The Bulwark Podcast - David Frum: American North Korea

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

Republicans have entrapped themselves with the promise of a massive surveillance state for American women. Plus, how Never Trumpers can put Biden over the top, the dangers of RFK, Jr.'s super pac money, Hamas may have gotten what it wanted, and a remembrance of Miranda Frum. David Frum joins Tim Miller. show notes: Frum's piece on the passing of his daughter Frum on Trump's self-sabotaging campaign Reagan's "Morning in America" ad Reagan '84 ad with the Statue of Liberty 

Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. I'm delighted to be here with my favorite David Frum. Yesterday we lost Joe Lieberman at the age of 82, obviously vice presidential nominee for Al Gore, longtime senator. Bill Kristol wrote this in remembrance, a public servant of principle and decency, an American patriot, a proud Jew, a happy warrior, a kind man, an example to us all. May his memory be a blessing. Rest easy, Joe Lieberman. David Frum, thanks so much for being on the Bullard Podcast again. You get a green jacket for all of your appearances. Thank you very much.

I wanted to start with you. It was about, well, I guess 11 months ago now, April 2023, you wrote The Coming Biden Blowout. I've got some listeners who complain about my rain cloud tendencies. And so I thought, let's start on this Thursday with a little bit of hope, a little bit of uplift. How do you assess that 11 months on, your sense that Biden was in good shape in the election? All right.

So it's a rainy day here in Washington. So I will bring some sunshine. Okay, great. Prediction of a Biden blow was not a prediction that Joe Biden would win a massive personal reelection win like 1984 and 1972. It was a prediction that Democrats were going to do well, or rather, Republicans would do badly up and down the ticket. And I base that on the working out of the logic of Republican positions on abortion and generally on the so-called Human Life Amendment.

I keep thinking that the master key to understanding 2024 is a story, but filming the first Star Wars, George Lucas handed a page of terribly clunky dialogue to Harrison Ford, who scanned it and said, George, you can write this shit, but you can't say it. And that is the problem with where the Republicans are on in vitro fertilization and these other issues. They have signed up for a massive surveillance state for American women. They've signed up for a massive anti-fertility state for American women. And American women have noticed this and are reacting. And that's, I think, what is driving so many of these special elections in places where Trump and January 6th

are all very far away. That the ballot question in January 6th is, shall North American women live in an American North Korea, constantly surveilled, where they're not even going to be allowed to cross state lines without a doctor's note or somebody else's permission, or won't they? Will they put up with this or not? And I think you're seeing all of that working itself out. And the Republicans are just trapped. First, this is something that many of them sincerely believe in. And even those who opportunistically believed in it have signed up for so many pieces of legislation. There's no retreat. There's no way to alter this. George Lucas wrote the shit, but Republican candidates can't say it. And then add to that all the Trump factors, the January 6th, and the increasing

strength of the American economy, plus the dysfunction of the Republicans in the House of Representatives. And it looks like a year in which not that there's going to be a massive personal mandate for the president, but Republican losses up and down the ticket, state losses too, which are going to be very, very important in the rest of the decade. So how do you square that with the numbers that do not show the strength for President Biden? Show Trump doing all right? I show Trump basically stagnant with the same numbers he's had in 2016 and 2020, basically

high 40s. You know, Mike Donilon will say that the democracy choice hasn't sunk in, that maybe the polling is wrong. Concerningly, I've heard several Biden people express that they think there are issues with the polling. What's your assessment? Are there issues with the polling or is it just something not sunken in yet? The issue with polling is always you need to ask very literally, what is the question

and what are people hearing? Not what is the meaning you are fusing into the poll, but how did the person to whom the poll was presented? So let me ask you a question. How do you feel about the dentist? Not good. Not great. Not good. How do you feel about gum disease? Really bad. If the choice is the dentist. That means more dentists though. More gum disease means more dentists. And that's the ballot choice. And it's gum disease versus the dentist. I mean, Joe Biden, his best and worst qualities are the same, which is he's a throwback

to a different America. And he's not talking to the America of today for good or for ill, but he's also reminding us of a time when politics seemed to be more stable and more functional than it is today. But Donald Trump is going to insist that this election be a referendum on him. Back in, gosh, the 90s, I traveled with Phil Graham when he was running for president. This is my second Phil Graham mention this week. Bob Shrum last night at dinner was telling me about how terrible the candidate Phil Graham was. He was like, all my friends, Frum and Crystal and all these guys liked Phil Graham. And I was saying to all of them, he has no personality.

He's never going to win. That was his story, at least. I liked him. He was a considerable intellect. Shrum is not wrong. It's not a surprise that Phil Graham ended up as a successful banker rather than as president. He had a lot of incisive opinions. And on this trip, we were talking to a loudmouth local politician who was contesting a seat. And Graham said to him, when you are running against an

incumbent, as this loudmouth was, there are only two issues, her record and you're not a kook. So that's what Donald Trump should be talking about is the Biden record. And I'm finding as this loudmouth was. There are only two issues, her record and you're not a kook. So that's what Donald Trump should be talking about is the Biden record. And I'm finding some way to make himself acceptable. But instead, he insists on making the election a referendum on him, not on the incumbent. What you want in an anti-accumbent election is to say this question, anybody here got any complaints? And if enough people have complaints, as they did when Jimmy Carter ran against Gerald Ford, as they did when Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter and going back into the past, if enough people say, yes, I do have complaints, then the incumbent loses. Even if an incumbent like Ford has many fine personal qualities.

But Donald Trump is not allowing this to be an election on got any complaints. He's making an election about do you all love me? And do you agree with me that the Constitution should be overthrown by violent mobs? And I just don't think he's going to find an American plurality that says, you know, thinking it over, I'm with the overthrow the Constitution by violent mob scandal. Well, I hope that's right. And I appreciate you bringing up the dentist. I found a good pediatric dentist in New Orleans. But if anybody has a grown up dentist recommendation, this reminds me I need to take care of that. I want one more pushback on this idea of optimism, though it's compelling.

You're warming my heart already. The Bill Kristol pessimistic view on this would be more that the parallel is 92, that people do have complaints about Joe Biden. Maybe things are getting better. Maybe things are improving, but just not at the rate that people were hoping that they would improve or it hasn't trickled down, so to speak, to their lives, their budgets, their impressions, and that people have kind of decided for whatever reason that the incumbent is feckless, the economy isn't working for them.

I don't agree with those arguments, but there's a concern that that is the parallel. And that would be hard for Joe Biden to break out of that. As I think about 20 years of sometimes agreeing with Bill Kistel about politics and sometimes disagreeing, I realize the core of our systematic disagreements going back over the time, and we agree on many issues, but we've disagreed on predictions and recommendations of actions, is that Bill tends to believe that candidates matter extremely. And I believe that candidates matter, especially at the presidential level. Not nothing, but much less.

The political system convinces people to see attributes in the candidates that literally aren't there. So a lot of normie Republicans, people who would have voted happily for Mitt Romney and reasonably happily for John McCain and very happily for George W. Bush, somewhat persuaded themselves that Donald Trump was a Republican, a normal Republican. Now, that is so obviously not true. In the effort of belief, of self-delusion, you have to muster. But lots and lots of normal Republicans, people who own car dealerships, people who are executive vice presidents and businesses convince themselves of this flagrantly false proposition. And meanwhile, lots of Republicans convince themselves that Joe Biden is a socialist antifa candidate. And that's also crazy. But beliefs about the candidate follow

from partisanship. They don't drive partisanship, except at the extremist margin. That is where I would differ from Bill in a lot of my political analysis. So yeah, I think people have qualms about Joe Biden, and those express themselves and express in doubts about the economy. But the economy is indeed strong. The election is not going to be about Biden, it's going to be about Trump. And Trump can't get north of 46% of the vote. And except with a very lucky bounce, like the one he caught in 2016, 46% is not enough. If it were, well, John McCain had, I think, 45, but Mitt Romney, John Kerry, Al Gore all got more of the vote than Donald Trump did, not to mention Hillary Clinton herself in 2016. His share of the electorate is just not sufficient normally to make you president.

Okay, which is a nice transition into the other way that it could. All right. So you've convinced us in a binary option that maybe Donald Trump does not is not able to get to the share that he would need. RFK Jr. I saw a very interesting riff that you were making about him on the merits on CNN and about his craziness. I want to get into that. But on the politics of it, first, the thing I worry about with RFK Jr., and there's there are a bunch of known unknowns still out there, is he going to get on the ballot and state which states and there's some particulars. But if he were to get on the ballot, I'm kind of the view that his core base is pretty Trumpy. It's like crazy, you know, vaccine skeptic and like anti establishment sort of weirdos. But then that next concentric circle out

is some of the people that we're talking about that are unhappy with Joe Biden at a low level, that don't like Donald Trump, that maybe he's an off-ramp for them. Maybe it's in some of the Biden constituencies where he's weaker, black voters, young voters, traditional Biden constituencies. So how worried are you about the RFK element of all this? I am quite worried about him, but not in the way that you've just described. When people talk about RFK, they talk about the RFK campaign. And the RFK campaign is, I think it's going to be a boutique operation. He can't not talk about the vaccines. His general views are pretty crazy. He himself is not RFK senior. And there are people alive who voted in 1968. I was just talking on the phone a few minutes ago to someone who's a very vigorous person in American politics

who cast their first vote in 1968. So there are people who are less attuned than the person I spoke to. They could well make a mistake. RFK junior will disillusion them or disabuse them of that. I mean, he is not his father. But here's what I think about with the RFK campaign, which is the super PAC, which has raised tens of millions of dollars and could easily raise more. Now, the super PAC is independent from RFK Jr. It is Republican money run by Republican partisans. And as far as I can tell, and unlike much of the Trump operation, not run by thieves. That's a pretty big, important distinction. So if they raise money, they use it for causes that are campaign related. So whatever RFK Jr.'s campaign does, the super PAC is going to be an anti-Biden weapon.

It's not going to run pro-RFK advertising. It's going to run anti-Biden advertising. And in an environment where the Trump money is being squandered or spent on lawyers or outright stolen, the RFK super PAC could be important in 2024. In a media environment that's going to be dominated by much more Democratic money than Republican, but where the Republicans will have less than they usually do, the RFK anti-Biden super PAC may be part of the equation. And so may be the no labels super, if that comes into being. Yeah. Well, maybe there's some overlap in our concerns then, because with that RFK super PAC, as you rightly pointed out, I don't think I've mentioned on this podcast. I should have that just the degree of which the Republican money that has been put into

it already eight figures. And, you know, what we saw in 2016 was a pretty unsophisticated effort by nefarious actors to tamp down core democratic demos. You know, that was a lot of what the Facebook Cambridge Analytica stuff was. If there's a well-capitalized RFK PAC that's trying to harm Biden more than it's trying to help RFK, there does seem to be some ripe targets for that. You know, as we've talked about the softness of the Biden support in some of these core demos. Yeah, the core of the Democratic, the fundamental Democratic strategic problem

is they are a larger but baggier coalition made up of many groups that are at variance with one another. Biden appears both to some of the, you know, most grounded people in American life, people who are well-educated, who own their own homes, who are very secure. I mean, that's who basically the never-Trump Republicans are. And Biden also would normally appeal to some of the least connected people in American life, young people who are new to the workforce, who are renting, who are burdened by debt. So holding those two kinds of people in the same coalition is a much harder problem than the Republicans have with their smaller but much more cohesive coalition.

And so Democrats are always vulnerable to campaigns that aim to break off part of their support. And that would be the smart play for a super PAC. That's what the Trump people and the super PACs and the Russians did in 2016. They tried to push away parts of the Democratic coalition with highly targeted messages. And if you have an operation that's run by smart people, it could make an impact. One of the things that Biden has going for them is a lot of people in the Trump ambit and a lot of Republicans seem to have pretty stupid ideas about what's motivating the Democratic coalition. Raymond Arroyo has disappeared from the Fox airwaves for saying that black voters will turn to Trump because they like sneakers, which was too much to say even on Fox. And mugshots. Yeah. Yeah. But a lot of people who write checks to Republican super PACs actually do believe that. And so they are vulnerable to making appeals to black voters

in ways that are probably going to be counterproductive. But you can't assume that everyone who's running these super PACs is a corrupt idiot. Some of them are corrupt, smart people, and some of them are honest idiots. And they may accidentally happen on themes that are more powerful. And there are people in America who say, at least during the pandemic, I was getting a stipend of some kind. That stipend is gone, and I can't find the kind of work that I want to. Or there are young men who say that because of the changes in the American workforce, women have certain skills that are more valuable and my skills are less valuable. I find it harder to get a girlfriend or a wife than my father did when he was my age. And I'm really mad about that. That drives my politics more than anything.

There are older people, there are people who are burdened by student debt, who are unhappy that Biden didn't get rid of more student debt than he did. They go to the grocery market and they remember what groceries used to cost and they forget that they've also had a raise or maybe they think about those in different ways. The raise I earned, but the grocery prices just happened to me. And they're mad about that. So there are lots of groups you could try to peel away. And that's going to be a big part of the Trump plan in 2024, the Trump universe plan, the anti-Biden plan, I should call it. Sure, sure, sure. I want to throw one notion at you from my, one of my brainchilds on the anti-Trump plan. I remember you, one of the times you were on with

Charlie, you talked eloquently and insightfully about how people who are victims of scams don't like to admit that they're victims of scams, right? And right now, it's like clearer than ever how big of a scam that Trump is running on his own voters as he can barely do events and they're paying for all of his lawyers, paying for his lifestyle. I do wonder, one of the advantages that Republicans have about being corrupt, they might be corrupt and stupid, but they also are nefarious, right? They are willing to use these types of strategies to try to peel off, you know, low info, black voters or young voters who might be able to be tamped down by, you know, advertisements that are dishonest or prey on them. Do you think there is any appetite or any reason for Democrats to think about ways that they can turn the tables and having outside

groups try to talk about how Trump has, you know, in red areas, in rural areas with young men, you know, talk about how Trump has scammed them, talk about how the abortion issue might affect them if they're not ready to be fathers yet. I'm not seeing a lot of that from the Democrats, but I do think that there is potentially green shoots there. But the other hand of that is maybe these people aren't reachable. Some people might say that to me. That's a waste of time, Tim. These people aren't reachable. I think we're moving into a very different kind of map. When Democrats talk about going after Republican voters, they say, we have to appeal to the guys who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flags.

I applaud the sentiment. Candidates should obviously try to compete for everybody, but you're not going to win the guy who drives a pickup truck with a Confederate flag on it if you're a Democratic candidate. Meanwhile, they don't see who they are winning. So 2018, Democrats flipped the House seat that was held by George H.W. Bush in one of the most affluent parts of Houston. They flipped the seat that had been held by Newt Gingrich in the Atlanta excerpts. They flipped Eric Cantor's seat in the outskirts of Richmond. The seat where W lives, because Colin Allred, now the Senate candidate, they flipped. Where are Democrats making their gains? Not with people who drive pickup trucks and fly the Confederate flag, but actually with the kind of people who 50 years ago were the heart and soul of the Republican Party.

People on their own homes, who are married, who have IRAs, who are basically content with life. Remember, if you watch Mad Men, all the partners in Don Draper's firm are all Republicans, not because they're super ideological. They're basically satisfied with their lives. So they're Republicans and the Democrats are the party of people who aren't satisfied with their lives. And not to make a moral judgment about which is better. It's just there are some people who are more content than others. And historically, they tended to be Republican. Well, guess who Biden gets? But the way he gets them is not by saying, hey, you're pretty smug. Vote for me. I just think of the ads that work on me. The ads that work on me are the ads that look like their old AT&T phone company ads. You know, people coming home and putting down their briefcase and hugging their kids and playing with the dog. You know, people working in a classroom with kids of every background. Flags, Statue of Liberty, fireworks, American battleships.

I'm susceptible to all this too. Yeah, same. Yeah. Right. The Morning in America ad. Now that ad, when you watch it today, it's incredibly old fashioned. Like the shots are so long. You cannot believe that six seconds of the Statue of Liberty. Are you serious? You think we're going to live forever? But, and Biden, that's how he launched his 2020 campaign. It was, you know, do you love this country? Are you proud of this country? Do you think the country is basically right?

Do you think we built something worth preserving? Do you have more to defend than you aspire to acquire? Those messages are very powerful in the George H.W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Eric Cantor congressional seats. Those are the people who I think are going to put Biden over the top. And one more thing, Newt Gingrich, Eric Cantor congressional seats. Those are the people who I think are going to put Biden over the top. And one more thing, and this is about the bulwark. I can remember having been at this Never Trump business for a long time, back in 2017, when it was a clever joke to say Never Trump was a dinner party, not a political party. Yeah.

But in fact, we're not the base at all, but we're the people who are going to put Biden over the top. And he needs his base, and to appease them, he, but we're the people who are going to put Biden over the top. And he needs his base. And to appease them, he does things that Never Trump people don't like. When beef prices go up, he has to pretend it's because of the machinations of evil meatpacking companies, which is stupid and false and untrue. They didn't become better people when beef prices go down. Gasoline prices are not determined by the moral quality of oil companies. That's childish. But the never Trump people who are the margin of victory are the people who would normally be susceptible to Republican messages, but who respond to patriotism, to unity, to pride in country, and to dislike of

troublemaking and resentment and violence and threats of violence and the lack of emotional control that you see from the Trump people who just, this guy should be in a psych ward, not running for office. Yeah, one data point in your favor on that from this week is there was a special election for a state house race in the Huntsville suburbs, Huntsville, Alabama. That was like a 25 point flip for the Democrat who has focused a lot on the IVF ruling in Alabama. Another article that you wrote recently that I wanted to get in was the good Republicans last stand was about Ukraine funding, how there was a cadre of the remaining good Republicans. I believe at this point, Mike Gallagher was still a sitting member of Congress. Maybe he was in this category. It was before Mitch McConnell had

said that he was going to step aside. But there were some Republicans doing the right thing. And yet here we are a few months later, and still nothing has been done because of the bad Republicans. How do you assess the state of play now and the good Republicans last stand? Well, I think this is the issue when I said, why am I going to be in the line at five in the morning to vote for Biden in 2024? It's because of Ukraine. Biden has not been by any means perfect on Ukraine. I think he slow walked a lot of the weapons that they needed early on. He's been trying to micromanage this war to give them the Ukraine. It's just enough not to lose, but not enough to win. And who knows what that point is? Many, many, many mistakes. And 2023

should have been the decisive year of the war. And because of bad choices by people in the Biden administration, it was not. And so we're suffering and bleeding through 2024. But the Republicans are selling them out. And that is just shocking to me. President Biden asked for more money for Ukraine on October 20th of last year. We're nearing the six-month mark, and that has been stalled. And while there are majorities in both houses of Congress for the aid, because there's not a majority of the majority in the House of Representatives, the aid has been successfully stalled. And Republicans have not been willing to do what it takes to overcome their own leadership, including, by the way, people who, and one of the people I singled out was the ranking member of the

Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jim Risch, who has been a strong supporter of Ukraine. But it just goes AWOL. I mean, behind the scenes, he's doing all kinds of things, but he doesn't even cast a vote before the scenes because he's so frightened of his own voters and Trump. There does seem to be enough assistance from Europe to keep the Ukrainians on the battlefield through the fighting season. They have found, thanks to the Czech government, a supply of artillery shells in Taiwan that does look sufficient to get, and the Europeans are paying for them. So they can eke it out. And we hope that the United States will be back in its responsible position of world leadership after this election. And especially if the Democrats retake it as their representatives, but it is a terrible, terrible betrayal.

It's rather astonishing the degree of the betrayal. I was talking, I had Stephen Hayes on last week and we were discussing all this. And, you know, there's like a cadre of Republicans in the House and the Senate that are still holding on to the complaint that Biden isn't doing enough, right? That they try to speak as if it's, you know, the early 2000s or the 1980s and like that they are the real hawks here and want more, you know, thinking about your Mike McCall's, your Tom Cotton's. But when it comes to actually trying to put pressure on Mike Johnson, or actually do anything procedural to do, they're totally AWOL. Like there's nobody that is actually putting any real political pressure on Mike Johnson to get this to move on the Republican side, right? Am I wrong about that? Yeah, no, you don't get to complain that your buddy is not giving enough charity if you yourself

are going around town kicking homeless people. And that's what's going on here. I mean, Biden isn't doing enough on Ukraine, and more catastrophically, did not do enough at a time when doing enough would have really brought the war to a speedier end, which is trying to be too clever, trying to specify the precise outcome that you're trying to hit 24 months out and then 24 months in advance, trying to gauge precisely the degree of resource and effort you need to get to that mark. Instead of just saying, send everything, empty the arsenals. If the Ukrainians end up with too much stuff, well, that's money wasted, not lives lost. Send them everything. Send it fast. Don't worry too much about how this is going to play out. You don't know. When people say, what's the end game? The end game is we win by applying maximum effort, maximally early. You can make that criticism, but you can't legitimately make that criticism if Mike Johnson is saying, I'm going to withhold aid from Ukraine altogether because Trump tells me and Trump is doing it because Putin tells him.

Amen. I couldn't agree with that more. Okay. Moving down to Gaza briefly, we had a guest yesterday that was representing the view of, you know, that Biden should be putting more pressure on Bibi, that we should have it on the table, stopping providing weapons to Israel because of atrocities in Gaza. I do not share that view. Also, I had a guest a couple weeks ago that had the view that Biden was trying to distance himself from Bibi too much. That's

another view I don't share. I have some concerns. I think that a lot of what Israel's actions were in the first months after the attack on October 7th were totally defensible and understandable. And I'm concerned now that we have reached a situation where they don't particularly have a plan for achieving their objectives of eradicating Hamas. And the plan that they do have doesn't make a lot of sense. You know, you had Jared Kushner going around the other week talking with Bibi allies about how, you know, they're going to occupy Gaza and put condos there. I don't know that Mar-a-Lago, Gaza is a solution that is going to make a lot of sense in the region. So where do you kind of fall on this discussion about how Biden is calibrating this and frankly, how Bibi is calibrating it? First, I want to make clear, I'm no kind of military expert and particularly not on the

most difficult form of warfare, urban warfare. I have no idea what is the right strategy and what is the right tactic. To the extent that I had views, they've turned out to be completely wrong. I worry that Hamas had booby-trapped Gaza in all kinds of ways. And it really seems like, actually, one of the big surprises of the war is how little effort Hamas has made to fight and to defend the people it supposedly represents. I mean, its plan seems to be to save itself and expose the civilian population to maximum harm in hope of generating a response on TikTok, which is also not a good plan because a lot of people suffer while you're waiting for the TikTok brigade to bail you out, which they're not doing. I would say first, I'm going to repeat what I said about Ukraine. Don't micromanage these things. The reason wars

are to be avoided at almost any cost is because they are big, destructive, wasteful, cruel, unpredictable animals. Once Hamas made the decision to wage this war of atrocity against Israel, it unleashed responses that were just incalculable, but that were bound to be horrific. And because wars are so horrific, the most important thing is to get them over as fast as possible. And that means not meeting out your violence. The same criticism I have about the Biden people in Ukraine. You do not meet out your violence with a exact measuring caliper, hoping to hit precisely the right quantity. You do too much too early in hope of bringing it to an end as fast as possible,

getting them to the work of restoration and peacemaking. Benjamin Netanyahu is pretty obviously fighting this war with one plan in mind, which is he knows the moment the war is over, his political situation begins to wobble. So he doesn't want the war to be over. And he's then adopted maximalist goals that can never be reached. So the war will never be over. And so he will never be. So to my mind, one of the biggest Israeli mistake was saying at the beginning, OK, we were caught by surprise and we'll change the government as soon as the war is over. They should have. The government had to be changed immediately.

Where were you on the Schumer speaking out about that? Did you think that was appropriate? I didn't think it was smart. No. And also, it's late. Netanyahu should have resigned on the 9th of October. And if he wouldn't, he should have been forced out, but he should have been forced out by the Israeli public. And once the Israeli political system reached its consensus, we'll change him afterward. You set in motion

very perverse incentives. On the American side, I think Biden has been stalwart. Some of my friends in the pro-Israel community are comparing Biden to their idea of what they would like rather than to what has ever existed before. The situation that this is very reminiscent of is the 1982 Israeli war in Lebanon. Thank you for bringing this up. It began when the PLO assassinated the Israeli ambassador to the UK in the streets of London, a really shocking crime, culminating a decade of terrible PLO atrocities, the attack on the Israeli Olympic team at the Munich Olympics, atrocious hijacking, some of them PLO, some of them PLO affiliates, and then this, attacking a diplomat on the soil of a NATO country. So Israel entered Lebanon to try to drive the PLO out. The war was very brutal. And the Reagan administration at first backed Israel, and then

flip-flopped and began putting enormous pressure on Israel. And at one point, somebody in the administration, I don't think President Reagan himself, but a senior, used the language of Holocaust and genocide from the unnamed source of the White House against Israel, which is something that's so shocking and offensive when, you know, backbench Congress people do it. But the idea that somebody in an administration would do it, if that's your benchmark, if Reagan 82 is your benchmark, then Biden has been a stalwart, stalwart friend, and it's unrealistic to ask him to do any more than he has done. And I think they have been able to be very generous with Israel with information, with weapons, with high technology. Israel needs different things from what Ukraine needs. And Israel's needs have been met better than Ukraine's needs have. Now, maybe it'll be different if the war goes on for two or three years, but for right now, I don't think there are any reasonable complaints against the Biden administration. But as to giving them advice, I don't have advice. They are facing a lost track of the count of living hostages, but there's still more than

100 Israeli hostages in Hamas hands. People have been killed and maltreated in the most horrific ways on video with the intention of provoking the reaction. I don't know that there is any way off this path until we get to a true outcome of the war. I totally agree with you on Biden. And obviously, I mean, the hostages should be freed. And this is all on Hamas. I was encouraged for all the negative things that are happening on campus these days. I'm at USC this week, and I was encouraged that there was a free the hostages gathering on the quad at USC that was unperturbed. And there's a rather big group that was, you know, I think there's some reasonable concerns that they might have been at least shouted down that their safety would be in question. And so I was encouraged to

see that. My one just follow up on this one area where I think I'd pick a net with what you said is, it's not about so much like the military strategy that I'm not a military strategist. I'm not going to tell BB, you should do it this way, you should do it that way. It is, if you're going to engage in a offensive action such as this, that is going to have the number of casualties that we've seen in Gaza and the tragedy that we've seen in Gaza. I would like for somebody to be able to enunciate what the end game is. I don't think that they've offered one that makes a lot of sense. That's like, well, question mark, question mark, Israel's going to occupy it. No, there's going to be a foreign group that's going to occupy. Who is that? egyptians they don't want to do it the saudis they don't want to right and so we're going to continue to go in and to bomb without i guess maybe the only answer that is well we're just going to do it until the hostages are released

and then and then we'll see kind of where we sit but that's the element of this that gets me a little bit that wishes we could bring it to the negotiating table and i know that again that's on hamas but that's the part that I get queasy about. I'm going to give you a very candid answer to this, and maybe too candid for my own good. Please, go. I think the reason people don't talk about the endgame is because there isn't a good one.

There really isn't. Hamas did this thing on October 7th and did what they did in the way they did it with the video, with the goal of making it impossible for Jews and Palestinians to live together side by side in neighborly state by state relationships. And I think for a generation, I think they succeeded in that goal. So we have these impulses, which is, okay, we have to get back to negotiating the two-state solution. But Hamas said, what we want to do is we want to videotape ourselves or GoPro ourselves doing things to the Israelis so they can never, ever trust us.

And not just us, Hamas, but us, the 15,000 people who came into their country every day from, I think that was the number, from Gaza to work, who are trusted people, who worked on the kibbutzes and who gave away the identity, who participated, it looks like, in the rapes and robbery. We want to make it possible for them to ever trust those people. And in the same way, our military plan is one where we have no bomb shelters. We have no plant. We've stockpiled no food and water for what is technically our population.

We're going to expose them to the vengeance of a highly advanced technological military state, which is seeking vengeance for what the terrible crimes we did to us, and they will inflict that vengeance in ways that make it impossible for our people ever to forgive them. And when this is over, so we say, what is the end state here? That's a technocratic question about a war that was designed to stoke so much hatred. And the authors of that war were Hamas, but the Israelis are the counter-authors because they behaved in exactly the way they had

no human possibility of not behaving in. And it leaves behind only wreckage. Who is going to police Hamas? No one. Anybody who does come in, it's going to be like Iraq, 2003, early 2004. If an Arab force or a European force go in, Hamas will commit terrorist atrocities to drive them out, and they will probably succeed. So there's going to be no law and order in Gaza, except in the tiny zones that Israel retains, which means there's going to be no reconstruction. There's just going to be tense. There's just going to be poverty. And that was the goal of the people who started this war. And I don't know that you can outsmart that or outcompassion that or bring anything good. Sometimes malign people get their way, at least in the immediate term. And I fear very much in

this case they have. And to say, well, let's come up with a plan to outsmart them. It's just asking human intelligence to do more than I think human intelligence in this situation probably can do. Thoughtful, quite depressing response, but on theme for this podcast at times. Final topics not going to be much easier. So when I took over this podcast from Charlie a couple weeks ago, months ago now, time flies. I said to Katie Cooper that in the first week, I wanted to make sure we had my favorite recurring guest, which was you. And that was our plan until you got what I imagine was the worst call of your life, that your daughter Miranda had collapsed. I imagine most of our listeners know by

now that she died a few weeks ago at the age of 32. You wrote beautifully about her life and her final gift to you in the Atlantic last week. I recommend everybody read that with some tissues. Many in the Borg family have had the privilege of knowing her, Mona and AB and others. I did not have that privilege. I was hoping maybe you'd share a little bit about her for those of us who had never got a chance to meet Miranda. Well, we do have this intimate bond of this coincidence of time. I was to speak to you on the 16th of February.

Our call was to be at 11 o'clock and at 10 40 AM that morning, I got what was, as you said, the most horrific call. Um, and my wife and I raced to New York where Miranda lives. We live in Washington, but of course all we could do is, was, was plan a burial. There's a lot to say. And I, I can take a lot of time to say it and i i won't because one of the things that i've when you go through this you have to realize is suffering is the great human equalizer and different people have different kinds of suffering and some have it in their past and some have it in their future but we we will all do this. And as a writer, you can only claim attention to your suffering, which is so raw to you, to the extent that you're able to make it part of the universal

human condition and to speak to everybody's. This is a world full of suffering. So what I tried to do when I wrote about it was to, well, first, I didn't directly write about it because you can't. It's like the sun. You can't look look at it it's like a rock that's too heavy you can only approach it indirectly and so i talked about inheriting my daughter's dog who's at my feet right now and so i talked about that experience as a way to make make things a little lighter but also to try to talk about something that i think is was the universal part this is what i talked about which is when you're a parent you're a parent you're bringing these human beings along, you're pulling them into the world. And that means you're not always their buddy. You try to be fun a lot of the time, but you can't be

fun all of the time because you're the person who's in charge of saying no when they need to hear no. And I'm saying, saying that you have to apply yourself in certain way that they may not want to. And what you hope is at the end of a long and full life, that the parent and the child can agree, well, it was worth, I understand now. And Miranda lived long enough that we did have that understanding, but not so long that I wasn't left with a lot of self-doubts about things that I had done when I could have done better, been more understanding and more insightful. And in particular, the nature of her death was one. She died because she'd had a brain tumor operation and it required constant interventions to adjust the hormone. The brain tumor had

ravaged her endocrine system. And so she had to take pills to manage everything from her thirst to her sleeping hours to her immune system. And if you didn't hit that right and it had to be changed every few weeks, you were at terrible risk, more risk than any of us, I think, understood. So you're left with, well, what if we had paid a little bit more attention to this medical clue and moved the knobs a little bit this way? Would she be alive today? And so, like many people in my situation, we're very tortured by those thoughts. And so I wrote the piece to talk about that dialogue at three in the morning of self-doubt and then the punch line of the piece was on the other hand she left us this really quite not a good dog dog i i refer the piece to like ringo bites everything he bites rocks like who does that

so i talked about living with ringo and just saying that she loved him so much. And when I feel these torments, I think, well, I'm taking care of Ringo. So whatever else I did wrong, I'm doing that right. Okay. I mean, I could ask you a million things about her. There's one thing that I really wanted to, though. I know that at least one of our listeners also had a child die not so long ago. And it's just a situation where I just can't imagine.

It's just hard for me to wrap my head around. So, I just kind of wonder for any others who are struggling through this, have been going through this, if there's anything that's been a balm or a buoy amidst the grief. There are many things in the long run, but in the short run, let me recapitulate a conversation I had with somebody that was weirdly helpful to me. I had a conversation with someone who had lost his daughter at age 33 two years ago. And similarly, very tight family. I was talking to this person, my wife and I were. And he said, look, if the angel of death were to come to you and say, if you and Danielle agree to jump off the top of this building we can bring miranda back would you take that would you do it and he said of course you do it you do it in a heartbeat you do it with a smile on your face he said this person was this person was

um hollywood agent type he said but that's not on the table and this phrase but that's not on the table that has been the best crutch we have. We just keep, like, whenever you say, but that's not on the table, we can't have that. So what can we have? What can we do? So that's the bomb I would, is there are things you can do. In my case, I could write a memorial piece. We can hold our family more closely together.

We can, in our hearts and to the extent you do it in public, memorialize the person. You can make sure that their story is known to the people who want to know it. And you can try to live more by their values. Miranda, she's not a fearless person. She had fears, but she was very, very, very brave. And I've done some TV things since we lost Miranda. And one of the things I've gone into every show is saying, I always had an idea of things I might say and things I shouldn't say. And one of the things I've been doing since February 16th is saying, when I go on, the things I might say, I'm going to say them. Because Miranda would have said them.

So I'm going to say them. I love that. Well, thanks for being willing to share that with us. And the article was Miranda's last gift. I don't know if I said that. You also posted the eulogy that you and Danielle did on your social media feeds if people want to find that. And boy, that was a tough one to watch, but it was full of love. Yeah, it was full of love. And at the beginning of the eulogy, you recounted a memory of her singing a hauntingly lovely karaoke rendition of The Passenger. So I'm going to leave folks with that song as a tribute.

And to the extent that we're able to know that many of us are trying to ride with you on this. And I hope to have you back on the podcast soon. Thanks so much, David. Thank you. All right. We'll see you all tomorrow. Peace. all right we'll see y'all tomorrow peace i am a passenger and i ride and i ride i ride through the city

i see the stars come out of the sky Yeah, the bright and hollow sky You know it looks so good tonight I am the passenger I stay under glass I look through my window so bright I see the stars come out tonight I see the bright and hollow sky

Over the city's ripped back sky And everything looks good tonight Sing la la la la la la la la La la la la la la la la La la la la la la la la la la Get into the car We'll be the passenger We'll ride through the city tonight We'll see the city's ripped backsides

We'll see the bright and hollow sky We'll see the stars that shine so bright The stars made for us tonight Oh, the passenger, how, how he rides Oh, the passenger, he rides and he rides He looks through his window, what does he see? He sees the silent hollow sky He sees the stars come out tonight

He sees the cities ripped back sides He sees the winding ocean dry And everything was made for you and me All of it was made for you and me All of it was made for you and me Cause it just belongs to you and me

So let's take a ride and see what's mine Sing la la la la la la la la La la la la la la la la la La la la la la la la la La la la la la la la la la I'll sing la la la la la la la La la la la la la la The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Breth.