Washington Wednesday: The Dobson effect

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 27th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Time now for Washington Wednesday.

MONTAGE: The FBI searched the home and office of John Bolton, / the former national security adviser in President Trump's first administration, / and allegations he included classified information in a 2020 memoir critical of Trump / suffers major Trump derangement syndrome. / To get the FBI’s permission to enter the Bolton home and office, you had to have two different federal judges examine the request. / A federal judge noted Bolton had gambled with the national security of the United States.

Joining us now is political scientist and WORLD Opinions Commentator Hunter Baker.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: Well Hunter, that federal judge, by the way, was Judge Royce Lamberth. He refused to block publication of Bolton’s memoir because it was about to be released, but that line by the judge ... that Bolton “gambled with the national security of the United States” by disclosing information before the review process was complete seems serious—and I guess maybe we’ll find out about that.

But one of the voices I included in that montage was military historian Victor Davis Hanson. He said on The Daily Signal that Bolton himself defended the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump over classified documents, telling conservatives to hold their fire and wait for the evidence. So now the shoe’s on the other foot—but isn’t the principle a sound one? Let’s just wait.

BAKER: It is a sound principle. And I mean, I think back to Trump’s first term, and Bolton was in a big hurry to get that book out, because it was very much tied to current events within that first administration and the gamble. I don’t know how it worked out for our security, but it worked out for Bolton because that book sold almost 800,000 copies in the first week, which helps to pay for that $2 million advance.

But to me, there is a bigger problem here. We are continually seeing this question of materials that are taken home where they should not be. We need to have a much more secure system and a clear set of rules to which we adhere in the future.

EICHER: Well, Hunter, let me follow up with you about this. The issue involving President Trump was never adjudicated, because you don’t prosecute a sitting president, so we never did get to the bottom of it. But how might that play out? Let’s say if John Bolton was, say, not very … hygienic … with his classified information, and he winds up going to jail over it. And yet, here’s the president of the United States with that same sort of thing hovering over him, unresolved and unprosecuted because he’s a sitting president.

BAKER: It’s an interesting question. Somebody who is sort of a national security advisor is a different situation than a president, and there’s less ability to claim executive privilege or anything like that.

But the difficulty here just kind of points us toward why we need to have some clear expectations about exactly how we’re going to handle it and whether or not we make laws, we need to have norms to which everyone agrees. You use the word hygienic, I would say that’s exactly what we need. We need to figure out what our national security hygiene is and to stick with it.

MAST: President Trump’s crackdown on crime continues…This week he signed an executive order to withhold federal money from jurisdictions with cashless bail policies… saying those policies drive up crime.

TRUMP: That was when the big crime in this country started… Somebody kills somebody, they go in, don't worry about it. No cash. Come back in a couple of months. We'll give you a trial. You never see the person again.

He also signed an order to end cashless bail in Washington D.C. Now, cashless bail policies have been touted as being more “just” than cash bail. Perhaps it’s worth asking, “just” for whom? So Hunter…what do you say… is there a correlation between cashless bail and higher crime rates? And how does this fit into the bigger picture of progressive crime policies and their success or failure?

BAKER: Well, so when Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York in the early ’90s, there were people who called the city the ungovernable city, that there was nothing you could do. You couldn’t get control of the crime and vice in the city.

And Giuliani picked up on some social science research that said the way you get control is that you crack down on even the smallest crimes. You fix the broken windows. Everything you do to project an image of order and rapid justice you do. And we all know the story New York was made far safer than it had been.

And I think that the progressive policies that include things like cashless bail are making it harder to incur a felony charge for things like shoplifting are a massive mistake. They send exactly the opposite message. And anytime that you send a message of permissiveness toward crime, I think it’s almost guaranteed that you’re going to get more chaos and disorder, and we’ve seen that.

So I would say that cashless bail is a bad policy. I would separate that from the question of whether Donald Trump needs to be dictating that policy to all the states. I think that’s a bad idea, but I think that cashless bail is a disaster.

EICHER: Hunter, we refer to you as political scientist and educator, but you’re also a lawyer, so one more legal question, if I may, just quickly on the Jeffrey Epstein matter … a very unusual interview between the deputy attorney general Todd Blanche and convicted sex offender Ghislane Maxwell. Unusual in a couple of respects. She’d never before been interviewed by federal investigators. Never until now, and well after her conviction. But in that interview she was asked about President Trump’s involvement with Epstein, and she was given limited immunity to talk about it. So let’s listen to that.

MAXWELL: The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.

BLANCHE: And did you ever hear Mr. Epstein or anybody say that President Trump had done anything inappropriate with masseuses or with anybody in your world?

MAXWELL: Absolutely never.

Maxwell also told the deputy attorney general she also didn’t recall inappropriate behavior by President Clinton. So given the timing of this, given the immunity, is there anything from this jailhouse interview that changes our understanding of the Epstein matter?

BAKER: Well, I would say that this comment from Maxwell goes along with what Alan Dershowitz said a few weeks ago, which was that there was no implication that Trump had been some kind of a guest, you know, or on some kind of a guest list, relative to this sort of sexual predation.

But I don’t think that people’s fascination with the issue is going to stop, and that’s because of the way Epstein died. People are going to continue to wonder if he was assassinated or forced to commit suicide in that jail cell. And so I think we’re going to be talking about this maybe decades from now.

MAST: Well, James Dobson, the evangelical leader whose influence once extended all the way to the Oval Office, died last week. Back in 1985, he interviewed President Ronald Reagan and asked a simple but profound question. Let’s listen.

DOBSON: What should be the role of government in the family in building in forging strong families?

REAGAN: well I think that everything that government can do first of all it starts with his prime responsibility of course of securing our freedoms and and our security both against outside assailants and against the criminal elements within our own country but it does not interfere and it does everything it can to strengthen the family economically…

Hunter, that exchange with President Reagan underscored how Dobson really did have the standing to shape both family policy and evangelical politics. But times have changed. Is the movement today more politically fractured than it was in the Dobson years?

BAKER: I don’t know if we’re ever going to have a period where the evangelical influence is as strong in one person or maybe two as it was with James Dobson. I think that James Dobson and Chuck Colson together were just a tremendous team.

And between the Focus on the Family broadcast and Chuck Colson’s Breakpoint, the ability to spread a message in the evangelical community was unparalleled. In fact, I have even argued that Dobson alone really may be responsible for ensuring that the Republican Party remained a pro life party when he threatened in the late 1990s to leave the party and take as many people with him as he could. That was a threat that Republicans could not ignore.

MAST: Can you point to anyone of similar stature today — someone who’s carried on that legacy?

BAKER: It’s really a tough question. You know, I have watched significant leader after significant leader leave the scene. I think about people, not only evangelicals, but people such as Richard John Neuhaus and William F Buckley, Charles Colson, James Dobson.

And I’m not sure if I see who is really going to replace them, but I can tell you somebody who I think is trying, and that’s Charlie Kirk. I increasingly hear people impressed with Charlie Kirk and think that maybe he’s really building something, so we’ll see.

EICHER: Well, that’s interesting. Hunter, you know, talking about the difficulty of another leader gaining traction after Dr. Dobson, I think we have to go back and realize how different the media landscape was at the time, and it’s difficult to assign what’s the most important and what’s secondarily important. Certainly, Dr. Dobson was a key figure, but he was also on Christian radio in drive time virtually every morning in every major market in America. He had built a legacy of trust with millions of families and when it became time to get political about attacks on the family and the nature of public policy to harm or to help the family. In that regard, he had already built up this enormous reservoir of trust, and so people, I think, very willingly followed him and trusted him. And now not only do you not have that singular figure like Dobson, but you’ve got this atomized media landscape where there’s no one voice able to concentrate in a drive time the way he did, and reach all those people.

BAKER: He was there at the right time with the right vehicle, which was the broadcast. The broadcast had a massive audience. He was able to make or break different ministries and figures by talking about them on the broadcast.

There are any number of ministries that probably were launched, like Summit Ministries, through some sort of appearance or discussion on the broadcast. But the other thing about Dobson was that he was a unique figure. He was not another preacher or pastor, which had been the norm before. He was a child psychologist with an appointment at the USC School of Medicine.

He was there 14 years, 14 years at the USC School of Medicine, and then he leaves that position speculatively to take over this ministry opportunity, and then we see what he did with it. And really, I would say that during the 1990s his influence was unparalleled. I think that he exceeded what Falwell had done with the Moral Majority, or Robertson with the Christian Coalition, and really became a decisive influence in the latter part of the ’90s.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is a political scientist and provost at North Greenville University and WORLD Opinions Contributor. Thanks so much!

BAKER: Thank you.

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