Welcome to the weekly standard podcast. I'm your host, Michael Graham, with us from the Weekly Standard, as Ethan Epstein, who has a new piece about how gotcha efforts at Donald Trump keep turning on the gotch-e. I think that's the technical journalist, right? Yes, I think so.
And making Trump's point. Yeah, there was a very amusing sort of bit of boomeranging here, I thought. So Trump, of course, is off on this ridiculous, which should be said, tangent, that he would have won the popular vote that had not been for various forms of voter fraud. Now, one of those forms of voter fraud he mentioned was the scourge of people that are registered in two states to vote.
Now, as a sort of gotcha, attempted gotcha on Trump, a bunch of various news outlets said sort of nannanabubu, while all of these people that are close to you are registered in two states, like Tiffany Trump and Steve Mnuchin and Steve Bannon, which would seem to me to prove Trump's point that it's quite likely that a lot of people who are registered to vote in two states, in this tiny sample size, they found three that are. So, out of one side of their mouth, they're telling us that voter fraud never, ever, ever, ever, ever happens. They're also pointing out how easy it is. And this is one of the challenges for those of us who are trying to keep our conservative bearings while watching the Trump show.
On one hand, he says things are just ludicrous, three to five million votes, even if one percent of the popular vote were corrupt. And that's an incredibly high number. That's, you know, not even two million votes. So that's, you know, that's, that's the one of the problems that he has.
Yes, among others. But then on the other hand, the media are so, either they are more interested in fighting than in reporting. They'd rather do virtue signaling than verifying facts. They make, they point out, Lucas arguments end up making Trump's point.
Everybody can think of people who are double registered college kids. Yes. And Northeasterners. Almost anyone who happens to have moved across a state, I mean, the last time you moved, did you remember to cancel your write legislation?
I know I did. But what you think of the large lumps, what you're thinking of is college kids, all lefties and Northeasterners, two tend lefties. Fair point. There's another area where I think this is where the media are also handing Trump a win.
And that is hammering away on the wall. Where is Trump on the wall? Where are the media on the wall? Right.
So it's not, it's, it's not quite that they're hammering him on the wall. In fact, that would make more sense is that they're hammering him on whether Mexico is going to pay for the wall. They basically ceded the fact that the wall will be built. And now they're nitpicking on him.
Oh, yeah. Well, well, well, it doesn't sound to me like Mexico is going to pay. I mean, Vicente Foxen, you had to, I'm really mad about that. But who pays for the wall is really a minor issue compared to the construction of the wall.
And they've basically let him slide on constructing the wall. Crazy. And as you broke the story a couple months ago that the former Foreign Minister of Mexico acknowledged that, of course, Trump and the United States can make people coming from Mexico and people who do business in Mexico pay for the wall. And he may, in fact, regret having made that statement because then he went ahead to suggest various ways that Trump could do that.
Like fees for every time a Mexican crosses into the United States, you can raise the border fee, you can tax remittances. I mean, there's all sorts of things. And by the way, a point that Castaneda made, and again, he probably regrets saying this so loudly, is that the executive can act all these. It does not require congressional action.
And this is once again, if the media were doing traditional shoe leather reporting and putting together the facts, they could lay out the facts about paying for the wall, acknowledge that there are ways that, and they may be terrible ideas and talk about the consequences of, you're really going to put a special fee on the visas of CEOs and high-end Mexican dignitaries come over. But because they miss that, they leave the conversation entirely in Trump's area where Trump is actually right about making Mexico pay for the wall. And I just thought of another example of this phenomenon, which is the fight over crime rates, how Trump was actually correct that last year saw a pre-sick and actually statistically significantly rise in violent crime in myriad major cities. I mean, we hear a lot about Chicago, but it's not just Chicago.
In fact, in Washington as well. But they were so gung-ho on saying that everything that Trump said was wrong is they ended up denying this reality. And also in a really offensive way, which seems to suggest that like all of those poor kids getting shot in Chicago don't matter because Trump's a liar. Another great example of the media picking fights that benefit Trump.
You've heard of friends with benefits? The media are Trump's enemies with benefits. The more they fight him and fight him stupidly, the better he looks. But the American people are picked up on it.
I was looking at the right track, wrong track, optimism numbers that just came out, and what issues Americans are prioritizing. And the headline was that the economy, worry about the economy has softened somewhat over the past few years. But one of the numbers that had jumped a big time worry about crime. It was up by double digits.
I want to say 14% more people are worried about crime today than they were a year ago. And so on another issue, Trump is where the people are. And I want to wrap up with this. I've seen a lot of conservative slash Republican slash water carriers try to affirm the crazy or clearly untrue things that Trump says.
Do you think that that's necessary for Trump's strategy to work? In other words, if the strategy really is the media are so determined to be dumb, let them be dumb, let them yell about popular votes and voter fraud. And then he's going to just pick a super conservative Supreme Court justice. He's going to start building a wall.
He's going to start moving towards extreme vetting from seven countries, whether they have known terror problems. Does anyone really need to defend it? Isn't this a job he can do by himself without other people humiliating themselves by pretending that what he's saying is? Well, yeah, if you think of those people, let's say, Hans Channity, maybe just not naming any names.
No, I think he was my favorite character in the Force Awakens. No, I think that sort of debasement is totally unnecessary. And look, Trump is as you point out. And in fact, the hidden weapon he had through his entire campaign was that the positions he took often enjoyed majority support.
And so frankly, he can be carried along on that without needing to pretend that we think that four million illegal immigrants voted. You know, there are a lot of things that can happen if there's anybody who can completely self-destruct on the launchpad. It is President Donald J. Trump.
But so far, the media are playing right into his game. Good pick up today in the Weekly Standard. Thanks for joining us. Ethan Epstein, you've been listening to the Weekly Standard podcast.
Please be sure to check more podcasts and more great content at Weekly Standard.com and to never miss a podcast, just subscribe on iTunes. Go to iTunes.com for Weekly Standard. We are right there. I'm your host, Michael Graham.