Exactly. It's the difference. I mean, if you want to go back to kind of first principles of philosophy, it's interesting to be conservatism and reaction, being reactionary, right? Like the reaction is the counter-revolutionary movement. Conservatism is that, well, let's see what is worth the conserving of the old regime and fight for that while accepting that things have to change. You know, I think a lot of the Trump voters, I mean, the January 6th pardons yesterday are a classic example of this, I think, where, you know, that's not where American public opinion is. They didn't want everyone pardoned. I think they would have stood for just having the nonviolent offenders pardon. But in the view, I think, of Donald Trump's voters, it's like, well, Joe Biden is going to pardon his family. He's going to, we've seen people like Leonard Pelletier, if you knew that name, you know, a guy who shot a cop killer get pardoned. We've had Jimmy, I mean, there were, there were Puerto Rican nationalists who blew up the bathroom of the Senate. You might remember that. And they got pardoned by Jimmy Carter and then by Bill Clinton. And it's like, well, why can't we do this too? Just because some establishment person says, well, there's a norm against it. Like who wrote that? It's almost postmodern. It's like, well, who it's deconstruction, right? It's like, well, who, who authored that norm and who does that norm benefit? It's authored by liberals and progressives to benefit liberals and progressives. we're just not going to pay attention to it anymore.

But this also gets to the norm shifting is that Biden was against pardoning Hunter and his family until he was for it. And there's no shame. You know, there's no sense of explanation, apology or shame attached to the 180 degree turn. And there's no media outrage. It's, you know, well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it's swept under the rug. I mean, I remember how Bill Clinton pardoned a bunch of campaign contributors and stuff. Oh, my gosh. And then suddenly we're supposed to be electing his wife to the presidency. And there's no sense that maybe this is a problem. Yeah, no, you were

dismissed as probably a sexist if you were trying to bring Bill into, you know, well, that's her husband, you know, she's a different person. Well, all of a sudden, Justice Alito's wife hangs a flag, or Clarence Thomas's wife sends some, I think, pretty terrible texts. And it's supposed to be entirely ascribed to Justices Thomas and Alito. You know, look, I actually think they got it right the first time when they said we shouldn't be taking the sins of the spouse and applying it to the principal. But if we're just playing Calvin Ball, right, if the rules just change every time, then what

good are the rules? Yeah. And since you mentioned Calvin Ball, you know, Calvin now has a positive rating on the Real Clear Politics. Is that your average? Donald Trump has a 48.1% favorable to 47.9 unfavorable. If it's not his high, it's pretty darn close to it. Given the polls propensity to undercount Republicans, it sure looks a lot like that general election result, which is to say there's actually unlike. years ago or unlike four years ago, where Trump wins because people don't like him, but they dislike Hillary more, or Trump loses in 2020 because not enough people like him. Trump's on top right now. Talk about that a little bit. What does that mean? Oh, gosh. It's

just so different. That's the only way I can put it. It's just so different from 2016. Let's talk about the cabinet officials, right? Like 2016, our secretary of state was Rex Tillerson. Why the CEO of ExxonMobil becomes our secretary of state? No idea. Basically, Trump didn't know people because he was a political outsider. He didn't expect to win, so he didn't put a lot of thought into it. He didn't have a lot of friends because most of the Republican establishment opposed him. You know, and so he was literally, I think, calling up people that he knew and thought were smart and saying, hey, you want to do this? This time around, it's a much more traditional, you know, Marco Rubio, right, gets confirmed 100-0. It's a much more traditional cabinet process where there are probably like, you know, three or four people who will get unanimously confirmed, probably, you know, eight or nine people who will be controversial, but they're mostly going to go through. And then there's going to be like three lightning rods. I mean, there's all that's how it always is, right? There's always two or three nominees who are lightning rods who the other party just can't stomach. And you have a knockdown drag out over them. Not only that, but like, look, the guy walks the guy walks into the Oval Office and he has like a stack of executive orders waiting for him. And he's just sitting there signing them, talking with the press as he does it. You know, my favorite story, I don't know if it's true or not, but I'm going to go with it because it's so good, is that, you know, the reason the travel ban, which was Trump's first move last time, had to be revamped three times was it was literally Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller going onto Wikipedia to try to see what an executive order was supposed to look like. Like I said, maybe apocryphal, but also totally makes sense because Trump didn't have a movement or an establishment behind him that he has now. And I think this is filtering down to the American people. It's just, even though in a lot of ways, this Trump administration is promising to be more dramatic or disruptive than the last one, it's also less chaotic. this conservative small c mindset of america because he seems to be in charge and know what he's doing this time and i think i think the voters are or the the i guess now the poll respondents are rewarding him for that so

another thing that stands out to me and we both talked about it and written about it is that this is the first election since the great depression or first presidential election where more people said they were Republicans than Democrats.