No Rules, Just Fight (w/ Sean Trende)

No Rules, Just Fight (w/ Sean Trende)

From Central Air by Josh Barro, Megan McArdle & Ben Dreyfuss

April 30, 2026 · 1h 13m

About this episode

Sean Trende joins the hosts to discuss gerrymandering, food inflation, and the public's response to an assassination attempt on President Trump.

On this week's show: Sean Trende joins us to discuss the continued devolvement of the gerrymandering wars. Sean is an election analyst for Real Clear Politics and lecturer in political science at The Ohio State University. With this week’s Supreme Court decision in Callais , even more opportunities to seek partisan advantage will arise. We talk with Sean about how to define and measure ‘fairness,’ and about the ways the gerrymandering debate remains stuck in the 2010s. Also this week, we talk about food inflation. Sean had a viral tweet in 2023 bemoaning how a family-size DoorDash order from Outback Steakhouse had climbed to $125 . Well, today that same order would be $190, in part due to the spiraling cost of lobster tails. This sounds trivial, but it gets at a key fact about politics — inflation bothers everyone, from those scraping by to those who simply notice that the things they like to buy cost more than they used to. Plus, Ben, Megan and Josh talk about the assassination attempt on President Trump, and the low-intensity public response to it — why is it no longer even that interesting when someone tries to kill the president? Sign up for updates from Central Air at…

People in this episode

Hosts: Ben Dreyfuss, Megan McArdle, Josh Barro

Guest: Sean Trende

Topics covered

  • gerrymandering
  • food inflation
  • politics
  • Supreme Court
  • assassination attempt

Keywords

  • gerrymandering
  • food inflation
  • Supreme Court
  • DoorDash
  • Outback Steakhouse
  • politics
  • assassination attempt

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Real Clear Politics, The Ohio State University

Products: DoorDash, Outback Steakhouse, lobster tails

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