The Bulwark Podcast - David Frum: Trump and Epstein Were Best Friends

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Of all the images of Trump, the only times he seemed to be authentically smiling in the presence of another person was when he was with Jeffrey Epstein. The two of them had the same interests, and other people in the 80s and 90s assumed they were best friends. Over in MAGA land, a proxy war has broken out among rightwing influencers—like Ben Shapiro, Tucker, and Candace—because the economy and the party are in trouble. Plus, SCOTUS rulings and cryptocurrency have created a public corruption free-for-all, the failed tariffs are masking the shortage of immigrant-built new housing, Trump has illegally added his name to the Kennedy Center, and despite the large military build-up off of Venezuela, the administration seems to be winging it. David Frum joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes JVL's 'Triad' on Trump's Venezuela adventure Catherine's "Receipts" on the impacts of the immigration crackdown on the construction industry NYT on the friendship between Epstein and Trump David's most recent podcast episode on crypto Tim's playlist

Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Glad to welcome back. You don't need his full bio. We've done it a million times now. He's the host of the David Frum show now, which I'm not considering a competitor. It's not hurting my feelings that there's a new competitor in the podcast space. It's very good and very serious.

You should go listen to that if you're not. That's David Fromm. How you doing, sir? I'm well. It's not a competitor because the guiding philosophy of the show is no concessions to listener taste. It's just like, it's just we are going there for, you know, monetary policy, trade policy. Yeah. It's the eat your peas approach to podcasting.

That is to certain listeners taste, though. With the podcast numbers, it's like everything else. It's a revealed preference. Yeah. You know, I get many, I get emails from people saying, I wish you would do more, David Frum style shows. And then I have a historian on or something. Yeah. You see the numbers go down, and it's like, well, you know, I appreciate it, though.

It's important to get some peas from time to time. You know, it can't be all fried chicken. It can't be all Epstein all the time. And let's start with Jeffrey Epstein. How about that? In this case, though, certainly deserved. The files are allegedly to be released today. But just before we started taping, Todd Blanche told us that we're not going to see everything,

which is not a surprise to me. He said this on Fox. I expect we're going to release several hundred thousand. documents today and those documents will come in all different forms. Kyle Cheney has been following this closely, writes the bottom line is the Trump administration is missing today's legal deadline to release the files. Blanche says many will be released on a rolling basis over the next couple weeks. Curious what percentage of the total files hundreds of thousands is. Look, my guiding rule for all of the Trump presidency has been a phrase I've used over and over

again, and that is many secrets, no mysteries. There's a lot you don't know about Epstein and Trump. and there's really nothing you don't know but Epstein Trump. They were best friends. The only photos you ever see of Donald Trump where he is authentically smiling in the presence of another human being, he was Jeffrey Epstein. And Putin, he hero worship. With Putin, he's like the little kid,

and Putin is the captain of the high school football team. He admires Putin. He hopes to grow up to be Putin. But they're not friends, but they're not equals. But Epstein, that was a friend. And they had all the same interests, stealing sexual assault. And they may have in the end fallen out over a real estate deal, but they were so close, so long.

They knew each other so well. And this whole idea that Donald Trump was the Q&ON hero of rescuing victims of sex trafficking. I mean, how gullible did you ever have to be to believe that? There were such people. There are fewer. You know, the Marjorie Taylor Greens of this world are dealing with the impact of realizing that the man who is the obvious fake Wizard of Oz is the obvious fake Wizard of Oz. Yeah, on that many secrets, no mysteries point, that great New York Times story for folks

who have the stomach for digging in by Nick Confessori in kind of the lead-up to these files being released, they did a bunch of interviews with all the victims just trying to figure out like what really was the Trump Association with Epstein. And, you know, just a couple things they discovered as, you know, in the late 80s, a bunch of people like literally thought

that they were best friends or not, you know, no other people can be sure whether Trump actually has any real friends, But the impression was Epstein or Maxwell introduced at least six women who have accused them of grooming or abuse to Trump, according to interviews. None have accused him of inappropriate behavior, none of those sex. One of the women, though, has never before spoken publicly about the experience told the times that Epstein coerned to attending four parties at his home. Trump attended all four, and at two of them, Epstein directed her of sex with other guests. So that kind of tells you what you need to know, basically. The question is, who goes to prison for how long?

obviously that has to be based on highly specific factual information. Even the worst person of the world, you want to punish that person for the crimes they did commit and not for the crimes they didn't commit or not for crimes they were in the vicinity of, but were not their personal responsibility. But with the president of the United States, there's just a threshold question. Is this a person who regards all Americans, including women, including young people, including kids who are adrift as human beings worthy of respect, or does he regard them as objects to be subject to his demands, pressures, lusts?

The Epson story, whatever the exact details are, and we may never get all the way through it, it tells you who he is, but you already knew that or you should have already known that. So, TBD, more on this will come out over the weekend, and if there are any, you know, particularly grotesque revelations from the files that we get today. You know, you can check us out over on the Borg takes feed where we'll be talking about that. It's just my suspicion we'll see, based on their behavior to date, I'd be surprised if the worst Trump material is in the first trunch, let's say that. So we'll continue to wait. So he gave a speech I wanted to talk to you about earlier this week, the kind of, you know, mall Santa yelling at America speech that he did earlier this week about how he was given a bad deal with the economy. And some on the left before the speech in the lead up were talking about how this, whatever it was that he was going to say was.

to be this big distraction from the Epstein file, so it was coming. I was never sure if that was really the motivation. If it was the motivation, seems to have been a total failure. I was wondering what you made of his remarks earlier in the week. Two thoughts. The first is, you may remember from the first term, the C-Bannon phrase, flood the zone with shit. Yeah. And this was an aggressive strategy where you created so many distractions that your opponents could never fixate on anything, could never hold you to account for any one horrible thing you did, any one abuse of power. like so many things in politics, as you know well from your long experience, these strategies work until they stop. And the flood the zone with shit strategy worked so long as the American

economy was prosperous as it was by good luck in the first three years of Donald Trump's first term. Most people don't pay that much attention to politics. Media elites can sometimes if they can all converge on one story in a time of prosperity, media elites can elevate that, but if there are too many stories they can't. And since times are generally prosperous, people aren't that fixed on politics. When times are not prosperous, and they're not prosperous now, the flood the zone with shit goes into complete reverse. Because there's one story that the person who decides elections is thinking about, and that is they can't afford their groceries and their kids can't get a job. And meanwhile, the president is fixed on the White House ballroom

and Epstein and Venezuela. It's his zone that is flooded with shit. And the shit prevents him from getting in the way of getting to the message that he ought to get to. And then he he doesn't have a message because the truthful economic message, the only thing Trump could do to make a difference to the problems that are afflicting most Americans is say, the central economic idea of my administration, the central economic idea of my life was stupid and wrong. I'm sorry I did it to you. I'm going to do my best undo it. You have to be patient as I undo this stupid thing I did to you, but it's all my fault. And if someone else had been president, it wouldn't have happened. That's a tough message. And that's the message he had to sell in that speech. And that's

that's why I was struck. Donald Trump used to be a really smooth con artist in a kind of chuckling manner. He didn't look desperate. He didn't look like he had to make the sale or he would end up like the guys in Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross. This is a guy who had to make the sale and had lost the knack for making the sale. And I was struck by one more thing in it, which is he used a lot of statistics. And one of Donald Trump's secrets of power has always been he couldn't remember them and he knew that most people didn't care about them and didn't understand. Yeah, Elizabeth Warren's got a white paper and, you know, he's selling you a monorail. This is going to be the greatest.

It's going to be the best ever, the best of all time. But he would never say 17%. Yeah, right. And even though most of the statistics are made up or irrelevant, the very fact that he's using them was part of the desperation of the con artist where the trick isn't working. It's interesting that you said that because it was one of my observations as well. Like, obviously he lies all the time. And obviously, you and I are going to disagree with the substance of whatever BS spin that he's

trying to push no matter what but so just judging it though on a performance level yeah he was always really good at at the flood the zone was shit strategy at playing the tabloid game of like hey i'm gonna get you to talk about this other thing yeah you know maybe it's gonna offend the sensibilities of some people but i know my people will like it and now we'll get now move the conversation it failed completely on that score it was not successful as a distraction or as a performance yeah or as something to move people to a more comfortable turf for him because His people are all saying, I am paying more for my weekly grocery basket than I did in January. And you told me I was going to pay less.

And maybe I discounted that and thought, okay, at least I pay no more, but I am paying more. And this time, unlike Biden, who is kind of the victim of a global inflation, you did it on purpose. You did it on purpose. And we kind of trusted that you'd be good at this. We never really expected Biden to be good at it. Frankly, that's what that voter would think, right? And you're failing. Right. So I've got a head of iceberg lettuce here that comes from Mexico, and it costs more because you made it cost more.

democracy depends on citizens who can listen reason and disagree without rancor that's what we think of the bulwark podcast at least and that's what students do every day at st john's college uh they've no majors no lectures no professors telling you what to think just small rigorous conversations about the great books that have shaped civilization in seminar every voice is heard as students wrestle with three thousand years of human thought from aristotle and plato to locke and russo from smith and marks to lincoln and Douglas. St. John's College has long been America's Great Books College, and the radical approach to conversation and community means that learning there is different. Every student is a source of insight, and every question is an invitation to go on a journey with an

unknown destination. Do you believe democracy requires the kind of trust that is engendered 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. Underneath all of this, there's like a proxy war happening. You can kind of sense that it's not just you and me, David, who have had, you know, Trump to Ranger's Syndrome for over a decade now who are noticing how he's, how he's lost his fastball and how he's adrift messaging wise. You can tell that the power brokers within MAGA can sense it because there is a, you know, this sort of proxy war happening now about what to do next with MAGA. And a lot of that has been centered around conversation about Israel. also the conversation about immigration,

like how much of a national populist movement should we be, should be heritage Americans, you know, what should our foreign policy be? And Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have been kind of at the forefront of the more nationalist conspiratorial side of this. Ben Shapiro gave a speech last night in Arizona pushing back on that

that was pretty striking the degree to which he went after them. And I just want to, if one could bear with us with the Ben Shapiro voice, if you're on 1.5 speed right now, you might want to move it back down so you can understand them. Let's listen to Ben Shapiro. or something. The conservative movement is also in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name

of principle, but actually traffic in conspiracyism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair. So, for example, if you host a Hitler apologist Nazi-loving anti-American peace of refuse like Nick Fuentes, you know, the Nick Fuentes who said that the vice president of the States is a, quote, fat gay race trader married to a jeet. The person who said that Charlie Kirk was a, quote, retarded idiot. The person who said, and pardon my language here, it's his quote, that he, quote, took Turning Point USA and fucked it, and that's why it's filled with Groyper's. If you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it. And when Megan said this week, quote, my goal and my job here is to try to understand, yes,

where Candace is coming from on this. And so she sees no purpose. in inserting herself, quote, into this on one side, that is a moral and logical absurdity. There is only one moral side here, Erica Kirk's side. And Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country. He's not actually making an argument-based in evidence. He's simply maligning people that he disagrees with, which is indeed par for the course from a man who was once a PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein. Check the record.

David? Look, obviously he's right on every point. And I think what he's revealing here is Trump benefited in his first three years from a very strong economy that he did not create. And basically the story of Trump won is the United States came out of the Great Recession of 2008, 2009, slowly. And as of 2014, it had still not recovered to where it was before. but the federal monetary authorities got nervous in 2014 and began tightening the money supply some more prematurely. And so the economy in 2016, all those years after the Great Recession, was still not performing the way Americans expected and wanted after so many years of first real hardship and

then slow recovery. So Trump wins in 2016 because of the reaction to the Great Recession. And then the economy at last catches up, gets back on its growth path, and there are three good years before COVID. And he benefited from all that. And the people whom Ben Shapiro is right, referencing that that whole podcasting industry. Tucker Carlson was still on TV and Candice Owen was not yet a full-blown maniac in those days. They were a side show. Well, now all the people who Ben Shapiro's talking about are much crazier than they were half a decade ago. The economy is much worse. Are the Republican Party is in real trouble? There's some real issues. And the nature of the podcast economy is that everyone has to keep upping the ante. My son Nathaniel, who produces

my show has a wonderful phrase. He said that in this environment, Charlie Kirk was the apex predator. And when Charlie Kirk was murdered and taken away from the scene, it left a lot of ecological spaces for like the smaller, meaner dinosaurs to roam the earth. And they're now all in competition with one another at a time when the Republican Party needs, has different needs. And Ben, who is, I think, much more about power and policy than about personality, is trying to summon them to, you guys, with your insane campaign that the wife of the president of France is an imposter, which even if true, would be not a subject of enormous interest from America. Well, unless she's also part of the plot to murder, like, mid-level American political

commentators, which is part of the theory as well. That's why you have to go there, because it's like, you know, some kind of crazed junky high. You need stronger and stronger doses of the same delusional medicine. But meanwhile, the podcast movement is moving farther or far away from anything that anyone else in the world would recognize as politics. I agree with all that. by one note, and I was, I've both on social media now here, I've praised everything that Ben said, no lies detected, as I say, about Candace and Tucker and Steve Bannon. Here's the problem with

it, though. Trump is the apex predator, right? Like, Charlie was his minion, not to kill the metaphor here. But even Ben, in those remarks, like, no one benefits from and no one has yet had the gumption to just address the real issue, which is the biggest conspirator in the whole party, is not Tucker or Candace, but is the president of the United States. The person screwing the economy is the president of the United States, and the MAGA movement cannot possibly move back to, you know, sanity and sobriety and anti-grifting when the leader of it is a grifter and a conspiracist. Yeah. Well, Trump is a crook way more than he is a conspiracist. He's both, though. You can be both. You can be both. Look, through this year, the MAGA movement has

this desperate decision to make, which is if the 2026 elections are free and fair, if they're allowed to be free and fair, they're heading for a massive repudiation. It's certainly. in the House, not impossibly in the Senate, not impossibly in governor's races. And if there is a massive repudiation, a lot of things that today are happening because no one in Congress is saying, how did the president make a billion dollars from unknown sources in his first 12 months in office? It's very unlikely that you did that without tripping over some criminal statutes somewhere along the way. Let's look into it. All of those things become activated. So it is a matter of maybe survival to keep the house, and that means increasingly desperate measures.

That's the great question. And so if you're trying to protect Donald Trump, and this getting distracting this discussion about is the wife of the president of France, secretly a man, secretly a Martian, secretly a mass murderer, is a big distraction from the thing you really have to do, which is find some way to stop democratic votes from being tallied. I want to get into the Trump corruption, but you've piqued my interest there. How is your threat assessment evolved over the course of this year on that question about our democratic stability in this moment? My threat assessment has been pretty stable since 2016, which is a president, especially with a complicit Congress, can do some things to shut down Democratic

competition, but he can't overthrow Democratic competition entirely. So there's a disparity you can overcome through electoral manipulation, but it's finite. There comes a point where the, the wave gets too big, where even the things you can do without absolutely overthrowing the rule of law in a way that the judiciary won't accept, using the military in ways that the military won't accept, if the wave is that big, then you are out of resources. And I think we may be in 26 heading toward a point where the economic discontent is so bad and on its way to getting worse that all the threats that they have in mind, when I hear the things they want to do, it's not going to be enough. And many of the courts have already said they can't do,

like the president taking personal control of the election mechanics. Trump tried to issue an executive order to that effect and was told, no, you can't do that. I was always less worried in 2026 about kind of the voter suppression parts of their plan because a lot of times voter suppression stuff backfires. I was more worried about a stop-the-steel thing more akin to what they did last time, which is that the Democrats win the House by three seats, four seats, and that Republicans in random states decide not to seat those, you know, congressmen. And then we have, you know, because they claim that the mail ballots were fraudulent.

And to your point about like size, that becomes a less doable effort if Democrats end up winning by 12, 14, 15 seats. Or 40. Or 40, yeah. So let me, here's the precedent that is really analogous. So in 1984, there was a contested race in Indiana where the two candidates, Republican and Democrat, were dozens of points of votes apart. And it was pretty unclear who really had won. And it became a big, big controversy, Indiana 7th, I think it was. And eventually the House convened a special committee to look into it.

But the committee had two Democrats and one Republican, and it found for the Democrat. And the Republicans were very upset. And in the end, the court said, we're out of this. The Constitution says the House of Representatives is the judge of its own elections. We will not enter into who was right in the Indiana 7th. And effectively, the Speaker of the House said, I'm seating the Democrat. And Republicans said, you will pay for this someday. And I think that has been sort of in their mind, Indiana 7th, 1984, as the precedent.

But as you say, that would work with two seats or three, maybe four. The Mike Johnson thing of, I'm just not swearing you in when there are 40 people who clearly want. I don't think it works. I don't think the other institutions of American life will abide it. A little worried your house is being robbed, though. We have a number of visiting house dogs. And so, yeah, I'm sorry to Michael up. No, it's fine with me.

I just want to make sure you just want to check to make sure you don't have an intruder. Your guard dog. There's a lot of wildlife in this house right now. That brings some people joy. I don't really get it, but I don't like to yuck other people's yum. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. The holidays are a time for tradition. Some people have many in their family.

We're updating ours. We get to stay in New Orleans this year. And I'm trying to jumpstart some new New Orleans. holiday traditions. But whatever they are for you now is also a time to reflect on what your traditions mean and how you might rewrite them or make some new ones. One thing for some of us might be healthy over the holidays given, you know, the emotional fervor and the memories of holidays pass is to think about whether therapy is something

that could be useful for you or a loved one. I was just talking yesterday with one of my friends who was in a great. group therapy session and going through some issues they were having. We were bouncing it back and forth a bit. And, you know, I do think that a lot of that stuff that sometimes hangs over us, you get a little extra time to think about it during the holidays. You get more family time. Emotions are higher.

Feelings are higher. And some of it starts to weigh on you a little bit more. And so maybe if that's you, this is a time to think about how therapy could help you with better help. They've got quality therapists that work on a stretch. Code of Conduct and are fully licensed in the USA. They help do the initial matching work for you. And they have an industry high fulfillment rate.

They typically get it right the first time. But if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored recommendations. This December started a new tradition by taking care of you. Our listeners get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash the bulwark. That's better, H-E-L-P.com slash the bulwark. I want to go back to the Gryft on your show

this week you had Will Thomas on to talk about Trump's corruption and the dangers of politicians regulating industries they invest in. When you had done the show, the focus was naturally on crypto, which is where Trump has gained most of his wealth on paper at least so far during this first year. Obviously, that's an industry that should be regulated more. It's regulated kind of minimally. I believe since you've taped, we had another news item that came out, Trump's business, the business that started as Truth Social, which is just basically his blog. And then Expanded into crypto, and I think it also streams somewhat like Don Jr.'s podcast or something. That business, the podcasting crypto blog business, has merged with a nuclear fusion company.

It was a $6 billion merger. Nuclear fusion feels like a highly regulated business, so I think that would be relevant to your discussion. The discussion focused on two lines that are convergent. The first line is the way that the Supreme Court has over the past decade and a half dismantled American public integrity laws. it is now very, very difficult to convict a politician in the United States of bribery. The Supreme Court has said they've got all these exceptions. If you give a politician money, like cash, and ask the politician, I need you to set up a meeting for me with a regulatory body. This is the actual facts of the most relevant case.

I'm not telling you to tell the regulatory body what to say, but the fact that you've made the call gives the regulatory body a pretty clear idea of the answer you want. But if there's no actual order from you to tell those guys to give my donor this, then it's not bribery. So the Supreme Court has created this. If the government is doing what is his ordinary line of business, setting up meetings, unless there is an explicit corrupt act for corrupt payment, no conviction. Wow. So that creates both a lot of loopholes in the law. And also, even when people do do things that are straightforwardly illegal, huge evidentiary problems. It very seldom happens that the politician is caught.

on some kind of record saying, you give me the $100,000, and I will give you the contract. And let me just make sure that that's in writing so that prosecutors can have it conveniently at hand. The Supreme Court has raised questions. If the gift comes after the act, there's a question mark about it. So public integrity is even before Trump, even before crypto, that was gutted. And a little cynically, I said on the show, the relevant decision here was a nine to zero unanimous Supreme Court decision because the liberals on the court want to make it harder to approve crimes generally. And the conservatives on the court want to make it harder to prove crimes skinks their friends. And so that produced the nine to zero majority. And to extent that

it was possible at all, they've dismantled the public corruption unit now, this administration has, which has just accelerated this, you know, preexisting problem. And now you throw crypto in, because one of the things the Supreme Court is very permissive of is if you're running a kind of business, the politicians can run a kind of business. And the crypto industry, it's a number of different lines of business, but the meme coins in particular, which are what, like trading cards, when Donald Trump put his meme coins on the market in January 25 at $75 a coin, today they are trading at about $5.5. Now, some of the people who bought them, some of the people bought one or two or three are genuine dupes who've lost money and they may even be irritated about it.

But the people who bought millions of dollars of those coins were not dukes. They were looking for a way to give money to Donald Trump personally in a way that would pass. past scrutiny, and maybe protect their privacy, too. So the meme coins were intended to lose value. And it's not Donald Trump was the only politician who can issue a meme coin. The next governor of California could create a meme coin and find a way to get money routed to anyone who's got an important, powerful job can say, yeah, I'm issuing a meme coin. And, you know, it's going to lose 90% of his value in the first six months.

But, you know, we'll both remember that wonderful moment we had when you put all that money in my pocket. And maybe I'll be grateful. Then on top of that, they released the stable coin, which is the deal that they're doing with, you know, with like where the UAE facilitated it and it's financed from a Chinese guy that's a criminal, right? It's like the notion there is that we're like pegging this fake coin to the dollar, to real currency. But like the idea that a foreign government would look at it and say, you know, I could take something that's actual currency or I could take the president of the United States meme coin that's pegged to currency. And it's preposterous to think that they're doing that for like legitimate investment reasons. I wrote an article for The Atlantic about the stable coins because they're more complicated and actually much more dangerous than meme coins are simply a way to do corruption. But they don't pose any threat to the larger economy.

Trump gets his corrupt swag. The donors get some get duped, more get attention in favor. But there's no systematic risk. But stable coins, these are seriously, seriously dangerous. Because what a stable coin is is a bank deposit. You give the sable coin issue or $100. He gives you the coin. He gives you a promise that the $100 will be available when you want it.

If you've seen it's a wonderful life, you know any institution that takes deposits is at potential risk. Because as George Bailey says, my $100, it's not here in the till. It's in Fred's house. It's in George's house. Well, the same thing happens with sable coins is the money is not actually at hand. Now, it's invested supposedly in treasury bills and other things, but they're not quite as liquid. it. And the thing that prevented the kind of bank run you saw in its wonderful life was the combination of strict regulation and deposit insurance. And deposit insurance is paid for.

And it's not a trivial payment. Banks pay tens hundreds of millions of dollars a year for their deposit insurance. A stable coin is a bank deposit without proper regulation and without deposit insurance. So the reason that stable coins are a competitive business is you say, look, what if you were allowed to take other people's money and not pay the insurance premium? Wouldn't that be more profitable? I think it would be. I think it would. Yeah.

You eliminate my most important cost? Yeah. But then there's a problem. What if they want the money back? And what if stable coins get big? And they become like, as happened in 2009, when this problem appeared in money market funds. People want their money back. The money's not there.

And the government of the United States is on the hook. One of the things that the Trump people kept saying, they passed a law called the so-called Genius Act, very ironically named law. But they said there's no public money involved. here, don't worry, there's no deposit insurance. The government is not on the hook. But if the failure is as big as it's likely going to be, of course the government is on the hook. Of course the government is on the hook is you cannot have billions or trillions of dollars of deposits not be refunded. That would be the end of the world. The one caveat, I guess, I'd give to that, is that

I don't know that the UAE is going to want their money back. I think that they're probably getting other stuff. So some of the other purchasers of the Trump's stable coin might be a different deal. Well, the stable coins are especially attractive to criminals and terrorists because, again, we don't want to go maybe too far down this rabbit hole. But it's actually, if you're Hezbollah, if you're Hezbollah, it's quite hard to get into the U.S. banking system. If you want to keep your money in U.S. dollars, that's difficult. Banks are supposed to know their customer. They're supposed to file all kinds of reports. The stable coin allow people who want to hold wealth in dollars.

And there is trillions of dollars of dirty money around the world that wants to be in dollars, allows them to hold their money in dollars. allows them to hold their money in dollars without going through all that scrutiny. And one more thing about the stable coin companies, all the big stable coin companies are domiciled outside the United States. They're in El Salvador. I think tether is in El Salvador. This is a whole arbitrage against U.S. regulation, against U.S. know-your-customer laws, with other people's money, all of it purporting to be a refundable deposit, but in fact

at risk, and it's just a time bomb ticking waiting to blow up. Just one more thing on this. No thoughts on the president of the United States being the majority. shareholder of a nuclear fusion business? Because that's true. That's what is a true sentence as of yesterday. Yes. Well, there are important regulatory concerns there. Like, nuclear energy. I'm a big believer in it. But it's got obvious safety hazards. And there used to be an elaborate system of controls and inspections to make sure that nuclear power plants were run safely. And if the president has got his well tied up, I have no idea of the same. I have no idea of the same.

science of the risks of nuclear fusion as opposed to fission. I presume they're significant. And given what Doge has done to every other executive thinking part of the U.S. government, what has happened to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? How intact is that? I want to go on to some foreign policy stuff. Well, I guess Dealer's choice. You had some thoughts about Japan. You mentioned in me beforehand. I also want to talk to you about the Venezuela, potential war. Where do you want to start? Probably we should start with Venezuela, because it's more urgent, although the Japan thing is one I'm more worried about. Through 23 and 24, a lot of Republicans, not just Trump. Actually, Trump was one of the more cautious, Vance, DeSantis,

we're calling for military action inside Mexico against the Mexican cartels. Rockets, seal team sixes, naval blockades, will run DeSantis' idea. The Mexicans fended that off by essentially appeasing Trump. They have opened their skies to American drones, and they've let the United States conduct all kinds of operations and surveillance operations inside Mexico. We'll see what they allow of military operations. But they've bought quiet. But the energy that makes the Trump people want to do something violent is still there. And so it's fixated itself on Venezuela. And it's not quite clear what the goal here is, what the plan here is. There are no allies. But there's clearly a lot of aggression looking for an outlet. So far,

it's found small boats, but it seems to be that they want even more. I don't know. Maybe Argentina or the new president of Chile. We've got a couple of right-wing governments now down there? You're one of them will be for it? I'm just thinking to make a point, like, it's crazy. It remains unclear to me who besides Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller are actually for this. And even like our old friends in the kind of neocon world who maybe would have been for this in a different thing, who are more amenable to Trump than we are, like National Review,

commentary, some of those folks, they're criticizing this. Like, who is for this? I remain that kind of interventionist. And the Maduro government is not only oppressive and cruel and dangerous, but it's also taken one of the most potentially prosperous countries in the world, certainly in South America, and reduced it to beggary and driven a quarter of the population into refugee status. So if you had a reasonably normal administration that would say, look, I'm standing here with the president of Mexico, with the president of Colombia, Venezuela's neighbor, and the largest receiver

of Venezuelan refugees, the president of Brazil, and we're putting together a multilateral force that will not only remove Maduro from power, but that will oversee free and fair elections afterwards and make sure there's some kind of order. And the face of this occupation will be South American. So this is not American imperialism, of which so many have fresh memories. I could be sold that project. Okay. All right. Now we're talking. Maybe there's a resolution by the organization of American States. But not Gallum, Stephen Miller, deciding he wants to do it just so that he can do the Alien Enemies Act and deport as many Venezuelans as possible. Because that seems to be what's really happening, right?

When the American troops went into Grenada in 1983 under Ronald Reagan, there were 1,900 Americans there. There were 300 from Jamaica, Barbados, and I think Trinidad. And the reason was not that the United States needed that extra increment of Jamaican firepower. It was to say to the Grenadians, your neighbors are here too, that we are showing a decent respect. And we know that every island in the Caribbean has unhappy memories of American action. So we want to reassure you that we are acting in conjunction with others who are, your situation and that you will retain your sovereignty and independence after this liberation action. This is one where I kind of don't know how this plays out. Do you have any thoughts on

the next few weeks? I mean, I've been kind of surprised. At first, I thought this was a little bit of Marco's saber rattling and, again, some excuse me for Stephen Miller to do some deportations and that Trump would eventually taco like usual, but that feels not right anymore. But what's weird about this is they have pulled together an enormous array of military force into the area. And you read these things like the largest deployment since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president is asking for options. And you said, wouldn't you have to ask for options before moving all these ships and troops?

The idea that they're sort of winging it even now, they don't seem to have a plan. Look, there's no staff process. There's no national security advisor of the United States. Who's running the interagency process? Who's doing the diplomacy? There's no one. And it just seems to be a series of ad hoc actions by different parts of the federal government with no clear plan.

at enormous cost and at enormous hazard. And while Venezuela is probably not a very credible military opponent, I don't know that they would be able to resist. There will be costs. There will be costs in life. There will be costs in life, for sure, American life possibly, huge costs and money. And there's no approval by Congress.

There's no statement to the American people. There's no buy-in, and there are no regional allies. Yeah. And unknown costs, unintended consequences. JVL did these letter yesterday that folks should read if they want more on this, where he took your point about. Maduro, and it's like, Maduro's a bastard, but this is, this is crazy. He wrote that Trump's bleed about this is the single stupidest and most irresponsible presidential statement and the history

of foreign policy. I defy you to find something dumber. Maybe somebody found something dumber, but like just the notion that he's going to saber-rattle and be like, hey, we got an armada, we've surrounded you, give us your oil with no plan. No, I mean, it is, it's just, it's truly moronic. Columbia was a reasonably stable democracy from the 1950s until the 1990s. But it has not been a stable democracy now for close to 30 years. So there's a lot of institutional damage. What's the plan to reconstitute a democracy? They're capable of it. They've done it before. But they're damaged and much of their population is it. And Trump's idea seems to be either Maduro coughs up the oil or we get the next Maduro in line. And the United States would be committing military resources on a big scale

to bring another dictator to power in order to get oil. And then we're going to take their oil. so they're going to have no natural resources and money to try to rebuild their economy and the democracy? It's nonsensical. Well, one more thing about that. So I'm a veteran of the W. Bush administration and all the... The commenters are aware. We still hear about it from time. Okay.

So one of the big left-wing complaints about Bush was that he went to war in Iraq for oil. I remember having this discussion with so many people in those states, which is nobody goes, if you want oil, you buy it. There's lots of it. And if you conquer a country, you don't get the oil for free. you still have to pay for it because it's not just like lying there on the ground like pebbles. It's a product of enormous investment and the capital has to have a return. You have to pay the sovereign a proceed. And I just had that argument so many times in 2003, 2000, it would be crazy to go to war for oil.

No one would do something that dumb. And now the president of the United States is saying, you know, we should go to war for oil. You want oil? There's a global glut. The United States is not where the world's not just producer of oil, oil and gas. and I think the world's largest exporter of gas. And there's lots more. There's no shortage.

So the idea you'd go to war to get, it's just... I was going to say, as stupid as the idea was then, it's exponentially stupider now after the natural gas and shale revolution. To Japan, I want to hear your concerns about Japan nuclearizing. Okay, so there was a little story unsourced that an advisor to the Prime Minister of Japan, an unnamed advisor, had said that Japan

should consider getting a nuclear weapon. Now, Japan is eminently capable. They have a nuclear industry of their own. They could have a weapon in a very few weeks or months if they wanted one. They have all the know-how. They have all the material. They forwent this because of their own history and because they relied on American protection, like so many people. The Japanese view was it's better to have a world with fewer nuclear weapons than more.

Our trustworthy allies, the United States have hoisted their nuclear umbrella over us. They are deterring the other nuclear powers in our region. We don't need the moral hazard of this. We don't need the odium of it. and we don't need the cost in trouble. But we could do it if we ever had to. But one of the costs of Trump making America so unreliable is that every country has to think, we can't trust the Americans anymore.

And they did this not just once, but twice. So this is obviously a recurring risk that they will abandon the world or do something selfish and imperialistic. They're talking about waging war on NATO-Alli, Denmark to seize Greenland. Maybe that will never happen. But they're thinking about it. someone who's drawing up papers right now for a U.S. war on Denmark. And one of the chances. Are you sure 82-year-old Demential little Trump won't do that?

Is it a 2% chance? Is it an 8%? It's a lot higher than it was before. It's not zero. And we know that they're thinking about abandoning Ukraine. So if you're a European, if you're Japanese, if you're South Korean, if you're Taiwanese, you have to think all of these countries could have a bomb in a few months or years if they wanted one. I worry that one of the costs of the Trump presidency is it's going to be one of the greatest nuclear proliferation events.

in world history and not with underdeveloped countries like Indian Pakistan who had their own agendas, but with former U.S. allies who have said, we thought we could trust the Americans and now we see we cannot. That's a dark irony because it was one of the things, when you said earlier that the one unifying thing of Trump his whole life back to the 80s is his love of tariffs, he also was an anti-nuclear person back then in his pre-days. That was just one of the schicks he did to get attention. And so it would be a good irony for him to be the one that's the cause of that.

The other thing is that in the way that Trump is erratic about all of this, and so that's concerning, right? It's like you can't, you know, you have to game out the options of 81-year-old Trump decides he wants to do something crazy to stand to power. The Vance element of it also is relevant because you look at his successors and you think, man, they might not be as crazy as him, but in order to appease his people, they might need to feel like they're more ideologically America first and that we might not be able to rely on them for kind of a related but different reason. And Vance seems, who is obviously much more intelligent than Trump and much more consistent and hardworking and more ideological, has really talked himself into a position of America should not be keeping the peace for other countries. And the America didn't do this as a favor to other people. America did it because after two world wars, the United States realized the world is not so big. America is very big. If there are major wars in other places, America will be drawn in.

And that will be really expensive. So, for an American point of view, you want to prevent war, and the way you prevent war is to make sure that all of the worlds are almost all of the world's most advanced, most sophisticated, most militarily capable countries are allies of yours. The idea that Germany doesn't have a big army and Japan doesn't have a big Navy was not some mistake made in 1945. You guys, you are so good at consumer electronics. Your cars are, why don't you focus on that and leave the army?

Leave the Army and the Navy to us. We'll protect you. You won't need one, and your French and Korean neighbors will feel a lot better if you focus on what you do best and let us do what we do. I want to just really quick talk on immigration, because you've talked about this quite eloquently in the past. I just want to hear your E-Rift, because I guess we were on with Nicole maybe a couple weeks ago. You're talking about the economic side of the immigration choices that this administration has

made this year. Catherine Rampal, my colleague, posted something, I guess it was last night, about just the crazy impact on the construction industry and how nobody's pushing back. She said that she called the National Association from Home Builders, which has been a source of her over years, so it's not like a cold call, and they refused to give a comment to her about this.

My buddy up in sent me a text that he had dinner with a guy that's a big home builder who had been a trumper who is like apoplectic about the state of affairs who now has to buy Uber's for all his staff to get to their work sites because they're all afraid, even the ones who are illegal, just wondering what you kind of make about the state of play there on the economic side?

Well, if I remember these figures right, back when they were telling figures, it was estimated that about a fifth of the construction workforce nationwide was here without status. But in the really hot housing markets, California, Florida, it was more like 25% and sometimes 30%. And there's specialties, especially roofing and drywall, where it can be close to half the workforce in a state like California, a state like Florida. So these kinds of crackdowns really have an impact on the housing market. Now, because Trump is driving so much to the economy into recession, the shortage of housing

is not as painful. It has been projected. I don't think we have the final figures on this yet. But on the present trajectory, 2025 will be the first year since the first census in 1790 when the population of the United States is smaller at the end of the year than it was at the beginning. Look, I comment this as someone who's definitely more immigration restrictionists than many people were in the Biden years.

But if you're an immigration restrictionist, you have to be very clear to eye. It's a cost. that immigration is a source of economic benefit. It has other costs associated with it, and your mileage may vary, but the question is, do you want to capture all the economic benefits or do you want to, even at the risk of the social harms, or do you want to reduce some of the social harms by reducing some of the economic benefits? But this idea that, J.D. Vance will say, well, we'll make housing cheaper by driving out

all the immigrants, the United States needs to build. They're building the housing. They're not just buying the housing. They're building the housing. And this is a single entry, bookkeeping entry. And meanwhile, there are all kinds of industries where labor is going to be scarce. Again, the magnitude of the economic slowdown masks this to some degree. But the idea that you're doing both an immigration shock and a trade shock at the same time

and trying to make up for it by cutting interest rates, that's a formula for a recession plus inflation at the same time. I want to lump two things together that I would be remiss not to mention in the Trump Megalomania category before we end. The one substantive announcement from Trump speech earlier this week, I should have mentioned this when we're talking about it, was the Trump Patriot dividend, which has turned out to be fake. The checks for $1,776 are actually reallocating things that Congress had allocated, which was subsidizing housing for service members. And then Trump has also officially renamed the Kennedy Center, the Trump Kennedy Center. So thoughts on either or both. Well, he's replaying greatest hits. was one of the things he did in the first Trump term that was disgusting and odious and on lowercase our Republican, but that worked, was that he put his own signature on the COVID relief checks that had never been done before. Every instinct of a Democratic Republic is, you know, these are not gifts to the people from the president. He's not a Roman emperor distributing largesse. This is your money. And the reason it's signed by this obscure figure, the treasurer of the United States, is to depoliticize it. But it paid off. It really did seem to do him a lot of political good. So he's got that same trick in mind.

But because there is no congressional authorization, he either has to spend the money illegally, the way the farm money is being spent illegally without an appropriation or authorization, where he has to take it from some other fund that he's got, and that's what he's done. And then we'll have an interesting question. Are military people sophisticated enough to recognize that the reason they're not getting the bathroom in their military housing upgraded next year as they were supposed to is because Trump took the money to give it to them in the form of cash, which is taxable, unlike the bathroom, which was not taxable? On the Kennedy Center, this is happening right now. So it's Texas to be, his name is now going on the building. I wonder if we can bulldoze it like the East Wing. Is that a wrong impulse that I'm looking at this picture of the Donald Trump Kennedy Center and I want to bulldoze up like the East Wing now?

One of the things that people like you and me get often asked is, is there anything positive you can say about President Trump? I realize after today, yes, there is, he really loves musical theater. He does. He's an old queen. He has a Broadway queen at art. He really loves it. And he wants to be a piece of it.

It's illegal, just as renaming the Department. The Department of Defense was named by a congressional statute in 1949. The president cannot change it unilaterally. And the fact that so many people chose to go along with this absurd practice, no, why not call it the Department of Booze? That might be even more accurate. Again, the Kennedy Center was a creation of Congress named by act of Congress. Trump can't change that.

But we're so used to the law being violated in ways big and small. This one can be undone. It's going to feel petty. It's so, like, all of this stuff is like, you know, well, it could consume another president. You know what I mean? He knows that and I don't know. Yeah. Okay.

So here's the serious point. I think I've wrestled with this point with you before, is should the next president, assuming there is a more normal precedent at some point in the future, is the right attitude to move on or undo? And the Biden impulse was mostly move on. Treat Trump as an aberration, where his crimes were undeniable, try to, get some other part of the government to focus on it. Biden clearly preferred to keep the Department of Justice away from Trump prosecutions. They were not very upset that Judge Eileen

Cannon kept delaying and delaying. I think that suited Biden too. Was that the right call? I think it was from the vantage point of 2021, it was defensible. From the vantage point of 2029, I think it will be harder to do. And let me introduce a last thought. People who have a political science background may remember a problem called the Prisoner's Dilemma. So there are two prisoners. they're in separate cells, and they're said, look, if you both keep silent, you get a light punishment, but if one of you defects, he gets away with it, and the other's punished, and the result is that both of them squeal on each other and they both get punished. So what is the solution to the prisoner's dilemma? In the early days of the computer era, a computer scientist at the University of

Toronto called for papers, and he said he was going to create a sort of mock computer universe, and he was going to play the prisoner's dilemma over and over and over again to find the most stable answer. And this is a long buildup, but the winning entry was a strategy. It was a strategy, he called tit for tat, which was cooperate on the first move, on every subsequent move, do what the other guy did. If he cooperated, you keep cooperating. If he punished, even if it seems irrational, you punish. Because over the long haul, if you have the reputation where if you cooperate, we'll cooperate,

but if you defect, we'll punish you. It can't be the rule that Republicans get to break every norm and Democrats have to tidy the room up afterwards. Bulldozer Kennedy Center. Sounds like David Frum's on board. with me. I like that. Tid for tech. Final topic. You worked with Rob Reiner on some political activism in 2017. Obviously, just a horrific tragedy. And I was just wondering if you had any parting thoughts about it. I got to know him a little bit. And we got became quite friendly,

not close friends, but I gave a dinner party in D.C. for Rob Reiner in 2018. I looked it up. And among the guests was J.D. Vance and Usha Vance, who were then the bright hopes of reform Republicans. So I'm unnerthing the records of that event for to use in a future, this memoir I keep working on. But Rob Reiner was just such a kindly generous gentleman. He had strong views and those sometimes could get in the way of appreciating his artistry. But his artistry at its peak was incredible. We watched Spinal Tap again, my wife and I the other night. And I mean, it's as perfect as it was the day it was made. It's terrible. And, there's an irreducible minimum of human tragedy.

There will be people born with mental problems. Some of them will be violent. With all these billions of people on the planet, there's an irreducible minimum. And all the rest of us can do is try to be decent. And the leaders of society are there to remind us, even if you're tempted not to be decent, that this is the way to behave. And when the utmost leader of the utmost society says, this is my moment to be a real dick, what hope is there for anyone else? It's sick. It's really sick stuff.

David Frum, appreciate wisdom as always. everybody else I got a little Christmas present for you is for like 15 years I've been toiling on what I believe is the best Christmas music playlist that exists in the world and so we'll put that in the show notes here for everybody and if you don't like it that's okay and my taste isn't to everybody's you know my father just wants Nat King Cole and that's cool there's a Nat on there I have a more diverse taste but everybody hope you enjoy that we'll have a couple shows next week before the holiday stick around for that. David Frum, uh, appreciate you. Happy holidays to you. Merry Christmas to you.

Yeah, everybody else will see you on Monday with Bill Kristall. Peace. Rudolph waking up in the road dude dripping off his red nose. Blue and black tire track torn through a beautiful dough. Delighted scene of lightning McQueen, blacked out at full speed. How many roads must a man walk down till he learned? He's just a jerk who flirts with the clergy nurse till it burned. I wouldn't be in the simile. If I could be with you, if I could be with you.

The Bullock podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.