The Bulwark Podcast - David Frum: Complete Chaos

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

If Trump were to win, his plans to sabotage the Justice Department and consolidate power would plunge the country into chaos: Our government would be disabled, Americans would pour into the streets, and our enemies would be very happy. Plus, Alito is not being on the level, and a helpful primer on Mexico's election this weekend. show notes: Press Advance podcast episode when Tim was a guest

If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from our Tread Experts. Ensure each winter trip is a safe one for your family. Enjoy them for years with the Michelin X-Ice Snow Tire. Get a $50 prepaid MasterCard with select Michelin tires. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca Hello and welcome to the Buller Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm delighted as always

to be here with my fave, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently, Trumpocalypse and Trumpocracy. I wonder what you think about Donald Trump. It's David Frum. Hey there. Canadian David Frum. It's been a rough little bit for Canadians here. You know, Drake is losing his rap battle with Kendrick. You know, basketball, Jamal Murray choked in game seven of the NBA playoffs. I don't know. How's the vibe up in Canada these days? I know you're not there right now, but you hear from Canadians. So I am only hazily aware of the world of sports and popular entertainment. In my high school career, I did quiz shows. And so long as the topics were like

name obscure English monarchs, I, you know, and then they would switch to name some things that are on TV and it would be like, I'd be zero for eight. So that sounds about right. We're bringing a nice balance. Your job is to reference a couple of obscure monarchs over the course of the podcast. And I'll,

I'll slip in some strike mentions when we were last together, you didn't say that one way you were paying tribute to Miranda was by unleashing opinions and thoughts you might've kept to yourself before and i've been monitoring your commentary and i and i will say you're living up to that in spades and so i hope i hope we can do that here today with a little twitter disagreement maybe disagreement we're about to find out and if you'll indulge me i just i need to reread for listeners who do not suffer twitter a paragraph from the washington post that i sent out this is the washington post yesterday samanthanowski, a former Trump supporter who recoiled from Trump's pivotal role in overturning Roe, was surprised to learn that Trump can continue

running for president if he's convicted or sentenced to jail. That even if he was convicted, she didn't think that would change her calculus in November saying that Trump is a man. And it was expected he would behave in tawdry ways her daughter 18 year old lacy was standing beside her she hadn't seen anything about the trial but she did remember hearing the false claim on tiktok circulated in an apparently satirical video that some took at face value that biden was the first president to fail a random test of his ability to recite the ABCs. That left me in a pretty dark place about the state of affairs.

You replied, quoting Edmund Burke, the individual is foolish, the species is wise. So try to uplift me after reading that anecdote. I'll give you one more quote to think about. Did you ever see the British series The Thick of It? I did, I did, yeah. Okay. Peter Mannion, who's not the cabinet minister, who's like the one more or less positive character in the series he's this overweight

rumpled conservative party cabinet minister and um one of the spin doctors says something to him and he replies well that's just the public and they're fucking horrible and the spin doctor says you can't say the public are fucking horrible and And Mannion replies, yes, I can. I've met them. There you go. And so how do you then take that to the David Frum view, which we did discuss last time, the David Frum view, as I recall, is that we have a coming Biden clear victory. Have you been shaken in that after listening to the public? I have not. And maybe this is more an article of faith than of scientific observation. But I mean, it's certainly true that the whole theory of democracy, the reply to democracy is

always, okay, sit down with the average voter and listen to what's in their heads. And it'll startle you. You know, I remember reading years and years ago, a selection from sermons of the Revolutionary War era. So we all know, give me liberty and give me death and awe-inspiring ideals of the American Revolution. But it looks like most of the people who did the fighting in the American Revolution thought that King George III had a plan to turn America Catholic. And they were fighting to stop him from turning America Catholic. That's a noble goal. And voter ignorance is always – it's just a fact because that's the way we are constituted as individual human beings.

And even those of us who think of ourselves as well-informed are still very ignorant about many of the things that it would be good for us to know. If you believe that that is, you're not going to have any kind of faith in democracy because it's always true. And yet somehow democratic systems do blunder their way to better outcomes. And I find it hard to believe that if people didn't choose McClellan over Lincoln in the bloodshed of the Civil War, when there are a lot of good reasons to be tired of Lincoln, if they followed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not Charles Lindbergh, into World War II, which is a pretty scary and unappetizing project, the idea that they'd fail now with this easy test, I refuse to believe it project. The idea that they'd fail now with this easy test, I refuse to believe it. I don't think they'll fail this test.

What do you think the impact would be? Our friends at National Review had a column this week about how us self-indulgent, self-important Democrats are never Trumpers. If indeed you are wrong, David Frum, and Donald Trump does win, we'll blame our fellow Americans for this instead of, you know, our own folly. And my response to that was kind of like, yeah, I think I probably will. I don't know. I do think I would be pretty disappointed in my fellow Americans if we elected our stupidest member for the second time. I don't know. So, are you prepared for that to be shaken? I think if Donald Trump does return to office one way or another, we are going to be plunged instantly into a crisis of such severity

that the question of whose fault it is, is going to have to wait for the history books, because the emergency will be instant and overwhelming. And the emergency I see, I worry less about the Project 2025 things that, you know, the Donald Trump having a rational plan to consolidate power. I worry about that a lot in the Mexican election that is coming next week, where we may see the demise of Mexican democracy or what remains of Mexican democracy. What's going to happen in the United States, in my opinion, if Donald Trump is instant, massive instability and crisis. His first priority is going to be to escape his legal troubles. Now, his legal troubles are of such variety, federal, state, criminal charges, civil charges, trials at varying stages of process.

He's not going to have a one-stop answer. He's going to have to do a lot of different things to close down the American legal system. And it's not going to be like you say the Harry Potter cheat code and everyone says, oh, okay, sure, you can fire everybody in the Department of Justice. You can terminate prosecutors. You can pardon yourself. If Donald Trump does return, he's in return with at most a plurality of the vote and quite likely a minority of the vote. And he will do so in the face of a Congress that is way less aligned with him than the Congress of 2017. He may only win one House of Congress. He may win neither. If he does win

both, his margins will be tiny. And there is going to be massive protest, massive pushback. And we're going to be plunged into a world where everything is going to go into the streets because the institutions, the institution that is our final arbiter, the Supreme Court, has completely discredited itself. When Donald Trump says, may I pardon myself? And a 5-4 majority of Alito, including Alito and Thomas, say, yes, you may. People aren't going to salute that the way they saluted other unpopular decisions in the past. They're going to say, this whole thing is crooked. And then the streets of America are going to look like the streets of Tel Aviv a year ago with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe more people in the streets saying the president is breaking the law. The president

is a criminal. The president can't pardon himself. And there'll be impeachment crises in Congress. It's going to be upheaval after upheaval. You're going to have resignations. Every general, when Trump orders the National Guard to suppress the protests in the streets, every colonel and general officer is going to be consulting the council to the army. Is this a legal order? I mean, I can go to prison for following an illegal order. Is this a legal order? Oh, but the president will be pardoning, will be offering pardons. Yeah, but is that a legal order? Because one of the themes of the Trump years is that while Trump himself got away with a lot of stuff, the people who worked for him, they went to prison. And Navarro

abandons on his way back, so many others. And you say, do I want to be one of those January 6 morons who takes the fall for this guy? The people believe in him maybe, but you're a colonel in the National Guard. Are you quite sure you want? And so some colonels will, and other colonels won't. It's going to be chaos. And so when people are blithe about this, I don't think we're on the path to consolidated power, maybe after three or four years of power struggle. But Trump does not have the kind of mass following that would enable him to do that. He doesn't have the hold on institutions that would enable him to do it in the lack of a mass following. And meanwhile, he's got a lot of very immediate problems where he's going to have to do things that are going to look pretty unlawful to lots and lots of people. You left me a lot to follow

up with there. And so I just want to put a pin in a couple of things. Can we just do a three minute aside on the Mexican election? Because you piqued my interest and I've been following it with a Twitter level of knowledge. I've been intrigued by leading candidates, woman and Jewish apparently. And so a lot of what you referenced there, I'm not familiar with. So can you just give us a quick briefing on what's happening in the coming Mexican election? I've written a lot about this for The Atlantic. But one of the problems of modern journalism is your editors know exactly how much readership each of your articles has got and where in the article people stop reading. And so while, you know, they're always, okay, David wants to write about Mexico some more, I guess we have to let him. Here's the good news. I don't have an editor on this podcast, so we can do seven

minutes on Mexico right now if you want to. We can come back to the Trumpocalypse after. So Chris Hayes, who may be a friend of yours, had a tweet this morning, which he said, how exciting. Mexico is about to have a Jewish woman president whose ancestors left Hitler's Germany. And I think, ah, I see you're new here. Yeah, it's like from an identity politics lens, you know, it's like, oh, that seems intriguing. So I interviewed Claudia Scheinbaum, who was then mayor of Mexico City last January. And her English is okay.

And we had to translate it back. So I don't want to say she's a Stalinist. That's a great way to start a description of somebody. I've interviewed this woman, and I'm not quite ready to say she's a Stalinist, but that's not a great intro. Continue. But she is a very doctrinaire leftist who was chosen to head her party because of her political weakness. So the outgoing president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, is a reactionary authoritarian of a kind of leftist flavor. That is, he says he's hostile to the rich, he's hostile to the

United States. And so the fact that he is the same as Victor Orban doesn't get seen because he does enough left-coded things to appeal to American progressives that they interpret him as different from Victor Orban, but he's not. And what he's done to the institutions of the Mexican state, and Mexican democracy is quite young and quite fragile, but they built some impressive and important institutions, including one of the world's most honest election systems. So that's what they had. And that was built in the 1990s. And that has been his number one target, the integrity of elections and destroying the independence of the election system, destroying the independence of the courts. People get murdered there. I mean, not by him, but the murders have impunity. Politicians are murdered,

judges are murdered, journalists are murdered. And not just in the remote countryside, not just obscure people, but I interviewed a journalist who was the anchor for one of the top three Mexican, and there'd been an attempt on his life in one of the fanciest neighborhoods in Mexico City. Immediately after, the president denounced him at a press conference. Now, again, the president didn't send the gunman, but the way Mexico works is it's understood there are people under protection and there are people not under protection. When you as an American tourist travel around Mexico City, everyone with a gun understands you're a person under protection. If they kill you, it will be a real problem. So unless you're strongly motivated to do it and have powerful protection, don't do it. But if there's a

journalist in a small town who takes a photograph of the daughter of the narco trafficker at her wedding day, he can be murdered with impunity and no one will do it. The state won't care. And so that person does get murdered. So López Obrador has been breaking every rule except one, the ban on re-election. Six-year term, no re-election. That is a central creed of Mexican life, and even he didn't dare do it. So what he instead went to look at life, and even he didn't dare do it. So what he instead went to look at is, how do I find a person with the least backing in my political movement? A person who will be entirely dependent on me.

Well, if she's a woman, that makes her weaker. If she's Jewish and the child of immigrants, that makes her weaker. If she's got a communist background, that makes her weaker. So I'm going to choose her over other people who had more popular following as my handpicked successor. It's like a Medvedev situation. Yeah. And then I'm going to put another gun at her head, which is I'm going to institute, although there's been a six-year term, a three-year recall, where the head of the party can organize a recall campaign against the next president if she displeases him in any way. And oh, by the way, I have completely debauched and corrupted the military by doing things like putting huge engineering projects in their hands, putting them in charge

of the customs. I've got a lot of rich generals who are beholden to me and know that I know their secrets. And I'm going to put her in charge of this political system. And by the way, in an election which follows Hungarian tradition and those of other backsliding democracies, this election will be free in the sense that if you go to the polls and cast a ballot, your ballot will be counted. You will be allowed to do that and your ballot will be counted. But it won't be fair because the media are completely distorted. But even more important, Mexico is an incredibly violent country right now. Mexico is a population of about one-third the United States, and it has, at least according to the official count, about half again as many homicides. So 30,000 homicides in a country of 130 million versus about 20,000 homicides in a country

of 330 million. And of those homicides, 95% are never solved. So violence breaks out at polling places in areas where the ruling party is weak, and it doesn't break out in polling places where the ruling party is strong. And so people come to the polling places where the ruling party is strong and are frightened away in places where it's weak. And so the risk is not only that the party of Lopez Obrador is going to win the presidency, that looks pretty probable, and they could probably do that on the merits.

They do have an important social base, unlike other authoritarians, but they're going to win enough of a congressional and state mandate that they will have the power to alter the constitution, which would mean an end to what remains of the independence of the courts, an end to what remains of the nonpartisan electoral commission, and a return to the bad old days of the Mexican past when it was essentially a party dictatorship. And the downstream impacts on us? One, you'll get more migrants because of party dictatorship. And the downstream impacts on us? One, you'll get more migrants because of the insecurity. But the other downstream, this is where it reflects not so well in the United States, is he's sort of a fake leftist. He rails against the rich. He rails against the whites, although three of his grandparents are immigrants from Spain. But at the same time, he's willing to do things to stop the flow of people

that are much more violent and ruthless than American. And Trump knew that he was doing it. And Biden knows it. And everyone sort of understands if you will keep the Central Americans at bay using whatever methods our press won't report on, we will then overlook as you destroy what remains of Mexican democracy. So you'll notice in 2024, the flow of people has been substantially reduced from what it was in 2023. We're down like 20% or something, 25%. Yeah. I had a meeting with, I won't name them because it was off, but with a very senior administration person in foreign policy and asked all my Mexican friends believe there's a deal between the Biden administration and Lopez Obrador.

You stop the flow of immigration for my election, and I overlook how you install your handpicked. And he just turned on me this look of hurt. Who says that you would say these terrible things about how could anyone believe us, us who are defending democracy here in the United States? How could you even think these? Let me get my person on this on it right away, and he'll reply to you. People in Mexico do believe that there's a deal between Biden and Lopez Obrador. You turn down the immigration for my election. I don't ask too many questions about how you get Claudia Scheinbaum elected. The identity stuff is interesting. The other thing I saw in this was Vincente Fox just sending out straight anti-Semitic tweets against her, trying to promote the other side, which I guess is the

thing to do. Two things about that to make it a little bit more complicated. First, Vincente Fox does seem to have adopted a hobby in his retirement make it a little bit more complicated. First, Vicente Fox does seem to have adopted a hobby in his retirement years, and the hobby is drinking, starting at about 10 in the morning. It's a common hobby among ex-statesmen. I don't recommend it. But the second thing is what he was reacting to was a very specific thing she did, which complicated. So although she is halachically Jewish, she campaigns wearing a rosary. The thing that prompted his anti-Semitic, it was more xenophobic. He said, she's Mexican, I thought she was Bulgarian. Her father's family are from the Baltic republics, her mother's family

are from Bulgaria. But she campaigns wearing this honking big cross, which is A, funny because she's halachically Jewish, and B, funny because, as I said, I don't think she's technically a Stalinist, but she does come from that kind of very doctrinaire hard left opiate of the masses view. Um, opiate of the masses doctor, give me a prescription for that. We have a real cruel intentions runoff.

She has cocaine inside the cross that she's wearing. Okay. Back to Donald Trump. That was a very educational aside i appreciate i'm glad that thank you for doing that the other thing that you were talking about though about the trump instability which i think you're right about which is there is this isn't a misapplied panic about which things we panic about which which is kind of i guess doesn't really matter that much you know if the predictions are correct about what to be worried about probably not but i think that people do miss and it really relates to the project

2025 in some ways which is the element of the staffing of this next administration and i was listening to trump with tim pool this like far left you know horseshoe podcaster yesterday and he you know floated for attorney general Devin Nunes, you know, the guy in charge of his fake social media scam, or Kash Patel, one of the people who is organizing the coup, there was no qualifications. And neither of these people can be confirmed by the Senate, of course. But is Trump going to care about that? You know, I think that as you look ahead to the next thing, like to me, that is the first crisis that would happen if Trump would get in. Let's play out those cards with a little bit more detail. I wrote in 2017 for the Atlantic

Peace warning that Trump was aspiring to build an autocratic form of government at the United States. And this was at a time when the prevailing view was, you're hysterical, he's going to be erratic and lazy and ignorant, and maybe corrupt. I wrote then, I don't think the normal people are going to be able to restrain him. The institutions are not as strong as Americans think. They seem strong because no one's ever tested them because everyone has automatically complied with them, at least since Watergate and really, you know, through the modern history of the United States. There's been a lot of voluntary compliance. It didn't occur to anybody that you could even do these things. Nobody even wanted to, not even Richard Nixon, really. And when they were tested, they proved weak.

But what the second thing we're going to discover is the instrumentalities of power that Trump wants to use are also weak. So let's say he sends forward Kash Patel as his attorney general. So the Republicans may have, at best, 51 senators. I don't know about at best. How many at best? Well, they get West Virginia, that's 50. They get Ohio and Montana, 52. You win one of these other states, Nevada, maybe 53. I think 53 is a realistic number. Okay, so let's say they have 53, and let's say they have a slim, slim, slim margin in the House of Representatives. Now you try to cram through a

January 6th conspiracy as Attorney General. Is there not going to be a filibuster? Is there not going to be chaos? Is that not going to be issue number one? Is there not going to be protracted debate? And as Trump discovered with his Federal Reserve appointees in his first administration, people get nervous and defect. But even supposing they hold fast, and it still is going to take months and months and months to cram this project through. In the meantime, Trump's legal difficulties don't give him a lot of margin for time. He may be convicted. The trials are going to be beginning. They may be completed.

So he's going to have to do his sabotage with non-confirmed people. Are there not resignations? Does the system work? And by the way, what does the governor of New York and the governor of Georgia say when the federal government starts saying, and by the way, we want you to pardon Trump for his state criminal convictions? The system just spins because, I mean, there are levers, but installing the levers is going to be hard. And then pulling the levers, they may not be connected to the mechanisms that Trump needs them to be connected to. Which is not to say it won't be a very, very bad situation.

But this is not going to look like a smooth consolidation of autocratic power. It is going to look like just months of chaos and protest and mess. I mean, it's good news for all of America's enemies, because the government will not be able to do anything. Maybe passports will continue to be issued. Air traffic control, I assume, continues to work. But yeah, Ukraine will be sold out. Israel will find itself alone and all kinds of other allies. And Mexican democracy, by the way, this will be a green light to completely destroy Mexican democracy with implications for Latin America, the region that really should be America's top geopolitical concern and somehow

never is because we managed to keep it just stable enough that we don't have to think about what's going on in our neighbors' houses. One of the things that you mentioned in the lengthy discussion about the potential instabilities and the concerns is the Supreme Court credibility. We had a new story from the Times this morning where the Alito neighbor is actually interviewed. You'll be surprised to find out, I know I was, that the story about turning the flag upside down at the home because Martha Ann Alito was called the C word was not actually accurate and that the hostile exchange with the neighbor, which included a police call apparently, that happened a month later. So, curious your thoughts about that and just maybe to expand on your aside from earlier about the

questions of Supreme Court legitimacy. Well, I have a speculative thought and a hard thought. When I began to hear this story, I had somewhat more sympathy for the Alito family than I do now, because it felt to me like alcohol was a factor in a lot of these activities. A little armchair psychology to determine who's a drunkard or not. We've already got Vincente Fox, Mrs. Alito. Anybody else you want to throw out there as a possible retiree? I think it's a popular pastime. And I think it affects people in ways that it's very difficult for American media institutions to report on because it's always speculative and they don't like to do it. And they have properly strong boundaries about people's private lives. But the way that these disputes ran out of control, but I think we're now in a

situation where it looks like a justice of the Supreme Court confronted with an embarrassing, but not overwhelmingly disabling problem, responded to it by telling lies. As he has responded to other embarrassing, but not crushingly like his salmon trips and so on and not none of these are good they're not the end of the world they're in judgment i'll stop i'll stop going on free harlan crow salmon fishing trips i'll pay for my own vacations now you make a good point here you make a good point here or or even just you know yes i did it i'm not ashamed you know other judges have done other things and I believed I was in the right and I'm going to continue to do it. But the error in judgment is much less important than lying. And smearing people while you lie also. Smearing the media. Yeah. Yeah. Like the

idea, you're not chosen here because of your commanding executive ability. You're not chosen because of your, as the way the people in the executive branch are. You're not chosen because of your people pleasing ways, like the legislators. You're chosen because of your integrity. And whatever you may think, most of you aren't that much smarter than any other 2,000 people who could do this job as well or better than you. Maybe 5,000 people could do the job as well or better than you. You're chosen because you're presumed to be people of the highest integrity. And if you don't have that, why should anybody listen to you? So when

you Samuel Alito then say, I've been searching the annals of the convention of 1787, and I have decided that contrary to what most people think, they did intend to give the president the power to pardon himself. We need to know that you're on the level. And if we can't trust that you're on the level, then why should your opinion about 1787 count more than the actual historians who've studied it and know it 100 times better than you do? I wrote this big article for The Atlantic about the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. I won't detain you on the article, but there's an answer. Honestly, since we already did Mexico, I do not think we can do Woodrow Wilson, but I did, I had prepped to do a whole Woodrow Wilson segment with you the last time we were on. We just, to fit in. So maybe in 2025, we can do Woodrow Wilson.

Here's the point of the story. So Woodrow Wilson is a demon figure on the American right for a lot of reasons. In the opinion in which the Supreme Court struck down EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, there is a concurrence by Neil Gorsuch with this lengthy personal diatribe against Woodrow Wilson. From my article, I read the footnote and I then began to reverse engineer how was this thing written? And what you see is whoever wrote this footnote, whether Gorsuch himself or the clerk, went to Glenn Beck's book and took a bunch of quotes from Glenn Beck's book and crammed them in and presented them. I mean, this is the kind of garbage history they do at the Supreme Court. If you then put the quotes back into context, they're not great, but they're not as

bad as they're made out to be. And pretty clearly, the person who wrote this footnote either willfully disregarded or was never aware of the first place of the context because they were relying on secondary or tertiary material. Are you implying that Glenn Beck did not use a researcher of the highest order for this book? So Gorsuch relying on a researcher who relied on Glenn Beck, who in turn relied on some crackpot at the Claremont Institute, who in turn, okay. So this is all going to come up with the self-pardoning. Because does the president of the power self-pardon? Never been presented before. And the question is going to be, is Samuel Alito's work on this question trustworthy?

Is it a work of integrity? Is it at least good for even if you don't like it is a good faith work? Well, if he lies about this stupid flag incident, how can you trust him? And if you can't trust him, why are you listening to him? Is there more of you than there are of him? As Hamilton said in the Federalist paper, the Supreme Court only has judgment. That's all it's got. And you can't trust their judgment.

Why do you listen to them? They have nothing. What do you think about the delay on, you know, this question of, you know, whether, you know, Trump was immune from prosecution in his presidency? Like, what do you think that it was reasonable? Because, you know, the defense argument of the Supreme Court is, you know, that John Roberts is like, well, we should take this opportunity, you know, to actually, you know, carve out where the lines are. Do you trust that that's right? Do you think that there's a delay happening? I think two things are coming together. I think there are at least two bad faith actors on the Supreme Court on this question who actually just want to just want, what's the answer where Trump wins? Can we just get to the Trump wins?

Right. And then I think Roberts's core motivation is leave me out of this. Just leave me out. I'm not for Trump. I'm not against him. I'm just trying to steer my little bureaucracy through these gales. And he's got, I think, a complete bureaucratic protection mission in mind. But the idea we're writing a statement for the age, that's not how these things are done. That's the worst approach to this. You can't write a statement for the age, that's not how these things are done. That's the worst approach to this.

You can't write a statement for the ages on what do we do in this extreme case. When the courts have in the past had to deal with presidential liability, Nixon versus Fitzgerald, which asked the question whether the president was civilly liable for official act. The Supreme Court answered that in the narrowest possible way. They said the president was not liable in civil court for his official acts. We don't say anything about his criminal liability and we don't say anything about his unofficial acts. We're just saying that if you're a disgruntled federal employee who wants to sue the president personally because the government did something you don't like, no, you can't sue the president personally because the government did something you don't

like. That's it. That's the opinion. And then a century from now, when there's a real case or controversy involving the next question, we will leave it to our successors to sell those other. And then indeed, the Clinton case comes out. Well, what if the act is not official? What if it's flashing your generals at a government employee? Okay, that's clearly not an official. And then the Supreme Court has said, okay. For Lyndon B. Johnson, that actually wasn't an official act, but we'll set that aside. So we have Nixon versus Fitzgerald that said one thing about one tiny set of presidential actions. And the Clinton cases, which said another thing about over the span of a quarter century, we have two rules. No liability, civil liability for official acts. Yes, liability sometimes for unofficial acts.

And no statement ever about criminal acts. So the correct answer is when you get the Trump case, you deal with the question narrowly presented. The argument is we don't want some horseshoe crackpot trying to haul President Obama into court because he used drones in a way that some people don't like. Those are official acts of the United States, and the right way to deal with Obama using drones is to run somebody against them. We're not going to haul them in front of some criminal tribunal because the drone fired by the military chain of command killed somebody. So I get that point. Clearly overthrowing the Constitution of the United States is not an official act of the president. Or maybe there's a factual finding. Maybe it is. But the courts should say, you can have an argument about whether

this was an official act or not. If it's an unofficial act, which is certainly what it looks like, then we will settle the question of whether an ex-president can have criminal life. And that's a narrow question, like the Fitzgerald and Clinton question. Sorry, too, for going on so long about this. But I don't think it's a good faith response that we need to deliver an answer for the ages, and that will unfortunately take us into 2025. Sorry. No, it's good. I like having that longer sense, because I think that there is a sense from people in

the center, you know, for people of good faith to like, just look at some of the, you know, more hysterical responses to the Supreme Court on the left. And it's just like, oh, they, you know, they, this is illegitimate, they should be recused and not consider the more serious underlying question about how they've undermined their credibility. A key way to keep your mental health on social media is try to avoid arguments about arguments. So there is a school of thought, and we can name the people who do it, who say, so somebody raised the point and said, well, there's something, yeah, there's some lunatic on Twitter presented a hysterical version of this thing

that's an argument about an argument just deal with the argument that is wonderful advice that we should all take and uh we'll learn to pull out that clip to use at a later date uh maybe a self-reprimand of the host of the podcast the other failure of the host of this podcast is we're now about 30 plus minutes in and I haven't asked you about the trial that is actually ongoing today. So right now as we speak, the jury's been given instructions by Judge Mershon. We had in the bulwark, Mark Caputo reported that the Trump team at this point is pretty negative on their chances. They're pitting their hopes on one juror because of a body language doctor that said that

this juror was very excited when J.D. Vance walked into the room. I will say very few people get very excited when J.D. Vance walks into the room these days. So there's maybe something to that. I'm wondering what your thoughts are now that the trial is concluded, just on the veracity of it, potential impact, just run wild. Any big picture thoughts on the trial? I've never had a good feeling about this trial. I wrote it when it started, when the indictments came down, I've never had a good feeling about it. And it's unfortunate that the important trials got, Trump was able to successfully delay them. And so this is the trial. I think it's very imaginable that the way the trial results is the jury convicts him on, as I think viewers here know,

there's a two-step. You have to show first that he altered the business documents, and second that he did so for a criminal purpose. If you can prove that he altered the criminal documents, but you can't prove the criminal purpose, then it's just a misdemeanor. It's a misdemeanor. I have a bad feeling that that's where this is going to end up. It's just going to leave everyone sort of baffled as to why we underwent all of this. And I have a bad feeling too, in that the American system of government is quite good at dealing with the tawdry, sleazy aspects of the Trump presidency, and very bad at dealing with the parts that have been dangerous. I wonder if a jury doesn't have the same reaction that the John Edwards jury did when he was indicted for, and now not the same, but similar which is he did it he broke the law

the law is very clear we hesitate to send someone to prison because he wrote a check to a woman to cover up an affair and even though in trump's case the reason he covered up the affair was not to save his marriage as it was for john edwards but to deceive the public which is obvious it's an obvious difference because john edwards this was happening in real time and Donald Trump was paying off somebody that he slept with 10 years prior. You know, like if it was to save the marriage, he would have done it in 2008 or 2009. Right.

And plus the contract that he has with Melania for her services, I'm sure was well drafted to include, you know, infidelity does not vitiate this contract for services. Not an official comment at the Bulwark. We will leave it in the podcast, though. I'll let Jeffrey Goldberg deal with that. Yeah, and he can sue his lawyer for malpractice if they didn't carve out the permission for that. So the jury may pause about actually sending a former president to prison over this. So I've never had a good feeling about this prosecution. I mean, people will be able to

say if he is indeed convicted and sentenced, we'll be able to say he's a criminal. But in the end, it's sort of missing the point because of all the terrible things that Donald Trump did in his career as a candidate, in his career as president, this is like not one of the top 10 worst. Or 100. Or 200 maybe. And the fact that this is the one that the system was able to hold him to account for, that is a sobering reflection on the defects of the system of justice. I have one more big topic to get to. This is also a big topic, but really quick, just because we're discussing Mexico and immigration. I am just always interested

in your thoughts on this as kind of a social moderate from the center-right, but who has, you know, pretty strong views on the importance of border security. And we talked about how the number of crossings is down this year. Biden, it seems like, has been mulling whether any executive action is appropriate for, I don't know, years now, for a long time. Is it too late for him to do anything? You know, if they called you, would you have any advice for them on what they can do at this late date about the border?

Ideally, in January 21, you don't drop the Trump enforcement actions. Failing that at this point, you message your intentions. As we've seen with the people remain upset about prices, even as inflation subsides, they want to know the direction, they want to know your attitude. So a strong law and order message on the border could help. But you know, he's got a more fundamental problem, which is Americans don't believe that this is the tightest labor market in the history of the United States, but the rest of the planet knows this is the tightest labor market in the history. The United States is putting a giant help wanted sign under three flashing red klaxons. And the whole world is hearing the sign labor is wanted in the United States. So there may not be a level of enforcement that can do much

about this the thing that makes me a border hawk is i've never believed this thing it's about asylum and the world's persecuted no they're coming to work which is maybe a social i mean it's commendable in the individual if you were them if you were in eritrea right now of course you'd be building the raft yourself and you know doing everything you could to get to some place where the job market, where your life was better. I don't blame anybody for making that decision. It's not morally wrong. It's also not morally wrong for countries to say, this number is fine, this number is too much, and to enforce it. But the driver, the fundamental cause of the problem is this super hot labor market.

And so part of the messaging that you need to say is, all you people are complaining about my economy. You know who doesn't think the economy is bad? The rest of earth who is trying to get desperate for their tiny piece of the Biden economy. I literally had a long argument with a Trumper on this podcast called Press Advance yesterday. We'll put it in the comments on this exact same point. So if people want a longer version

of how actually the economy is a magnet right now, they can listen to that. All right. I want to close with Israel, but we need a palate cleanser first. We have a new segment on the Bullwark podcast called The Right Stuff. It's this man, if you don't know him, Johnny McEntee. He's going to be in charge of the hiring and firing of the next Trump administration. He also runs a dating website called The Right Stuff for conservatives looking for other

conservatives. Problem with the site is that it's mostly men on it. And so the site has not done that well. But his social media accounts promoting the site has done quite well. And he's put up a couple of his recent TikToks I just want to share with you. Women really saw their husbands come back from 12 hours of work miserable and tired and thought gee i want to do that too how about the other one let's listen to the other one so a man who doesn't want to take care of his kid is a deadbeat dad but a woman who doesn't want to is pro-choice. Got it. What, is this giving you hope or dread that

a man like that would be a prime figure in a Trump 2.0? Well, I haven't been on a date since the Reagan administration, so I'm maybe not the best person to turn to for comment on this. It is a little shocking that this is the MAGA youth. Wasn't he also

the person who fired the Secretary of Defense? He was, yeah. That's him. We're talking about messaging. Maybe messaging for the Trump administration. You know, there are a lot of places in America where you hear a lot of, like, petty naysaying about experience and qualifications before you can have a senior job. Come to work in the Trump administration, where you can be 22, totally unqualified. And so long as the president thinks you look the way he likes young people to look, you can be in charge of the Defense Department, or the Justice Department, or everything. By the way, brains and education not required. Blonde hair required.

Football can throw a good spiral. I will say maybe the counter argument for the Biden administration this fall and for the youth that seem to not be as attracted to them as they've hoped in recent polling is that that person will be in charge of the defense department it's an argument that works for both sides all right i want to do uh i want to do israel with some slight differences on this my case here i want to restate for people sometimes people hear what they want to hear is not that what israel has been doing is not righteous. It is. Getting rid of Hamas is a righteous goal, especially in the face of the attack

and in the face of the amount of hostages that still remain. But the way that they've conducted the war is alienated allies. They never really had a chance with Europe, but it's alienated our European allies, in addition to the ones in the region. He seems to be antagonizing the Biden administration as much as possible. They're unwilling to offer a post-war plan. They've had minimal successes lately in the region. He seems to be antagonizing the Biden administration as much as possible.

They're unwilling to offer a post-war plan. They've had minimal successes lately in actually getting hostages. So even if the goal is righteous, is the damage here, both on a humanitarian and strategic side of things, making this not worth the continued effort? So what's the question? The question is what you think it is. You think that what they're doing in Rafah is worth the continued push to try to eradicate Hamas. While it might be a righteous goal, I don't know that they have a strategy to implement it that is effective or smart. So I don't have a military opinion. I have no opinion on the tactics of this. I just don't have anything like the information or knowledge. I remember about a decade ago, taking my son on a tour of the front line of the first world war, where two of his great grandfathers fought. And the way the first world war is often taught is

these generals were morons. They sacrificed men needlessly. And I, the first world war is long in a serious study of mine. And the thing I want to impress on my son in memory of his two great grandfathers was sometimes the problems are just too hard. And it doesn't matter how smart you are. The problem is too hard. And the tools you need to solve the problem haven't been invented yet. Someday they will be. Someday there will be planes and trucks and tanks. But right now there aren't any.

The only way through is you have to go on foot through the barbed wire or let the other guy win. And those are your choices. I defer to the leadership of the Israeli military that these problems are really hard and that the reason wars are to be avoided is because they are never surgical. And the tragedy of all of this is the people who started this war, Hamas, their strategic goal was to maximize human suffering because Hamas can't destroy Israel. Maybe an Iranian nuclear strike could, but there's no other military force in the region that can destroy Israel. So what's the point of starting the stupid war? What are you going to do? The point is, well, we want to cause as much misery as we can in the hope of changing the political

dynamic. And then there's a lot of misery. You think, well, congratulations, you guys got what you wanted, but it's not, I don't know if there was a way for Israel to manage the level of misery. The last thing I want to say, because I know you've had some words with, I want to say to some of my friends in the pro-Israel world, I don't think they appreciate how solid a friend Israel Biden has been. President Reagan, of sainted memory, never visited Israel once during his time as president. The first president ever to sell arms of any kind to Israel was John F. Kennedy. The first president ever to sell arms of any kind to Israel was John F. Kennedy. The first president to offer military aid without cash was Richard Nixon. Reagan never visited. The idea that American warships fired weapons to knock down drones heading toward Israel,

drones and missiles, that is unprecedented. The idea that an American president would visit Israel during wartime, not just once, twice, at tremendous risk to his own safety, the prolonged backing. During the 1982 Lebanon War, Jews get very upset when some professor somewhere calls, says that this is a genocide or a Holocaust. President Reagan, during the 1982 War, compared what Israel was doing to defend itself in Lebanon to the Holocaust. So people need to adjust their markers to know how solid Biden has been. And he's not done absolutely everything you would want exactly the way you would want it done. Call me when you get a president who does everything you want exactly the way you want it.

That would be a remarkable thing in any vector. But he's done a lot. And I think he deserves a lot of thanks from people who care about Israel. 100% agree with that. One, just one more item on this news of the week. I saw you share, there was a tweet from a former Israeli government spokesperson. There was this discussion this week, I think, where you can see how this stuff gets very heated, right? Where there's an IDF attack, kills two Hamas leaders. The immediate response is it was in a humanitarian evacuation area. It seems like what actually happened was they bombed outside of the humanitarian evacuation area, killed two Hamas leaders, but it's such a dense area

that there was some other weapons cache or something that exploded, causing a fire that resulted in deaths in the evacuation area. And I think this speaks to your point. Across every vector, to use your word, this is much more complicated than I think that the people that are on social media that are condemning Biden

or condemning one side or the other want to make this seem. Well, this is an unusual war in that one combatant has, as its top tactical goal and even its top strategic goal, maximize the number of casualties among its own people, or at least the representation of them. So I try to avoid commenting on these individual tragedies before you know the details, which takes often weeks. And the war opened with accusations that Israel had struck a hospital. Well, it turned out the hospital had been struck by falling debris from

a Hamas rocket, and the number of casualties had been exaggerated by Hamas people from their own rocket. And whether this fire was caused by ricochet from the Israeli strike, some meters away, or whether it was caused by Hamas's own weaponry striking inadvertently or advertently striking its own weapons cache, someday the answer will be known. Gosh, when and if the US government closes down TikTok, boy, will we all be so much smarter. We can leave it there. David Frum, as I mentioned, rough month for Canadians. Seems like possibly a rough month or time ahead for the Mexicans. And we've been discussing a lot of our problems here in America. So I don't know, some instability

in North America. I'm grateful that we have David Frum to give us guidance and wisdom as we travel through these turbulent times. Hope to have you back on the Bullwark podcast soon. Thanks for your hospitality as always. Bye-bye. We'll see you back here tomorrow, possibly with an update on the Trump trial with Ben Wittes, possibly not. We'll be playing it by the seat of our pants this week as we await the jury to come back. We'll see you all then. Peace. I don't know, I don't know, oh where to begin We are North Americans

And for those of you who still think we're from England We're not, no We've been on planes and on trains till we think we might die Far from North America Where the buildings are old and you might have lots of mimes Uh-huh, uh-huh Where the buildings are old and you might have lots of mimes I hate the feeling when you're looking at me that way Cause we're North Americans But if we act all shy, it'll make it okay

Makes it go away I don't know, I don't know, oh, where to begin When we're North American But in the end make the same mistakes all over again Come on, North America We are North America's gun Oh, we are North America's gun We are North America

We are North America's gun We are North America Take me back to St. Thomas North America's gone Where we could be and have a world of a million real fans North America Where the DJ gigs are his friend Here in North America's gone But don't blame the Canadians The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.