The Bulwark Podcast - David Frum: A Dark Path

Episode Date: December 12, 2023

If Trump wins, the first crime of his second term will be committing perjury—when he swears to defend the Constitution. Plus, Republicans aren't really looking for a deal on the border: They're trying to rationalize abandoning Ukraine. David Frum joins Charlie Sykes. show notes: https://www.theatlantic.com/press-releases/archive/2023/12/atlantics-janfeb-issue-next-trump-presidency/676227/

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Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is December 12th, 2023, and the title of my newsletter is Everything Everywhere All at Once. It does feel like all of the threads of our politics and the geopolitical situation are coming together this week over the next three days. You have Vladimir Zelensky in Washington, last-ditch effort to get aid for Ukraine. Meanwhile, that's all tied up with secretive border discussions that will determine whether or not we have any aid for Ukraine or Israel, or maybe even whether the government is able to stay open. Meanwhile, House Republicans slouched towards a Biden impeachment, even though they don't really have any evidence. We continue to have the meltdown across higher education, although the president of Harvard apparently is going to be keeping her job. Well, to sort all of

this out, we are joined by David Frum, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently Trumpocalypse and Trumpocracy. He also wrote the lead piece in an extraordinary special issue of The Atlantic on the threat that would be posed by a second Trump term. David, welcome back on in these dark days. How are you? Happy New Year, maybe? No, probably not. We're not quite there for the Happy New Year. Okay, so we just start with this moment we're in right now. Vladimir Zelensky is here in Washington, D.C. He is hat in hand meeting with congressional leaders. It appears to be a mission of some futility because he is completely now caught up in the

partisan divide over completely unrelated issues involving the border. So can you give me the state of play, what you think is going on, and whether or not this country is actually going to abandon Ukraine after all this? Well, it is a shameful moment. We should be eager and ready to give the Ukrainians, who have been so heroic, sacrifice so much, everything they need to defend themselves. Meanwhile, Israel is also in need of a much smaller but still significant support from the United States. And by the way, this same $106 billion proposal the president has for Ukraine and Israel also includes humanitarian relief for displaced people in Gaza and in other war zones, and support for friends in the Pacific. The Chinese are

threatening now, in addition to their usual threats against Taiwan, they're engaged in all kinds of sinister activity against the Philippines and harassing Australian ships. So this is a world potentially in crisis. We have a threat from Venezuela to invade Guyana, which sounds like something from an absurd farcical movie. But Guyana's had a big oil fine. Venezuela's broke. And if Putin can get away with seizing a chunk of Ukraine, why not seize a chunk of oil-rich Guyana? The United States is the guarantor of security for so much of the world. And right now the United States is stepping down. The border issue is real. It's an authentic problem. I wrote about the very first piece I wrote during the Biden administration, warned that if Biden did not get control of this issue, it would be his administration's greatest

vulnerability. He's got an 18 point deficit as compared to Republicans on the border. It's a real issue. It doesn't have anything to do with Ukraine. There's no reason to link the two together. Republicans have done that. The piece I wrote for the Atlantic most recently says they didn't do that because they care so much about the border because they're not interested in a deal on the border. They did it as a way to rationalize abandoning Ukraine. Okay, so this is an interesting point because you have been very, very critical of the Democrats on their approach to the border, but are suggesting, if I'm reading this correctly, that you think that Joe Biden's offer on the table, or at least what we believe the author is on the table this morning, is a reasonable one, and that the Republicans are

just not negotiating in good faith at all. It's a good opening bit. So let's understand what the border problem is. Historically, the United States has contended with the problem of illegal immigration. That is, people, typically younger men arriving alone who cross the border surreptitiously, who do not want to be discovered by authorities, who then make their way into the United States by passing the authorities to work without any color of law. Over the past decade, that traditional form of illegal immigration has been displaced by a new kind of abuse of the asylum system. The United States, by law, by treaty, by many domestic judicial decisions, has promised that if you have a fear of persecution

in your native place for something you can't help, your race, your ethnicity, your religion, and you come to the United States, you will get a hearing to determine whether you've got a right to stay. And pending your hearing, you get work permit. You can work until the hearing comes. So this is a system that was basically written for refugees in the Soviet Union, for that kind of person, where you would imagine you would have 10,000, 12,000, 20,000 such people in a year. Now there's suddenly millions of people who are arriving and saying, I'm a victim of persecution in my home country. I want my hearing. Oh, okay. You say it's 12 years. That's fine. Just give me my work permit and I'll work until I get my hearing in 12 years. And I'm legal. I'm not breaking the law. I want to be found. When I cross the border, I want to meet a border officer and say, put me in the system. 12 years

is good. 15 years, even better. And if when the time comes and I get up to the hearing where I'm probably going to lose because about two thirds of these claims are rejected, but more recently as the systems become more abusive, then I drop out, then I become illegal. So that's the problem. So what do we do with that? We need some changes in law and we need to change some treaties as takes action by Congress. And in the meantime, we need to hire a lot more people at the border to hear these hearings and say, if you come here, it's not a 12 year, you can work in the United States pending your hearing. You know, you're going to be heard within 12 days and be told no, and then be sent back and all that money you paid the human smugglers wasted. So please stop doing this. So, okay. That's the background to understand why the president's bid. So President Biden's $106 billion proposal for Ukraine, Israel,

Gaza, and other human also had $13 billion to hire 2000 more people in the asylum system, both officers to Greek people and then judges to hear their cases faster, because we have to work through not only the new people coming, but all the backlog of people who've been released into the country pending hearing that they hope will never come. Right. So that's the offer. Republicans say, okay, I don't like the president's offer. Fine. I don't love the president's offer, but it's maybe 2000 isn't enough. Maybe 3000 is the number. And by the way, we need some legal changes too. We can negotiate with all of those things. But when you start making calls, it's very hard to find out what the negotiation is. Yeah. Because some of the negotiators, like James Lankford, the senator from Oklahoma, I think really authentically want to get to yes.

But many of the negotiators are looking to get to no and are just being difficult and have proposals that obviously aren't going to go anywhere. Not because they are being so pure, but because they actually want to sink the whole negotiation and take Ukraine down with it. I'm trying to pull back to the 35,000 foot level and think, okay, you know, considering that, you know, what is at stake with Ukraine, with Israel, everything, knowing what a big deficit there is on the border. There are people who are basically saying to Joe Biden, you should just cave on this negotiation, right? I mean, why not basically get the Republicans in the room, say, okay, what is your bottom line? Here it get the Republicans in the room, say, okay, what is your bottom line? Here it is. But in return for which I want to give the aid for Ukraine, which has the advantage of not abandoning our responsibilities while also potentially not taking the issue off the table, but certainly blunting the border issue for 2024. So why not give the Republicans what they're asking for?

You're saying that they're not asking for anything that they're going to take yes for an answer. Is that it? Yeah. Cave. Sure. Okay. So you say, okay, I will give you what you want. What do you want? And the answer is guess. Remember back during Obama days, there was a Saturday Night Live sketch. President Obama was out of town for something. He had gone to Asia Pacific or something like that. And Biden was presiding over the government. Saturday Night Live did this sketch where their Biden imitator said, I'm saying to my friends, Republicans, you send me a stack of paper with the word health care on the first page and I'll sign it.

So there are Democrats in Congress who have more militant views, but my sense of the administration, you send them a stack of paper with the word immigration on the first page, they're ready to sign it because this border issue is a problem for them too. The problem is that the internal negotiation within the Republican party makes it very hard to know what the Republicans want. When you talk to House Republicans, they'll say, we want this thing called H.R. 2, which we passed in May, which remakes the immigration system from top to bottom. And you say, okay, how did H.R. 2 do in the House? Well, it passed by, I'm now going to forget whether it was five votes or seven. It lost two Republicans. It had not a single Democratic vote. That H.R. 2 is obviously going

nowhere in the Senate. It was a messaging bill. It wasn't intended single Democratic vote. That H.R. 2 is obviously going nowhere in the Senate. It was a messaging bill. It wasn't intended to go anywhere. It wasn't. And indeed, one of the reasons that got as many Republican votes as it did is by assuring the Republicans this is not real. You don't have to worry about it. So if H.R. 2 is your ask, you don't have an ask. And then when you listen to the Republicans in the Senate, they have various asks, but

they're not sure that their House counterparts will agree. So the model where Democrats want Ukraine, Republicans want immigration, why can't we do a trade? It's not clear that what's really going on is Republicans want an immigration deal where they have the ability to say, we asked for stuff and Biden said no, and we don't want to do the Ukraine. Actually, we want to get to know. That's what we want. So what happens if by the end of this week, Congress goes home, there's no aid for Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky has to get back on an airplane, empty handed. We go into the new year with all of our aid depleted to Ukraine. What happens? What happens to Ukraine? What does Vladimir Putin take from this? What does he do with this?

Yeah. Well, there are reports from the front that there are important Ukrainian units that are already conserving ammunition. Ukraine obviously doesn't have the manpower, the human resources that Russia does. They have fought with brains and gut and technology, and they've been given a certain amount of technology from the Western allies. I mean, they're still fighting with 1980s weapons and never enough. But what begins to happen is lacking ammunition, they have to start substituting human lives. People die because instead of putting down the fire that you need, you have to meet enemy fire with human bodies. So they die, then they begin to lose. And then demoralization

spreads through their civilian population. You know, one of the things that is already a kind of a scandal, Ukraine is a poor place, but it's not a backward place. They have hospitals, they have old age pensions, and all of these things have to be financed by a country that is at war and that has much of its territory occupied. So Congress has already taken the view, we're not helping Ukraine with the humanitarian aspects of their crisis. Well, how do the hospitals get funded then? How do the school teachers get paid? They don't have a tax base. Their country's at war and it's unoccupied. Obviously, demoralization begins to spread. The feeling of abandonment begins to spread. And some on the Republican side would like this. There are

Republicans right now who are at the Heritage Foundation meeting with Viktor Orban about how do we sell out our friends. But those of us who care about the good name of the United States, those of us who don't want to see the world go fascist. And we have to hope that Ukrainians can trick this out. Maybe there's still some aid in the pipeline. Maybe there's some things that can be done. Maybe there's a deal that can be struck in January. But maybe the question is, supposing it were this, and here's one of the things I invite people to imagine. It's 2007 or 8. Democrats have taken control of Congress during the Bush years. And the Democratic majority says to President Bush, we're not going to fund the fight against Al-Qaeda unless you give us Bernie Sanders' universal single-payer health care funded by

highly redistributive taxation. Oh, and maybe you don't buy a carbon tax. So unless you give us everything we've ever thought of wanting, we won't exactly spell out what it is, but you get the idea. What would the Bush administration have done to such people? They would have nailed them to the wall as you are friends of Al-Qaeda. You are betraying the American troops in the field. There are no American troops in the field in Ukraine, but that's the magnitude of what's going on here. I want to talk about this extraordinary issue of the Atlantic, because this feels like we're rolling into, OK, this is the future. If we abandon Ukraine, it feels like a down payment on more abandonments to come, including NATO. So let's talk about the danger ahead.

And you wrote the lead piece laying out how if Donald Trump returns to the White House. You've talked about this before. Trump 2.0 is not Trump 1.0 because he will understand much better all of the system's vulnerability. He will have more willing enablers and he will be more focused on his agenda of retaliation. And of course, we're getting a lot of blowback and you're getting a lot of blowback, you know, from the usual suspects saying this is Trump derangement syndrome because, you know, hey, we survived one Trump presidency. It wasn't that bad. Most of the institutions held. So why would we not also survive a second Trump presidency? Why would it not be just simply a replay? So when people say we survived the first Trump presidency,

you get in the car with a drunk driver and half an hour later, you pull into the garage and there's a huge gash on one side of the car and one of the headlights is staved in and you're soaked with sweat and panting with terror. And you all have court citations to show up at court for the but you're not dead you're not dead and and so your driver says well that wasn't so bad let me have one more drink and go for another ride right okay i am never getting in that car again are you crazy you nearly killed us all i have have a court date. Are you crazy? Get back in the car with you after more drinks? No. So that's my analogy on that. Term one Trump, when Trump arrived in the in 2017, what did he want? He wanted to steal. He wanted to bask in adulation. And mostly he wanted not to do any hard work. If Trump returns in 2025, what does he want to do? Even stealing will be a secondary

priority. What he wants above all is to turn off the justice system so that he doesn't go to prison. Then he wants to activate the justice system against his opponents. And he wants to issue a lot of illegal orders to the military to suppress any dissent that arises when he does the first two things. But just on the first day? We are heading toward a degree of chaos. I mean, you'll get these periodic questions. You know, what does a second Trump term mean for NATO? What does a second Trump term mean for US energy? What it means is a giant honking traffic jam at the center of the US government where nothing gets done. I disagree a little bit with Bob Kagan's piece in the Washington Post, which appeared just a few days before a special issue predicting a Trump dictatorship, because the system actually won't work that well.

So here's what's going to happen. Trump is going to, for example, supposing he invokes the so-called Insurrection Act. This is a piece of legislation passed during the first George Washington administration at a time when the United States had an army and some state militias, and that was pretty much it. And it gave the army some civic order responsibilities. Since 1792, a lot of laws passed and a lot of regulations passed, both in police and in the military. If Trump orders the military up, generals are going to be calling up the general counsel of the Pentagon.

Is this order legal or not? And the council is going to be saying, I'm not 100% sure because this has never come up before. I do know if we get the answer wrong, we all probably go to prison. But, you know, use your best judgment. And so some generals will obey and others won't. And we're just going to have this wreck, this wreck at the center of the US government, and allies will be abandoned, and there won't be any policy. And meanwhile, Congress is going to be in an uproar. And the president will have no legitimacy because Trump's not going to win a majority of the vote. He's going to, if he returns to office, it's with another one of these electoral college flukes, this time helped because his rich

friends shaved off some of the vote with Cornel West and some of the vote with Joe Manchin and some of the vote with Bobby Kennedy Jr., just enough to splinter the Democratic coalition. He's going to have no legitimacy. He's going to be doing these crazy things, and he's going to be surrounded by freaks and weirdos. Well, you're right. The first time he was president, his corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and his laziness, which is sort of the good news. But let's talk about the people he's surrounding himself with, because personnel being policy. In the first Trump presidency, there was at least going through the motions. I mean, you did have Steve Bannon in the White House there for a while, but you did have some substantive people in that administration

who played crucial roles when he tried to overthrow the government later on. What is your sense of the kinds of people who would be in the White House, in the cabinet, either confirmed or enacting roles? Yeah. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to describe the British army as the scum of the earth recruited for drink. That seems a little harsh, but it's not clear that he actually said that. But he is supposed to have said, I do not, when he looked at one of his groups of troops, I do not know what effect they will have upon the enemy, but by God, they frightened me. So it's just going to

be the scum of the earth recruited for clicks and giggles. It's going to be just one weird person after another. And the question is, do we have a government because will any of these jobs be able to be Senate confirmed? Does Trump try to bypass the Senate confirmation process? I think when people are not imaginative enough about the chaos, what happens if Trump names a general who not even a Republican Senate will confirm? When he appointed some super weirdos to the Federal Reserve, the Senate refused. And I think they ended up with two or three vacancies for years on the Federal Reserve because a Republican Senate would not confirm his strange choices. We could have that with the Attorney General. Trump can fire the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then

do we get another one? How does that vacancy get resolved? I just think we need to imagine not so much an authoritarian government, but an attempted authoritarian government passing into chaos because it can't operate. Well, I mean, you can certainly imagine he obviously fires the whole cabinet. He fires the FBI director. He fires the CIA director. He guts these institutions. Now, when he tried to install one of his toadies at the Department of Justice, there were threats of mass resignations. So it's certainly possible in your scenario. I mean, just imagine that he does install a thorough deplorable as attorney general. The Senate either does or doesn't confirm them.

But there is mass resignations. I mean, that is possible. People threatened it. It didn't come to that. But there's no reason to believe necessarily that faced with another four years that you wouldn't have actually the hollowing out of the justice system and the intelligence agency at a time of real peril. I mean, this could happen, right? People in the military have been prosecuted for obeying illegal orders. Now, typically, the typical illegal order case involves some kind of embezzlement scam.

You know, the CEO is stealing gasoline and selling it on the black market. He tells a major to cooperate. The major does. And then when they're prosecuted, the major is prosecuted not only for the scheme, but for following an illegal order. I don't know in modern times whether there have been any cases of senior officers facing this, but it's a thing if you're a three-star general and the president says, I want you to take your troops into Chicago and start shooting at people. You know, it's a real risk.

And one way I would just resign and say, you know what, I don't know whether this order is legal or not. It doesn't look legal to me. The general counsel has put me on, you know, perpetual hold. And maybe there isn't a general counsel at the Pentagon. Maybe there isn't an assistant general counsel, because maybe those people couldn't get Senate confirmed. And the army is being told, go shoot people in Chicago, and it doesn't know what to do. I can make this even darker. He gives the illegal order. The counsel says, okay, that may be an illegal order. And Trump says, okay, I'm ordering you to do this, but I'm also telling you that if you're ever prosecuted, I'm going to pardon you. I'm going

to preemptively pardon you for any laws you break. Remember when he was actually, quote unquote, joking with the border agents, you know, that if you violate the law because you are doing what I'm asking, I'm going to pardon you. So this is the other dynamic here, because I think you're going to have a robust use of pardons. So can I just go back to like day one of his presidency? Because you write something interesting. If he wins, that he will commit his first crime of his second term when he takes the oath to defend the Constitution, because he'll be committing perjury. So the very first moment he is sworn in, you say he is committing perjury. Because he takes the oath to defend it. He tried to overthrow the

government last time. His first priority, his very first priority, first day, is getting himself out of legal trouble, because he is on his way to a lot of legal trouble. So what happens? Does he wipe it away, everything? Does he pardon himself? What about the state cases? I mean, does it all vanish the first day? No, because it's the U.S. government.

It's a big, tangly mess. So his first move, I assume, is to say to the federal prosecutors, you're fired. But that doesn't make the case go away. You know, he can try to get an attorney general who will fire Jack Smith, but the case doesn't go away. So he can then try to get somebody else installed in the Department of Justice who will make the federal cases go away. And maybe that works and maybe that doesn't work. He will have to argue through his lawyers in state court that a serving president is immune to state prosecution. The state can't do it. But let's think about what this means and what the courts will do. If a serving president cannot

be prosecuted for violating a state law, supposing during the campaign, the candidate for president gets drunk and kills somebody with a DUI. If that person wins the election, does the DUI go away? A candidate for president, if you win the election, you can kill people on the roads and escape your state charges? That can't be right. And we do have a precedent here for state law, which is, remember the famous Hamilton-Burr duel? What people forget is Burr was the sitting vice president when he killed Hamilton.

And he was indicted both in the state of New York and the state of New Jersey for that killing. The cases were both dropped because in 1804, the state of New Jersey especially thought of dueling the way we think about marijuana smoking today, which is okay, maybe it's technically illegal, but people shouldn't go to prison for it, obviously. So I think that there are jury proceedings and the case collapsed. And in New York, he was charged with something else, not with killing as the homicide took place in New Jersey, he was charged with something else. And that case was dropped. But no one argued that the Vice President of the United States who killed somebody could not be

indicted by the state in which he did the killing. And so that strongly suggests that the president, if he kills somebody in a DUI, can be held to account. And that means the president can be held to account for any criminal. I think that's what that precedent means. As for the federal cases, again, he will try to make the cases go away, but you can't just fire the prosecutor. You have to get another prosecutor. Can he pardon himself? Why didn't he just pardon himself? All right. So if that, this is a contentious decision, but I would argue, no, if the president can pardon himself, that means the president for a federal crime,

he can't pardon for state. That means he can walk across the hall, shoot the first lady dead and pardon himself. And it means even more incredibly, the vice president can walk into the Oval Office, shoot the president dead, become president and pardon himself. So this can't be true. So all of this goes to the Supreme Court and this goes to the mood of chaos. It goes to the Supreme Court. We don't know whether the president is on his way to be convicted of a felony. And by the way, by January of 2025, the trials may have begun. He may already have some conviction. This pause right here as a slight digression, because, you know, this does come back to the Supreme Court. And yesterday, I mean, this strikes me as like for all the marbles, bad analogy, I know, but Jack Smith has gone directly to the U.S. Supreme Court and says, I want it has said before, which is that no, the president and ex-presidents are not above the law. He's looking

for a preemptive major decision by the Supreme Court that may send a signal on these issues that you're talking about. I mean, I would like to think that it would be a unanimous court that said, no, David Frum is absolutely right. You cannot pardon yourself. You are not immune, all of those things. I think that's somewhat naive, but this is a very big deal. And the implications of Jack Smith losing this motion, I don't think can be overstated. But also, I think that if the court sends a strong enough message, it will also be kind of a kind of a brushback pitch. What do you think of this move by Jack Smith to say, let's clear this up right from the beginning? To your point about if supposing the court finds on Trump's side, as you say, I don't think they will, but suppose they do.

There's an assumption that some people have. There's some Harry Potter cheat code that if the court says the president is above the law, the rest of us say, oh, well, okay, that case, nothing we can do about it. That's not how it works. When the founders of the constitution wrote in the 1780s, the history they knew best was the history of England in the 17th century. That was the most dramatic period of their recent memory. And what they knew was the Stuart Kings, who ruled in England in the 1600s, had claimed similar rights above the law. They claimed something called the dispensing power. That is, they could release any officer from any liability. If there was a statute of parliament

that the king could say, the officer is released from that. And that had a lot to do with the wars of religion and other problems at the time, taxing issues. So one king who asserted the dispensing power was Charles I, and the English cut his head off. And the other king who tried it was James II, and the English drove him out of town and replaced him. Didn't work out well for either one of them. So one of the things the founders of the Constitution would know is if the head of the government claims immunity to law, we have a lively tradition of meeting that in our Anglo-American culture with very militant forms of resistance. And I think that tradition is still, so if, suppose the court said, you know what, the president can shoot the first lady dead in the White House. The vice president can shoot the president dead.

There's nothing much that anybody can do about it. It's a political matter. Work it out amongst yourselves. I don't think the society said, okay, in that case, this 47% president who got in through a twitch of the electoral college can do these things. They're going to say, meet me in the streets, a million persons strong, surround the white. But how does that work? See, this is where we're in a completely new world. If the court were to accept that Donald Trump, I am a king, I am immune, we are in a completely new world. If the court were to accept that Donald Trump, I am a king, I am immune, we are in a completely new world because you're now talking about the possibility of revolution.

He, I think, would relish this with the Insurrection Act. The level of chaos would just spin almost completely out of control. We saw it in the streets of Tel Aviv three months ago, where Netanyahu in Israel tried to do a much more modest thing. And partly for ideological reasons, partly because of his own criminal exposure, he tried to rewrite the way the courts worked. What happened? What happens in a modern state? It's not the 17th century anymore.

So you had hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Tel Aviv. You had threats of resignation by army officers. It's a state secret in Israel exactly how many Air Force pilots they have and how many active reserve Air Force pilots they have. But they apparently got so many threats of resignation from active duty Air Force pilots that the government had to yield. Now, this may have been one of the things, this is not a happy story, because one of the things that may have greenlit Hamas that this was the time to strike was the level of dissension in Israel. And if we have this dissension in the United States, it will be a green light to enemies all over the world. But I just mean to say, I don't think we will have a revolution in the United States. But the

idea that the president says, I said, what do they say in Harry Potter, whatever those cheat codes are, I've said the words you all have to put up with it. I don't think it works like that. Well, I mean, going back to this analogy of Israel, because I've thought about this, you know, one of the things that I think Donald Trump has been absolutely clear about is that he would gut the deep state, that he would dismantle many of our intelligence agencies, the criminal justice agencies, the society would be bitterly, bitterly divided, which does make us more vulnerable, does make us unsafe, does embolden our enemies. And that's part of that story in Israel. And I think probably for decades,

people are going to be looking at this, you know, how did this happen? How did the, you know, the intelligence failure? Why was it so egregious? What did greenlight the decision to attack Israel? These don't seem like separate stories. They seem like a cautionary tale that, in fact, the most powerful countries in the world, if they tear themselves apart, become vulnerable. I want to stress this. We're getting maybe into the second half of this discussion. I mean, we're scaring people to death. I want to give people more optimism. I don't think there's any of these. I think these are all the ghosts of Christmas future. One of the things I've, in one of the two Trump books you were kind enough to mention, I'm not going to

forget which one, I reminded people of the last scene in Charles Dickens' The Christmas Tarot, seasonal for this time of year, where he's visited by the spirit of Christmas future. And Ebenezer Scrooge asks, are you an image of things that will be or things that may be? The spirit doesn't answer, but then story makes clear. This is a vision of things that may be, not of things that will be. And human choice always operates. So as we head into 2024, I think one of the things that's going to happen is Americans are going to rediscover things are okay right now. Prices are a little higher than we'd like, but Charlie Munger, the right-hand man of

Warren Buffett, legendary investor, just died in his last meeting with Berkshire Hathaway shareholders. He's 89 years old. He gave them his vision of the power of creativity of the US economy. He said, if I can be this optimistic and I'm nearly dead, the rest of you can cope with a little inflation, sure. Like, you know, I think we're going to read this thing. Things are pretty good. Things are pretty good. And for most people, and the alternative is civil chaos. It's sort of normal troubles of politics with Biden or complete chaos, breakdown of

authority, possibly global war with Donald Trump. And I think the good sense of enough people will kick in that we will be spared this fate. And we'll see this. This is the vision of things that may be not the vision of things that will be. Well, this is the dissonance that I am constantly struck by, that that when you step out of the world that you and I spend too much time in, you know, of politics and division, you step out into the actual real world. People are doing OK. They treat each other with a certain amount of civility and decency. They may play with the ideas of civil war and chaos. They may play with it online, but they do not want that for their kids.

They do not want that for their family members. They don't want that for grandma. They don't want that in their places of work. So the question is, how do you deal with this weird thing where people, you know what I'm getting at? I mean, it's like there's a split screen in the American public where their actual day-to-day lives are one thing. And yet when they turn to politics, they have different moral standards, they have different ethical standards, and they have different appetites. And it's just like, okay, do you understand that this is one world? And are you really going to vote for something that you may like toying with when you're following Charlie Kirk's Twitter feed, but you don't want in your hometown? And you see the split scene on the economy. You ask people, how are things doing? Oh, terrible,

terrible. Well, what are you doing in your personal life? Well, I'm starting a new business. Business startups are at record highs. Oh, okay. What are you doing tonight? Oh, I'm taking the kids out for dinner. That seems expensive. Oh, yeah, I can afford it. It's like the worst economy since the Great Depression. And dining out is reaching new highs. Business startups are reaching new highs. You're not acting. What you're saying and what you're doing.

And you, you, Mr. and Mrs. Around the Corner, what you yourself are doing by starting that new business is declaring your faith in the future of America. And by the way, that's smart. The surest way of getting poor in this world is betting against the the future of America. And by the way, that's smart. Like the surest way of getting poor in this world is betting against the United States of America. But this may trigger some memories. This is not the first time in the world, first time in American political history where things have been relatively okay. And yet, you know, in the political world, it was the worst economy in 50 years. I'm kind of flashing back to 1992. Do you remember that? Where Bill Clinton was running, this was the worst economy in 50 years. I'm kind of flashing back to 1992. Do you remember that? Where Bill Clinton was running, this was the worst economy in 50 years

at the very time when it was very clear we were coming out of the recession, things were getting better. And yet George H.W. Bush was just not able ever to convince people that things were getting better. The public just looked at him and they thought, no, things are not getting any better. We want something different. You know, I just remember the frustration of Republicans back then. You were in that world. As I look back on 92, I have a different theory about what happened that election. And I think it does apply to today and maybe in a more hopeful way. So from Nixon to Reagan, American politics is dominated by a conservative coalition that is bound together by dislike of inflation, dislike of disorder, dislike of too

fast a pace of social change, and resolution in the face of foreign enemies, especially the communist ones. And that's the Nixon, the Cold War coalition. It's about crime, it's about inflation, it's about the Soviet Union, and it holds together from about 1966, when the Republicans have that big win, those off-year elections, to 1990 and the end of the Cold War. By then, yes, there's a downturn, the mildest since World War II. But there's also the end of the Cold War. And the coalition begins to unravel. And both in microwaves, and one of the things that happens

with the end of the Cold War is there are a lot of layoffs in the engineering industry in Southern California. A lot of people who had had steady, steady jobs in the defense industry. The peace dividend is no dividend if you are an engineer at Lockheed Martin or whatever the company was called in those days. And so the Nixon to Reagan coalition cracks up. And Bush keeps some of it, but some of it is put into play. And Ross Perot claims a piece of it. And Bill Clinton with 42% of the vote, which is less than Michael Dukakis got four years before, but is able to become president. Well, I think we may be in a moment like that where we've had a lot of the coalitions we're used to are rearranging. And

I think for many of the people who make this particular podcast, and some of those who listen to it, the anchor of our political identity is belief in the mission of the United States and the world, confidence that we live in a better world because of the strength and credibility of the United States. And we look at issues like Ukraine and Israel, the defense of the Philippines against the Chinese, And we said, you know, that whoever's doing that, that's where we belong. And of course, we also want a market oriented economy, but we'll make some compromises on some of those things to get the thing that is our first commitment, which is a belief in the goodness and greatness in the United States and America's role in the world. And so just as the Nixonagan coalition came unstuck, there may be in 1992, there may be a

new coalition coming together. And it doesn't have a figurehead because I don't think there was ever a time in his life when Biden could have articulated this. And if there ever was, it probably isn't now. So a lot of the messiness is because there's no great voice speaking for what could be. But again, there is a thing that could be, and maybe it's happening. It could be happening. You know, your piece and the, and the piece by your colleagues though, does paint such a, such a stark picture of what that, you know,

Christmas future might look like. And I guess one of my concerns is, you know, you're talking about a coalition coming together. I'm kind of feeling a coalition fracturing over what's happening with Israel. This is deeper. I think it's more personal and it has the potential to be more enduring. What are your thoughts on all of this? Because, I mean, there's a palpable sense of shock and perhaps people, you know, haven't been paying attention, but the generational gap, the ideological gap, the consequence of sort of oppression identity politics, the way it's playing out here. I do think that there's a possibility that this centrist coalition that you're talking about may be fracturing at exactly the worst moment to let in some of these darker

forces. What do you think? Well, I don't know. It's a powerful question. First, I think the Gaza war will be a much briefer war than the Ukraine war. And my guess is major kinetic operations are almost over. And I think that 30 days from now, I mean, I don't think that there'll be a resolution exactly. I don't think that there'll be a resolution exactly. And I don't know that even that all the hostages will be released, although I hope. But I think that the major combat operations are going to achieve whatever major combat operations are going to achieve. And then we are left with the political consequences. A lot of the reporting, reporters have a bias toward bad news. They have a bias toward conflict.

And so they want to report is the democratic coalition is coming on stock over israel when you actually sort of look at the polls more closely what you see is you know there was a poll just the other day in the state of michigan which is the center of the arab american vote that twice as many people said that biden was doing just right in backing israel or not doing enough to back israel i think it was 55 just right or not enough to back is. I think it was 55% just right or not enough to back Israel versus about 22% who said he was doing too much to back Israel. 22% is not zero, but it suggests he doesn't have a lot to worry about this issue in Michigan. And

if you don't have much to worry about it in Michigan than anywhere. Meanwhile, I think so much of the Trump campaign and the Trump message is about, as terrible as I am, you need me to stop the left. And I think one of the things we've learned over the past week is, however little you think of the left, Joe Biden is not the left. The left hates Joe Biden more than they hate Trump. And that kind of blame America first group, they're much more comfortable with Trump than they are with Biden. Because whatever else Biden is, he comes from that, the consensus before Nixon, Reagan, he comes from that Truman, Kennedy, Humphrey, Muskie tradition of the Democratic Party, which is pretty liberal on labor issues, pretty liberal on the economy, but very robust in the

defense of America's role in the world. And it's so old that it's almost new again. Well, back to your piece, you write, if Trump loses, we'll continue on our imperfect way of dealing with the Middle East, Ukraine, climate change, educational opportunities, and economic growth. But the possibility of progress would continue along with our constitutional system. But, you write, a second Trump presidency, however, is the kind of shock that would overwhelm all other issues. It would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of these rips between before and after that a society can never reverse. Even if the harm is contained, it can never be fully undone, as the harm of January 6, 2021 can never be undone. For democracy to continue, however, the democratic system itself must be the supreme commitment of all major participants. Rules must matter more than outcomes. If not, the system careens toward breakdown as it is careening

now. But it's not inevitable. It is not our destiny. There's a saying attributed to Sigmund Freud, I don't know if it's authentic, that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to convert hysterical neurosis into ordinary unhappiness. Like if we can beat Trump, you know what we talked about in 2025? Entitlement reform. Oh, I wish that was true, but. Boring old entitlement reform. It'll be back.

It'll be like, you know, Brian Kemp and Nikki Haley and, you know, Paul Ryan will reemerge. Yeah. Okay. Well, that was weird. But now, you know, money doesn't grow on trees. And yes, the return of the Republicans, who's God created to say that money doesn't grow on trees, you know, you have two pieces of that pie, I don't think so, that there can be a return to those kinds of normal politics, at least that God, I hope so. Yeah, God, I hope so, too. I'm a little bit more skeptical. In fact, I'm looking forward to the Atlantic special issue of if Trump loses and it might not be that pretty.

I'm just saying it's going to be we've been through this before. But David Frum, again, the issue is it's an important document. I would urge everyone to go out and get it. Twenty four writers with 24 different articles trying to imagine. I think you put your finger on it. One of the big problems, I think, is our failure of imagination to imagine what could happen. And we've failed, I think, pretty consistently. But this is an extraordinary work, David. Thank you. What a pleasure to be with you. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again.

The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.