The Bulwark Podcast - David Frum: Both Pro-Jesus and Pro-Sex Trafficking

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Forget the Epstein files hullabaloo. Members of the Trump administration, perhaps at the urging of Barron Trump, seem to have directly intervened to get the travel ban lifted on the Tate brothers, who are charged with rape and sex trafficking in Europe. Meanwhile, a "Keep Christ in Christmas" extravaganza is being planned at the Kennedy Center, where Trump is now chair. Plus, the con behind crypto is going to run out of fools, CEOs are regretting their bet on Trump, Kash wants to run the FBI part-time from Vegas—and the Dems need to try on a little shamelessness and make Trump own the spiraling price of eggs.  David Frum joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes David's new piece on the Tate brothers (gifted) David's "Cautionary Tale for Trump Appointees" (gifted) Nevada Independent story on Kash and the Vegas timeshare megadonor WSJ on Kash's whirlwind start at the FBI Tim's playlist

Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. He's back. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently, Trumpocalypse. It's David from, what's happening from? Hey there. I'm just back from almost a month in Austria. Yeah. So now catching up with the world. How are the folks in Austria, you know thinking about what's happening Here stateside. Well, I have to confess. I was mostly talking about ski snow quality snow Good. So I was the ski snow quality We were very lucky with the skis no quality But we were we were escaping the month of February and on a ski hill my wife and I and two little dogs

Well, that sounds lovely. Well on the topic of Trump apocalypse I was perusing your social media feeds, and I saw this nice summation of where things stand. Egg shortages, fatal measles outbreaks, airplane crashes, crypto scams, tariffs, betrayal of allies, pardons and special favors for insurrectionists, crooked mayors and online pimps. The American people have voted for change.

I guess we'll get to all of those topics. Which one, I guess dealer's choice on which one you want to start with. Let's talk about eggs because I have a serious point to make about that. Okay. It goes to a big structural problem in American politics. So the price of eggs has almost quadrupled since fall.

If you're in the restaurant industry and you're buying sort of high-end eggs, you're looking at $8 a dozen. If you go to Walmart in the DC area, it's about $6 a dozen. There are some at 5.97, but a few at higher than six. Now, everybody listening to this podcast, every Democratic politician in Congress,

knows this isn't exactly Trump's fault. There's an avian flu, the herd of egg-laying chickens has been culled, and there's a genuine economic shortage. So Democrats are hesitant to blame the president for something that's obviously not his fault. In 2022, the price of beef ran up, and it ran up for because during COVID, there had been people in the beef processing plants that had to sit farther apart from one another,

reducing the efficiency of the plants. There was a drought, and so beef cattle were arriving at slaughter less heavy than usual. It wasn't Biden's fault. Did that stop the Trump people? It did not. There is a great novel about the rise of the Nazi, published in 1934 very prophetically, called The Oppermans, and I recommend it to you.

And at one point, one of the characters says, "'Our opponents have a great advantage over us. And that is their absolute lack of any sense of fairness. And I think you see in the beef versus the eggs, that dynamic at work. The Trump people knew it wasn't Biden's fault. It was, you know, there was a pandemic. The people in the processing plants had to sit farther apart.

A lot of the processing workers got sick. There was a drought, so the beef cattle were less heavy. It wasn't the president's fault that the price of beef went up. That didn't stop them. Democrats know it's not the president's fault the price of eggs is up, but it does stop them. I don't know how you do politics in a country where people respond to price cues so intensely, and one party says we're going to be responsible about economic causation, and the other party says the hell with that. No, we're not.

That's a fair point. And I think I've been thinking about this on the egg thing, because you do see. Pundits like liberal pundits talking about it a lot are anti-Trump pundits more than the politicians. So you see it some for politicians. I think, I think Ruben Gallego mentioned it on the pod on Wednesday. One thing I notice is the other side also has the benefit is of they're so shameless, you know, in the argumentation Trump is so shameless

that it's almost easy for him to say, this is sleepy Joe's fault. You know, he's asleep at the switch. It's Joe Biden's fault. And sometimes the, even when the Democrats I notice do try to pin this on Trump, it's almost, it's like in an ironic way where I almost feel like they're criticizing the voters, not Trump themselves like the voters Are we're too dumb to know that the egg prices, you know He wasn't gonna fix and so I sometimes I feel like the egg prices commentary is an attack on the voters And if you're really going to play their game, it's got to be what you're saying, which is the shameless

Attack on on Trump and the politicians years ago an acquaintance of mine who is a literary person, hard up for money, as a gag, wrote a kind of romance novel under pseudonym and sent it to one of these generic pulp, Boone and Mills kind of things. And he was hoping to pick up $1,200. And he sent it to the company and he got back a rejection letter that said,

if you want to write this stuff, you have to believe in it. Right. Yes, exactly. And that, if you want to write this stuff, you have to believe in it. Right. Yes, exactly. And that, which takes us to George Costanza, which is, which is, that was his advice as well, right? It's like, it's only a lie if you believe it. Well, what was the exact line? Shit. It's not a lie if you believe it.

It's not a lie if you believe it. Yeah, there it is. But there's just a structural infirmity because because the event in the past 24 hours. Trump people have done this big rollout of the so-called Epstein files, which are of course things that have been available on the internet for a decade. They're no revelation. We know that Bill Clinton flew on Epstein's plane. We know that Trump and Epstein were very close friends.

We know nothing today that we didn't know 48 hours ago. There's a big hullabaloo of some of the most shameless people in Trump world. I don't want, that's not my point. My point is this happened on the very day when thanks to high level intervention by people in the Trump administration, the two Tate brothers, the worst kind of sex abusers, sex traffickers were released from a legal process in Romania to fly to the United States as political asylum. They're both the U S citizens.

So they have a right to enter the United States, but they were under a travel ban in Romania because they were facing trial for so many charges. They also have charges pending against them in the United Kingdom. They got their freedom because of a personal intervention by Richard Grinnell, who met the Romanian foreign minister at the Munich Security Conference and said, I, meaning the United States government, take a great interest in the fate of the Tate brothers. This is the same Richard Grinnell, by the way, who is now president of the Kennedy Center where he's trying to do, he's planning a big Christmas extravaganza to put the Christ back

in Christmas. So Christ, sex trafficking, we can have both. So the point is not that the Epstein thing is a hullabaloo. The point is the same people who think that Epstein is the worst criminal in America believe that the Tate brothers who did the same and worse because Epstein, at least as far as I know, was never violent. The Tate brothers were. I think the girls were younger. I mean, you know, more splitting hairs here at this point, but in the Epstein case, yeah. Yeah, okay. But the Tate brothers involved minor girls too and direct personal violence, which they

talk about, they use beating as a tool of control, not just mind games. And you're right, we are splitting hairs and they're both bad, but there's no one who defends Epstein. There are people who defend Tate and the Tate brothers escape justice because of this. And by the way, when they arrived in the United States, one of the Tate brothers, I forget, which told reporters that it had been that they gave credit to the personal intervention of Baron Trump in their case, which if true, and it may not be true, they're big liars. If true is even more astonishing. Yeah. Um, I know you're writing about this for the Atlantic, but the, um,

which people should check out, but I, like the layers of hypocrisy, like even go deeper than that and shamelessness, right? I mean, they were also literal groomers. You know, and like, this was the big attack on gays from the magas over the last few years that why they had don't say gay in schools and all that was that, you know, there are the gays against groomers, which I guess Richard Grinnell considered himself a monk, you know, as, as a Maga that would show up to these events. And now it's, it's in this case, we have twogo that would show up to these events. And now it's, in this case,

we have two men that were in the most literal sense grooming women that they're also trafficking. And then for people who didn't follow this, using them in pornography, I think the seven women that are at the center of the Romanian case, they put in a house in Bucharest, they turned into a porn den and they, you know, against their will showed, you know, allegedly, they showed pornographic videos of them. And like that is, you know, it is on the nose of what they, you know, had accused the left of as you say, on the same day that they released the Epstein files. Nobody cares about hypocrisy though.

I do wonder, is there, like to me, the more interesting thing is the evangelical side of the party, like the Christian, the social conservative side of the party, like the Christian, the social conservative side of the party, there's just, there's nothing. Like how does, how can Mike Johnson, who monitors his own son's porn use, like also live coherently in a party that celebrates these two men? And step back to something you said a minute ago. You're right, no one says it carries anything about hypocrisy. You just have to do it. So in this vast country, parties need complicated,

they don't need complicated messages, but they need complicated message groupings. Look, I confess, I'm another touch East Coast elitist. I know the price of eggs because I looked it up on the Walmart site. I don't even like eggs that much. So that's not a message that's actually going to change my vote.

I'm about democracy, I'm about cash, Patel and anger management problem, Don Bongino at the FBI, I'm about the predicates being put in place for what looks like some kind of military backing of the president if he defies a court order. Those are, that's my issue. And me and my neighbors here in Ward 3 of the District of Columbia, we're going to be motivated by that. And we're going to get to the polls at 5 a.m. and stand in the queue, and we're going to vote

for school board too while we're there. You talk to us one way. The people who decide this election care about the price of eggs. And you have to talk to them, and you have to, and this is the thing that the Trump people did with a lot of, you know, people for whom English was not their first language, new to the country.

They did actually kind of politics in some ways the right way, which is, you know, people for whom English was not their first language, new to the country. They did actually kind of politics in some ways the right way, which is, you know, we're going to go into this neighborhood, people weren't born here, may not have English as their first language and we're going to talk to them about what they care about because their votes count too. That's like democracy done right if it weren't done for such evil ends ultimately, but the process is done right. And that's something that those who want to save democracy have to do, which is, you know what? Yeah, there are people in Ward 3 in D.C. who know that it's not literally the president's fault the price of eggs is up, but the people who feel

the price of eggs don't know that and don't care. So you just go there every day and you say, when will Trump eggs reach a dollar an egg? Because right now they're 50 cents an egg, they're on their way to a dollar an egg, Trump, Trump, egg, egg, Trump, Trump, dollar an egg. And maybe the answer to this is there isn't any, but I just, I'm going to extend your remarks and use the Tate brothers as an example. We know that the evangelical leaders

and the political types in the Republican Party have completely sold their soul to Trump and don't actually care about these issues anymore. Is there not eight people in the church on Sunday though, at a conservative church, mega church in Georgia that do care about this, right? That you could peel off by speaking to them about this if they learned about it, if it wasn't for the fact that their information silos didn't inform them about this? I don't know. Maybe the answer is no, but to your point about them, the Republicans doing regular politics, That was Trump's case with black voters. Trump didn't think he was going to win black voters by 50%. It was like, can I get the highest Republican number by pandering to them and appealing

to them? I think the same principle applies there. I'm not a Christian. I'm moderately, but not super religious, but I've had the privilege of knowing some intensely religious Christians. And the ones who really mean it have always responded to revelations of bad behavior in high places by saying that the Christian response to that is to not talk about it, to say, what have you done? What have you done? Search your

soul and you will find there greed and hate and envy and resentment and anger and lust and all the things that are Christian sins We're not here as the morality police for others. Jesus talks a lot about this, right? Like, you know cast the first stone, you know like the whole point of the Jesus teaching is you do not criticize others you criticize yourself and so if They were saying look this is that Bill Clinton or Donald Trump or the Tate brothers, these are occasions to remind people to improve their own behavior and just check their own stores.

And to understand, by the way, that their behavior necessarily is going to be imperfect is refutable. That would be a very holy thing. On the other hand, if they're going to be police, then you have to be. The rule can't be that if you give us free parking for our mega church and give us the zoning abatements we want, then you get to do what you like. And if you don't, you don't. The rules should not be that.

I don't know if it can't be. I think it may be in certain cases. I want to get back to the economy, tell them the eggs, because you're focusing on this on the messaging side of this and message matters. It's not everything. Life experience, people experiencing the economy in their own ways matters probably actually more. I played this yesterday, but I wanna play it again.

Because I think that for various reasons that you laid out on eggs, I don't think it is anybody is particularly incentivized to say things might get very bad with the economy right now. Like the Democrats don't wanna seem like they're rooting for that. The media doesn't wanna predict it and be wrong. But here's Steve Cohen, who's a conservative hedge fund guy, donated to Trump in the past.

So not somebody with TDS talking about the economy as it stands right now. This is one of those moments where there's really a lot of uncertainty. I mean, tariffs cannot be positive. It's a tax. Taxes are never positive. On top of that, we have slowing immigration. And in addition, now you have Doge. Wherever you lay on the Doge issue,

I mean, that's austerity. It's gotta be negative for the economy. We think growth is gonna slow to 1.5% from 2.5% in the second half. The reality is, we've got a brew of sticky inflation, slowing growth, and austerity in the government. I'm actually pretty negative for the first time in a while.

It may only last a year or so, but it's definitely a period where I think the best gains have been had. It wouldn't surprise me to see a significant correction. Sticky inflation and slowing growth, that doesn't seem like a great combo. No. I think that's right. I think that is good dispassionate analysis of those factors. The tariffs I think are the most

important. You'll notice that the stock market which briefly went up, the US stock market is now has given up all of its post Trump gains as the stock market. It doesn't want to believe that Trump could be serious. I mean, tariffs, the tariff policy is so stupid, so destructive. The stock market and the people don't want to believe that any of this could be real. When Trump talks about it, he sounds like such a moron to educated people. They think, oh, even if he says these crazy things, the Secretary of the Treasury will

throw his body in front of the tariff train and save us all. Maybe that will happen. Trump did a lot of tariffs in first term. He started late, he started in 2018, not right away. This time he's starting from the beginning. And of course, the economy reacts not just to the imposition of tariffs, but to the threat of tariffs.

If you have a $10 billion investment to make in a new facility, how hard are you gonna look at Mexico? Because you're gonna think, you know what? Okay, they haven't laid heavy tariffs on Mexico yet But Trump's made clear that he is not going to abide by the terms of the trade treaty with Mexico that he signed in his first term he now says that treaty was signed by the stupidest people in America and He's man. That's point broken clocks and all

So your ten billion dollar investment decision is going to be held hostage to the risk that these tariffs might be coming next week. You certainly won't make that decision hastily. I don't think people understand that a tariff is a tax, but it's a tax with much greater potential for harm than other taxes because other taxes just, you know, take money out of people's pockets. Surprise demand. Tariffs go to the efficiency of the productive process. Speaking about what, maybe not the stupidest people in America, but the most gullible.

I'm obsessed with this because it just seems so obvious to me. I've not gotten very wealthy. I assume people that got very wealthy did so because they are smart about risk reward calculations and such, but anytime I talked to a rich person or a finance person in the lead up to the election, I was like, why are so many people at the CEO level on Wall Street, like either neutral sitting this race out or even leaning Trump or actively for Trump in this case, when like the risks seem so obvious to me. Here we are, we're one month in, Semaphore article is quoting some CEOs. It's a difficult time to invest.

Everybody's paralyzed. I'm sorry, I can't be particularly positive. The chaos that is raining right now is causing everyone to sit on their hands. Headline, America's business leaders are turning on Trump fast. What did these fucking people think that they were going to get? Okay. Let me try this two ways. So first, like you, I'm not an especially successful

economic actor, but my late father was. And he started with literally nothing and built a considerable business before he died. One of his sayings was, God blesses you by making you lucky and then he curses you by making you think you're smart. And he would tell story after story about how you're driving the car

in the Mario Kart video game The rocks are falling and you can't you don't know whether the Swift turn to the left or the Swift turn to the right is the right move And a lot of people are just as smart as you make the Swift turn to the right and the rock falls on them You happen for reasons of dumb luck to make the Swift turn to the left the rock misses you and you get another chance to play the game so for the entrepreneurs, I think that entrepreneurs are people who are not necessarily the most highly analytic people. They have a kind of nerve and courage and self-belief that drives them.

And as we're seeing with Elon Musk, I mean, you can be a great entrepreneur and not be an ordinarily intelligent person, which he seems not to be, at least not now. Maybe he was different 15 years of drug use ago. I think he might have broken his brain with the social media company, but yeah, sure. But a CEO is different. A CEO is not an entrepreneur. A CEO is more like a politician than like an entrepreneur.

And so the CEO has to manage all kinds of expectations. And let's say you run the 14th biggest financial firm on Wall Street. Your scope for freedom of maneuver, especially in political matters, is quite limited. You have investors who have beliefs. You have regulators. You have your peers. You're trying to be not too unconventional a person.

When you have a bad quarter, you don't want to have a bad quarter in some freakish individual way. You want to have the same bad quarter that everybody else did, then you have an excuse. It's not surprising to me that CEO types, especially in the financial industry, who are mad at Biden for a host of reasons, would say, ah, we're going to bet on Trump because that's what all our friends and buddies are doing. No one ever got fired for giving money to the Republican candidate. So we'll do that and we'll hope for the best and we'll hope that some wiser heads at Treasury

stop the tariffs. And now they're confronting the fact that, no, it's wrong and the tariffs may really be coming. And that's not just a tax. That could be the end of all kinds of efficiencies that make a real difference to American production. It's your sense though, I mean, you know, we don't have a crystal ball. Things don't look good economically, right? Here's why the immigration pieces is important.

The United States had this extraordinary burst of productivity growth in the 1990s, but that productivity growth has slowed. And the reason the American economy has continued to grow as well as it has is not just because there's intensive growth, that is using each factor of production more efficiently as we did in the 1990s.

So there's extensive growth. In a country that would otherwise have a shrinking population, it has a growing population because of immigration above all. And whatever the merits of that from a social policy point of view, if you start not only stop the immigration, but send it into reverse, yeah, that's going to have an effect both on costs and consumption. It's going to have an effect on cost as you're taking people who were doing

work, taking them away. The MAGA people are very clear. They want price of landscaping services to go up. They want the price of construction to go up. But half the people in the construction industry in the fastest growing states are immigrants. And I assume a lot of them,

especially like in the most dangerous work like roofing are illegal immigrants. So again, I'm not endorsing any of this. I'm an immigration enforcer. But understand it makes costs go up. And also every immigrant is a buyer. They buy houses and shoes and cars and all of that is being subtracted for the economy. And yeah, it's a shock. Well, David, we are going to add some to the economy though. We like to be fair minded here at the Bullock Podcast. They do have a plan for bringing some people in. It's called the new gold card. It's going to solve the debt and bring new fresh blood into the economy. I want to listen to Donald Trump talking about

this plan the other day. If we sell 10 million, which is possible, 10 million highly productive people coming in or people that we're going to make productive. They'll be young, but they're talented like a talented athlete. That's $50 trillion. That means our debt is totally paid off. We're going to sell 10 million gold cards at 5 million a pop. What do you think about that? Well, every country, including the United States has programs where they do sell

visas for in exchange for a certain amount of investment. Well, every country, including the United States, has programs where they do sell visas in exchange for a certain amount of investment. You don't pay it directly to the government because this was, is, or was a free market country. But if you- Is that a golf club with dues where you pay to Bedminster? The old idea was that you would, if you made a $5 million investment

in something that wasn't personal real estate, that this is not a new thing. And many, Singapore has it, Canada has estate, this is not a new thing. And many in Singapore has it, Canada has it, the United States has it too. So it's not a completely outrageous idea. But the Trump gold card comes, CNBC reported this, with a special loophole. The United States has a regime of taxation where if you are a high net worth individual, high income individual, and you come to the United States, you are taxed on your global

income. So you don't just get taxed on what you make in the United States, you get taxed worldwide. And that's one of the reasons why the United States is not a haven for the international criminal rich in the way that, say, the United Kingdom is, because it has this global tax system. CNBC reports that the Trump gold card is going to come with a proviso that you only will pay tax on your U.S.-based income if you get one of these visas, which is a loophole unavailable to US citizens, unavailable to normal green card holders, unavailable to anybody except these Trump oligarchs.

And it's exactly the kind of thing that has made London the haven for all kinds of bad actors that it is, because you can have your money in Russia or wherever it is and not be taxed on that. You're only taxed on whatever you earn on your US savings bonds. So why Trump, who is America first and so anti-foreigner, is going to give a certain subset of foreigners a unique tax benefit unavailable to America's own indigenous rich?

That's a remarkable thought. America first. America first. It's also just like as a practical point, I'm with you, right? Giving visas to people that are going to invest is something Canada's to effect seems sensible to me. This is according to a study from 2023, there are only 8.4 million people globally worth five million or more.

Unless the plan is for Saudi Arabia or Putin or somebody to buy a bunch of these or some billionaire, maybe a Chinese crypto billionaire, we'll get to that next, to just pay Trump off personally, this is not a sensible plan. Look, and if you need to raise five million each from rich people, the United States has a lot of billionaires. You could just raise their taxes by five million each. We don't have 10 million, unfortunately. We don't have 10 million billionaires to pay off the whole debt, but we could.

Again, I'll quote my late father's business acumen. In the days of handwritten cafe bills in European cafes, he had this line he would say, if they were just bad at math, you'd expect half the mistakes to be in my favor. So Trump is bad at math. I mean, he's really bad at math. And it's not true that half the mistakes

are in the customer's favor. All the mistakes are in his favor. And whether he's lying about how much aid was provided to Ukraine, whether he's lying about how much aid was provided to Ukraine, whether he's lying about the impact of these things, that, I mean, he's a con artist and he sells these cons. But I think the back in mind is there is somebody who said to him, I would like to come to the United States.

I will pay $5 million to that privilege if I don't have to pay tax on my global income. And Donald said, and Don, there'll be something in it for you too. And Trump said, that sounds good to me. But everyone else in America pays tax on their worldwide income. If you tax the golden visa people on their worldwide income,

you're not gonna sell all those millions of golden visas. They want the tax benefit that comes with the visa. Speaking of those scams, I do wanna revisit the crypto crypto story because I've mentioned this yesterday, but we have an update. The judge did grant the SEC's request for a stay in the case of Justin Sun. Justin Sun has given reportedly over 50 million, invested over 50 million in the various Trump bitcoins.

It's a Chinese bitcoin magnate, just essentially paying Trump directly and getting the government off his back for his fraud, for his alleged frauds. The crypto industry is at bottom. It's a regulatory arbitrage bet. What is crypto? American law says if you're a security, you're regulated by the SEC who have lots of expertise and a kind of a very tough attitude to fraud. If you're a currency, you're regulated more lightly because I mean, obviously, you know, if

the Dominican Republic wants to issue a new currency, that's not going to be regulated by an American financial and if you want to trade Dominican Republican Cruz Arrows or whatever they are, you know, they're they're issued by the Dominican Republic as that's your so that it's regulated not by the SEC in a more lightweight. So the reason it's called cryptocurrency is so that it's regulated not by the SEC in a more light way. So the reason it's called cryptocurrency Is so that it's not regulated by the SEC

But nobody who invests in crypto is investing in it in order to go to another country and buy things They're investing it because they think it's a security there. It's an investment. It's a store of wealth That's the criminals there They are using our currency if they're criminals but if they're The non criminals they are buying the security. And they were afraid, the reason that the crypto bet so heavily on Trump against Biden was they were afraid that the Biden administration was going to say, you know what, this is obviously a security and it needs to be regulated with proper kinds of disclosures and statements

of risk and conflict of interest statements by management and all the fancy things that got us into trouble in 2008 have to do now. Crypto should have to do it and the crypto is no, no. While we want the United States government to bail us out and buy vast quantities of crypto, we do not want to tell people the things that we would have to tell them if we were regulated as a security. Yeah. And actually there was a statement also just yesterday on this point from the SEC where

they said that these meme coins are essentially a collectible. They see them as trading cards, essentially, baseball trading cards. And so in the same way that currency is regulated more lightly, the baseball card market is regulated more lightly. And that's great news for meme coin scammers like the president of the United States, the secretary of commerce, and many other people in their orbit. And tragically, the president of Argentina on whom so many hopes rested.

I had a lot of time for him and I think he may have been suckered in this Libra coin thing he got mixed up in. But you know, it may be the economic reform in Argentina fails again, this time because somebody got, I think in this case, it was the president's relatives who were behind it got him involved In a dubious meme coin venture and discredited him It is disappointing just because he could have just done a mea culpa Yeah

You know that's really was the just most disappointing thing about Malay that he like got so defensive of it and started attacking people for Attacking him. It was such an obvious fraud. Yeah, just say I got to you know, like but I guess these guys It's part of the machismo side of this of this. You can't say that I got duped. But I guess these guys, it's part of the machismo side of this. You can't say that you got duped. I think there's also something, which is the very thing that makes him such an outlier in Argentinian politics is he's a little crazy. And until now, it's worked for him that he wasn't trapped in the usual self-destructive patterns of their politics. But the same thing that makes him a little crazy makes him unable to do the mea culpa or to put some discipline on his relatives and say,

you know, this is a chance to turn this country around. You will all behave yourselves. And if I succeed, believe me, you will all be sitting on the board of the Chase Manhattan bank and making a lot of money in very respectable ways. Just, just patience, be respectable. The other scan they have going is the strategic Bitcoin reserve. Saw a post that you had about that. I wanted to hear your take on that strategic Bitcoin reserve plan.

My line on it was the strategic Bitcoin reserve is a device to respond to the looming greater fool shortage in the United States because these coins are sold to greater fools. Eventually you run out of greater fools and people ask, what can I do with this thing? And the fact that Warren Buffett has always said, stay away is, is a warning that maybe you should stay away. The biggest pool of fools is, is the government run by a fool, you know? Right. And also the fools in this case don't get a choice that if you can, the people who will make this decision are probably not fools.

They're probably in on the con. So if you can get infiltrate the government with people who have large crypto holdings themselves. Which has happened. Which has happened. And make them get them not only make favorable rulings like the SEC will not regulate our industry. I think this is so telling that Trump is about to reenact the plot of Goldfinger at Fort Knox. And meanwhile, what he's actually going to do is give away not the gold but the actual money

of the United States to buy these stupid Bitcoins. For what? What is the problem to which a Bitcoin is a response? The strategic response. The United States holds reserves of gold and euros and yen because in case there's suddenly a fluctuation in the movement of the dollar and you need to go buy dollars, you need to buy the dollars with something.

So you buy it with cool. But the idea that you're going to do this with, with something as mercurial and unpredictable as Bitcoin is it's not a currency because currencies don't move up and down by a thousand percent. To the autocracy and to the autocracy and cacostocracy altogether. You, you wrote this Trump tried a seizure of power in 21 It didn't work because he relied only on a violent mob military and FBI stayed loyal to the Constitution this time with the approval of the Republican Senate Trump has installed anti constitutional putschists at the FBI DOD and

Pentagon since then he's out of the Joint Chiefs under that list since you wrote that I think. What is your alarm level when it comes to this? It's getting pretty high because he has understood the elements of power in a way that he did in the first term and I think he's also come to grips as he did in the first term that he's not a hugely popular president. So a lot in term one who's lying. You think so? Yeah, I think so. Because otherwise, in term one, when he was doing all that, he didn't bother making sure that the military and the FBI were on board, because he had that big map of how, you know, the 3000 counties in the United States, all the ones with tumbleweed voted for him.

And all that stuff about the crowds, that was, I think, a lot of the narcissist reassuring himself that he is beloved. And if you're beloved, then you don't need the violent seizure of power. His plan to corrupt the 2020 election came up really was done very much at the last minute. He didn't start working on that on the first day in off like a different kind of, you know, Putin started working immediately on destroying Russian democracy. Trump postponed and postponed and did it at the end and in a very careless way. I think he's, you're now seeing a much more systematic effect with buy in grudging or not from Republicans to say, what are the power ministries?

How do you secure them? Um, and the FBI is the most extreme. I mean, it's incredible. They confirm Cash Patel. Dan Bongino is now up and he, I mean, I've had run-ins with him and I'm sure you have. I mean, you wouldn't hire him to be deputy sheriff of Mayberry. He's erratic. You certainly wouldn't want him to be a school teacher. Yeah. You know, like you wouldn't want him to manage your store if you had many stores and you couldn't oversee him day to day because

you wouldn't know if he'd start screaming at a customer. If he'd smack a kid. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've, I've personally witnessed him lose his cool and I won't tell too much about that because I, my colleague, Jonathan shade is writing that story for the Atlantic, it'll be up shortly. I certainly personally witnessed it. He's not someone who should be in charge of men with guns.

And the other thing about the FBI as compared to the military, it's a relatively small bureaucracy and the FBI director has a lot of power to ruin people's lives in his work for him. Because as Patel is doing, when you say we're moving 500 agents to Huntsville, Alabama, what you're really giving is, of the 500 agents, suppose 400 are in serious relationships or married, you're forcing a large proportion of the 500

to make some important career choices as to whose career will be followed. And by sending people to Huntsville, you can put a lot of pressure on them to leave the agency altogether and create vacancies for you to hire more politically malleable people. And I think that's a big part of what Patel has in mind. Yeah. Among the politically malleable people, we have a couple of stories from Cash on what he has in mind.

He wants to live part-time in Las Vegas, apparently, going to the Wall Street Journal. He lives in a home there with a timeshare scammer, rich guy. I guess we don't know if he lives with him, but he lives in that man's home, according to the Nevada Independent. He has a plan for hiring MMA fighters into the FBI. Let's hope that that's a romantic relationship because if not, this was a long ago, but there was a serious scandal in the District of Columbia when I first got here that the chief of police was living in this 3000 square foot condo in a fancy building of the Navy Memorial that

belonged to somebody like this. And they were not romantic partners. It was just a bribe. And eventually the whole thing came down and this chief of police had to resign. But the head of the FBI should not be accepting free stuff from people. No, no he shouldn't.

But I don't, that might end up being the least of our problems. Then we have also Raisin Cain, the new chairman of the joint chiefs. The way Trump tells the story, Cain is a three-star general, told him in 2018, I guess, when he was still a general, that he loved Trump, he would kill for him and slapped on a MAGA hat on his head.

There's kind of this cute Politico story as if it's 1998 where they're writing about how this might be a problem for him because that is against the rules and regulations of the military. Maybe Tom Cotton or somebody will say something about this. I find that hard to imagine, but that's a little alarming. You have to separate Kane in one way from some of these other people, because he did have a very distinguished career.

And he does seem to have been, unlike Cash Patel, where again, you wouldn't let him run the store. This guy, he was a very admired three-star general. It's also true that being a three-star general. It's also true that being a three-star general is a very different job from being a four-star general. A four-star general is managing this giant global supply chain. We assume that they are personally courageous

because they were once one stars, two stars, and three stars, but four-star work doesn't take a lot of personal courage and shouldn't. I mean, you're sitting in an office building, moving billions of units of stuff around the planet and it's a political job. What you want in a four star is, and there's a reason that they never made

Douglas MacArthur chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, brilliant and brave as he was, he was unstable. They made George Marshall because he was stable and those are important qualities and the most important thing in that job is the ability to look at the president and say, no, sir, that would be illegal. Sir, may I have your order in writing? And then I will give you my resignation in writing, sir.

That doesn't seem likely from somebody that says that they would love, they love the Trump and kill for him, but who knows, I'd love to be surprised. Lastly, I wanted to talk about Ukraine. So Trump and Zelensky are meeting today right about now as we're taping. So by the time this is out, the meeting will already have happened. This is reportedly about ink in the deal on the rare earth minerals. So I'm wondering what you're thinking about the state of play. I would encourage people to watch that clip where Trump is asked,

did you call the Zelensky dictator? And he said, did I? I don't remember. Did I say that? Because that story is being played as if he's senile. Yeah. But when you watch his face, he's like daring the media to call him on it. Like he knows perfectly well what he did. He is toying with somebody. He's being he's enjoying power without responsibility. He's enjoying the cruelty well what he did. He is toying with somebody. He's being, he's enjoying power without responsibility. He's enjoying the cruelty of what he said. And Trump, I think is in some ways, mentally deteriorated from the man he was 30 years ago,

but he is not out of his mind. And you need to take that seriously into account. The deal, it's so shocking and upsetting because now the Ukrainians have done a good job of rewriting this deal, so it doesn't mean very much and it's not as predatory, but when this war is won, it will be the responsibility of the developed world to collectively find ways to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine. And that's going to be the World Bank, I think estimated the other day, more than a half trillion dollar project over many years, but a half trillion dollars.

Some of the money will need to come from frozen Russian funds. Some of it will come from the European Union. Much of it will, but some will have to come from the United States if we're to get the Europeans on board. The thing everyone needs to understand as they gird for this is this is going to be a fantastic investment as Marshall aid was, as the reconstruction of Eastern Europe was in the 1990s. You get the money back in richer customers, better trading partners, secure allies.

You get it back so far. You get it back to the point where if you were to tell people how much the Marshall plan cost, they wouldn't believe how little it was and what you got in return. The safe, secure world where, by the way, Americans don't have to learn foreign languages because all their allies learn English instead. Thank you very much. And we can use Visa in Bangkok. It'll be worth it because wise countries have a generous long-term view of their economic interests, not a predatory view. Trump thinks like a bandit out of the middle ages. You go in there, seize the stash of coins and run out again. And the idea that real wealth is built by investment and long-term contracts and building

rules of law and from products that don't exist yet but will in 30 years. Some Ukrainian entrepreneur who's like in a cradle is going to invent and sell to the world. Like whoever in Denmark invented Ozempic, you know? That's billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth created by some Danish chemist. I'm just searching for a positive here, one green shoot, and so feel free to take that away from me.

Is there anything to the idea that Trump is kind of tricking himself into having to do more for Ukraine than the otherwise would because he wants to feel like he's getting this good deal? I got this deal. I'm getting the rare earth. We're going to invest there. Some of my cronies are going to make money and then they're going to give it back to me buying my coin or whatever. And so that we'll have to, we'll have to, you know, defend them at some level

to make sure we can get our rare earth. The test of any Trump deal in Ukraine is, are there not just meaningful security guarantees, but foreign bodies? Whether that's couched in NATO terms or not, there's an old joke that's told about the Cold War, but it actually dates back even earlier. Before the 1914 war, the British and the French were doing defense planning. The British general asked the French, how many British soldiers do you need to defend Northern France? planning the British general asked the French how many British soldiers do you need to defend northern France and the answer was just one will get them killed in the first five minutes.

And the same way that was how how many Americans did it take to defend Germany from the Soviets? Just one, just one. We know but we need to know you're there. So whatever the guarantee is this idea of British and French troops in Ukraine that that is the test of success. And backed by some American presence to say, you know, the Russians aren't there for territory, but whatever the ceasefire line is, whatever the line of control, whatever is free Ukraine, that part of Ukraine needs to be a place where investors can invest hundreds of billions of dollars in security.

And that means they need to know there is a tripwire there back by Britain back by France back By the United States the Russians ever try this stunt again. They're going to feel the wrath of the world not indirectly but directly Yeah, I'm sorry You said the Russians aren't there for territory the Russian attack on Ukraine is not the Trump fantasy that they want This is about taking control of some one-fifth of Ukraine. That's nonsense They were there they were there just to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign entity. So if Ukraine keeps sovereignty over 80% of its territory, that's a win for the West. If Russia can find ways to sabotage and corrupt Ukrainian sovereignty by, for example, saying

that Russia insists that Ukraine have an election. That is not a Russian decision to make when the Ukrainian, if they are able to write that into the schedule and they have corrupted and weakened Ukrainian sovereignty and that's the loss. When you say, can I be optimistic? I think there are things you can say about the Trump administration that are going to be positive. I've always believed that there are gifts of Trump that he forces, he's forcing a deepening commitment to democracy in the United States. He's, you know, we are having to think about institutions in a way we never did. Why did Congress give all that power over trade to the president?

People have been warning that that was a danger for a long time. Now we can see, maybe we'll fix it. Should Europe have a more serious approach to its own security? Yes, yes. And they're going to be forced to do that. Those are inadvertent gifts of Trump, but it can't be at the expense of the brave people of Ukraine who have sacrificed so much for their freedom and who are winning this war.

All right. Last thing, you wrote a cautionary tale for the Trump appointees, it was related to these negotiations and how Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz might learn something from the past. I'd love for you to just share a little bit about that cautionary tale with people. Well, this is based on the sad career of someone who's not well remembered now, but Richard Nixon's Secretary of State William P. Rogers. So Rogers was a very distinguished lawyer, both in public life and private life. And Nixon enticed him to be Secretary of State with the promise that he would have large

authority over the two most important issues of the day, the Vietnam War, winding it down and peace in the Middle East. And then Nixon immediately created a secret channel via his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. And so while Rogers thought he was negotiating the end of the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger really was negotiating the end of the Vietnam War. And the war had not gone well, Kissinger didn't get very good terms. And so the final agreement meant basically the death of South Vietnam and the abandonment of the American commitment.

And guess who got to sign that agreement? Not Henry Kissinger, but William P Rogers, the guy who had had no power became the fall guy for the disaster. And the piece said, this is going to be the fate of Rubio that what Rubio is doing with Lavrov is not the real negotiation. The real negotiation is being done by, I don't know, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, and maybe, and Elon Musk, some sinister shadowy figure.

And the real negotiation is a pretty grim one. So if you're Rubio, who is for whatever his weakness of personality, you know, who is a patriot and it has had an amazing career and does stand for good and important principles or just articulate. Yeah. It does articulate good and important. Yeah, there you go. Let's not overdo it. Yeah, but does he want to be the man whose signature

is on the salad of Ukraine? Yeah, I mean, he's already learned this lesson kind of in the micro where Henry Kissinger, the role of Henry Kissinger was played by the 23-year-old Doge guy, Big Balls, where Marco said, as Secretary of State, we're going to protect the good parts of USAID, PEPFAR, a couple of other things.

And then when Doge took over the payment systems, the little 23-year-old said, actually, no, we're not going to pay for PEPFAR. We're going to override the Secretary of State on this. Yeah. PEPFAR, it're going to override the Secretary of State on this. Yeah. PEPFAR, you know, it originated in the Bush administration. One of its leading advocates was someone who's now deceased, Michael Gerson, the head of the speech writing office. You may have known him. Very devout and committed person. And Bush is entangled in the Iraq war. It's not going well. And it's one of those moments where the president who's always

described as the most powerful man in the world, doesn't feel very powerful at all. He can't make things happen. And this small cadre in the Bush administration said, let's just do something good. Hundreds of the penny in the national budget, a figure that no one, it won't even show up in there. It's not even a rounding error, because it's too small even for that.

But let's go save tens of millions of lives from the HIV epidemic in Sub-Saharan Africa. It will cost us nothing in relative terms. It's a good thing. It's an exercise of presidential power. And when George W. Bush goes to meet his maker and God says, what did you do with this power? He can say, well, this is the thing

that's gonna head the list. This is what I did. And here are 10 million souls beside me to testify that I made a difference. Like, how can you begrudge that with the vast wealth and power of the United States? It's nothing. And yet it means so much. Well, I guess when you only care about oneself, I think is the answer to it. And that's the situation with Trump. Gerson, I was recently reminded of one of his, he had many good terms of phrase, but one recently, when the king is a liar, truth becomes treason. Very good,

Michael Gerson. He is missed. David Frum, thank you for the time as always. And we'll be talking to you again soon. Thank you. All right, everybody else, we will be back Monday for a Lundi Graa edition of the Bulwark podcast. We'll see you all then. Peace. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Now, you're all alone Don't forget your little mama wants a dollar You can try a hundred and ninety I'm going to be a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a

little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a I'm a man of my word, I'm a man of my word Tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala,

tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tralala, tr, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, little mama wants a dollar to cry, day and night and day. Thank you. The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.