The Bulwark Podcast - David Frum: The GOP’s Obnoxiousness Problem

Episode Date: February 17, 2023

The text messages in the Dominion case show that Fox was intentionally pushing lies about 2020 — lies that led to violence. And Trump is one step away from wearing a T-shirt that says "Yes, I COUP'D!" David Frum joins Charlie Sykes for the weekend pod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. It is February 17th, 2023. And yes, I did get out with a snowblower yesterday and I will do later today. There's so many things going on right now. We have the redacted version of the Georgia Grand Jury Report, which Donald Trump apparently either didn't understand or is just completely delusional about. We have an epic dump of emails from Fox News showing what they knew and when they knew it about all those bizarre election laws. And of course, this was released as a result of the gazillion dollar lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. That's obviously not going well for them. Meanwhile, Nikki Haley is taking incoming fire from both the left and the right. There's one

issue that I want to focus in on where there's a real distinction between her and Donald Trump, even if she won't draw the distinction. So because it is Friday, we are fortunate enough to be joined by one of the most preeminent public intellectuals in America today, David Frum, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently Trumpocalypse and the Trumpocracy. Because you are one of the foremost public intellectuals in North America today, since you're talking to us from Ontario. David, I want to talk to you about the Austin Powers Swedish penis enlarger sketch. Is that okay? Well, I'm glad that was a comic setup rather than an actual biographical description. It's all in the timing. Okay, the, I'm glad that was a comic setup rather than an actual biographical description. It's all in the timing.

Okay, the reason I'm bringing this up is because a lot of people saw your tweet and are having a hard time understanding exactly the point here. Okay, so the Department of Justice said yesterday that a guy named Garrett Miller was actually wearing an I Was There January 6th t-shirt when the FBI came knocking on Inauguration Day. And the Department of Justice is saying, well, this shows that he was proud of his conduct. So here's a guy who answers the door. The FBI is trying to figure out, like, what was your involvement in January 6th? He's wearing the t-shirt that says I was there. And you tweeted out the Austin Powers Swedish penis enlarger sketch predicted everything. And I have to tell you, David, that I felt the need to go back and listen to the original Austin Powers Swedish penis enlarger sketch. And for the many, many, many listeners who may have forgotten about it,

here it is. Danger Powers Personal Effects. Actually, my name is Austin Powers. It says here, name Danger Powers. No, no, no, no, no. Danger's my middle name. Okay, Austin Danger Powers. One blue crushed velvet suit.

Hey, all right. One frilly lace cravat. There it is. One silver medallion with male symbol. One pair of Italian boots. Buongiorno, boys. One vinyl record album. Bert Bacharach plays his hits.

Hey, Bert. Yeah. One Swedish maid penis enlarger pump. That's not mine. One credit card receipt for Swedish-made penis enlarger signed by Austin Powers.

I'm telling you, baby, that's not mine. One warranty card for Swedish-made penis enlarger pump filled out by Austin Powers. I don't even know what this is. This sort of thing ain't my bag, baby. One book, Swedish made penis enlarger pumps and me. This sort of thing is my bag, baby. By Austin Powers.

Ah. Just sign the form. Okay, don't get heavy, man. i'll sign him just to get things moving i don't know that i can go on right now so david you think that sketch predicted everything please explain as one of the leading public intellectuals of our time i smile when you say that i am there's tears in my eyes. I think that's sketch. That's the master joke of the Trump era. So Donald Trump would, when he was president, would do something and people would say, he didn't mean it that way. And then he would confirm.

When I called for the death penalty for anybody who criticizes me on Facebook, I meant it. And people would be forced into this endless retreat. Well, yes, he didn't quite mean it. And then, yes, I quite meant it. And so there it is, one of his acolytes who took part in an attack on Congress, wearing the T-shirt, confessing it, and then trying to deny it to the FBI. That's the Swedish penis enlarger sketch. I mean, we are at that point in the series where Donald Trump is going to appear at Mar-a-Lago wearing a T-shirt saying, damn right I cooed. Yes. He really does make no secret of it at a certain point. I mean,

there is that pattern of denial, of shuffling, of rationalization. And then Donald Trump basically comes out and says, look, look, I actually wanted to overturn the election. We ought to suspend the constitution. Right, Kanye? And I think that's part of the problem. I think for people who, throw in words like normalize, it's like for six years, we've been going through this with Trump. But thank you for making it fresh again, because it's been many years since I saw the Austin Powers, Swedish penis and larger, which, as you state, does predict everything. So, okay, we are coming up on the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine. David, I was thinking of writing a piece today, and I backed off because of this huge Fox News email, Dom, about an area in which Nikki Haley could lead, but probably won't. I think people know that, you know, she's been asked several times, can you name one issue you disagree with Donald Trump? But you can't really come up with any.

But there is one issue where if she chose to draw a line, she might make a difference. And feel free to disagree with me on this. This is a short clip from her interview on The Today Show with Craig Melvin, who's specifically asking her about what she would do with Ukraine in contrast to what her former boss, Donald Trump, and what Kevin McCarthy has said. Let me just play that for you. Your former boss has said that he would stop supporting the Ukrainians if he's elected. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has said that the Ukrainians shouldn't get a blank check. Where do you stand? The war in Ukraine and Russia is not about Ukraine. It's about freedom. And it's a it's a war we have to win, because if Ukraine doesn't win this, Russia will go on to Poland

and the Baltics and then we'll have a world war. What we need to do and what Biden should have done was give them what they needed to win early. We're not putting troops on the ground. We are not writing blank checks. But when they need the ammunition to win, we should give it to them. President Zelensky's asked for F-16s. Should we give those to him? I think we give him what he needs to win, not money, but equipment. And you recognize there's some daylight between you and the other declared candidate for the Republican nomination on that front. There's some daylight between me and Joe Biden. OK, so, you know, she dances around that.

She just doesn't want to say that I disagree with Donald Trump. But David Frum, she clearly does differ from Donald Trump. And at some point, she has to draw that line. This is an area where she actually could make a difference, especially as the Republican backbone on Ukraine seems to weaken. What do you think of her answer there? Well, she's also drawing daylight between herself and another possible candidate, and that is Governor DeSantis of Florida, who has been conspicuously silent on this question. If I recall correctly, the only public statement he has ever made about the Russian invasion of Ukraine

is to criticize the Ukrainians for not being grateful enough to Elon Musk for providing Starlink to them at enormous expense and threatening periodically to cut it off if they use it in ways he doesn't like. And what makes the DeSantis silence so tremendously conspicuous, you might think, well, he's a governor. He doesn't have to comment on it. The day before, two days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there were about 200 or so American trainers working in Ukraine, helping Ukrainians master NATO-style equipment. Those 200-some trainers were from the Florida National Guard. And they were then evacuated from Ukraine to return to Florida on the brink of war. I assume the governor greeted them in some way.

But there's no photograph. There's no statement. There's no thank you to them for their work. It's kind of glaring omission when your own state's National Guard return and the governor of the state has nothing to say to them in these situations. And he's never said, as far as I know, anything in praise of his own National Guard and their important work in Ukraine. He has also not taken the Fox News, Donald Trump view of being on the Russian side, but he's trying to walk a line between being on the Russian side, which is where a lot of his core supporters in

the nomination, a lot of the people he wants to support him are, and the line that is espoused by Nikki Haley and Mitch McConnell and the historical traditions of the modern Republican Party to support an invaded democracy against an authoritarian invader. You know, you would think that at some point, if you want to lead the free world, you ought to lead on something. And this is going to be interesting kabuki dance, how someone like Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis manages to try to finesse disagreeing or perhaps agreeing with Trump on Ukraine. the difference over Ukraine is because, I mean, there are long historical analogies within the Republican Party where figures stood up against the isolationists and arguably made a tremendous difference. Wendell Willkie in 1940 certainly shaped, you know, the pre-war political environment as a Republican candidate for president who did not demagogue America first. And then after World War II, people like Senator

Arthur Vandenberg from Michigan, who, you know, rock-ribbed Republican, at one time an isolationist, decided that the party ought to embrace internationalism, and along with Dwight Eisenhower, certainly, you know, shaped the post-war world. Nikki Haley at this moment could, if she wanted to, make a real distinction between herself and Trump, as well as lead her party out of the wilderness. I just don't see that she has the willingness to do that because she's shown her just a willingness to chase whatever magabit of candies out there any given day. But I mean, there is an opportunity, and there's a real difference in the party right now on this issue. If Nikki Haley were a different kind of person, she would behave in different kinds of ways.

Since she's this kind of person, this is the way she behaves. But you're quite right. I mean, these are important battles, and they've been had before. I'll give you a couple of other historical examples that are maybe very precedent here. Gerald Ford, as a young man, had been an active member of America, an opponent of U.S. entry into the Second World War. Then when Pearl Harbor struck, he joined the U.S. Navy, had a distinguished career, and he came back, like many in this generation, aware of America's responsibilities. And the issue that drew him into politics in 1948 was he began in a Republican primary in Grand Rapids, I think it was, challenging an incumbent Republican for the Republican nomination precisely on this issue. And that's how he started his career.

In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower said to Robert Taft, who was sort of the intellectual leader of the Republican Party, I'll stand aside if you will endorse NATO. And Taft wouldn't, so Eisenhower challenged him and beat him and became president on an issue of supporting NATO. I think right now, in today's Republican Party, you see three main tendencies on these issues. There is the Mitch McConnell, absolute traditional Republican. We, together with our allies, have to stand up to dictators and invaders and aggressors. There's a tradition that is, I think, best represented by Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, which is he wants to stand up to invaders, but he doesn't want to do it with allies. Mike Pompeo's whole message is the allies are almost as much of a big problem as our adversaries. The allies will shut up and do what they're told. And that's partly because the overbearing

unpleasantness of his personality. That's, I think, just the way he deals with other people, period. But there's, I think, an intellectual conceit, which is he has very little respect for the allies and doesn't want to work with them. I'm guessing that's probably where Ron DeSantis really is. And then finally, there are the outright pro-Russians, which are represented in Fox News primetime, President Donald Trump, so many of his supporters. They despise Zelensky and the Ukrainians. They're broadly sympathetic to the Russians. Trump got his first impeachment by trying to blackmail Zelensky. And many people around him hate Zelensky so much because Zelensky

is really the world leader who can say he stood up to threats both from Trump and Putin. Not many people can say that. Not many Republicans can say that. So how are you feeling about the status of the war one year on? A year ago, we could never have predicted that Ukraine would have been able to put up this kind of resistance. I personally would not have predicted that NATO would have been so unified or that our Western allies, with the possible exception of Germany, would have stepped up so dramatically. But now, of course, we're hearing about a Russian offensive and the Ukrainians are, as Nikki Haley mentioned, you know, the Ukrainians are still saying that they do not have yet, they think, all of the tools they need to finish the job. So what is your sense about where the war is right now and whether or not we have done enough so far?

Let's start with the humanitarian tool, because this war is ultimately about a people and their desire to live and to live in decency and freedom. And my God, the scale of infliction of suffering is just so horrific. And I refer everybody to a piece edited by my colleagues Anne Applebaum and Natalie Gomeniuk in The Atlantic this week, where they just tallied the scale of torture and cruelty and murder inflicted on the Russian occupied zones in Ukraine, especially around Kyrgyzstan. This is like nothing seen since the days of Stalin, of just rounding up people, murdering them because they are suspected of being honest and honorable and decent and patriotic. I mean, they've done no overt act to support resistance to the Russian invaders,

but they were rounded up and tortured and killed. And this is the scale of the damage. I mean, the rebuilding of Ukraine is going to be a trillion dollar project, I think. And one of the fights I look forward to, I hope we can get to this as fast as possible, is the argument about how will we finance? How will we, the free world, collectively refinance the reconstruction of this damaged country? From a military point of view, as you said, and I'm no military expert, things look reassuring. I am very skeptical of these claims of a big Russian invasion. I'm not sure they've got – they may have the troops, they may have the weapons, but do they have the supply capacities?

Can they get fuel from point A to point B? Can they get food from point A to point B? I mean, there's no trick putting soldiers in a place. The trick is keeping them eating once they get to that place. And that, I think there's a lot of skepticism about the Russian ability. The fear is that the war bogs down into some kind of grinding stalemate that leaves Ukraine in perpetual ruin. And that's why they need the weapons, is to expel the invaders. My assumption about the way the war will end, the best case scenario is the Russian army just begins to crack apart and walk home.

You know, the 1917 scenario where they just realize they can't win. They're not being fed. They're not being paid. Their uniforms are in tatters. Their families at home are under economic pressure and they just go back and walk away and the Russian army then begins to disintegrate. That's the optimistic scenario. The pessimistic one is years of grinding horror and suffering for the Ukrainian people.

And of course, you know, whether the clock is running on the West's unity and American support, I'm feeling better about whether or not the United States is going to, you know, continue to support Ukraine. I think Mitch McConnell's statement is certainly strong. I'm feeling a little bit more optimistic about that, but I do think we're probably in for a grim slog. Although, as you were talking, I was thinking about that old adage about, you know, how do you go bankrupt, you know, gradually over a long period of time and then all at once, that the Russian army may lose and lose and then crack up all at once, that it may happen very, very abruptly if it happens. And that's in fact how armies do tend to disintegrate.

You know, the Russian army in the spring of 1917, the German army in the fall of 1918, they just start going home. About the Allies and about the American commitment, the Ukrainians have done the rest of the world this enormous service by calling us back to our own best nature. And while the Europeans have not been as generous with military aid, they don't have it, partly because they have their own divisions, their economic aid has been really substantial. And remember, Ukraine, it has a health service, it has old age pensions to pay and has no economy. So when you see old people, you think, how do they keep

eating? Well, the answer is they're getting pensions from the Ukrainian that are funded by European Union taxpayers. So the Europeans are not doing nothing. The United States has provided weapons and it needs to provide more and faster. We need to rebuild our own defense infrastructure so that we have the capacity to continue to fund them. We're going to be giving, I think when people see these numbers about the United States has given X billion dollars, you should be aware the United States has not written much of a check to the Ukrainian government. What it has done is provided equipment worth a certain amount on the books. But it's not like we're planning on using that equipment. The tanks and the Bradley fighting vehicles, those are things that were on their

way to being junked in five or seven years anyway. They were becoming obsolete. So the United States is giving away its last generations of equipment that otherwise were going to be turned into scrap metal and valuing them at a certain amount. And that's the number you're seeing. Yes, then eventually this equipment will have to be replaced, but it was going to be replaced by more futuristic equipment anyway. So speaking of the pro-Putin centers of political strength in this country, we have to start with Fox News. And Fox News had a terrible day yesterday. I wrote, you know, arguably they've had worse days than

yesterday. I can't think of one of them. I think that there are worse days ahead. They're being sued by Dominion Voting Systems for $1.6 billion. And the bar is pretty high to win a lawsuit like this. You have to show not just you were wrong, but that you acted in knowing disregard of the truth with malice. And what Dominion has done is put into a court filing, laying out in real granular detail its case that, and this is a direct quote from them, that literally dozens of people with editorial responsibility at Fox News, from the top of the organization to the producers of specific shows to the hosts themselves, acted with actual malice. And so NPR's headline, off the air, Fox News stars blasted the election fraud claims they peddled. CNN, Fox News stars and executives privately trashed Trump's election fraud claims court documents revealed. New York Times, Fox stars privately expressed disbelief about election fraud claims, calling it crazy

stuff. And then it goes on and on. Oh, and then of course the dazzling detail, Sean Hannity, Tucker Halston actually tried to get a Fox News reporter fired for daring to fact check a Trump tweet about Dominion and noting that there was no evidence of votes being destroyed. I mean, they actually wanted to get her fired. It's always dangerous to predict anything in the legal system, but it seems pretty clear that there's a lot of evidence that Fox knew, knew that it was pushing lies about Dominion and about the election, and yet they continue to smear the company. They continue to spread the conspiracy theories anyway, and it looks like Dominion has the receipts. How do you read this, David? There's a technical legal bit here that is

also, I think, interesting to me. The nature of the filing, and I think it was just unsealed yesterday. It was actually filed a few weeks ago. What this is, is a motion for summary judgment. What that means is Dominion is saying we should win even without a trial. What a motion for summary judgment is, it's a motion where you go to the judge and say, look, I've got a dispute here. And even if you, the judge, were to assume that every disputed fact between me and the defendant is settled in the defendant's favor. Everything that's uncertain, we say, okay, let's take it the defendant's way. I would still win because on the things that are not disputed, the case is so strongly in my favor that I would win even if you resolve every doubt in favor of the defendant. So that's what they filed here. Now, it seems to me pretty hard to win a libel case. American law is so pro-defendant on libel case, pretty hard to win a libel case. American law is so pro-defendant on libel case. Pretty hard to win

a libel case on summary judgment. But if anybody's ever going to do it, Dominion could. And by the way, this is not the only one of these libel cases that's going to be. There are lots of other people who are libeled in the course. There's another company that was also libeled. They've got a lawsuit. And there are many individuals. And just to give you an idea of the scale, as you say, they're asking for $1.6 billion. Fox News is a company. Its market capitalization, I just looked it up the other day, is about $30 billion. They're asking for 3% of the whole company.

I mean, that's a staggering blow. And these other claims that may follow, if Dominion wins, then a lot of these things are going to be adjudicated facts, and they don't have to be recontested all over again. I assume that at that point, Fox begins to pay settlements. You know, it's going to be a little bit like Exxon after the Valdez, you know, what's going to be left of the company after you pay all these settlements. You know, I would like to say this was also, you know, a fatal blow to its credibility, but its own audience might not have that same reaction. But just in terms of any quasi-journalistic entity, this is really a nightmare scenario. Peeling back this just sort of onion of the hypocrisy and the duplicity and the media malpractice and watching them shoot at each other and admit that they knew they were

putting false information, this is really an extraordinary moment, you know, particularly for people who have been concerned about, you know, media bias and everything. I mean, it feels as if they have been exposed in a pretty raw manner. Yes. What we have is their own words admitting to conscience, intentional lying that culminated in an act of violence on a massive scale against the Constitution of the United States. If Antifa ever did this in like a mayor's office in a Portland suburb, this is the national news organization organizing self-conscious, confessed lying on a massive scale that ended in violence. And I think there's one other point about this that needs to be made, which is why did they do this? And they did it partly out of ideology, more to fear, fear of Donald Trump and fear of their own audience. They were in a

situation where they were losing viewers to other more extreme networks. And rather than say, you know what, our viewers will come back, neither fear nor favor. We all in the media, and these days, so many of us are in the media, we all have much more information about what our audiences think than we used to do. There was a famous line of, I think, the founder of the first American department store, John Wanamaker, and he had this line, I know that half my advertising doesn't work. I just don't know which half. Well, we all now know. We know what our viewers, our listeners, our readers want. Many people live in systems where they depend directly on subventions, Patreon and other such things.

To maintain a sense of integrity in that universe is difficult because you know what the audience wants. And sometimes you have to say, whatever you want, this is what you need. And my responsibility here, we've all made a choice. There's a kind of non-market element to journalism. We say, I know what you want, but here's what you need. But Fox, one of the most powerful, wealthy corporations in America, met that test and said, you know what? We're not going to give our audience what they need. We're not going to give America what they need. This Constitution, these flags, they don't mean anything to us. We're going to contribute to a movement that led to an attempted coup against the Constitution because we are so scared that we might lose a few viewers to some

crazier network and our stock price might go down a little bit, as Tucker Carlson said. I think this is an absolutely crucial point that I think is sometimes misunderstood, because I think that sometimes there is the belief that these things are all top-down, when in fact, as you point out, what you have here is audience capture, where an organization like Fox is really terrified of losing its audience. And I think you see this in conservative talk radio. I mean, I certainly come from that particular world and watched how other hosts, when they realize that their audience is demanding a certain thing, they feel tremendous pressure to give it to them. And in the case of Fox News, a lot of this seems to have been fallout from their

call on election night that Donald Trump had lost Arizona. And there was so much blowback. There was so much anxiety. And Tucker Carlson, you know, writing to the higher ups, he's never seen anything like this. You know, our audience is absolutely, you know, livid that you accurately reported that Joe Biden had legitimately won Arizona and they're just, you know, their hair is on fire and we're going to lose them and they're going to go to OAN, they're going to go to Newsmax. And that is sort of the background noise for why they would have allowed people like Sidney Powell and others to go on their air and say things that in retrospect, actually, I don't think it needs to be in retrospect that they were bat shit crazy because they were apparently bat shit crazy at the time. But what we now know is that they knew that it was completely delusional and bat shit crazy at the time they were continuing to put them on the air because they needed to throw their audience what they wanted. So this is not Rupert Murdoch sitting in a castle in the sky saying, I want you to do X, Y, and Z. That may happen, but this is all about being afraid of that viewer in Missouri who might turn the channel. This is a dynamic that people need to understand. And it's a dynamic with large political effects. And we're going to see this

shortly play out in this new Congress. When Republicans get hold of something, they lack the self-limiting mechanism that allows them to use what they have and not chase what they don't have. And I'll give you a very concrete example. I mean, it's pretty obvious that over many years, Hunter Biden, the sad, addicted son of President Biden, and now President Biden, then Vice President before that Senator, tried to traffic on his father's name and represented himself as having connections with his father and picked up some hundreds of thousands of dollars of money that is not very nice to pick up. And in this, he follows a long, ignoble tradition of the sad relatives of presidents dating back to Ulysses Grant's in-laws, maybe even before that, where people, you know,

a relative gets president, this is your chance, and you try to pick up a little bit of unclean money that way. That's bad. And President Biden, Vice President Biden maybe didn't do as much about it to stop him as he should have. So that's a story. That's not good enough, however. So now we need to build the idea that Joe Biden is himself leading an international criminal syndicate and has chosen the sad son as his business partner. And the thesis of the investigations that we're about to have is going to be so crazy and so untrue and will collapse

and will alienate people because you'll have discover all these messages from Joe Biden expressing love and concern and upset about what his son has been up to and inability to stop him because he's a grown man. And it's going to be like what happened with the Clinton scandals in the 1990s. They were authentic Clinton scandals, but those were never enough

unless you made Bill and Hillary Clinton serial killers too on top of it. And no Republican is going to want to stand up or go on Fox and say, these are serious charges, but I've concluded that they're not true. Yes. Or that they are misleading because the moment you throw cold water on these, you know, precious conspiracy theories, you're going to be accused of selling out or being part of the deep state. And so there's a real fear of basically telling the truth about all this. So probably the best you can hope for is that they

just stop talking about it and they move on to something else. You know, let's talk about UFOs, or can we talk about Dr. Seuss again or something? They abdicate as a party of government. I mean, one of my longstanding pet reforms has been that any presidential relative who accepts Secret Service protection should publish their tax returns. That is, if you're close enough to the president that the public is paying to protect your life, then you owe the public an explanation of your financial activity. Now, the Republicans, after the thermonuclear world historical financial scandal that was the Trump family, are not in a position to do this. But it's a fair thing. Like the public is entitled to know if Hunter Biden,

you know, is trafficking on his father's reputation, and if he's accepting Secret Service protection from the public, then, you know, we need to have some insight into what, you know, who he's doing business with. That's not unreasonable. And that's the kind of thing that Congress is there to do and maybe score some partisan point along the way. But, of course, what happened in the Trump years was so thermonuclear worse. And, of course, because Hunter Biden's misconduct can't be traced back to his father, who did nothing wrong except be overindulgent. You know, we're not going to achieve anything. Let's talk about the emerging race for president. You had a really interesting piece in the March issue of The Atlantic about the role of performative obnoxiousness. You wrote about

the performative obnoxiousness that now pervades Republican messaging. And this is something I keep coming back to because, you know, many of us grew up in an era where we actually wanted to like politicians, right? I mean, you know, Ronald Reagan was warm, right? Bill Clinton had this down-home, you know, charm. You know, George H.W. Bush was, you write, Donald Trump delighted in name-calling, rudeness, and open disdain. And that has really, it's not just Donald Trump, it has really been imprinted in the DNA of Republicans. So you are seeing, you know, over and over and again, the Republican Party really embracing its own inner obnoxiousness. So let's talk about that because Ron DeSantis' theory of the case seems to be that Americans don't want somebody who's going to take care of their kids or that they want to have a beer with, that Americans want the meanest son of a bitch who's going to punch the people they don't like in the face. That is apparently his strategy.

I mean, have you ever seen Ron DeSantis looking like he's in a good mood? And looking like a good mood that is caused by something else than enjoying somebody else's suffering? I mean, have you ever seen Ron DeSantis looking like he's in a good mood and looking like a good mood that is caused by something else than enjoying somebody else's suffering? I mean, you occasionally see him smiling, but it's usually it's kind of like it's like a really mean smile. It's like the kind of smile you would see at a very bloody gladiatorial contest on the face of the audience. You know, wow, they really hacked the arms off that man. Ha ha. Enjoy that. I don't think it works, though. I mean, I think there's definitely a market for it. There are people who enjoy it. But I think part of the freakish quality of the 2016 election, where Trump won in the Electoral College, having lost the top

popular vote, and then persuaded Republicans that he'd actually not fluked into office on a lucky chance with the slimmest of possible votes, but that he actually won the historic victory, that he created a false impression that this works. I mean, one of the things that Republicans really, a data point I wish they would imprint on their brains is from the year 2000 through the year 2020, there are, I think, six presidential elections, 12 major party nominees in those six elections. If you were to rank them in their share of the vote, Donald Trump ranks 10th and 11th, second from the bottom and third from the bottom. The only candidate to do worse than Donald Trump in share of the vote was John McCain in 2008. And he was a nominee of the party, the president facing the worst financial crisis

since Great Depression and the worst military quagmire since Vietnam. And so, yeah, the party of the president did badly but trump on his own with you know none of those problems he finished second from the bottom and third from the bottom we had a lucky election in 2016 but it set us up for failure in 2018 in 2020 and 2021 in 2022 2022 was the worst election for the out party up and down the ballot since the 1930s. When you look, not just the House of Representatives, the Senate, the governor's races where the Democrats had a net gain of two among governors, but look at the state legislatures.

There are 99 state legislatures. In every non-presidential year, the out party picks up some. This is the first election since the New Deal when the out party picked up not one of the 99 state legislatures. In fact, it lost four. Two in Michigan, and I forget where the other two are. Lost both houses. So that is an incredible result for the party of the president. It's a warning. It's bigger than Trump. There is something wrong with what Republicans are doing. But if you don't honestly face it, you can't fix it. Well, as you point out, a lot of the unsuccessful Republican candidates were

weird, extreme, or obnoxious personas. You know, obviously you had Blake Masters down in Arizona who looked like a sociopath and you had others. But you tell the story. And in retrospect, I think this is really important. Tell the story of Dr. Oz and John Fetterman, John Fetterman back in the news again for checking himself in for depression. But I have to admit that at the moment during that debate where Fetterman was clearly struggling, you know, I thought, you know, I went along with the conventional wisdom, you know, mea culpa, that this was disastrous. Karen Tumulty and others like you saw, wait a minute, what you're seeing here is you're highlighting the real sort of crass opportunism and cruelty of

Dr. Oz. I mean, Dr. Oz was a successful TV guy. He was an acclaimed doctor. But he had to tap into that performative obnoxiousness in mocking John Fetterman. So talk to me about how that actually played out. Because again, you know, in real time, it looked like, wow, that Fetterman campaign may be done. But Dr. Oz played exactly the wrong card. Republicans played exactly the card that was going to lose them in the Senate. Well, I didn't watch the debate in real time. I saw the reaction on Twitter, which was all like, as if Fetterman had been totally mentally incapacitated. So I then, the next day, I downloaded the thing on, I forget now which platform, and actually, and I ended up not watching it, but listening to it. And when you listen to it, you realize, okay, yeah, he obviously sounds not sharp,

but he's getting his points. In a way, that being a little under the weather helped him say over and over again, you're going to ban all abortions and you want to get rid of Medicare and Social Security. Okay, you stick to to those things. That's going to take you pretty far. So I didn't think it was as disastrous having listened to it and not watch it and having done it the next day, but even more, Dr. Oz was a better, he was no Blake Masters. I mean, Blake Masters was obviously a weirdo and a crackpot. And in an election that is going to be decided in suburbs, the idea that you would do all these ads or you position yourself with these massive arsenals of weapons

that, A, make you look like you are yourself emulating some kind of disturbed person, but also just emphasize just what a small, scrawny, miserable person you are looking for external validation. Like this guy looked like he could barely pick up one of these weapons that he was carrying. It was pretty obvious why he wanted to have that big weapon in his hands. But Dr. Oz was a good candidate. I mean, whatever you think of his supplement business, millions of Americans believe in it. He's very successful on TV. And before he went into that awful pitchman business, he was a genuinely great cardiologist with a lot of treatments. He's got patents to his name. And he wanted to be a

moderate on the issues. He would have been the first Muslim in the U.S. Senate if elected and a Republican. He had a story of creating this extraordinary success for himself. And you would think he would be a good candidate. And the Fetterman stroke was also an opportunity for him because as a doctor, this was his opportunity to show I'm a man of knowledge and also compassion. And the statement I would have written for him, if it had been me, was to say, in my practice, I've treated many people who have suffered strokes, and there's absolutely a protocol for full recovery. And if the people of this state want to have more crime and higher taxes, I have no doubt that after a complete recovery, Senator John Fetterman will be able to deliver to them

the policies that they want, but the better policies that, you know, just be a decent human being about it. And instead, he fell into this path of ridicule. And when your problem is you're already seen as kind of, you're not from this state, you contain these houses in New Jersey, you're so wealthy, you are so far away, you're so handsome, all these things that make you far away from the typical voter to then say, and when someone gets sick, I'm going to mock them. That only reinforces your core problem. And so the question is whether that was more about Dr. Oz or what was expected of him as the Republican brand circa 2022 is that you can't show compassion and understanding and kindness because that translates as weakness. Therefore, you had to go along with this new brand of performative obnoxiousness. I mean, do you think that's what happened is basically told him told him, no, this is what you have to do. This is what the Orange God King is going to expect you to do down from Mar-a-Lago. I think there's some of that. I think a lot of it is now

in the DNA, as you say, not strategic. Think of how campaigns are run. There are a few grizzled veterans at the top, but most of it is run by quite young people who are formed by the culture around them and who have ideas about what politics is like. And you've got this whole generation of Republican young people who are formed by these message boards and by watching Fox News and worse. And the kind of people who end up as writers on the Tucker Carlson show. Where are they getting that stuff from? And they think it's funny and they think it's clever. There was a big Republican super PAC run by, I think, Stephen Miller, the ex of the Trump White House, that would go into swing states and put up billboards that were designed to draw contrast by being jerky. One of their slogans was climate change threatens pregnant men, I think was one of it.

And they were like pretending that these were the things liberals think and they were clever trolls and they put them up in billboards and you just think about you know some family on its way to take the kids to a baseball or soccer game or choir practice and the gasoline prices are high and they've got all kinds of concerns and they think do i want to find my family security in the hands of this these irresponsible nitwits these loudmouths what have they got to offer you know they don't seem to care about my choir practice. They're scoring points. And you just imagine, who are the people, who's the audience for this? And when you have an audience that says they're going to love this on the 4chan message boards,

the 4chan message board is not a swing voter. A swing voter is a decent human being. Well, you can see what the incentive structure right now on the right is when you realize that Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of the most prominent members of the House of Representatives, that in fact this behavior is rewarded. So I'm thinking, you know, the really bad news here is, you're right, a lot of these folks are younger, which means they're going to be part of our political bloodstream for the next 30, 40 years. 40 years from now, we're going to look back and think, you know, hey, remember when that person got their start. I mean, look, think about the number of people, you know, who came out of the late 1960s, out of 1968, and the role they played over the next several decades in

politics. That's what you're going to get from these folks. And because the incentive structure is what it is, there's going to be the constant escalation. So, you know, before we started, I was reading a piece from townhall.com written by Hugh Hewitt's radio fill-in host, who's mocking Nikki Haley, calling her Nikki Harris, as in Kamala Harris. I mean, get it? Nikki and Kamala are both women of color. So calling her Nikki Harris is just hilarious. So, I mean, you come for the racism, you stay for the stale sexism, but you have an entire generation that does not recoil from this, doesn't realize how stupid it is or offensive it is. They kind of like it, and they think that other people like it, and maybe if they traffic in it,

this is the way to advance their careers. And we're stuck with them for decades, David. Well, they may be washed out by, or they may learn from adversity. And maybe that just through the process of competitive politics, this is the thing one has to hope. And people are going to learn, you know, the person who's deciding this election is a 50-year-old mother with some college, a lot of economic worries, and kind of compassion and concern for other people, but very practical problems that she is hiring you to solve. And I think if more people got into the habit of thinking of elections as job applications, I mean, when you talk this way, if you are applying for a job in the marketing department of a company, would you try to say,

you know, let me just tell you how I'm going to revile and ridicule everybody around me? No, if you're applying for any other job, but when you're applying to be hired as mayor, when you're applying to be hired as a U.S. congressman or U.S. senator, you're acting like an employee and people want to know you're going to be a decent person who can get things done for me. It feels as if that culture and that tradition has been really eroded because it is remarkable the number of people who think about politicians and public service is completely devoid from anybody else. In other words, you don't look for the qualifications. You do not look for the resume or the ability. You know, you tolerate behavior in elected officials, you know,

congressman, senator, president of the United States, that you would not tolerate from a car salesman? Yeah. You know, I mean, is there any American corporation that would put Donald Trump in the C-suites right now that would hire him as COO or CEO? No, the answer is no. I said, spoiler alert there, nobody would do that. And yet, many of these same people would go, yeah, I have no problem putting him in, you know, in the Oval Office, making him Commander-in-Chief and President of the United States again. You see this problem very much with DeSantis. So here is someone who had a record as governor with considerable achievement. And that's why, I mean, he didn't get reelected in the way he did because he was a troll, although he did a lot of trolling. He got reelected the way he did. Some people liked the trolling, but a lot of people who didn't like the trolling would say, well, he's been really active in

restoring the Everglades. He raised teacher pay. He made the big call on reopening the schools in time for fall 2020. And, you know, that was a tough decision with inadequate information. And there are a lot of people were saying it was dangerous. He took the risk and maybe he took it for bad reasons, but he was right. The schools were reopened, and Florida children suffered less of the learning loss than children in other states. And a lot of people voted for him for those reasons. So now is his moment. He used a lot of trolling and obnoxiousness in the elite primary to capture the attention of Fox News to get big donations.

But now you would think it's 2023. Now is the time to turn yourself into a general election candidate and to speak to people who are not part of this core audience. And he's locked in. I mean, it's going to be all culture war, all attack, all war on Disney. We may have an election in 2024 where Biden's message will be, I helped to lead to win the war in Ukraine. And DeSantis is going to say, yeah, well, I won the war on Disney. It's okay. You don't think he can pivot in 2024. I mean, my guess is in the high command, they're thinking, okay, you know, we have to run two campaigns. We're going to run as hard to the right and culture war in 2023 in order to secure the

nomination. Once we secure the nomination, we pivot conventionally to try to be a little bit more normal. You don't think he can pull off that pivot? I think he's not left himself enough time, and for two reasons. One is when you did this strategy, when you ran as one thing in the primary contest in a completely different thing in the general election, you were in a much less information-dense environment. We're back in the era of the 1960s and 70s. Today, the information density is so great that you have to start communicating who you are early. This is not 1976. This is more like even in 1998, George W. Bush began positioning himself as a compassionate conservative on the night he won re-election in 1998. He had done some culture war things in Texas in his first term as governor. But it's

really worth reading that speech he gave on election night, and when he won re-election with two-thirds of the vote, as opposed to Ron DeSantis' 56%. And he said, what we've demonstrated is here in Texas that our effectiveness and compassionate conservatism can win, and we've shown we can balance budgets and meet social needs. And he's balancing. He doesn't start at the convention. He starts on the night that he really launches his campaign. Yeah, two years before. Two years before. And I don't know that Pantus has left himself enough time. And he's going to be so strongly identified with not just speeches, but actual, I mean, despite with Disney, so strongly

identified with that. I don't know that he's going to have time to reinvent himself as someone that the swing voter is going to like. Well, there's another dynamic that's emerging is that Mike Pence has decided that he's going to run as the ultimate culture warrior, that he's going to try to flank Ron DeSantis as being more anti-woke, more conservative on the social issues. So I don't know what you think about this. I think there's no way that Mike Pence gets the nomination. But that strategy seems to make it inevitable that the center of gravity in the Republican Party for the next year and a half will be to pull it as far to the right on the social issues as possible. And there's going to be a bidding war when it comes to the gender issues, to book banning, to abortion, and that they're going to be bidding against one another on issues that have already been demonstrated to alienate a huge portion of swing voters. Even if the public is on your side, I mean, I think on

some of these transgender issues, the public probably is more where the Republicans are than where activist elements in the Democratic Party is. I agree. The question you always need to ask yourself, and you can poll for this, is how salient are these issues? One of the ways that the British conservatives kept getting into trouble in the Tony Blair era is they would poll and they would say the public agrees with us on our top five issues. The problem was when you did deeper polling, the public agrees with you on your top five issues, yes, but those are not the on your top five issues. Yes. But those

are not the public's top five issues. So if you say to the public, do you happen to think X about Y? Yeah, I suppose I do. But what I'm voting on is not that. There are many issues with the Democrats. I was just retweeting this morning. You know, many Democratic controlled local governments are trying to abolish honors programs at high schools. They're fighting with AP. So I assume that the parents that the Democrats most need to win are not with them on those issues. And it probably will be expensive for many local Democratic candidates. But that's not how people are going to vote for president, because that's not what's in your mind. You're thinking about economic management, national security, war and peace, and some assurance that your retirement will be taken care of. I think that's an important

distinction there because, you know, I was thinking about that actually this morning, you know, how certain issues play out, you know, for example, the war over transgenderism, which has become really, really, really heated. But what I don't know is what portion of the electorate will cast their vote on that issue. You know, whatever you may think about it, what actually drives the vote? Okay. So,

um, David, I wanted to give you a television recommendation. I don't know if you have any for me. Television shows you're watching. Okay. No, I'll take yours.

Okay. I stumbled upon this by completely by accident yesterday because I was online and I was trying to watch the new South park about Harry and Meghan, which I strongly recommend. It's really, really good, about their worldwide privacy tour. Okay, so leaving that aside. called Stonehouse, based on, and I was not familiar with it, based on the 1970s story of a labor member of parliament and minor cabinet official named John Stonehouse, who was basically a complete bleep-up, who ended up faking his death in the mid-1970s at a time when the labor government of Harold Wilson, I'm going to make this sound more

boring than it is, but it's actually very funny and it's very, very well done. Harold Wilson had a one vote margin in the House of Commons. So he needed this guy who was a complete crook and a liar and who had fled to Australia after a fake. He's stolen the identity of some of his dead constituents. And yet, Harold Wilson needs his vote. It's funny. It's very, very well done. So check out Stonehouse. It's hard not to think about, you know,

Kevin McCarthy sitting there going, okay, so what am I going to do with George Sanders? I need his vote. I need his vote. I'm not going to get rid of him as long as control is. But there was a time when Harold Wilson's labor government hung on a single vote in the House of Commons. So that is my gift to you today, David, for putting up with the whole Austin Powers. Thank you.

Well, you have a great weekend. And once again, thank you. Thank you so much for your time today. David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently Trumpocalypse and Trumpocracy. David, thanks for coming back on the podcast. Thank you. Bye-bye. And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back on Monday, and we'll do this all over again. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.