The Bulwark Podcast - David Frum: This Is Shame-Faced Trump

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

Our commander-in-chief and breaker of mores can only muster the energy to beg Republicans to stop talking about Epstein. Where is the blustery guy who proudly declared he paid no taxes and that he could shoot anyone on 5th avenue? Because of the lame duck smell he's giving off—and the economic problems Trump himself brought on—he's not getting the support he needs from the outer MAGA media world that's obsessed with Epstein. Meanwhile, he's getting ready to have taxpayers pay off his cronies for trying to help steal the 2020 election. Plus, the four kinds of corruption in the Trump administration, the Caribbean boat bombings have driven down the price of cocaine, and the origins and modern flowering of antisemitism on the left and right. David Frum joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes David's recent episode on the military buildup off the coast of Venezuela David's interview with Sarah this week Tim's playlist

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller, delighted to welcome back, Gold Jacket guests, staff writer at the Atlantic and host of the David From show. It's David From. How you doing, sir? Good. When you say gold, I'm conjuring up one of those WrestleMania jackets, so those really shiny ones. Yeah, okay.

Sure. I kind of am thinking about like the Masters winner or Saturday Night Live. Like if you've been the host, I think five or ten times, you get a jacket. That's what I had in mind. But we'll give you a shiny one. All right. Thank you. I don't know. What should we talk about at the start of the podcast?

Who's to say? Lots out there in the news. Won't we talk about it? Maybe Jeffrey Epstein. What do you think? All right. All right. Bad for the Jews.

Not a great representative. I want to talk about, you know, there's some, there's some angst. And so it's a lot of negative discussion about the Jews out there in the public space. I want to talk about that at the end. But, yeah, Jeffrey Epstein coverup is in full bloom right now. We've seen a bunch of emails, talked about that the last two shows. This morning, Trump is out with a bleat about this. He says this, the Democrats are doing everything and their withering power to push the Epstein hoax again.

Some weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they're soft and foolish. Epstein was a Democrat, not our problem. him. Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers about Epstein. They know all about them. Don't waste your time with Trump. I have a country to run. How does he sound on that? Well, when you say the cover-up is in full bloom, I think it's sort of past the bloom. Look, if you want to do a cover-up, you don't keep obsessively talking about the thing you yourself are covering up. You introduce the country to the seven brave astronauts who are about to embark for Mars. And you announce your new Trump candy bar. And you say tariff holiday for Republicans in red

States and more tariffs on blue states. You do something else. But Trump, in a way, I forget whose point this was, this is not original to me. I'm going to be repeating somebody else. Maybe it was Charlie Sykes who said this, that normally Trump doesn't cover up. He just says, yeah, I did it. I punched that baby. And in fact, after years of our country being led by weak presidents who wouldn't punch a baby, I punch the baby in the face. I did it. And people say, yay. Some people are upset, but I would say yay. But there's no cover up. And Epstein is distinct. because he's actually, for once, acting guilty and shame-faced. And that has led, I think, a lot of people think, this must be really horrible.

If all the other things he did, he doesn't cover up, what happened here? He also is very good in those cases when, you know, he says, like, you know, whatever it was, but I didn't pay any taxes. You know, imagine, like, the prime example of this is, you know, could have Mitt Romney and, you know, how apologetic he was and all this for the, well, not paying the taxes and trying to figure out how to spin it. And Trump was always like, yeah, I didn't pay taxes. Right? Like only a sucker would pay taxes, right?

That was, you know, his normal move here. But then the other move is that, as you say, he would do a distraction, right? Like, where we'd be troops into the cities or, I don't know, maybe we'll get to Venezuela later. Maybe a Venezuela will be the answer on this front. But this is an issue that he has just been unable to do that with, in part because at least some element of his own media ecosystem won't go along with it. Like, Fox is pretty much going along with it. But the outer reaches of the mega ecosystem won't go along with his efforts to try to talk about other random shit. Yeah, I want to introduce a theory here that maybe helps us understand this, which is there is MAGA and there is maybe para MAGA.

And the MAGA universe is all about Trump and his ambitions and his greed and his very specific degrees of hatefulness. That Trump hates people who in any way cross him. But if you don't cross him, he doesn't have kind of ideological hatreds. He's too selfish to have ideological hate. Why would I hate people just because other people hate them? Like if a cat eating Haitian migrant who came into the country, like put on a red MAGA hat, they would be invited to the Oval Office. Right, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And he could eat the cat. Trump would serve him the cat. They could eat the cat together. But there is this paramaga universe for whom Trump was a vehicle for their general craziness and insanity and paranoia and hatefulness. And Paramagga decided that Epstein a while ago would be the biggest scandal. Ever. Pizza Gate was false. The idea that Hillary Clinton was having bathing in donkey blood, that was false. Epstein was true. I mean, not every aspect of it, but there was an Epstein. He did abuse underage girls. That was true. Now, they built a construct about it with a lot of

anti-Semitic overtones. If Jeffrey Epstein had been Godfrey Epworth, this story wouldn't resonate in the same way. But it was true, and he was Jewish, and many of the people around him were Jewish. So it was perfect. And Trump went along for the ride arrogantly, shamefacedly, not giving early signals that, you know what, let's find another scandal here. People, this one cuts close to home. So Parameda spent years convincing the really hardcore or the outer fringe, not the opportunistically crazy people as Marjorie Taylor Green is turning out to be, but the sincerely crazy people as Lauren Bobbard is turning out to be. This is the key to all mysteries. This is the master's story of American life. This will unravel everything. And they built

it out and they built it out. And then his own vice presidential nominee and then his own vice president went along for the ride too for reasons that may have been very cynical. Well, if we magnify the scandal and it turns out there's something to it, maybe Trump will have to resign. Maybe. And who would benefit from that? They got everyone ready for this thing. So they built the spotlight, the bank of spotlights that are now turning on one by one. And now Trump is trying to run around the amphitheater, turning the spotlights off. And it's not working. You mentioned, you know, some titillating thoughts there about, I don't think Trump is ever going to resign.

But just kind of an adjacent thought to that that almost never crosses my mind, because this is the place that you come for rain cloud assessment of our politics. There are other places on YouTube that you go to for, you know, the walls are closing in on Trump, plenty of options for that. But I don't know, man. This week, the thought has crossed my mind a couple times the last two days that between the, you know, potentially losing hold of the pair of Magus, as you call them, on Epstein, between just the economic problems that are happening in the country that they don't seem to have any plan for reversing. If anything, they seem to be making it worse. The fact that people after the election last week can kind of smet within the own coalition can sort of smell lame duckedness on him in a way that they couldn't before. It does feel like it's at least possible that this week could be a week we look back on and say, you know, the wheels did finally come off this fucking thing. He was around for way too long, but that was the point where it started. Is that too optimistic? Is this too Friday, Pollyanna for you? I basically agree, but I don't want to point to a specific time. So do you remember when Trump was running for the first time? There was this internet tag, LOL, nothing matters. And my response to always was actually everything matters. It's just there's a lot of everything.

So things accumulate. The economic difficulties, I mean, in a country where elections are decided by people who know the price of every can of beans on the shelf and how much that can of beans cost in their grocery basket and how much it costs this time last month and this time last year, you can't tell those people that grocery prices don't matter. I mean, you can tell fancy people who shop on Instacart what the grocery prices are down. They may not know. But the people are going to decide this and other elections. This coming election, out of their elections? They know. So if that's your plan, lie to them about the price of beans, it's not going to work. And there's a very specific problem, which is when Trump says, I'm going to go around the country and tell people how great the economy is. All of the economies of the economy in 25, or virtually all, are directly caused by things he did, intentionally did, did solo, did in defiance actually of much of the rest of his own party, and did for really no reason except malice and ignorance. I mean, if people are concerned about the price, of macaroni and cheese. Well, the reason the price of macaroni and cheese is up, because Trump tariff the macaroni. Yeah. Speaking of that, there's an interesting tariff announcement

yesterday. I do want to get. I have one more obscene thing, but since you led me there on the tariffs, so in the New York Times, the Trump administration is preparing tariff rollbacks on goods from countries beyond those that have reached trade agreements with the U.S. in an effort to lower prices. They specifically mentioned also the coffee tariffs. They're rolling back in an effort to lower prices. That's intriguing. So they're going to roll back tariffs in the hopes that that lowers prices. Huh. They're connecting the dots, aren't they? Wait a minute. Scott Bessent and Howard Nutleg told me that this wasn't true. The tariffs were increasing prices. But it's interesting then that to roll them back would, in theory, lower prices. You mean if I drop the egg from a two-story

window, that's why the egg carton smashed. That's fascinating. Yes, well, you know, that would do But the problem is, of course, you've introduced so many dislocations into the economy that, yes, cutting tariffs will bring prices down, negotiating new free trade agreements would bring prices down, but it won't do it overnight. It will work with a lag. And you'll have to iron out a lot of dislocations. And the point is you can't just selectively. This takes us back to the politics of 19th century terror policy, which I'm interested in

and nobody else is. I don't know. You did a one? Was it the first, very first David from podcast or the second? was a two-hour deep dive on early 20th century tariff policy, and I was eating it up by the pool. I've got to tell you. I'm sure you were with Doug Erwin, who wrote Doug Irwin, who's the greatest expert on the history of American terrorists. Yeah, we spent two hours talking about it.

He said to me that he wrote this thousand-page book on it, and he said he wasn't sure that his own wife had read it, but he was grateful that I love the subject. I listen to the problem. I did doze off a little bit as I recall. but then woke back up. And the parts I heard were really good. Yeah, we got to the parts about pig iron. But look, what would happen in the night is you'd have these things where the coats would be too expensive.

And so they would cut the tariff on wool cloth. He said, well, wait a minute. What about the tariff on thread and the tariff on needles? Like, you have to do the whole package. It's not going to work. You just create selective windfalls. So Trump's got this problem. And it's entirely of his own making.

And it's, by the way, it's a very Trump-specific problem because there are a lot of things that are happening under Trump that might have happened, had to, had. Ted Cruz become president. But then there are things that only happened because of Trump. And the tariff mania is something that only no one else in the Republican Party thought it was a good idea before Trump started selling it. Democracy depends on citizens who can listen, reason, and disagree without rancor. That's what students do every day at St. John's College.

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through honest searching and through the great books that built our civilization, become a Johnny by visiting sjc.edu, St. John's College, the education democracy needs. I've got to get back to Epstein on one item because we can't move off without talking about our friend Megan Kelly. She was on yesterday. I don't really understand exactly. I mean, I understand that Megan Kelly is interested in attention for herself. And so at some level, we're giving her what she wants here.

But it's kind of at the outer edges of, I think, what is advantaging her at this point. you know, getting a siding at some level with Candace against Ben Shapiro when it comes to the question of of whether the Jews were involved in Charlie Kirk's murder. And now yesterday, spinning for Trump on Epstein, she was going to the old Roy Moore defense about, well, you know, he's really hanging around with a fibophiles, not pedophiles. So let's just listen to a little bit of it. But that he was into the barely legal type. Like he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I'm definitely not trying to. make an excuse for this. I'm just giving you facts.

That he wasn't into like eight-year-olds, but he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passer-by. So Epstein was into the barely legal 15-year-olds. That seems to be a contradiction in terms. And so it's not a big deal because that, so he was just in a feebophile. And then Trump was around once they became 18, I guess was the spin now. There may be something with the pressure of that size podcast aimed at that size audience that drives people quite literally crazy. So you're saying I'm lucky that she's fourth and I'm 11th in the rankings.

You know, it's like, if you get above seventh, it starts, you start to go crazy. You're not talking to that audience because what you know, as Megan Kelly looks at the universe, she knows that there's up above her, the places she's going are Candace Owens and Joe Rogan and modern medicine is a lie. and Hillary Clinton conducted human sacrifice and real mania in that audience and that and the algorithms that that serve that audience reward real media but she is herself still someone who's very much a part of the real world at least so far so she can't say that Donald Trump is a heroic fighter against child sex trafficking I mean that which there are people will say that

I mean she's enough on earth to know well that's I mean yes he's deeply interested in child sex trafficking, but no, he's not, not as a fighter to fly on the wall. So she's looking for a kind of reality-based defense of Trump. And this was the best she could do on the spur of the moment. But her world is close enough to the real world that the reality-based defense runs into the reality-based reaction, which is what do you mean, the two-term president of the United States, who many of his supporters said he's coming to office to do justice on child sex traffickers was himself intimate friends with America's most notorious child

sacksacker and himself waited until these victimized traumatized girls had grown up a little bit at which time he would victimize them himself on sort of the rebound that's the defense and that's not going to impress anyone who's not already Epstein would groom teenagers you know and traffic them and then when they became of age he would take she would take the people that he'd take the young girls that he'd groomed and trafficked and then pass them around like party favors to the creepy old friends of this. That's not the best defense. I mean, it might keep you from being behind bars if you're one of the creepy old people, but it's not exactly moral comportment. It may be the best defense that doesn't rely on utter delusion and denial of reality.

I think that's what's going on in her head in that case is she doesn't want to quite say, I live in, you know, fantasy land with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. I do live on Earth. Well, Google searches and chatGBT services for epiphilia are skyrocketing. A lot of water is being used right now on AI searches for the definition. When politics was a very male-dominated activity, there was a rule among politicians that what you did with women was a completely separate part of your moral life. I mean, look, if you cheated at cards, unacceptable. If you embezzled from the bank, unacceptable.

But maltreating women was an entirely separate moral category that had no way reflected on who you were as a man. As politics becomes less, and I think this raises a lot of very profound questions, are women people? Is your treatment of women a reflection of the kind of person you are? And if women are people and the way you treat them is part of the person who are, the way cheating at cards would be, the way embezzling from your employer would be, then it's just not enough to say, well, I waited until the moment that the girl celebrate blew out the candles on her 18th birthday cake before I molested her. The question, well, how you treat her? How you treat her? her is an important part of the story of your life. And that is true, whether she's 18 or 23.

The question is, who are you? And even if you avoided criminal liability, who are you? Because part of who you are is the way you treat your intimates. This goes back to the Bill Clinton question. I mean, Bill, the only person had good news in the Epstein file leaks recently because there's some email where Epstein said that he'd never been to the island. Again, who the hell knows if Epstein's ever turned to truth in his emails or not? But that was no worthy. But I felt that way when I got older and like when I became Monica Lewinsky's age I felt that way about that question about his treatment of her right that's like there's nothing was illegal here like that was not it was not equivalent to a 15 year old girl of course different than 22 or 23 how old she was but like

what is appropriate comportment and treatment of somebody you know and when there's that kind of dynamic is obviously like something worth contemplating and and I do think that if you go back and look from a bipartisan level at basically, you know, the period before up through Bill Clinton. It was, as you're saying, it kind of was just like accepted that you can do whatever you want with women. That's a side deal. I want to talk about a couple of other items of the news. Are these settlements now? It's going to bundling a couple of things together, but obviously Trump, there's some rumors that Trump was talking to DOJ about settling, about having the taxpayers pay him directly for the ill treatment that the government made against him. In this shutdown deal,

the worst part of the shutdown deal, I think we can just be honest about that, is that it allows senators to bring lawsuits if federal law enforcement seizes or subpoenas their data without notifying them with potential damages about a half million each. This apparently was about the fact that Jack Smith's investigation into January 6 included looking to some of the phone records of people that the coup plotters conversations with GOP senators. And then out this morning from Bloomberg, the DOJ is in settlement talks with Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security advisor, who's seeking 50 million over what he says is a wrongful prosecution by Robert Mueller.

And there's another Trump lackey that is also in negotiations for similar. This is, I think, unprecedented and insane, right? The Trump wants the taxpayers to pay off his cronies, basically, is what's happening. Well, the reason it's unprecedented is because in the past, people who had done bad things who had been convicted and who then later either got a pardon or had some other change in their legal status would know, well, if I now sue, I reopen the case that originally led to my conviction. And the Department of Justice will vigorously contest. And since they won the last time, the odds are pretty good, they will win the next time. So Mark Rich didn't, after Bill Clinton pardoned him for all of his many financial crimes, did not say, okay, now I'm going to demand that I'd be compensated for the phone. Because they won the last time, they will probably win the next time.

So the predicate for all of this is that Trump will instruct his Department of Justice to take the fault and not to defend the interests of the taxpayer in protecting the public purse against these claims by wrong doors, convicted wrong doors. Now, in the case of the senators, they weren't convicted of anything. they weren't accused of anything. And their phone records that were obtained were not any content of their phone calls, but simply numbers in, numbers out, time of the call, the famous metadata. But this is a little bit, the analogy I've used, it's a little bit like Confederate cabinet officers suing for reparations after the end of the Civil War. You tried to bring down the government.

And the government in its mercy did not bring cases against you in particular. There's a limited universe of people who will face legal consequences. There are many more people who are involved in this conspiracy, like the Confederate cabinet officer. So we're letting you go. We're just, we're letting you off the hook with bygones be bygones. It's not a, actually, it's not a very vindictive political system, which is, which we used to think was good and may still be good, although I'm beginning to change my mind about that. The prosecutions are as selective as possible. Actually, only the people who went into the building and did crimes inside the building, everyone else, more or less left alone.

But you're not getting a payoff. You're not a hero for having been a Confederate cabinet. officer. You're not a victim. You tried to bring down the government or people around you did and you knew them and you helped them. Yeah. And the Flynn case, I mean, he's even more stark. I mean, he was a Turkish intelligent asset and he takes the job to be national security advisor and he's being investigated for like back channel conversations he's having with the Russians and he lies to the government. He was caught so red-handed that even Donald Trump got rid of him. Donald Trump, the same guy that just, he just gave a promotion to this guy that, you know,

that had the leaked texts, you know, that said he thought that all men aren't created equal, actually, and we should take out calipers and be a white nationalist country. That guy just got a promotion from Donald Trump. Trump looked at what Flynn's behavior was early and was like, oh, okay, I can't do this. And so that's how outlandish and outrageous Flynn's behavior was. The idea that now we should pay him back is crazy. Does the name Valerie Plame ring a bell? Of course, yeah.

Okay. So this was a big case in the Bush era where, uh, Valerie Plain was a former CIA covert operative, and there was a complicated story. She helped her husband get a very important role that he probably wasn't otherwise qualified for, and the role was then very embarrassing to the Bush administration. And in the blowback, Plame's name was divulged in a way that it should not have been. She was an agent. She was an undercover or had been.

So one of the people who was implicated in the Plame case was Carl Rowe, who was never charged. And the reason he was never charged was when the FBI came to talk to him, he said, yeah, I did it. I did it. I don't think I broke the law. I did it. And it turned out only way you got in trouble was, if you lied, that was how you got in trouble. If Flynn had told the truth, there probably would not have been much of a case against him. Yes, he was operating as an agent for the Turkish government and he hadn't told anybody about it. But that happens. Prosecations are kind of unusual. You just tell the FBI the truth and then there's nothing they can do. But he, as a senior official of the U.S. government, chose to lie to the FBI. That's a big deal. It is. But he might be

And he's asking for 50 million on the background. That's too, you know, he's asked a mistake. He should ask for half a million. He'd probably get it. Trump would give it to him. Trump is also kind of cheap. It's crazy. Trump, the other is this interesting thing about this.

Not interesting. The other like, the unique, the uniquely depraved Trumpian element of this is, I just don't know that any other president in modern times. I mean, maybe I'm watching the great, this James Garfield series right now, which is so good. So maybe, maybe, you know, back in the 18. 80s, one of the presidents thought about this. But in modern times, I don't think it even occurred to any of the presidents like, hey, I could have my own attorney general do settlements with my pals and pay them cash. Yes. The 90th century political system was very corrupt in a lot

of ways. But the presidents tended not to be. I mean, Garfield was implicated in some things, but what they would do is they would take the money for the party. And a lot of the things they did were kind of shocking to modern sensibilities until you realize that's how parties were financed. And they drew a kind of distinction between what they did for the party and what they did for themselves. And some presidents went farther. Ulysses Grant appointed some three dozen of his relatives and his wife's relatives to government jobs. That's probably, you know, that was untoward even at the time. Arthur. Yeah, Chester Arthur, yeah, who had the highest collector of the port of New York and, you know, run the Republican machine in the state of New York with the proceeds.

But the idea of this kind of, it's a difference in scale, it's a difference in brazenness, and it's also the question, I mean, political morality changes. And the question is, how far away are you from the political morality of your own time? You know, there are things that, you know, happened at other times that would have shocked the people of the 19th century. In our time, it's just not done that presidents are supposed to use the office to enrich anybody. and the scale of it and the billion dollar extend of it. And the warning of largesse to people who had been implicated in a conspiracy against the United States government, that's incredible. Kudos to him, I guess, because to be the most brazenly corrupt member of the Trump administration is a challenge.

You know, I mean, like you really do have to, you really do have to go above and beyond. And it might go to Bill Pulte, the head of the federal housing finance agency. He's a classic example. I was just doing a little backstory on him. He's like one of these 37-year-olds who looks like he's 50. So he's carrying a lot of weight, I think, on his soul. Just in the last week, Pulte floats the 50-year mortgage idea that's been going around to help people get lower monthly mortgage payments.

So that's going to be the big solution for affordability from this administration. You just pay way more interest. Then yesterday, he sent a criminal referral to Justice Department against California, Representative Barrett Swalwell, thinking about running for governor. Again, making the same accusation he's made against Tish James and others, that there were misleading claims on Morgan's documents while he says that's not true. And then the other story that did not get as much attention that caught my eye was, as Pulte was gathering all this information. There was, I guess, a marketing official inside Fannie Mae that was sharing sensitive information with him. Senior Fannie Mae officials called her conduct into question and an internal ethics watchdog was brought in to look into it.

The officials that called her behavior into question and the ethics watchdogs have been fired. Palti and the marketing woman who is giving them the information are obviously still in the government. It's hard to kind of think of a parallel for this character. You can't. Let's divide, leaving Trump himself aside, Trump officialdom. As I'm sitting here thinking of it, I see four broad categories of Trump badness. So first are those who are wasting taxpayer resources on their own vanity and fun, Cash Patel, Christy No. They're not actually pocketing the proceeds.

They're squandering the proceeds to have a big time at other people's offense. Yeah, taking the jet to their girlfriends' country music show. Patel seems to live for fun. No them for Instagram likes. But so squanderers, category one. Category two are the people who are enriching themselves in one way or another. And that's true of many of the people in and around the financial area. This is more litigious, so I won't use names here.

I mean, I'll just say. I'll say it. The Wickhoff and Lutnik families seem to be doing. pretty well. I will see exactly what all that shakes out, but the children are both in business with the Trump families in ways that are insanely inappropriate. So category one, they're squanderers, category two, are using public position to enrich themselves privately. Category three are people who seem to be on, but are just sort of generally evil in ways that you don't, the Stephen Miller's, the Paul and Gracias, they're not enriching themselves in government so far as anyone can tell,

and they don't seem to be wasting public resources. They're just doing things. In a free and democratic government, you didn't think anybody would ever do. But then category four, and this is where Pulte comes in, are people using the power of the state for political retribution. This is the watergate type of crime. So Pulte doesn't seem, he's not crooked, exactly. I don't think he's plenty rich. He doesn't need to be more rich. He might have been crooked in enriching himself back then in order to get the wealth to be this type of influence. But I think his parents made the money. I think he's an error. Yeah, but then he was also involved in some of the game stop stuff. And I don't know exactly all the details, but it wasn't like he invented a widget.

sold it. But saying, I'm going to go into the bill and use files that were obtained by the government for one purpose and obtain them without process, without warrants or anything like that for a purpose of legal criminal retribution. That is the Watergate category of offense. And that's not corrupt, it's not corrupt in self-enrichment sense, but it's a huge abuse of power. And maybe of all the four kinds, maybe the most dangerous. Yeah. On top of that, he has also, So, you know, the retribution is happening both externally against the political foes, right? The comies, the changes in the Swalwells. But to me, like the most malignant, most malicious, rather, is the retribution against people

that are just trying to do their job inside the government. And you have seen a little bit of this. This is where Cash Patel kind of goes from category one into four as well, right? Like people who are working at the FBI, working at DOJ, working at Fannie Mae, just trying to do their jobs, making sure they're following the rules, making sure the government's following the rules, doing what they're told. And next thing you know, they're getting pushed out of their jobs punished and who knows, maybe even targeted and looked into because they were part of the January 6th investigation or because they're an ethics watchdog looking, you know, at Trump officials. This brings to a question I alluded to before that I'm thinking about a lot and I don't have an answer to it.

So I'm just laying it out there for other people to think about. One of the great things about the American political system has been it's non-vindictiveness. I mean, it's a striking thing that of the makers of the American Revolution, every one of them, except poor Alexander Hamilton died in bed. There's not another revolution in the history of the world where that can be said. And generally, however hot an administration is, there's just kind of a bygones, be bygones aspect to it afterwards. And, you know, people who in their active days, you know, they end up on going to the Miller Center and yucking it up, telling old war stories. And there's something very the best of America about that.

And after the first Trump administration, it wasn't completely, there had been so many, outrageous crimes culminating with January 6th. It wasn't completely possible to do that and Trump's stealing all those documents on the way out the door. But generally, I think the instinct of the Biden administration was just push him to the side, let history judge. If there's a federal district court judge who wants to take forever to decide a case, that's good. Let her be as slow as she likes. And Julie Brown of Miami Herald, who has done so much good work on the Epstein case, made the point on a tweet today, that the Biden people, made a very conscious choice when they're prosecuting the absentee. They made it a higher priority

to send Maxwell to jail and to protect the privacy of the victims than to use the files to embarrass Trump. And again, that was in the best American tradition. But my question to myself, and again, I don't have an answer, is, is that attitude obsolete? If we somehow get to the other side of this second Trump administration, and if there is a return to normal government, a peaceful transition to the resumption of lawful government, should bygones be bygones? Or do people like Pulte and like the second and third level down, rather than load everything onto Trump's shoulders and send him off into history, should there be some kind of deeper set of cleaning up the government? You know, there are no major institutional reforms passed by Biden after the

first Trump administration. No changes to the pardon process. No changes to the declassification process. Electoral Count Act. That's right. Yeah, that's right. And again, can we, can we do that a second time? Get away. I mean, one of my pet legal reforms is that anyone who accepts secret service protection from the government, any presidential relative who accept secret service should publish your tax returns. That Eric and Don Trump Jr., they're getting protection, publish their returns. Because if they're using, if they're official enough to be worthy of protection, they're official enough that we need to see their tax returns. Yeah, I ain't a lot there. And probably maybe in 2027 will do a full podcast on this, because I'm with you. And in some ways, it won't be possible. Like, there's a question about what is judicious and what is right, you know, what would be best for the Republic going forward. But then there's an element of it that will be, it'll be more impractical this time than it was last time. Even if, even if we had decided that some reformer comes into government and they come in on the whole, and that is their MO, and they win an election mandate based on that.

It's like, well, now still you've got, like, what do you do with the marketing woman that was working with Bill Pulte on this? Can you fire her? Like, can you lose her, again, like in past administrations, you probably would just let that person go and ignore that and move on. But now it's like these people are all around the government now inside DHS, inside FBI, inside DOJ, inside Fannie, you know, that are doing acting with retribution, and how would the next president deal with them? Yeah. Are people who have authorized the use of serious force in immigration enforcement where it's completely not necessary? I think we have probably slightly different views on the immigration question between us. But I mean, I think every previous advocate of stricter enforcement has always regarded it as fundamentally matters of non-criminal law with site and the penalties.

Like Sandwich Man. If Sandwich Man had received a thousand dollar fine for throwing a sandwich and a federal officer, I think most of it was, yeah, you shouldn't throw a sandwich. That should be, you should get a paper in the mail that says. Yeah, or you should have to pick up dog poop on the side of the, you know, 10 hours community. service or something, either one, you can pick. Yeah. We don't send 20 armed men to your house, and we don't charge you with assault. The people who were partied to those abuses of police power, what do we do with them?

Yeah. They shouldn't be police anymore. That's at a bare minimum. There's someone who's authorized you to send, she used pepper spray against three-year-olds. That person shouldn't be doing police work. This isn't on my list, but just really quick, because you've titillated me about our differences on the immigration thing, because I, you know, I'm such a squish in immigration. But I wonder, I get this question a lot when I go into right-wing circles now, which is, don't you give them credit for the border, at least?

And my response to that has been actually no, because we don't want zero immigrate. At some level, sure, it's better. We also don't want the situation that we had in the second year of Biden. But we don't want zero immigration at the border. That is the sign that the country is like Venezuela, that we have net negative migration, not a healthy country. But where are you on that? Do you feel differently about the border? Well, first, I always think that when I hear a person who claims to be an immigration

hawk talk about the border, I know they're faking it because the locus of enforcement is not the border. It's the workplace. And border enforcement is like blowing up drugboats. If you want to stop the flow of drugs, you are never going to succeed by blowing up drug boats. There is not literally, but practically an infinite number of drug boats carrying an infinite amount of drugs.

If you want to do drug enforcement, you have to do it on the interior of the country. And if you want to reduce the flow of illegal immigration, that means going into places where you know there are a lot of illegal immigrants, checking the books of the employer, and writing them a big fine if it turns out that their workers are not legal, and then they will stop employing illegal workers, and then illegal workers will come in smaller numbers in the future. In the Biden case, the problem was an abuse of the asylum process, that the United States took a view in those years that basically anyone who came across the border who claimed to be an asylum speaker was entitled to release inside the country until seven or ten years later when their

case was heard, by which time it would be impossible and inhumane to eject them. So you need the answer was to meet them quickly and to expedite their hearings and to do this in sufficient numbers massively enough, early enough, that people, the world got the message. But you also needed to understand that a lot of the asylum process of the Biden years was driven by a very specific foreign policy crisis in Venezuela, which is not to be met by blowing up boats or invading Venezuela, but a quarter of the population of Venezuela left the country to escape poverty and oppression. That's not an immigration problem exactly. That is a Venezuela problem, and you needed a policy about Venezuela.

And the Biden people met it by saying, okay, let's welcome all to the United States or as many as can walk their way to the border. They're more, by the way, it should be stressed, more Venezuelan refugees in Colombia than there are in the United States. And I believe there are more in Mexico than there are in the United States. So to that Venezuelan question, you alluded there that you're not for, despite being neocon, David, from. You're not for us just kind of yeeding boats out of the Caribbean and planning a regime-change war against Maduro, it sounds like. But the last podcast was about this. I should shout out. People can listen to that. But what's the short version of your view? I'm for sure not for blowing up the boats. I'm neocon enough to contemplate military action against

Maduro. Sure. With congressional approval, as Bush got before the Iraq war, and working in cooperation with regional allies. The idea that you're having this battle, Colombia has been a longtime friend of the United States on many important issues, including a terribly dangerous and deadly drug war that it's fought on its own soil, with tens of thousands of Colombians dying in the fight to protect Americans from Colombian drugs. The present president of Colombia is a little wacky, but he, I think, leaves early next year. There'll be a new one and one friendlier to the United States. It's the single largest place where Venezuelan refugees go. They have been astonishingly compassionate and helpful to their Venezuelan neighbors. They have to be a problem. They have to be

partner. And Mexico has to be a partner. And Brazil has to be a partner. You have to work with partners, partly for practical reasons, partly for reasons of legitimacy. And then you have to have a clear idea of the future you contemplate for Venezuela. And the idea that you would use force to replace Maduro with the next in line thug, because the next in line thug has assured you that he will be more cooperative on a very narrow range of issues. But Venezuela needs from the United States has helped finding his way back on the path of development. That was the main theme of that podcast we did, is that this used to be one of those prosperous countries in Latin America. This used to be a country that received refugees from war-torn Europe and gave them opportunities

to be a new life. It could be that country again. And so I'm not against an American intervention, but it can't be this kind of solitary action with sinister goals in mind. And it can't be done without Congress. And in addition to that, like, I mean, just the human rights violations in the Caribbean, like, they're not even telling us what they're doing. The idea that our government can say, okay, we're just going to take out these boats.

You've got to trust us that they're drug boats because, like, summary execution at sea is now the punishment for selling drugs in this country, when Venezuela is not even a source of drugs. And then simultaneously, like, oh, yeah, also we've got this potential regime change war that the Secretary of State is interested in planned. And, like, the whole thing is just a colossal. Even if they really are drug boats. And even if everybody involved is guilty. And even if none of them are people who paid for smuggling traffic. Or people being human trafficked or who the hell knows? I mean, at least half the people we sent to El Salvador prison weren't even gang members.

So I can't exactly trust that they're telling the truth. As you say, summary execution at sea is not a punishment for drug smuggling. But the last thing is, the whole thing is stupid and futile. We don't know how much this operation costs. There are no estimates provided. The United States now has the largest concentration of force in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile. crisis. It's pulling assets away from all sorts of other regions of the world to deploy them in the Caribbean. It must cost hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more. How much cocaine is

being intercepted? And it's, by the way, it's cocaine, not fentanyl. How much cocaine is being intercepted? There's an anecdote from both Daniel Patrick Moynihan and George Shultz telling themselves, I repeat it a lot because I think it's the beginning of wisdom. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the first drugs are in the Nixon White House. That is not a cabinet officer, but he had all the government responsibility for the drug war. And in 1971, or thereabouts, he achieves a huge drug bust, tens of millions of dollars worth of heroin, and is very excited. And he books a helicopter to fly to Camp David to tell President Nixon about this tremendous victory in the war on drugs. And as he gets on the helicopter, there is Secretary of Labor, George Schultz, reading the Wall Street Journal.

And Moynihan, and they both tell this in their memoirs, Moineshan is just burbling with excitement over the little headphones and Schultz's could not be less interested. Could, and just, barely folds down his newspaper. And finally Moynihan remembers that before Schultz was Secretary of Labor, he was a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, famous free market school, and says, George, I suppose you think that so long as there is demand for drugs in the United States, there will be a supply of drugs from somewhere. And that's the point. How many of these boats do you plan on blowing up? You know, I looked this up. Year over year, the price of cocaine at retail in the United States is down 25%. That's the one price that Trump has brought down.

Yeah. And quality's up because there are fewer fentanyl deaths, you know, also than there were during the Biden years. So intercepting the cocaine boats is even if every person were completely guilty as charged, even if they were all like senior members of the cartel and they were deserving of some terrible punishment, it still would be a stupid and you'd be spending billions to save millions. I want to close by kind of talking about the anti-Semitism. discourse that's happening on the right and left. First, I want to just talk about what we're seeing on the right. This was a tweet from Candice yesterday about the Epstein stuff. She writes, They're blackmailing President Donald Trump in broad daylight. The slow release of the emails is intentional. Now he will give them whatever they want. For those who struggle with context clues, they equals Israel, who Jeffrey Epstein worked for. So what's the point of using all these

Oh, by the way, in case you're too dense to get it. I was talking about the Jews. This, Candace is explicit anti-Semitism and explicit like conspiracy mongering. She proffered a theory about how I think the Mossad came from underground in Utah to kill Charlie Kirk. That was a possibility. There are more examples of this. That and Tucker, you know, having Nick Flintus, an unapologetic anti-Semite, not an anti-Zionist. No, jury is bad, anti-Semite, having him on his podcast, Megan Kelly doing apologia for Tucker on that.

That has created this big feud on the right with kind of Ben Shapiro and Mark Levine and some on one side and the podcasters on the other. I'm wondering what you make of that, and then we'll talk about the way that it's horshoeing over to the left. Look, anti-Semitism is different from other forms of hatred, and this is not my original point. Others have made it because most hatred, most bigotry, is based on contempt. misogyny, homophobia, racism based on, I'm better, you're less, and I use my position of cultural or financial or whatever kind of power to diminish and demean you to make myself feel better. Anti-Semitism is different because it is not based on contempt.

It is based on paranoia. And one of the dangers of being a paranoid person is because anti-Semitism is the fundamental myth of Western culture that God sent his son to, to reprove humanity and embedd them and the Jews were able to combine and kill the Son of God, which is a man who split the Red Sea and made the planets. They were able to kill his son. That's pretty big. Once you start delving into paranoia, if you believe that they are responsible,

you know, as Candace discovered, you need to, who's they, who's this they, and who's behind the they? And who's the mastermind behind the ultimate, who's the ultimate boss in this video game of conspiracy upon conspiracy? So because so much of modern right-wing thought is a form of paranoia, it's just this, powerful myth that is waiting for you at the end of the paranoia gravity. But this is where it leads into left-wing, anti-Semitism. So anti-Semitism itself is a word coined in the late 19th century in German, because the anti-Jews of the late 19th century did not want to look old-fashioned. They didn't ask, we're not, we're not religious bigots. We're not like Martin Luther or the medieval papacy. You know, we are modern and scientific. We have nothing against Judaism

as a religion. We have a much more up-to-date and modern. problem, which is that Jews are biologically semites. And as such, so anti-Semitism began its life as a euphemism to create a new kind of anti-Jewish hate in exactly, and it functioned at its time in exactly the same way as anti-Zionism does. It's a way of retaining the old hate while distancing yourself from the old justification. And I think the proof of the similarity is medieval anti-Judaism believe that Jews killed innocent Christians to get blood for Mata and modern anti-Zionists. There was a case just at University College London just the other day where somebody, lecturer was brought to campus to teach the students that the Jews had done this as recently as

as 1840 in the city of Damascus. The content remains the same, but the justifications for promoting the content. And so I believe it is certainly theoretically possible in a lab to imagine a form of anti-Zionism that has no element of anti-Jewish hate. I don't think countries should exist. So as the, this non-ante, and I object to Israel existing, I object to Pakistan existing, I object to, I think there should be like John Lennon, no borders. I try to make this very point to Hassan Apica when we're on this podcast last weekend. It's theoretically, it's theoretically possible. And I even know one or two people who are like this, but it's extremely difficult.

And it doesn't exist much in the real world. And it's not a lot of fun. The oomph and excitement of anti-Zionism is precisely that it draws from anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, your belief that there is this conspiracy of these uniquely powerful, uniquely malevolent people who are congregated in the land of Israel, where their normal, imperfect government becomes your summary of all the evil in the world. So you wrote a provocative tweet about this. It's kind of a loose what you're saying, but puts us succinctly,

which is Republicans are having a big public argument about anti-Semitism that has contaminated their party. Democrats aren't. Their anti-Semites are vile neo-Nazis. Our anti-Semites bring new exciting energy to our party. There is something to that, I think. And you see some examples. That's like I'm thinking of Richie Torres and Adam Friedland did a podcast a couple weeks ago, where Adam Friedland, who is anti-Zionist, Jewish comedian-slash political podcaster, was pressing

Ritchie about this and was talking about I'm Jewish. And so, you know, I'm an anti-Zionist, so it can't be anti-Semitism. So you see a little bit of it. One of the most important biological anti-Semitic tracks of the early 20th century was written by a Jew, Otto Weninger. I mean, it is not unheard of. And I've always had a theory that most of the members of the American Nazi Party are Jews under different names who are in some way crazy or estranged from their families. And a lot. I mean, this is an old tradition in the Jewish world that people either for ideological reasons because they find in communism a substitute faith for Judaism or just because they're alienated and estranged that they become very effective. And then they, as a Jew, I therefore endorse all of these myths. But look, half the Jews in the world live in Israel. It's pretty hard to have a sustained critique of the Jewish state that doesn't put half the Jewish population of the world at risk. So here's the thing that I struggle with. And then maybe might be the area that we have slight disagreed.

agreement on that I want to hear your pushback too because I don't I think it's actually really important that the left figure out how to talk about this and discuss it which is there and I talk about it's a little bit with Chris Hayes on Tuesday which is there are a lot of people on the left particularly younger people who are passionately opposed to the way that Israel conducted the response to October 7th and they've seen the videos in their TikTok feeds of innocent Palestinians getting killed and maimed and children and it's and horrible they've seen horrible stuff they don't like to be a Netanyahu government, many good reasons for that. And they're upset at Israel. And then they're on the internet and they're consuming information. And the people that seem to have the

most moral clarity about that question of how the Palestinians were treated are also the people we were just talking about. But Candace Owens is of the world and Tucker Carlson's, I say seem to have the most moral clarity. I just want to say, like, this is from their perspective. And then there's some people who are left pod influencers who make their whole brand, oh, the Democratic party is in league with APEC and the Jews and Israel. And so the only information they're getting are from these far-right podcasters who are anti-Israel and these left-wing podcasters who are attacking the democratic establishment, again, in some ways, potentially legitimately for their policy views. And so how do you break through that? I think the only way to possibly break through

that is to be able to have a clear denunciation of the things that you don't like about the policies put forth by the Bibi Netanyahu government with also and does so in a way that doesn't lead people down, you know, a slide towards, oh, I'm concerned about jury worldwide. And I don't, I think that's very challenging. Well, let me come up with a comparison that might be helpful here. Urban crime, genuine, serious problem. Many of the perpetrators of urban crime are black and a disproportionate number of them are black.

So supposing you are talking, you want to talk about urban crime. And you're aware of this fact. How do you deal with it? Do you see this as a secret source of political power? And do you look for code to say, you know, you don't like black people to begin with? Let me give you a whole other reason not to like them. Or do you understand that you've got a genuine problem here that can draw power from some of the worst things in American history? And you have to learn how to talk about this in ways that don't use that resource, even though it's beckoning.

and also signal to the people you're talking about, I'm not driven here by animus. And indeed, since the victims are also disproportionately black, that you have an interest in solving this problem as much as anybody else. And we can have a kind of solidarity. I think this is one of the reasons that the Mamdani case resonates so differently with supporters of Israel,

Jewish supporters of Israel and non-Jews. We just don't think he's a good faith actor. He's not interested in the Syrian Civil War, which had anybody bothered to share the pictures on TikTok, was, in fact, it's so upsetting that many of the pictures that you think are from Gaza are actually from Syria because those are the really most terrible ones. What is the resource? And who do you make league with?

And if you celebrate the financiers of Hamas terrorism in your own personal rap video, it hard for me to believe that you have no view on Hamas terrorism. You don't give him points for trying? He seems to be trying, which would be what I would defend Zoran, which I think is a kind of great difference from someone the Republican side who revel in the wink. and the nod comment, whereas Zoron seems to be trying to win people back over. What does trying mean? When George Wallace reinvented himself after he was assassinated, he sat down, oh, he's in a wheelchair, he had to sit down, but his near assassination, he...

And this is a little different. George Wallace, like, instituted racist policies and then as an old man, Zoran's 34. The point is when you have, when you have done things, and in this case, not a decade before, half a decade before, but a few weeks ago, the question is, who is this for? Who is this for? Is this for the people who feel that you are hostile to them? Or is it for an audience? If it's for the people who feel you're hostile to them, then you meet with them privately. You listen to them.

And you try to find a way, this is, I think, a little bit of the trajectory of Al Sharpton, who was involved in anti-Semitic incidents in the 1990s and then made a serious effort to reinvent himself and to say, there's still things I'm not going to reject that I believed in 1991, but there are things I did or whatever year it was that I am ashamed of and I want to I want to show that in a good faith way and that's not what anyone is seeing what Zoran is saying let's it's still in his case it's the single thing he's most sincere about all this housing stuff that that's that's all affect that's the poll the pollsters told him it would work the thing that has motivated him through almost all of his career he's not such a young man he's been

active in public life for 15 years and social media and other places has been this issue. And if you want to convince the people on the other side of the issue, that you're not driven by animus against them, there are things you do and there are things you don't do. So as I said, he comes on your show and he speaks to an audience, but he's speaking about. He's not speaking to. All right. Well, I guess we did get to the answer of the question. We got way laid a little with the Zoron, but the question of how to talk about concerns about Israel without doing so in a way that yields to the they, them accusations. And I guess you're the comparison to urban crime is the answer. I would say a way to do it, and there are many, is a little bit the Biden method,

which is you go to Israel. You see the devastation that was done on October 7th. You express your solidarity with the victims. And then you turn to your friends and you say, let me tell you, I think your answer is wrong. By the way, I wouldn't even necessarily agree with that myself, but if you were in this position, I think your answer is wrong. And I'm going to say it on your own soil to your face. And not only is your answer wrong, but here's the thing I would have done instead. Because defenders of Israel say, what were they supposed to do? The answer comes not this. You know what?

You don't value my life very much. I appreciate that. The thing I most appreciate that I just want to mention is that I do think, back to your original point that the Democrats aren't grappling with us, I do think folks that are on the other side of you for their views of how Israel has handled the war in Gaza are at least open to hearing that there are manners in which those actions have been criticized that yield to these broader questions. of anti-Semitism and racism and stoke it and and are most dangerously in my view

when you said in the second part of your quote their anti-Semites or violent neo-Nazis, our anti-Semites bring new energy to the party. What, what a lot of, I think the critics are doing is sending people down the radicalization pipeline to the neo-Nazis and like and basically delivering a new audience, a new young audience into the lapse of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson to spread their vile hate. I think that that's really happening. And all of this in a context in which of algorithmic devices that are not neutral on the anti-Semitic Twitter is engineered to bring anti-Semites together. And so it looks like is TikTok. And that may change if TikTok comes into American hands, but it's not clearly Americans are going

to get control of the algorithm. They'll just get the profits from it. All right. Final thing, do you have anything from Canada? Any report for Canada? How mad are the Canadians? How are things on the ground? It is not mad because Canadians understand that most Americans want no part of this. I spend a lot of time in Canada, of course. they understand most Americans are ashamed of it and not a part of it. But the injury of the Canadian economy from Trump is very real. Unemployment of the greater Toronto area is now nearly 10%. And it is having an impact on Canadian politics in a way that is especially, and that you see this throughout the English-speaking world, is especially damaging to those Canadians

who have historically been most friendly to the United States, that they, we look like fools. David Frum, I was pretty sure time, brother. Thank you so much for coming on. Always so good to be with me. We've got some JD stuff. save we're saving stuff for next time what our vengeance looks like jd 2028 it's a little teaser um and we'll talk to you probably the new year all right bye bye thanks so much everybody else see you on monday with bill crystal peace i almost gone standing you can't break that which isn't yours i oh must It's not much choice Be afraid of the lame

Don't her to legs Be afraid of the whole Don't her to soul Be afraid of the cold Don't her to blood A point moie malle de luce After me comes to fly I almost gone standing

You can't break that Which isn't is in your words You're almost gone standing I'm not my own It's not my choice Be afraid of the lame No No

No No Be afraid of the lame Don't inherit your legs Be afraid of the old They'll inherit your souls Be afraid of the cold No inherit your blood

inherit your blood A prima de luis After me comes the flag I must go on standing You can break the which isn't yours I oh must go on standing I'm not my own It's not my choice

I oh must Tong, you can't, can break that, that which is in yours, yours I hope, must go on, stand, standing tongue. I'm not, not my own, it's not, not my child. The Bullock podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.