Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger joined as always by Steve Hayes, David French, and still Jonah Goldberg.

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Today, we're keeping with our new format. The guys have brought us some great topics. The president's HBO interview, mail-in ballots. Okay, that one's mine.

Civil society in the pandemic, and Jonah tries to convince me that he isn't sexist just because he doesn't like Kamala Harris.

Let's dive in. Steve, coming to you first with the Jonathan Swan Axios interview with the president. Usually it is behind the HBO paywall, but they released it, quote, in the public interest.

Yeah, I think it's one of the best two interviews, most effective interviews that we've seen of Donald Trump since Trump has been president. The other one was Chris Wallace, our colleague at Box News, from just a couple of weeks ago.

But it's the kind of interview that I think if you haven't watched the whole thing, you should take the time to do so. We'll put a link in the show notes.

But it was a fantastic interview. I think there were several reasons that it was as good as it was.

Jonathan asked very smart follow-ups. He came obviously very well prepared and knew his brief and was able to push back when the president came back at him sometimes with sort of bluster and volume.

Jonathan was able to sort of calmly and dispassionately point back to the president and point him to the facts on which his questions were based.

And that goes to the second reason. I think it was successful. Jonathan clearly knew the material very well. In some cases, it's pretty clearly better than the president himself did.

The third reason I think it was a good interview was it was devoid of the kind of show off the atrix that we see so often from reporters who question the president in the White House briefing room.

It's certainly the case that the president loves the entertainment aspect of those exchanges in the briefing room when he does his press conferences.

But so do a lot of the reporters and the criticism of reporters for not taking the briefings seriously for focusing on things that they know will get them a viral clip rather than trying to extract information.

I think a lot of those criticisms are well found. There was none of that in this interview with Jonathan Swan.

There were a number of topics that he covered that I thought were particularly interesting in a number of exchanges that we can get into a little bit in more detail.

I think one that stood out was about the status of the coronavirus and it was very interesting to listen to Swan who conducted this interview on July 28th.

So almost a week before it was released on HBO press the president on what some had described as a president's new zone where Swan said, you know, Mr. President, you're taking this more serious.

You're advising people to wear masks. There seems to be a shift in the White House messaging on this. How wrong can you stick with that and suggested that some happy talk from the president was likely coming.

And as it happens, as as of this morning and interview on Fox News, the president said, this thing is just going to disappear. It will go away soon.

So Swan, I think, pressed the president in a number of different ways that were not just the kinds of things that got caught up in the moment, but spoke to sort of broader issues.

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