress is going to go along with that.

And just to say that the clock is ticking on Republicans being able to ignore the politics

of this.

Yeah.

Just go back to the math for a second.

If I kind of the most conservative estimates, probably this war will cost on the order of

$100 billion, but probably it will end up costing when you consider that's just a direct

cost.

But the indirect cost of all the refreshment that you talked about, John, is probably

more than that.

It's probably going to be a couple hundred billion dollars.

You think about that.

That's about $600 per American.

I live in a, you know, I have three children.

That's $2,400 for me and my three children.

For a war, which has, now you can say like, okay, it's created, has it created $2,400

worth of stability for my family, of benefit for my family?

I would, it would be hard to argue that it has.

It would be, it would be hard to argue that like the world is now more stable.

The United States is $2,400 per family richer because of what's going on.

And that's, that's just, and that's not even accounting for all the gas costs that

ever has been.

The people who are getting more wealthy, by the way, are both the executives at oil

companies who have seen record profits or record sharing increases as a result of the price

of oil and also Bank of America announced its earnings.

And all of the crazy trading that goes on up and down as, as people try to bet on which

way this war is going, the people who are executing those trades make the money whether

the trade is to buy or to sell.

So they enjoy, when falls as a result of this activity.

So as you were, as you were counting up the cost to the regular American, it's also

interesting to think about the people who are benefiting from this war, even if they

note intentionally mean to benefit from it.

And in the oil case, I should note that some of those trades that made the CEOs of those

companies so much money were booked long before the war started.

So it's not, not like they were totally rushing in to take advantage of the war.

Let's turn to the Pope for a second.

John, I'm going to go to you because he's your Pope.

What what's going on between the Pope and Trump and who started it?

Oh my God.

Well, the Pope said, basically, the Pope, I mean, I guess you could say he started it.

Basically, what the Pope said was that, you know, God is not on your side when it comes

to war basically, which is, you know, articulating a moral framework against killing, which is

pretty meat and potatoes for a Pope, you know, he's doing his job.

That's a top five Pope line.

Yes, exactly.

I mean, that when the president threatened, I guess the, the, the, the precipitating event

was the president promising to wipe out Iranian civilization, which the Pope said was

truly unacceptable.

So then the, then the president responded by saying that the Pope was called a weak on

crime.

I mean, it is true that when Jesus is turning the other cheek, it can be considered being

weak on crime.

Anyway, and then, and then the president said he was not a fan of, of Pope Leo.

And we, there was a second, which is while we're on this topic, there was a second beat

on this, which is JD Vance said, and I love the New York Times headline.

Vance says the Pope should be more careful when talking about theology.

So basically what the Pope said was God does not bless any conflict and to cry out to

the world that whoever is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace never stands on the side

of those who wielded the sword or dropped the bombs.

And what he's referring to there, I think, is there's one argument, which is whether like

Christ and God think it's okay to have wars and one rebuttally as well.

There is that, which is God's and that which is Caesar's and there's a, you know, like the

two worlds are separate.

But what the Pope is saying is something slightly different, which is you can't go around

and claiming that God is written on these bombs that like he's all for this.

This is yay, yay, team God when you're, when you're dropping bombs, which is what Secretary

Higgseth has essentially done in addition to describing the airman who was captured in the

context of Jesus' resurrection narrative, which is also crossing a new line.

It's crossing a new line because Trump is Jesus.

And so the, is it airman Jesus or is Trump Jesus?

Oh, let's get to that.

But John, I do think I do, I do look, I, I think it is definitely Pope's job.

Pope job, top Pope job is to call for peace.

And of course there's deep Christian history of this.

On the other hand, I don't think it is, it would be historically incorrect to say that the

Catholic church and popes have been involved in fighting and encouraging war.

I mean, that certainly has been a big theme of the Catholic church all through the crusades

are, are absolutely that.

Yes, I mean, fortunately the Catholic church is not on trial here.

I mean, I mean, what you say is incredibly true.

And it's also true that not all popes have been swell,

perfect, peace, nicks and perfect avatars of Christ and, and you know, as close as

you can come to be as a saint on earth.

However, the book says what it says, the guy says what it says.

And if you are a believer in Jesus and you talk about being a believer all day long,

JD Vance has written a new book about his conversion to Catholicism and in that book,

or at least the promotional materials for it, he says, I'm a Christian and I became a Christian

because I believe that Jesus Christ's teachings are true.

It ain't a stretch to say Jesus Christ's teaching teachings are that you should not kill other

people that you should not engage in war.

That has nothing to do with Catholic history.

It just has to do with what's in the gospels.

And if you're standing up and saying, I believe in these words.

And then somebody says, hey, those words don't say what you're saying.

There's mean like that's a problem.

The reason this matters is not just about it like an internacing Catholic, you know,

a fight in the basement.

It's because we've seen standards drop across a whole range of areas.

And so one of the roles that a church plays or end that people who profess to have faith,

one of the things they say is like, they're these standards and we live up to them.

So this is, you know, this is another fight of a kind of fight that we've had or discussion

we've had over the last, you know, 11 years.

Does Catholic doctrine have room for just war theory in it?

I mean, this is not a just war.

I'm not arguing that.

But I feel like there's an absoluteness in the way that you're characterizing this that

then it gets confusing how you're supposed to be a world leader at all.

So there are, yes, I mean, there is just war theory, which is the evolution of, you know,

sense like, you know, 400 AD about when, when leaders can engage in war.

It's basically when, you know, it's when it's defensive, when it's not,

when it's not just like for fun.

But again, that to me is a distinction between what's being debated here.

One is, as a Christian engaged in war, there are conditions in which it is quote-unquote okay.

And there's quite a lot of, you know, debate about this.

The other is to say, God's on your side.

There are lots of things that Christians do that God is not on their side for,

and for which you ask forgiveness.

But there's no, I don't think there's a just war doctrine.

And this again, as you said, this doesn't really check the boxes in which it says,

go bomb on behalf of God.

Yeah, and go bomb and obliterate a civilization on behalf of God.

That's all I've told.

Precisely discernment, you have put your finger on the right thing.

Like indiscriminate destruction, not I don't think in just war theory.

And even if you're just threatening it,

threats have their own, you know, world.

Although I don't think it is not fair to say that what the United States

I do not approve of this war in Iran is not fair to say that this has been indiscriminate destruction.

It's been quite different.

No, no, no, no, it's the threat that the president made.

But the threat, yes, but I, yes.

And I don't know whether that's it.

Why about civilization is indiscriminate?

Yes, why about civilization not good?

What, let's talk about the image of Jesus to close this out.

Emily.

Well, I mean, this is just so, okay, so Trump posed this AI slap image.

She said it was created by a very beautiful artist afterward of himself as Jesus.

I mean, I just know he was a doctor.

Emily, it was him as a doctor.

All right.

So he posed this image, which is clearly him as Jesus.

Also, it's coming out of his criticizing the Pope.

He's clearly presenting himself as the godly one between the two of them.

And then when people didn't like that,

because it's completely blasphemous and in terrible taste, etc, etc,

he then said it was doctor, which I mean, he,

so I guess like, this is, I'm torn between, this is all just farce.

And I, I don't know, it's kind of funny.

And then also horrifying.

And thinking that like really these stories that maybe he, he's just really losing it are true.

Like, there's a lot of evidence that he's just kind of losing it.

And this is a exhibit number, I don't know, 1903.

But people have been saying that from, I mean, people have been saying that about him for 10 years.

But don't you think it's worse?

I feel like it's worse.

Well, all it's worse because he has more power.

I mean, I'm not constrained.

It's not constrained.

But I don't know that he, I don't know that that's evidence that he himself is more crazy.

It's evidence that his craziness is able to be imposed on us

and more easily and more readily and more quickly than he used to be.

But I don't know that he, that's all, but I think he's more detached from reality than he was.

Well, as we know, the job will do that even to the say-nest of brains.

And I mean, I don't know, you know, we should also keep in mind,

Secretary Besant this week said, you know, when that went asked about the costs of the war,

he said, well, I don't know what it would have done to GDP if London had been hit by a nuclear bomb.

So obviously that, you know, that kind of rhetoric has been used in lots of wars before,

which is like, you know, no matter what goes wrong, it's not as bad as my imaginary threat.

Now, obviously, the idea that Iran was seeking a nuclear weapon is not imaginary.

But it re-centers the key question that's never been asked, which is,

was the threat of Iranian nuclear, Iran getting a nuclear bomb imminent and was war the only way

to solve it? Like, and all of that exists. Obviously, no. Both of the things are no. Plus,

people in the last summer that the nuclear threat was all gone. Like, come on.

The answer to those questions lives in Donald Trump's brain, because he made those calls.

Like, so it's why the brain is, what you say, David is true. The stakes are so high.

And this entire moment exists only in Donald Trump's brain. He made the call about both the

imminence and the reason that that war was necessary as a response. And so, I'm not sure I think

he even put it in those terms to himself. I mean, I don't really want to be dissecting what he

was thinking about, but I feel like he might have gone to war without really grappling with those

questions entirely possible. Well, based on the Swan and Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and

Maggie Haberman reporting, he was given the information and just chose to believe what he wanted

to believe. Exactly. Which is that this would be quick and easy like, then, as well. And like, exactly.

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gab at shopify.com slash political gab. Emily Baselon, the

House historian, the New York Times's House historian of the Trump administration has another

amazing oral history compiled with her colleague, Rachel Poser, Matthew Purdy. It is the story of

what has happened and is happening inside Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security. Emily,

of course, has previously worked on similar projects with colleagues about the DOJ and the FBI,

Emily. Another amazing reporting feat from you and your colleagues. Congratulations. What

was different about trying to cover DHS compared to DOJ and the FBI? This project felt to me

slightly different. I can't put my finger on it, but maybe you can put your finger on what

felt different. Well, in the reporting, there were two things that were different. One thing that

was helpful was we were focusing on immigration. We had an arc about enforcement and policy changes.

It's a very dramatic arc and a huge change. We could see this big pendulum shift from the Biden

administration, especially the first three years in which the border was relatively permeable. Lots of

people were coming into the country to Trump shutting down the border. Then I think most

drastically doing very harsh enforcement inside the country in a way that we haven't seen.

Maybe ever and for sure since the 1950s. The subject was unified. The thing that was really hard

about this reporting project is that DHS is this very sprawling agency. It was created after

September 11th. It doesn't necessarily cohere. It has FEMA and TSA in it, and we didn't even try

to cover that stuff. But even the immigration machinery is in three parts. There's ICE. Then there's

customs and border protection, which usually operates on the border, like the name says, but has become

pulled into this interior enforcement, even though it operates, usually under less restrictive rules.

Then there's the service part of the agency for legal immigrants, which is called USCIS.

Citizenship and immigration services. That's more a standard government bureaucracy. It's not

people out in the streets. Getting our hands around all of that was hard. Then finding people

who would talk about it was difficult. The Trump administration has been very successful in

scaring people out of talking to the press, even if they have left the agency. We did in the end

end up with something like 25 named sources. I was grateful for that. We also have a bunch of

current officials talking in this piece, especially ICE agents and agents for Homeland Security

Investigations, HSI, which is supposed to be the part of DHS that looks into big criminal

enterprises, but lately is just out in the streets with ICE. Emily, is it fair to say that Steven

Miller is whipping the horse here, that that is one of the strong narrative. If one strong narrative

theme is Biden created this insane condition that sort of invited this, and there's some amazing

quotes throughout the interviews along those lines, that it sort of Biden's mistake plus Miller's

obsession leads us to our current moment. Yeah, I think that's a great synopsis. I mean,

over and over again, the people said the most important event, ongoing event, is Miller

setting this target of 3,000 arrests a day and a million deportations a year. They've

never met it, but they've tried really hard, and it is very different in terms of interior

in the country enforcement than anything we've seen before. And we all know this, right? Like we

see this in LA, and especially in Minneapolis and Chicago, but these raids, these sweeps, these

really just kind of unrestrained power of federal law enforcement, and it's all being driven

from the top by this pressure for numbers. And the ICE agents who talked to us, you know, were

very candid about how much that is, you know, pushing them in the direction of racial profiling

of making arrests like even with people who turn out not to be the right target. I mean, all the

stuff that you are worried is happening, they were talking about it, and it is happening.

Right. So, so I was counting as I was reading the story, and it seems like that

you are chronically five significant changes in what DHS is doing. Who was being targeted?

How the agency is targeting them? How targeted people are then taken care of?

How agents interact with the public, and then how agents are in fact trained to do this job.

And these are all things that have been radically reshaped by the Trump administration.

And some of them, of course, more visibly like the agents interacting with the general

public is the one that has probably caused the most damage to the agency's reputation. But all of

those have been radically reshaped by this administration. Yeah, totally. And, you know, the

it was true before over many administrations that basically you got targeted if you were a criminal

in the US, not like you crossed the border illegally, but you committed a crime here. That's how

in particular President Obama deported so many people. But it remained true, you know,

for mostly for the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. Now there's just like

huge rise. It's like seven hundred and seventy percent rise. I don't even know how to think about

how much bigger that is. Right. It's like a confusing exponential rise in the number of arrests of

people who have no criminal convictions. I actually would push back on that number. I mean,

not obviously it's a huge number. I felt like the thing that was missing in that piece or at least

that I skipped is like, what does that mean? Absolute terms. Because if you start from a low base,

if that number is 10 and a seven hundred seventy percent rises, then 77, that's 67 new people.

But 67 new people in the context of thousands a day is not many. So I don't know whether seven hundred

seventy percent rise is a huge rise in absolute terms or it's only a huge rise in relative terms.

Yeah, it's a big rise and that's interesting. We really struggled with that line. Now I'm thinking

like we should have put the absolute numbers in as well. And I don't have them at my fingertips,

but it is a significant rise. I mean, one way to think about this is that there were fewer than

40,000 people in detention when Biden was president. And now there are more than 75,000. And so

that is like a doubling of almost. And you can see that. And the percentage almost all those

additional people are people who did not have criminal histories. That's one way to think about it.

I also found it actually shocking. That was another one. Because there was more like holy

shit. There were 40,000 people in detention in the Biden administration. And it is,

you know, those 40,000 people I'm sure there are some reasons. And I'm a person who believes in

immigration enforcement in some fashion. But like 40,000 to 70,000 to 80,000 is a big leap. And

especially for those new 40,000 who are in there. But to me, I thought that original number

was going to be like 2000. Yeah, it's interesting. You're right. But it's not. Sorry John, go ahead.

Well, I was just to remember that there are Camilla Montoya-Galvez at CBS reported that

of the 400,000 immigrants arrested by the immigration and customs enforcement in the first year,

14% were had criminal had charges or criminal convictions. And I guess the, so I think that goes

some way towards answering your question, David. But the obvious context is that the president,

both in his first before his first term and in this one said that the whole point of these

operations was to go after the worst of the worst. And so 14% is the worst of the worst. So it's

and the reason obviously that matters is when you make a promise and then not only are you not doing

it, but the people you were going after are causing you to engage in behavior that ends up killing

two Americans and maybe more and causing all this other mayhem. You're, that adds to the picture

as well. It's not just that you're not keeping a campaign promise. You're stomping on the accelerator

to do something that you said you weren't going to do. And I think also, you know, David, you were

talking about the change and how the government takes care of people or fails to take care of them.

And that's like the conditions and detention, which have become really more emisorated. And all

of this is about sewing fear so that people will leave on their own, because even though this is

like a pretty effective machine for making people miserable and detaining them, it's not that easy

to deport millions of people. That's just like that's hard. That takes many more resources even

than we've put into it. And so the fast paths to Stephen Miller's goal, which really is to make

all the immigrants leave all the undocumented people is to get them to just decide that it is too

difficult here and that they're going to leave on their own. And that that is like, you know,

oh, we used to talk about, you know, when when Mitt Romney coined the phrase self deportation,

it was like a joke, right? Both that people would do that. And also that we would try to really

make that happen. And then, you know, Alabama passed the law where they like end up just emptying

their own fields of agricultural workers. And it's like a mess. And it just seems like you're going

to kind of wreck your own economy. If you really tried to root out all the undocumented immigrants,

because of course they are doing a lot of work for much cheaper than people who are born in this

country are usually willing to do it. But in this context, like that really is the goal in the

administration, which doesn't say to say that they're going to accomplish it. But that is the kind

of North Star. And it accounts for why things are miserable. I one thing I really liked about

this story, Emily, was that you did manage to talk to people who broadly supported the president's

goals. And, you know, and some of them, there's some dismayed by ways they're being carried out. But

but this is a very textured piece because there are people who are kind of sane. Yes, we're trying

to do this is why we're trying to do it. This is what we're trying to accomplish. Yeah, totally. I

mean, look, this is DHS like this is an agency that is partly devoted to immigration enforcement.

So it makes sense that when you talk to a lot of people who work there, some of them are going to

support the goal. And I think there is a wrestling with the extremes on both sides of this, right? So

if you just let millions of people in, that can become kind of out of control. I mean, there was

this customs and border official Mark Cummins, who I talked to a lot, who was just describing what

it was like when there was this huge influx of people and just the challenges of like housing

and feeding everybody and how he was spending two billion dollars in a couple of years with like

tons of contractors and trying so hard to partner with people, just the giant like operational

challenge of the border. And so, okay, then that the border shuts and for for customs and border

patrol in a lot of ways, that's a relief. But then you unleash this like wave of, you know, like

terror or certainly like lots of fear and some violence and incredible harshness inside the country.

And people can see who work for ice that that is making them deeply unpopular. I mean, we had this

ACH and talk about how, you know, they were getting deployed to Minneapolis and nobody wanted to go

and you would like show up wheeling your wife's like, girly looking suitcase and kind of pretending

to be in Minneapolis for other reasons, using your personal credit card. Like that is also not the

kind of government that people want to be part of. What's the opportunity, honest Emily, of

the reorientation of DHS to immigration in this fashion? What aren't they covering? And how

much worry is there about that? Well, HSI, Homeland Security Investigations, which is a more like

FBI like agency in theory, is not doing the kind of, you know, big criminal enterprise work to the

same degrees it was before because they're like all out on the streets with ice. And so, you know,

people were telling us like that is making the country less safe because we're not paying attention

to threats in the same way.

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We're now joined by the Atlantic's and Applebaum to talk about the defeat of Victor Orbán in

Hungary's elections. Orbán was defeated by a former party ally, Peter Maggiar. I hope I'm

pronouncing that right. I haven't heard it said. Maggiar routed him in the general election,

winning two-thirds of the seats in parliament, although only slightly more than a majority of the

vote. Let's start with what comes next. What does the new government need to do to unwind

the authoritarian and anti-democratic elements of Orbán's Hungary? Will they be able to do it?

First of all, it is Peter Maggiar. You write that he's a former member of Fidesh,

which is Victor Orbán's party. That means he knows and understands the political system very well.

It's also been targeting him in unbelievably nasty ways for the last couple of years.

And this is by way of answering your question. They sent spies into his movement. They recruited

a girlfriend of his so that she made tapes of him. They bugged his phone. They bugged lots of

other people's phone. So this is a system in which the intelligence services as well as the

controlled and captured judiciary and captured bureaucracy all have to be somehow dismantled or

neutralized anyway so that it's possible for a different political party to make decisions and

have them be carried into effect. Hungary also is famous for having a group of oligarchs who were

created by the ruling party as a way of funding various things that the ruling party wants to do.

And they're all still there as well and they all have a lot of money. They control, I don't know,

about 20 or 30 percent of the economy. The economist told me one time when I was there.

And so all of that is a huge, those are huge obstacles. It seems like Maggiar is going to hit

some of them head on. He gave his first television interview to Hungarian state television. They

have an important, you know, like most European countries, important state TV. He had not appeared

on it for the previous year and a half. In other words, the main opposition leader was not allowed

on state TV. And the first thing he did is he went on a program and he said to the woman who is

the presenter, basically, I'm shutting you all down. You've been lying about me for a year and a half.

You made up fake stories about me and you're gone. I don't know whether that's a good tactic or a

bad one. But I mean, I think he, I know I should say the second thing he did was he also went to

meet the president of Hungary, who's a, it's not an elected president. It's somebody who's chosen

by the parliament. And he told the president also, by the way, you have to resign as well.

So he is, I think, making clear that he's going to use his constitutional majority to make very

big changes very fast. And that will probably be dismantling some of these constitutional institutions

that were captured in various ways. What he's going to do about the people with money, I don't know,

or the party, the Orban's political party, which has huge amount of money in this whole network

of think tanks and foundations, that's going to take a long time to unravel. Remember that the

point of Orban's political system wasn't that it was repressive in the 1984 sense, but that it

sought to control outcomes and conversation through, as I said, dominating media, dominating

conversation, dominating state institutions. And so picking all that apart is going to be hard.

We had a similar thing happen in Poland after the 2023 election when another autocratic

populist government lost. And frankly, the arguments for certainly about the courts are still going on.

I mean, they're still, it's still unclear who's a legitimate judge and who's not a legitimate judge.

And we haven't solved many of the problems that were created. So he has, I mean, really dozens

of institutions to think about and dozens of things to worry about.

I was thinking about the courts and about Poland, because the judiciary and Hungary, as I understand it,

took a while for Orban to really take over, like the judges who were in place when he was initially

coming into power, tried to resist. And then he succeeded in replacing them. And often courts are

kind of slow to turn over unless you have some mechanism for getting rid of all of them at once,

which of course is its own kind of quasi, maybe unconstitutional up people.

Are there, so if Poland is still struggling, that was, I should let all interrupt by saying

that was exactly the problem. That was a good interruption. I was going to ask you what,

so if Poland is still struggling with all that,

are what are the lessons in terms of like how fast you try to move? Right, because like maybe one

of the reasons Majar made the moves you talked about with the media and the president quickly is

right now he has momentum. You could try to go in and break a lot of things, I guess, in the service

of putting the country or the democracy back together. But then there must be some sense that you

can't do everything at once. And I wonder how that has played out in Poland.

Actually, the lesson in Poland is that you should do as much as you can immediately

before inertia sets in, before people get sick of you, before the backlash, the inevitable backlash

starts because the Polish government was able to do quite a few things initially. And for example,

they also had a very similar problem with state television. And they took it off the air for

a few days and brought in a new team and restarted it from scratch. And initially it was rather

primitive. But the point was to create a state television that was neutral, that was not biased,

that was not angry, was even slightly boring. That was not that easy to do. I mean, they had planned

it in advance, so they had some preparation for it, but they did have to evict the previous team.

And that was successful. And then the decision about judges in Poland was to wait and try and do

it slowly and legally and carefully. And that was probably a mistake because we're now some years

down the road and they haven't fixed it. I agree that there is a potential problem down the line,

which is when you try to fix unconstitutional change unconstitutional, you immediately run into the

problem of becoming the next dictator. And I'm sure it's going to be about five minutes before

people start saying that that's already happened. I would give Peter Majar a little bit of time,

you know, give him a few months and give his team a few months. I mean, I was just not just him,

it's there are a lot of other people involved who've been studying these problems for a long time.

And let's see how it works out. Again, the problem of what you do in a political system when the

rules have been broken or when the system has been set up in such a way as to favor one particular

party or particular political outcome, it's not always that easy to find the legal way to fix it.

Or the way that seems the most neutral. And as I said, I mean, in Poland, they tried to do the

judge, the captured courts slowly and it wasn't very successful. So my guess is he'll try and move

as fast as he can and my guess is he'll hit a lot of obstacles. And in the Atlantic, you made the

case that the law, the war bonds laws punctures the inevitability that's sort of pervaded his

movement, Putin's movement, MAGA, that basically illiberal parties are destined to hold power forever

because they speak for the people. Can you talk about that with respect to what lessons one can draw

or where the line is where you can't draw any lessons about the relationship between what happened

in Hungary and what's what is happening with the MAGA movement in the States?

So Hungary is a special case and it's a special case because the Hungarians, because Viktor Orban, in fact,

made it into a special case. So Orban decided at some point that his form of power was only safe

if he could convert lots of other governments to be like him. And he had a huge outreach program.

He had these international think tanks that sought to make contact with right-wing intellectuals all over

Europe and in the United States. They had programs to bring people to Budapest. They also

certainly funded other think tanks. We don't know the extent of that yet. We might be about to

learn more. I mean, they had a huge operation in Brussels, for example. We're going to

assume find out just exactly what was their relationship with the Heritage Foundation,

which was also, it was significant in some way and maybe now we'll learn. And Orban did become

for, I mean, the head of heritage has said this, Steve Vanagan has said this, others have said it,

become the kind of model for how you do this. You win a democratic election, you win it by creating

an existential crisis. You tell people that their way of life is under threat. Their society is

dying. If you don't vote for us, you'll be wiped out. And only we can save you and we can save you

by changing the political system in order to fight off the radical left or the woke D.I. people,

whichever or the migrants or the LGBT gender people, whichever, whichever enemy you've created

that's endangering your country. And that was seen as the way to win power. And it was assumed that,

you know, once you won power that way, you could hold on to it forever. I was actually once at an

event. It was in Rome. It was a while ago. It was just before the pandemic, in fact. And it was one

of the first national conservative conferences and Orban was there. And he was interviewed on stage.

And the interviewer literally said to him, you know, in so many words, Mr. Orban, how is it that

you've managed to hold on to power for so long? And Orban had two answers. One of them is, you know,

I make sure that we don't have too much criticism from the media, which, you know, the media in the

back of the room laughed, but actually he wasn't, he wasn't joking. And the other was, I made sure

that I have a majority so that there are no, I'm not sharing power with any coalition parties.

You know, and so he, you know, he was very overt about how he was doing this. You know, if you control

the media, if you control information, if you control as many political institutions as possible,

then you won't lose and then you can rule forever. And that was the model that people wanted to

adopt in the United States. And that's what, I mean, I think Project 2025 is very influenced by that.

I think Russell Vote and the idea of taking over the American bureaucracy, I think a lot of that

comes from, or is inspired anyway by Orban, actually, the American version is much more brutal

and is happening much faster than anything that ever happened in Hungary. But so because of that,

you know, because he made himself dissymbol, then his downfall also has more symbolic significance

than if he were just some right-winger in, I don't know, Austria or Italy or somewhere else.

Because he was the one who said he gave people the message you can rule forever.

He also had this, as you said in your question, he had this sense that, or he had this message that

I speak for the real Hungarians, like the real people in the countryside, the real deep Hungarians,

like they follow me and these lefty, liberal, whatever they are, you know, centrist, progressives,

they are somehow foreign or they're, they just live in cities, they don't matter, they're,

they're a fringe, you know, they have dominance that doesn't reflect their numbers.

And this election, if nothing else, shows that that wasn't true. I mean, that in a way is,

or it's been clear for a long time that that's not true in Hungary because he never won elections

by that many votes. He just that their voting system was twisted so that the largest party had

a disproportionate number of seats in parliament, which is actually what has just benefited

the opposition party, Peter Magiars party. But that also, you know, that also is now broken. I mean,

was he, it turns out he wasn't, you know, speaking for the masses, you know, he's speaking for

his own minority. And I mean, I think that the magic of that, of that kind of politics also loses

some of its power. So what was Magiars able to do to overcome all the obstacles or Bonn had set up

to prevent him from losing an election? What did Magiars do that was effective? And also,

what did he avoid doing? The main thing he did was he really created a large, diverse grassroots

social movement. I mean, he had, he did grassroots campaigning. He had no access to media, no TV.

He couldn't even get billboard space. So they ran this very ground campaign. It's a small country

so you can do it. And they created local circles and groups. And he went round and round the country.

And he visited many towns and villages more than once, five or six times. In the last few days of

the campaign, I saw his schedule. He was going to six or seven towns every day. And that's how he,

that's how he's been campaigning for the last year. So he tried to, you know, he had to fight against

this, you know, very heavy propaganda that was based on a lot of fictional threats. In the last

in the campaign, Orban was trying to tell people that they were threatened by a possible invasion

from Ukraine, which is of course insane. You know, Ukraine doesn't want to invade Hungary. It's

busy fighting Russia. But he created this boogie man because the old threats, I guess, LGBT and

and migrants were working anymore. And so, and so, Majork overcame this through trying to reach

as many real people as he possibly could. But also the Hungarian opposition, having learned this

lesson last time when they also came pretty close to winning. They learned that they can't have,

they could only have one party. So they had, they had several parties. There was a left party.

There was a green party. And all of them said, right, we're not running. We're not even putting

it candidates. We're all backing Peter Majar. And that doesn't mean they agree with every single

thing that he thinks about every subject. But they understood that he was a normal European,

you know, Christian Democrat, which is a, which is a center right party, that he wasn't a puppet of

Russia like Orban, that he understood fetish corruption and he wanted to fight it. And that he

would help take apart the system. There was this unifying thing. And I'd say the, the third thing,

the thing that he avoided was he avoided getting caught up in culture war arguments.

Existential arguments. You know, he just tried not to talk about Ukraine on the campaign trail.

You know, it was, you know, because he didn't want to get into the question of, you know,

is Ukraine going to invade Hungary or not and get go down some crazy, you know, some crazy rabbit hole?

I think he stayed away from anything that could create that sense of existential threat he

avoided. And he focused on the economy, schools, hospitals. And as I said, corruption, which is

something that people felt pretty strongly. And as we're taping Thursday morning overnight,

was the largest attack by the Russians on Kiev so far this year. I think 16 or dead, 12-year-old

child is dead. What does this change in Hungary mean for NATO, for Ukraine, and for the war?

It's really important for NATO and for Ukraine. Because Hungary was the country that was acting as

a Russian puppet or Russian proxy in Europe. So the Hungarians were voting against European

sanctions on Russia. They were voting against European money for Ukraine. They were constantly

creating friction and causing slowing down all kinds of processes designed to help Ukraine.

And since Europe is now really the sole backer of Ukraine, the U.S. is not, is not helping Ukraine,

except with a few defensive weapons that are being purchased by the Europeans from the United

States. The U.S. is not giving Ukraine any aid at all. And so it's really, really important that

Europeans stay united and have an efficient and effective way to deliver help. And Orbán was the

biggest problem for Europe. And we know now, because of material that was leaked during the campaign,

that this was being done in cooperation with the Russians. The Hungarian foreign minister would

leave EU foreign affairs, council meetings, get on the phone, call Sergei Lavrov, who's the Russian

foreign minister, tell him what had happened, was offering to send him documents from the EU,

so that he would understand what was going on in real time. I mean, all of that ends now. And Peter

Majer has been really clear about that. And so that, you know, that, that takes away a big obstacle.

I mean, there may be some other other effects that we, again, we don't really know the extent of

Orbán's support for other far-right parties. We know that it existed, but we don't really know

the scale. Maybe now we'll find out. But certainly, he was backing a lot of other political parties

who are also pro-Russian in Europe. So the A.F.D. in Germany is pro-Russian. The French far-right

is a little weird, but is often in the past been pro-Russian. They're pro-Russian leaders in

Slovakia and the Czech Republic, who also had backing and maybe money, maybe we'll discover

there was money as well from Orbán. And so I think that network also is weakened because Hungary

was really at the center of it. You know, Orbán is no longer the organizing force of the pro-Russian

far-right in Europe, and that will take off pressure in other countries as well as removing

Hungary as this, you know, continuous obstacle to European action. And Applebaum, thanks for coming

on the gap, Fist. Thank you. John Dickerson, when you were having a delicious glass of Hungarian

Tokai with Andy Kerson, what are you going to be chattering about? Oh, it's going to be light.

So there's so much sadness in the world, but there's for many people lifting them out of their

sadness is one person, Goli Parthen. The University of Massachusetts did a survey with you,

of the 20 international luminaries and how people felt about them. And the overwhelming winner

was Dolly Parte. Who's second? Obama and Zelensky, but they were, she apparently left them in the

dust by more than 50 percentage points. That must be American survey of Americans because I don't

think anyone is. It's true. It is American independence. You're right. You're right. Bogotá knows who

Dolly Parte? No, it's true. But she, her net approval rating is 65%, which means only there are 5%

who get had an unfavorable impression of her, which I wonder if you actually pulled those 5%.

Like what exactly the foundation of that 11% would be based on? You don't believe that anyone.

Exactly. I've, I've, I've, I've, I've pregnant impossible. Once again, you have put, you have

exactly put it down. What do you think the net favorability of George W Bush was?

Now.

In this?

In this?

Now. Yeah, now.

Negative 12.

I would have said like positive five.

Emily Baselon once again puts her finger on the metaphysical truth. Positive five is in

fact exactly the case. Trump is negative 18. Biden is negative 19. So that's really interesting

because presidents get more favorable when they leave and you could imagine Biden getting

more favorable as people are reintroduced to what they didn't like about Trump. But

at least in this and I've now over read these results in a way that you get all my licenses

revoked. But nevertheless, that's intriguing.

He baths. What is your chatter?

I am reading a book called Law on Trial. Oops, it's going to be backwards on the screen.

No, no, no, no.

It's not your backwards on the screen because you're seeing yourself as a mirror.

Fun with physics.

On the physics.

There's the book. It's called Law on Trial. It's by Sean Ose Ousou who is a law professor

at Penn. And I'm going to go do an event with him on Monday. And I'm really taken with

this book and interested in it. It's a giant critique of of the legal profession of how

we teach law and law school of how lawyers practice it in all segments, not just big law

firms, but also in the nonprofit space. And Sean is just pointing out all these ways

in which lawyers basically let themselves off the hook from reckoning with deep moral

and social consequences of their work, getting caught up in technical legal thinking as

opposed to really thinking through purpose and consequences.

And then the other thing in it is like the part about law school, it just makes me all

there are many things that you learn in law school that are really old. So one of the things

he brings up is the rule against perpetuities, which is like how the thing that prevents

property from being the prevent someone from controlling how property is inherited and

distributed like forever and ever in generations. It's like a thing in downtown Abbey.

But why are we still learning this and not, for example, learning about current land use

rules that prevent people from building housing, et cetera, et cetera. It's a kind of deep

critique that's making me just think about all of these different things. So I'm looking

forward to talking about it with Sean on Monday.

All right. Two chatters, one chatter, just a quick first, a quick job announcement, which

is if you are a data reporter and you want a job being a data reporter for cityCAST

DC where we're building a whole new local newsroom and doing data work all in the local data

here in DC, Maryland, Virginia, we got a job open. So if you're interested, please check

it out. It's going to be a great job working with an awesome team and that data, that data

is just up is really fun. So do it. My actual chatter, I picked up a book for no apparent

reason. I kind of with had run out of things to read and I had this book by a Seaguin empire

of the summer moon. Have I either be of a Reddit before you? Yes. Sam was my first editor.

Oh, really? Sam? I didn't know with Sam. Sam Gwyn. Sam is not my first editor, but

he's responsible for me being left, lifted out of being a secretary because he made me

a researcher on his first book about the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Oh, well, this book, which is a book about the Comanche Nation and a leader of the Comanche

name, Quantaparker, is a freaking tour de force, amazing book about the most powerful Native

American tribe in American history, which I knew nothing about. And this entire history

of the rise of the Texas Rangers, the battle for Texas, this kind of three way war between

Texas, the United States, Mexico, and the Comanche Nation, totally fascinating about the

kind of the arrival of horses in America and how horses change America. I'll just one

super interesting fact. So the Comanches go from being a tribe that has no horses to be

the most accomplished horse people on the planet in about just only in less than 100 years

this happens. But one of the effects of this is that their fertility rates drop precipitously

because their women, young women, are riding on horses all the time and that is not great

for your fertility. Raises risk of miscarriage and just makes it difficult to hold a pregnancy.

And so there's a lot of kidnapping. There's a lot of children who end up adopted into this tribe

and then end up becoming part of the tribe because they can't maintain their own

fertility rates with the members of the tribe. Fascinating book, that period of almost

incomprehensible brutality and vitality and conflict and a world that I didn't know anything about.

So great book. Oh my god, Sam Gwynn. Empire of the Summer Moon.

By S. C. Gwynn, whose name is actually Sam and who literally like responsible for me

not still answering phones on the 52nd floor or whatever floor it was.

Well good work. I for talent and a beautiful pen, purple pen too. Listeners, you've got

chatters. Please keep them coming. Please email them to us at gapfest. It's late.com and our

listener chatter this week comes from another Sam. Sam Shannon.

Hi Gapfest. This is Sam from Madison, Wisconsin. My chatter is on the deep space network

operated by NASA. It is a global array used to communicate with all the interplanetary satellites

in the solar system. You can go to the DSN website and see which satellites are currently

in communication with the arrays. As I'm recording this, the Spain array is communicating with the James

Webb telescope and Voyager 1 at a distance of 24 and a half billion kilometers. At that distance,

it takes 48 hours for a radio signal to travel the round trip length. The website also has a

real-time map of the solar system so you can see where the exploration satellites are at any given

point. It's fascinating and humbling to see humanity's ongoing adventures beyond our payoblued.

Thanks Gapfest. PS. I'm hoping John Dickerson becomes the new judge and scorekeeper for weightweight

don't tell me. Fingers crossed. Oh, well that's nice. It's a new idea. Yeah, exactly. The David

David's lots didn't think of. Yeah. We'd be good at that, John. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. All right. Well,

there we go. I just imagined that actually it was a pleasant little reverie. Peter Segal,

Peter, if you're listening, John would be great at that. Yeah. That's all for our episode this

week. We also have a bonus episode in your feed Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzalez and why powerful

men are so reckless. That is just for slate plus members. So become a slate plus member. You get

lots of great stuff for your subscription. You never had the paywall in the slate site. You get

bonus episodes of our show and other great slate shows. You also get discounts for things like

our upcoming live shows, which we need to plan. We need to plan some upcoming live shows.

So do that and you can become a member by going to the political Gapfest Show page on Apple

Podcasts and Spotify or go to slate.com slash Gapfest Plus. They want us in Providence.

Providence. Let's show in Providence. Yeah, people like a lot of people stop me. Yeah, no,

seriously. Like, totally, let's go do that. Yeah, it's okay. Very near it. We can all get there and

Neanne will be done with school so there won't be any embarrassment of children and yeah. Okay.

That is our chef for today. The political Gapfest is produced by Nina Portis. Zuki, our researchers

and we did our theme music. It's by they might be giant spin-richment senior director for

podcast ops, meal, lobelle, EP of slate podcast, Hillary Fry, editor chief of slate for Emily

Vazlon and John Dickerson. I'm David Plott. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.

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