The Bulwark Podcast - David Frum: Losing the Dominance Primary

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

DeSantis claims he doesn't back down, but most of the time, he is flinching and cowering—and now he's allowing Musk to push him around. Plus, Trump v Kamala, felons can't vote for themselves in Florida, and the Russians fighting for Ukraine. David Frum joins Charlie Sykes today. show notes: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/joe-biden-health-versus-donald-trump-indictments/673989/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/durham-report-fbi-trump-russia/674088/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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David, I felt that we needed to have a soundtrack for today's show, a special soundtrack before we get into the news of the day. Go for it. Here it is. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide. There is no escape from this reality. I mean, where do we start, David? Donald Trump gets his felony court date. The country is inching toward default. And Ron DeSantis, the governor of the state of Florida, has chosen to launch his candidacy for president with Elon Musk on Twitter. Can we start there? That Ron DeSantis is going to launch with Elon Musk? I've had an observation about the way DeSantis communicates, and it struck me when he did an earlier pre-launch online ad. I watched it and realized it was three minutes long. Every encounter between DeSantis and a voter in this ad was mediated through a screen,

that the voter would see DeSantis on a telephone, they would watch him on a TV screen, even when the voter, they photoshopped DeSantis in apparent conversation with actual voters but when you look more closely you realize that the voters were looking at each other not at him and in fact they were holding screens in front of their faces as they talked to him. In this new ad that is I guess 24 hours before launch DeSantis is walking toward a stage and we hear a speech by a voiceover. In a British accent. In a British accent. I think it's something that really happened. This was at some rally. In each case, there's an immediate motive. In the latest ad, the motive is to conceal that DeSantis has an uncompelling voice. In the previous ad,

it was to conceal the fact that DeSantis' actual real-life encounters with voters are few and look awkward. But the ad then sends a subliminal message, which is that DeSantis is someone you do not encounter directly. You encounter him through the prism of media and launching a campaign, not in front of a cheering throng, but in a Twitter spaces where I don't think there's video in a Twitter spaces is a very disassociated kind of event. You're not going to watch this on your television at home. There's no one there. It's not for people in any in Iowa or New Hampshire. It is something to appreciate at two or three removes from the actual person.

Well, and it has the obvious advantage for Ron DeSantis. I mean, there's a Trump advisor who told NBC News, announcing on Twitter is perfect for Ron DeSantis. This way, he doesn't have to interact with people and the media can't ask him any questions. I suppose that's right. It also gives you deniability if the numbers are low. So when Donald Trump did his town hall on CNN, for all the criticism that format got and much of the criticism was deserved, something like three and a quarter million people watch that. That's not a colossal audience, but it's quite

a big one. It's about five times what CNN normally gets. Donald Trump can truthfully say that because of him, CNN went from its usual 600, 700, maybe 800,000 people in prime time to three and a quarter million. So if 48,000 people listen to the Twitter spaces, DeSantis can say, look, we're not doing like with like here. It's not that we're on TV. Anyway, it's at six o'clock Eastern time during the working day everywhere else in the country. So of course no one watched. But what you're hearing more and more from the DeSantis campaign is they have a series of often reasonable explanations of why they're not succeeding. Okay, those are all good explanations

for why you're not succeeding, but at some point you have to start succeeding. Yeah, that would be a good idea. So David, in my newsletter this morning, I started off by saying, can we just leave aside the rank punditry just for a second and just ponder this bizarre twist that the showrunners have thrown at us here that we have a major candidate for president of the United States who is paying court to this petulant man-child who spent the last few months posting poop emojis, taking advice from somebody called Cat Turd and destroying a social media platform. And he is now a kingmaker and politicians indulge his fantasy. So we're going to see this man who wants to be president of the United States, either hear him or see him saying, good to be here with you, Elon.

We can get to the rank punditry, if you like, why he thinks this is a good idea. I want to jump ahead to something that you and I discussed that we would discuss today, perhaps, and that is Trump doubling down on his abuse of E. Jean Carroll. So E. Jean Carroll is the New York writer who brought a lawsuit against defamation for Donald Trump, won a substantial verdict, and Trump is now defaming her again. So let's compare and contrast these two things. What is the message you're constantly getting from Donald Trump won a substantial verdict, and Trump is now defaming her again. So let's compare and contrast these two things. What is the message you're constantly getting from Donald Trump, which is, I may be stupid, I may be incompetent, I may be lazy, I may be crooked, but I am the most aggressive person in American politics. And even when I lose a defamation suit, I repeat the defamation because there is nothing you can do.

And what is DeSantis? DeSantis' message is, I won't backamation because there is nothing you can do. They redefine. And what is DeSantis? DeSantis' message is, I won't back down. I am so tough. But every time we encounter him in the presidential campaign context, we see him flinching and cowering a little bit, turning to Elon Musk for protection, refusing to engage with Donald Trump. If you premise that the Republican electorate of the 2020s, above all things, rewards dominance, at every turn, Donald Trump is displaying dominance.

And DeSantis is displaying dominance aversion. And so are the others. There's been this pundit argument, is it better to sort of deflect Trump and ignore him or to fight him? And there are a lot of smart people who make the point, well, why don't you let him burn himself out and let him throw his punches? But once you understand you're in a dominance contest, you can't do that. There is just one question. Who is mean enough and tough enough to deal with Trump? And that doesn't mean responding to every provocation because there isn't world enough

in time to do that. But at some point, you have to stand up and say, no more, and hit back and hit back so hard that you establish your credit with Republicans as someone who can't be pushed around. There's this theory that every campaign has a secret slogan that defines what it's really about. And the DeSantis secret slogan was, weak on dictators, tough on Mickey Mouse. But it's also weak on Trump, tough on Mickey Mouse. Well, this is a great point about the fight for dominance, because if there's one moment in a presidential campaign where you want to project power and dominance, it is that moment you announced that you want to be the president of the United States. And what is Ron DeSantis doing? He is diminishing himself, first of all, by going to a shrinking,

somewhat obscure website. And I mean, not just Twitter, but Twitter spaces. And then he's going to be in the shadow of Elon Musk. So he is diminished. I think I can understand the logic. I mean, he knows that he needs a reset. He really needs to do something dramatic. He needs to create a lot of buzz. He needs to reinforce, you know, his status with the, you know, the online far right. And this is consistent with this pattern and practice of, you know, co-opting the based wing of the party. And he knows that embracing Elon Musk is going to create rifts within the MAGA verse and it's going to trigger Trump down in Mar-a-Lago. What puzzles me about this is first, your point, which I think is number one, is that it certainly does not project dominance. The second, the risks that come with the possible rewards. I mean, at minimum, he's going to be tied to and he's going to be asked about, you know, Musk's latest crazy thing that he says, you know, it's immoral days ago that Elon Musk is emoting over how great Tim Scott

was. Tomorrow, he could decide that he's done with Ron DeSantis. I mean, he could throw him under the bus. He could cut him off at the knees. And DeSantis would be well and truly screwed if a week from now, Elon Musk says, yeah, I gave the guy a shot. And yeah, he's just not all that. He is now a hostage of Elon Musk, this erratic man-child. Those are all great points. And just to amplify something you said at the very beginning of that important presentation, the DeSantis campaign offers reasons for what it does, but they're never reasons. They're rationalizations. What it does at every point is take the coward's way out. And then afterwards, it explains why that

was actually the smart thing to do and sometimes it is the smart thing to do so you don't have to fight every fight but in the end we say you know what all of these things add up to what you are displaying is you are one of nature's followers at some level stephen crowder and ben shapiro are the campaign managers for the DeSantis campaign. Any stupid, petty thing that arises on the internet, I remain to this day a reasonably socially conservative person. Some of these things are things I even kind of agree with, but in the scheme of things, how important are they? This is just internet flotsam and jetsam. The country is days away from a potential default on its debt. Does DeSantis have anything to say to that?

Tens of millions of Americans are going to pay less for insulin, which is a thing they will like, because of a massive government intervention in the pharmaceutical industry. Is that good or is that bad? The war in Ukraine looks like it's entering a new phase. There's ever-increasing Chinese aggression toward its neighbors. Where is the big Ron DeSantis foreign policy speech? Where is the one moment where he shows, if you don't watch all these weirdos on the too spicy for YouTube video channels, the people who watch baseball and not hate video, what has he got for them? He doesn't talk to us at all. Most of American life is a completely alien space to this

campaign. And yeah, they've got explanations, but they're rationalizations, not reasons. It seems deeply unserious, except if you live in this world of the flotsam and jetsam of the internet. And maybe the calculation he's made is that that's where the influencers are. That is where the Republican base is. The Republican base is frankly not interested in the very serious issues, the real serious threats. I mean, they're willing to throw a rhetorical bomb once in a while, but what they are most interested in are these petty, trivial culture war fights. So, I mean, maybe that is the id of the Republican voters who will decide who gets the nomination. But there's another rationalization. We're testing that right now. And what we're discovering is not

true. Not true. The guy who bet everything on the audience for Too Spicy for YouTube is discovering he's got about 18% of the Republican primary vote and dwindling. And the man who is beating his chest and taking random positions on issues, Donald Trump, is dominant because he looks like the Klan leader. And so these issues are all stand-ins for what this contest is really about. And at every turn, DeSantis has failed. And we can enter the space of how do you stand up to Trump within the context of Republican primary. There are a lot of things that you would do in a general election that wouldn't work in a primary, but there are things that would work in a primary, or anyway, you have to try because you're certain to lose. I mean, one of the things that is strange is as obnoxious and

provocative as the DeSantis campaign has been, it's actually been kind of a risk averse campaign because they've never been willing to say, look, we either beat Trump or we lose to Trump. And if we're going to beat Trump, we have to beat him. And if you're going to beat him, you have to go to his area of strength, which is he's the biggest, he's Leroy Brown. He's the meanest guy in town. And you have to do to Leroy Brown what was done to Leroy Brown in the Jim Croce song, which is leave him looking like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone. And if you can't do that, then Leroy Brown's going to do it to you, and you will look like the jigsaw puzzle with a lot of pieces gone. I think DeSantis needs to have that as his theme song. That would be good at his rallies.

So another weird element of this announcement today is, you know, DeSantis is sitting down and he's chatting with Elon Musk, but it's going to be moderated by a guy named David Sachs, who you are familiar with, but most of our listeners aren't. What's interesting about this choice is, I think one of the less successful moments of the DeSantis pre-campaign was when he blundered on Ukraine and seemed to suggest that he was going to bail on Ukraine. He tried to walk that back a little bit, but David Sachs is an open anti-Ukraine social activist bundler, troll. So, I mean, that's an interesting choice that he would launch his campaign with two guys who I would say are pretty clearly pro-Russia when it comes to this particular war. Well, it also tells me that Elon Musk dominated the discussion about the launch campaign because, I mean, supposing you're the DeSantis campaign manager. Look, we're going to announce

that the governor of one of our great states is running for president. Now, normally that's done in front of a cheering crowd. We're going to do it in front of an interviewer. Okay. He's the richest man in the United States and he owns an important media platform. Different, but maybe futuristic, possibly connected with space. Okay. Oh, and he wants to bring along his sidekick.

Also to ask him some questions. I have a friend. Can I bring my friend along? No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Carson, okay. Ed McMahon, no. And what happened there was DeSantis said, okay, Mr. Musk, you bring whoever you want.

That's exactly right. There's no alternative scenario here that Musk basically dictated. You want to be president of the United States? You have to be the man in charge. And DeSantis has shown us that every turn, he is a weakling. You can push him. You can't push him if you're a gay school teacher. But if you've got a couple hundred million dollars and you've got a mildly corrupt Florida real estate deal that you're trying to advance or some other scheme, you can push him. And he will take the pushing and stay pushed. And I've often thought that one of

the most profound moments I've ever seen in American politics occurred in the 1992 presidential race. This is the three-way race between the elder Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot. And the last of their debates was a town hall moderated by Carol Simpson of ABC. And they took questions. And one of the questions came from a woman, an older woman, who's obviously, if you watch the clip, terribly nervous at being on TV for the one and only time in her life. Her question was, I would like to ask each of the candidates how they personally have been affected by the deficit. So total panic. Deficit is very abstract. Of course, we're supposed to believe it's important. It's Ross Perot's big issue, but none of us are personally exactly affected by it. It's not in a way that it's easy to communicate. Anyway, so to cut the story short, Bush and Perot both flubbed the question. And then it's Clinton's turn. And Clinton says, takes one of, you know, that giant step toward her and projecting sort of emotional reassurance, this frightened person

says that nervous person. I'll answer your question, but first I need to ask you, how have you personally been affected by the deficit? And as the woman spoke more and more fluently, as she overcame her nervousness, it became clear she didn't mean the deficit. She meant the recession. And either she didn't know the difference, which is possible because these are technical terms, or just because she loved it because she's scared to be on TV in front of 80 million people. She made a mistake. And the lesson of that is the question you hear from the voter, when the voter enters the realm of politics, they're often speaking a foreign language, deficit, recession, things they don't know the meaning of. They mean my neighbor lost his job

or my husband lost his job. So you have to help them to translate from their language into the language of politics and then do the translation back. And you have to hear the question behind the question. And DeSantis keeps thinking that the question is, what are we going to do about this or that piece of internet flotsam? And he's never understood. The question is, are you big enough to take on Donald Trump?

Are you brave enough? We don't want you to take him on like some maniac. You want a maniac, we'll get Trump. But you have the kind of cold, steely authority that allows you to deal with this guy. And at every turn, DeSantis' message is, no, I don't. I don't. And I can't deal with Elon Musk. And I can't even say no to David Sachs.

Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day we remind you, folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not, go to thebulwark.com slash charlie. That's thebulwark.com forward slash charlie. We're going to get through this together, I promise. So let's talk about Donald Trump and what he is doing these days, the lack of impulse control now that he is in a different world. You know, I think it is worth pointing out for everybody who says, well, you know, nothing ever touches Donald Trump. Okay, that is true. That conventional wisdom is probably

correct. However, he's not in Twitter anymore. He's facing potential federal indictment. He's been indicted in New York. He has to give depositions in civil cases. And so over the last 24 hours, you get a trial date set in his criminal case in New York, the hush money case. The judge issues a contempt warning. You mark this on your calendar, March 25th, 2024 on your calendar, right in the middle of the Republican primary. He's going to go on trial, 34 counts of felonies. Wall Street Journal reporting the special counsel is wrapping up the Trump Mar-a-Lago probe. E. Jean Carroll, we talked about this briefly, is seeking very substantial new damages after Trump again defamed her, called her a whack job in CNN town hall.

And Michael Cohen, his former lawyer, is commenting on all this and said he has zero confidence that Trump's going to obey the judge's order. Here he says, I have less than zero confidence. He gets blinded by anger, Cohen said Monday. Rational thought flies out the window when Trump gets angry. He's no different than a petulant child. And so he's basically saying, look, whatever the judge says, Donald Trump is not going to follow this. He doesn't think that these rules apply to him. So give me your sense of where Donald Trump is, because I think there is that default setting that nothing's going to matter, that he keeps getting stronger. However, he is in a world in which his lies actually have consequences, and there's no indication that he fully has taken that on board.

Right. Well, we have a habit of talking with Donald Trump purely in the context of his relationship to his base or to the Republican primary electorate, which is a little bigger than the base. And all the things we've just been saying about how this is a dominance contest, that applies to a certain subset of America. first contest. But after that subset, after he prevails or loses in that context, he then has to face a different election in which the questions are different. And that's in front of the big general election audience. And there is not a dominance contest. There are other things are at stake. There are questions of empathy and compassion and responsibility and reassuringness matter. Because it's so outrageous that Donald Trump is any kind of figure in national politics at all, because it's so embarrassing to all of us any kind of figure in national politics at all, because it's so embarrassing to all of us that he did serve as president, that we lose sight of the fact of just what an unpopular president he was and how he has always been a minority figure. From 2000 to 2020, six presidential elections, 12 major party nominees. After John McCain in the

catastrophic year of 2008, we're having both the Great Depression and the Vietnam War at the same time, and McCain is the party, the president, the second and third worst performing candidates for president were both Donald Trump. In his first outing in 2016, he got like half a point of the vote more than Michael Dukakis did in 1988. And we do not sort of spend lots of time pondering the mystic connection between Michael Dukakis and his base, although he had one, I'm sure. So what we're heading toward is this person who's always been a candidate of a minority of the country, now tangled in these additional legal problems. And they rally the alienated Republicans to him because they think that the system's unfair and

stacked against them and they should be in charge and they're not. And so every attack on him is an attack on them. But most people in this country respect the laws. Most people respect the operations of the criminal justice system. And if he ends up with indictments and convictions, this ex-president who's already weighted down by his unpopularity because of the many reasons he deserves to be unpopular is now going to have a whole bunch of new weights attached to him and will sink even lower. That's a great segue to two recent pieces that you wrote. So last month, you wrote a very sort of upbeat piece predicting a Biden blowout. And you argued, you know, the strong political fundamentals pointed to Biden's reelection, growing economy, rising

employment, Republican culture war gambits that are alienating crucial groups of the voters. But you wrote a more recent piece just a couple of weeks ago, identifying the X factors, the things that could maybe turn Biden's reelection upside down. So let's just walk through that, because I mean, I think that all the fundamentals do point to a Biden reelection. However, you know, life is full of contingencies and politics can take strange turns. So what are the unexpected events that might bump history off its predicted course? Also, to give you a glimpse of the writing process.

Yeah. The way that one, two piece happened is typically my wife will read my pieces before they go online and give me comments, but she doesn't always have time. And in this case, I wrote this piece about why I expected a Biden blowout and she didn't read it before it was published. And then over dinner, she said, okay, well, if you're wrong, why, this is the sort of thing she would say to me, if you are wrong, why would you be wrong? And I said, well, there were two things that could complicate it. And she said, you should have put that in the article. I said, okay, well, I will, I'll write another article. And the two things

that could complicate things are, one, Trump has these legal troubles. At that point, it was not impossible, although I think it is now very unlikely that they could have tripped him up on the way to the nomination and scrambled the field. And then there's the Biden health problem. If Trump had impulse control, the way for him to run the 2024 election is to accept that Biden has a big advantage over him, and he can't do that. But if he could, and if he could remember that Biden, in a one-on-one contest, Biden did beat him and will beat him again, his message should be, I'm not running against Joe Biden. Joe, love Joe. Joe's fine. Everyone likes Joe. Joe's vanilla ice cream. No one minds Joe. Joe's fine. If Joe were to live for the next

four years, we'd all be fine. But, and you're Donald Trump, so you can say things like this, we all know Joe's dying. So I'm not running against Joe. I'm running against Kamala. And then you refuse to talk about Biden for the next, and anytime they ask you, he's, I don't, I'm not running against Joe. We all know Joe's not going to be president. Kamala's going to be president and go after her. I think that's exactly right. And I think you're already seeing signs of that. Yeah, that's the play. And I'm not going to join in the piling on her because I'm sure she's fine.

But what Democrats will say is her numbers are bad. And they say, yeah, that's only because Americans are skeptical of a minority woman, both of whose parents were foreign born. I'm sorry, you can't say the voters were scolding you for your irrational attitudes. They're voters, they're full of irrational attitudes. If you know that being a woman is a discount and being a minority is a discount and having two foreign born parents is a discount, and you've got a candidate with all three of those discounts, that you just, that's a problem. And you should have thought of that in advance. And as vice president, she has hampered in what she can say to defend herself because she has to insist you're not running against me. You're running against Biden. And so every time she defends herself, she turns the subject back to she will counter inflame the worries about Biden's health because her message keeps in the spotlight that denial is as dangerous as an accusation.

It keeps the question of is Biden really going to be the next president if the Democrats win? You cited examples of how they would go after, you know, Kamala, including over race, sex and immigration. For example, the panel in California recommends reparations to black Americans blame Kamala, you know, disorder in the New York City subway, you know, blame Harris, trans influencer on a Bud Light can, you blame Harris. So she can become kind of the magnet for all of these complaints. And as you point out, this pressure is only going to increase as we get close to election day. As you point out, even a twisted ankle, a respiratory infection is going to bring doubts about Joe Biden's fitness to the fore. I mean, there's so

many opportunities for this, the focus to switch. And you already feel that the Republicans are gearing up to kind of not run, you know, they'll run against Biden, but it's really sort of Biden dead, Kamala alive as their hidden slogan, to go back to your hidden slogans before. No, that's going to be a big problem. And the Democrats have no choice but to say she's not a bug, she's a feature, but they have one more problem with her, which is, despite her biography, she was not a trusted favorite of the Democratic left. So she doesn't have as much running room as one might think to put distance between herself and the Democratic left. I mean, Barack Obama, who was a creature of

the Democratic left and had enormous credit with them, could then send culturally conservative message when he headed the ticket in 2008. He could campaign in churches. He could talk about the role of fathers. He could sound these, within his own ideological and tradition, he could sound themes. And it wouldn't trigger a mutiny. Whereas she has this problem because there's this feeling that she was a prosecutor. Remember the line against her in 2020, Kamala is a cop, said the party left. She actually spent a lot of her vice presidency building fences with party progressives and especially the cultural progressives. And so it's going to be hard for her in the campaign to say, yeah, how am I different from Joe?

I am tougher on crime than Joe. Okay. The other big X factor are Trump's legal problems. And again, so far, they've generated a rally among supporters sort of so far. You raise a very provocative question, though. It's mostly now that we know that the criminal case is going in March, and I saw this, but Trump appeared via video, and he was on mute, but he throws up his hands in frustration at the scheduled date and glowered at the camera. But you raised the possibility. Is it possible that when he comes here to Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention that he's wearing

an ankle bracelet? What? I think it's very possible. The DeSantis campaign has, I think, invested a lot of hope in the idea that the legal process will remove Trump on its own without DeSantis having to do anything. Indeed, allowing DeSantis to falsely pretend to be on Trump's side, even as the legal process does its work for him. That investment will not pay off. That investment of hope will not pay off. But it's going to be an issue. And I think one of its cultural legacies is going to be that we may see an intensifying alienation of Donald Trump's

core supporters from American society and American law. They may react to his legal troubles by saying, well, we just reject the whole legal system. And we've seen that pattern before, white Southerners after the Civil War, or the way in the big cities of the North, the corrupt bosses could survive because they appealed to immigrant groups who felt equally alienated from a legal system they interpreted as foreign to themselves. And as American society sort of fissures, this is a potential for Trump. And it could signal an enduring problem that could be a problem long after Trump himself departs the scene. You raised the, another X factor is whether a convicted Donald Trump is still a viable

candidate. You don't think that he would be in a general election? Yes. No, I don't think you can be a convict, especially if he remains a Florida resident. Donald Trump, convicted felon, cannot vote for himself in the state of Florida. He has lost his voting rights. He wants you to vote for him, but he can't vote for himself because he's a felon. This now seems like an old story, but it's not an old story on the right. You wrote extensively about the political fallout from the Durham report, which you described as a sinister flop. I agree with that, but in the right-wing media ecosystem, it was a very, very big deal. Fox News ran with it heavily. Donald Trump obviously is going to pound it. So give me your take on the Durham report and whether it's going to have any enduring

political fallout. Well, I wrote a short dialogue on Twitter that sort of summed up my reaction to it, which is, I imagine the Trump person saying, and what, sir, do you say to these? Slamming the cards on the desk. Yeah. These are a pair of twos. Oh, that's Trump derangement speaking. I win the pot. But these are twos. I win the pot, Trump derangement system, but these are twos. investigation in exactly the optimum way, and that they may have transited too quickly from

a preliminary to, you know, there are three stages, and there's stage one, which I forget, preliminary stage two, and full investigation of stage three, and arguably, perhaps they transitioned a little too quickly from stage two to three. On the other hand, when they got to stage three, they sent a lot of people to prison. They caught a lot of crooks. So the Republicans who like the Durham report are in a bit like a certain kind of defense attorney, where he's arguing, when you caught my client for driving with a trunk full of cocaine and machine guns, that traffic stop began by pulling him over for a busted taillight, and you had no right to do that. Maybe that busted taillight was an overreaction,

but the trunk was full of cocaine and machine guns. Yeah, you still have the machine guns and the cocaine. Okay, so let's switch gears a little bit to latest developments in the war in Ukraine. You tweeted a number of times about this report that some far-right anti-Putin Russian fighters who were aligned with Ukraine a couple of days ago stormed a border region claiming that they had deliberated a village. So what is going on here? Yeah, I won't pretend to understand that, except to say one of the talking points from the pro-Putin people is some of this group, whoever they are, turn out to have kind of unsavory histories. It is a remarkable thing that we are watching this horrific crime on the European

continent, and the people who are apologizing for the horrific crime are constantly like checkboxing. Are the Ukrainians responding in every case with perfect propriety? Do their fighters all have unblemished civil rights records? I just keep thinking of, you know, the things that we did in World War II, which was, by the way, World War II for the United States was a much, much less existential fight than this war is for Ukraine. I mean, the United States was building a better world for everybody. But the United States was never, except for Pearl Harbor, which was a raid, it was never invaded and occupied in the way that Ukraine was. You know, the British suspended elections for 10 years from 1935 to 1945.

In the darkest days of the war, in the summer of 1940, Churchill authorized campaigns of sabotage inside Nazi Europe. He famously sent out a memo saying he wanted forgers, bank robbers, and safecrackers for the special operations executives. So yeah, it may be that some of these Russian citizens who are leading these operations are going to be kind of unsavory types. They may not have perfect civil rights records, but this is a real war. And the start of nuclear warfare, the Russians are observing no limits. They're waging a war of atrocity. And we all want this war over. And the more pressure that can be put on Russia to end it, the faster the war ends and

the better for everybody, including, by the way, the Russian population, who have suffered horribly and will suffer more if this war continues any longer. So I'm interested in your thoughts about the decision finally to give the Ukrainians F-16s. Why now? Why not a year ago? I can't parse that. The Biden administration has been very cautious about a lot of these forms of aid. And some critics suggest that the Biden administration is ambivalent about the kind of outcome they want.. And some critics suggest that the Biden administration is ambivalent about the kind of outcome they want. Again, I can't read that. But I'm glad they're getting them. And my view has always been the arsenal should be open and everything they need, they should have. And this idea that by showing the credibility of the Western alliance,

we somehow make ourselves more vulnerable to China, I find absurd. The message that the Chinese authorities have to take from the Ukraine war is these democracies can really row together when they have to. And as disorganized and chaotic and unready as they seem in normal times, give them a crisis. And they're a little tougher than we think from reading our silence press and reading their open press. Well, and also it does appear that we are no longer engaging in the kind of self-deterrence that I think slowed down the aid a year ago. And I think that that's all positive. Okay, one last question, because you've written very extensively about this. A lot of us have been

bracing for a crisis at the border with the expiration of Title 42. You've written extensively on all of this. Give me your thoughts about where we're at on the border, because you very memorably wrote that, look, if liberals do not secure the border, we will turn to fascists to secure the border. I mean, this is one of those dilemmas. You either get this right or people will turn to the most extreme folks out there who are promising to do the job for you. I've always believed that unlimited immigration leads to political instability and you can have large immigration, but voters need to be assured that someone's in control and that their political choices matter and that they have a say in who's in their country. And one of the

reasons that illegal immigration and this kind of asylum wave, which is illegal immigration made legal through technicalities, are so destabilizing as people feel, I'm an American, I get a vote and who joins, I live in a condo, I should have some vote on who joins the condo board, and things feel out of control. I have been focusing recently on not just on the border, but on what is beyond the border, because the reason the end of Title 42 did not lead to a deluge of new immigration is the Biden people have been doing a deal with the Mexican government to act as America's police force. And the Mexican authorities are keeping Central Americans and people from even farther afield, there are many illegal immigrants from China,

from Africa, even from Russia, that were showing up at the southern border, and the Mexican authorities are now doing the policing. And that's helpful to the United States. But what this current Mexican government is asking in return is we want you, the United States, to look away as we destroy Mexican democracy. So we have much less of a problem at the border, but a worsening problem beyond the border of a Mexican regime that is heading in some very sinister authoritarian directions. Mexican democracy is quite new. Mexico has had elected governments going back now more than 100 years, but free and fair elections in Mexico started in the 1990s. And the first peaceful transfer of power from a president of one party to a president of another party in the entire history of the Mexican state took place in the year 2000. It's a quarter of a century of

peaceful transfers of power, 30 years of free and fair elections. And Mexico is suddenly going backward very fast under its current president, who is working toward unfair elections in the summer of 2024 that could spark a true crisis of authority inside Mexico. And the respite on border crisis that the Biden administration has got by cooperating with the president of Mexico, Lopez Obrador, may blow up into a bigger crisis in the summer of 24. David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

He is the author of 10 books, most recently, Trumpocalypse and Trumpocracy. David Frum, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. I always enjoy it. Always such a pleasure to be with you. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.