The Dispatch Podcast - Voting Against Trump | Interview: David Frum

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Notorious RINO and Atlantic writer David Frum joins Jamie Weinstein to explain why he’s voting for Kamala Harris this election. Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and a longtime critic of Donald Trump, believes that the current Republican Party no longer reflects conservative principles and has been overtaken by populism. The Agenda: —Frum’s history with conservatism —Donald Trump as a “unique danger” —Frum’s personal connection to the Gaza hostages —Assessing Kamala Harris’ and Donald Trump’s foreign relation strategy —Is J.D. Vance dangerous? —Is Frum still a border hawk? —Canada’s new leaders are emerging after housing crisis —What to make of campus protests over Gaza Show Notes: —Frum for The Atlantic: Women Can Be Autocrats, Too The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and weekly livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Jamie Weinstein. We have just three episodes before the 2024 presidential election. So for two of those episodes, I'm going to bring a conservative on to make the case for the vice president and make the case separately for Donald Trump. This week, we have the case for Vice President Kamala Harris. And the guest is David Frum. He is a staff writer at the Atlantic Magazine, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and the author of many books, a writer on many different topics. We get into his case for Vice President Harris for president. I think you're going to find this conversation. Fascinating. Full disclosure, as I do these interviews before the election on who to vote for, as I tell David Frum, I am on the same side, at least voting as he is. But I try to press him on those issues on whether that is the right decision and whether there are alternative ways to look at it, despite my agreement on that. But without further ado, I give you Mr. David From.

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. Thank you so much. In these closing weeks before the election, I wanted to bring a conservative who supports Donald Trump and a conservative who supports Kamala Harris on. For full disclosure, I will be voting for the vice. president, which is why we have you on here as well to be the affirmative side. But I'm going to try to press you nonetheless on the reasons why a conservative would support the vice president over Donald Trump. But let's just begin. Why should a conservative support Kamala Harris

over Donald Trump for the presidency? The core of the argument that I use is borrowed from Sherlock Holmes. And I hope I'm quoting this accurately. But Holmes once offered this way to solve a mystery, Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the right answer. So I begin, it is impossible for me to imagine supporting Donald Trump, a man who attempted to overthrow the Constitution by violence, by overthrowing an election by violence, who, that was a cap to four years of utterly unacceptable behavior in the presidency. And so who's running against him? And he's impossible, the alternative, however improbable, must be the right answer. So is it a, it's a negative case against Donald Trump, not a positive case for the vice president? It is a negative case against Dom Trump.

And I think it was, I think it was Norman Podoritz, who was once, someone who once accused him, I'm saying, you don't, you don't have a positive politics. All your politics are so negative. And he thumped the table and said, my negative politics are my positive politics. But in this case, no, I think we, I take very serious that Donald Trump is, as Dick Cheney has said, a unique threat to the Constitution and the institutions of the United States. And so offered, I mean, almost any choice against him. I will choose that almost any choice. Let's talk a little bit about Kamala Harris and then we can go to the threat that Donald Trump poses. I guess what is your view of her? Do you admire her in any way? Well, I think like a lot of dispatch listeners and readers, I'm a little bit of a fish out of water in the sense.

election. I came to conservative politics. Actually, let me back up with it. One of the questions you will get is, well, David Fromm, this notorious rhino, maybe he was a conservative once upon a time, but at this point in this late date in his career, how can you even invite him? How can you even think of him as a conservative voice? So I want to talk a little bit about what I mean by conservative and why you're taking people's time to listen to me. I came of age of the Reagan years. My politics were founded on a couple of, a few very core beliefs, which I still share. I believe in world order secured by American leadership. I believe in markets at home and free trade abroad. I believe that it's dangerous to fool around with

long-established institutions of human life. I believe in the independence and impartiality of law. I don't think it's just an extension of power or power by another name. I believe law has its own reality. And these are the things that in the late 1970s drew me into right-word politics. I remember, you know, I remember the gas lines. And I remember the adults, I was a teenager, but I remember the adults around me talking about, you know, this is about OPEC, this is about the world is running out of oil. And as a kind of smart alecky 14-year-old, I would say, oh, pick me, pick me, I know the answer.

It's the price controls. Get rid of the price controls and there will be no gas lines. And although normally that kind of behavior by 14-year-olds is not to be encouraged, I was right. It was right. I mean, not just me. It wasn't my idea. I read it in a magazine somewhere, but get rid of the price controls and you get rid of the gas lines. So I still believe all of that.

What we're living through, though, is something that happens in a world. It happens, I think, to all of us as we get older, if we get older, is that the questions have changed. So even though I remain committed to many of the same answers, most of the same answers, I believe in 1978 or 1982 or 1988. The questions have changed. And we are faced with real challenges to democratic institutions at home and abroad. Donald Trump has been a challenge at home, and he's been an ally of the people who challenge those institutions abroad. And he is, therefore, as Dick Cheney said, a unique danger.

And so he must be stopped. But looking at the vice president, is there anything, although I'm sure you disagree with a lot of policies, is there anything that you admire about her? Is there anything that, you know, if it's not a positive case, is there anything that gives you slightly, makes you happy that it's her, not someone else. Well, look, I've spent a lot of my life around politicians, and I admire the work that they do. I think she's a good politician, but we need to understand what politicians are for.

They are specialists in the gaining of democratic consent. There's a lot of mockery of her, because she's given some interviews where her answer turns that when people say, why do you do this or that? Her answer is, well, what I believe in is getting people around the table and working out a consensus and seeing what's acceptable and what's not. And that is important work. Presidents don't and shouldn't just declare things and lead from the front and impose their will. They can't.

They have to work collaboratively and collegial. And she has been able to do that. I think she's obviously a responsible and deliberate person. She's someone who takes time to think through answers. I think she has had a couple of important learning experiences of which maybe the most relevant is that she got pushed. in 2019 into taking up a series of very left-wing positions that were obviously not natural or real to her. That's not where she had been in 2018 or 2017. She opportunistically moved that way in 2019, and she seemed to really regret it and be mad at the people who

pushed her. So that's a positive thing. Look, we are going to, it is true, that one of the criticisms of her is right, we know less about the kind of precedent she will be than we have known about any president since Harry Truman stepped into the office upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt. So there may be surprises good or bad. But what we've seen is someone who does accept democratic institutions, who is responsible, who does believe in collegial and collaborative leadership. She's a standard issue, Democratic liberal. She's good on some foreign policy issues from my point of view. She'll do. She'll do. I'll say one last thing. I was at a Rosh Hashanah event with some families we know. There's a young person there who asked me,

are you not tremendously excited about the possibility of the first woman president? And I have to say to this bright young girl, and I have to admit, no, I'm not excited. I said, I am looking for non-criminal leadership. I'm not going to be too fussy about how we get it. I want non-criminal leadership. And we have one criminal and one non-criminal. It's interesting. I think you bring up an interesting point, which we had Ben Dreyfus on a few weeks ago, which was similar. If you were making the positive case, I might say, well, isn't the reversal as the sign of a flip-flopper? But when you're making a negative case and she's flip-flopping in your direction, you view that as a positive, that she's flopping in the more conservative direction than where she was.

Well, let's see. The questions, what do we mean by a flip-flop? I mean, if you, look, where flip-flops are bad is where you see someone so unmoored. Flip-lops are alarming in a politician because it means you can't predict what they will do in the future. They have no convictions. They are moored from things. I think what we can see is she tried to do something in 2019 and it didn't work and it was a bad idea. So it's not that I say, yay, therefore she will always pivot in ways I want.

I think she learned something about leading from polls and especially the misleading polls inside the Democratic Party in 2019. But again, I hope she'll be fine. but I believe she'll be acceptable. And I believe above all, if she's not fine, there'll be an opportunity to do something about it. There's going to be congressional elections in 2026. There'll be another presidential election in 2008. She keeps alive the possibility of democratic reversal in choice, which is a possibility that we lose if Donald Trump is the press.

Because someone tried to overthrow the Constitution once to hold on to power will be tempted to do things like that again. And he's surrounded by people. And he's changed the Republican Party in a way that what Trump did in 2021 is no longer unacceptable. His vice president, young, vigorous, intelligent, able, completely endorses what Donald Trump did in 2021. And I think we are faced with a world in which, you know, the analogy I sometimes think of as like Italian politics in the 1970s, where one party was the Christian Democrats who were kind of shambling and often ineffectual and generally uninspiring. and the other party was the Communists. So you voted for the Christian Democrats because the alternative was the communists.

But you mentioned she's probably more unknown than any vice president since Howard Truman took over from FDR. Do you think, and I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing given our choices, but do you think she has an ideological core? Do you think she follows the zeitkeist? As you mentioned, whatever is popular at the moment,

it was popular in 2020 running in the primaries to do certain things. She didn't have to run a primary this time. It's less popular to support those things. So that's where she's going to stand. Yeah. Look, I think she is like Biden, a party, a creature of the party. And she is going to be someone who is balancing party considerations.

But one of the balancing act she's done that has impressed me is she has woken up to the idea, you know, the coalitions are changing. The far left is on its way out of the Democratic Party. The far left has made it very clear they prefer Donald Trump. Trump, they were, people tried to wreck her convention in Chicago this summer. And meanwhile, she is attracting support from a lot of the kind of suburban voters who historically would have backed Republican candidates. That's symbolized by the endorsement of Liz and Dick Cheney. And I think you can see her, including that in her calculation, in her coalition calculus.

My guess is that she probably leans more to the right on foreign policy than she does on domestic policy. We do know she's going to be a solid friend to Ukraine. And her statements on Israel have also been very reassuring to me. We record this on the day that the Israelis killed Sinwar. And so we have good reason to hope that that conflict is actually going to soon be winding down. And therefore, the question of support of Israel may be less urgent. The Ukraine war does not seem to be winding down and support of Ukraine is going to be very urgent. If Donald Trump will betray Ukraine and J.D. Vance is the most hostile politician in the U.S. Senate after Rand Paul to the Ukrainian cause,

but Rand Paul is an oddball and a loner. J.D. Vance is a real leader, and he is the leader who expresses hostility to Ukraine and with it to NATO. He's the politician who said, it's not worth a million cheap toasters are not worth one American job. And if you do the math on that,

he's willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of wasted resources and aren't to reserve jobs that otherwise would vanish. So protectionism, betrayal of alliances, it's so unacceptable. And it's a betrayal of everything that I came into politics to stand up for. So, yeah, I'm going to, I'm not voting with enthusiasm, but I am voting with conviction. Well, I'll get to Trump in a second, but let's talk about a couple of the issues. And Israel is one of them.

You know, I have talked to people. I've moved out to L.A., and so, you know, they're not very political people. But some issues that have come up, people that had voted for Democrats in the past, where they might be reversing now, sometimes because, of Israel, that they think that Donald Trump, post-October 7th, would be tougher and stand with Israel more than Joe Biden did. Do you think that, and he did certainly in the beginning stand with Israel, do you think Kamala Harris would have stood with Israel as long as Joe Biden did and would have maybe even been more pro-Israel than Joe Biden? Or do you think she would have done some of the things the left and the party wanted her to do. Well, first, I think Joe Biden does not get enough credit

from the pro-Israel community for how strong he has been. And I think some of this is nostalgia and forgetfulness of history. I just want to put a little historical context. Israel fought its first three wars, 1989, the War of Independence, the Sinai War in 56 and the 60 War and 67, without any American weapons at all. The United States did not sell weapons to Israel, did not provide weapons to Israel. The first president to sell weapons to Israel was John F. Kennedy, and And that was a huge controversy in the early 1960s. The first president to give weapons to Israel was Richard Nixon. So that's a quarter century after the founding of the state.

Richard Nixon was also the first American president to visit Israel. All those sainted predecessors did not visit. Ronald Reagan never visited Israel as president. And so when you just go through the history, said, my, it would, another way to make it, during the first Gulf War of 1991, Saddam Hussein started firing rocket at Israel, scud missiles. And the elder Bush provided a patriot battery to help defend Israel. But he insisted there would be no cooperation between the United States and Israel.

The scud battery would disembark from the American ship. It would be set up by Americans. It would operate with Americans. It would not coordinate and cooperate in any way. And the price of the scud battery was that Israel was absolutely forbidden to retaliate in any way and forbidden to take part in the anti-Saddam coalition. But Syria, under the elder Assad, was invited to take part. So compare all of that to a president who visits Israel twice during wartime, who provides limitless material support, who sends two carrier groups, who actively cooperates with Israel in the interception of Iranian missile barrage as fired at Israel, who deploys U.S. warships and other assets in cooperation with Israel. Nothing like this has ever been seen before.

And while Biden has sometimes voiced opinions about what Israel should do that have turned out to be unsound, I forget who was the first person who said that the advice not to be. go into Rafa. It was like the murderer's advice, don't open the door to that closet. Yeah. When they tell you, don't go into Rafa, that is a good clue you should go into Rafa. So he's offered some unhelpful comments, but someone who's provided as much material assistance as Biden is allowed to voice views, especially since Israel was often able to disregard those views without being punished for it. Biden did symbolically suspend arms deliveries at a couple of points. Ronald Reagan did the same at various points in his disagreements with Israel. George H.W. Bush did the same. So I think it's been an extraordinary act of support.

Now, where Harris is, I don't know. She has said many of the right things. But I would strongly that people think that Donald Trump has been a great friend to Israel. Remember just how mercurial and unreliable he is. To remember that his primary attachment in that region has always been to Saudi Arabia who pay him, not to Israel. And that there's a really high chance. the person is going to be running the next administration is J.D. Vance, who is hostile to alliances of all kinds. But not Israel. I mean, he has. Well, let's go closer on that. So Vance, who is so critical of allies, in May of 2024, when it was clear he was on the shortlist, got word, you better clean up your record on Israel. And you better give a speech on the importance

of the Israeli relationship and maybe go visit the Western Wall as well. So he gives a speech in May. Now, there are two things that are notable about the speech he gave. The first is where he gave it. He didn't go to the Hudson Institute. He didn't go to the American Enterprise Institute. He didn't go to the University of Ohio State, of which he was an alma mater. He didn't go to Yale, where he went to law school. He didn't go to the Brookings Institute.

He didn't go to the Counsel on Foreign Relations. He went to the Quincy Institute, which is a think tank funded on the explicit premise to be hostile to American entangles and whose cheap operating officer is a long-standing, I want to say this in a non- actionable way, but someone who certainly has given loud and powerful voice inside Washington, the agenda of the Iranian regime, Treata Parsi. So that's a funny place to go to demonstrate your support for Israel. And then the speech itself said, why does he support Israel?

He said, his argument was, unlike our useless European allies, unlike our useless Asian allies, Israel has demonstrated that it's able to defend itself without American help. And that's why they're a good ally. Well, the logic of that argument, and J.D. is a thoughtful person who weighs his words and does not speak carelessly. If they can defend themselves without American help, that's also an argument for not giving them American help, right? Because they don't need it. The logic of the speech was it was complementary, but it also was a logic that led as much to the conclusion of abandonment. I don't trust on Israel, someone who had abandoned Ukraine.

I really don't. Someone who had abandoned one embattled democracy, it will abandon others. He doesn't believe in the American idea. He believes that America is a country based on race and soil. If you don't have seven generations of ancestors in an American cemetery, as he said at the National Convention, you're not a fully paid up equal American to him with his seven generations. I'm Ashkenazi Jewish on both sides.

Ashkenazi Jews have been genetically selected for alarmism and pessimism. because basically the non-alarmist and non-pessimists, they said, this looks fine, it'll blow over, and they didn't have grandchildren. And the people said, I'm getting out of here. Well, we still can. They did have grandchildren. So I just have these censors of who can I trust on this one particular issue? And who can I not?

And I don't think Kamala Harris has eaten quite as many UJA salmon dinners as Joe Biden has done. But I see potential there, and I see nothing but alarm from. President Trump's likely successor. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain, on top of everything else, is why life insurance

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All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Do you think that the idea of Trump, you know, no matter how untrustworthy is, but the idea that he might, you know, bring fire and brimstone down if Hamas doesn't release the hot.

Most like the Iranians in 1980 who released the hostages on the election of Ronald Reagan. I don't know if you know this, but I do have a relative who is a hostage. So you have seen them on television many times, Ronan and Orna Nutra. Ronan is my, he's a second cousin, but we've come to know each other quite well. And his son, Omar, has celebrated now first is 22nd and then his 23rd birthday in captivity. He was taken in uniform, and so one has to fear that he's been subject to very, very harsh treatment. He was last seen being hauled off his tank, which he had gallantly commanded, but which the tank was disabled. And he and his crew were pulled out of the tank, beaten and taken into captivity.

As far as I know, he is still alive. So I can tell you, his parents are dual American-Israeli nationals. They are not at all political people, and they have met with both presidents. Trump and President Biden and Kamala Harris and many of the people in the U.S. government. What you get from Trump is a lot of big talk. This would never have happened if I'd been there and he vows all kinds of vengeance. What they've had from Biden and his team are hours and hours of intensely personal conversations,

intense care. There are people who are deputed to keep up with the U.S. citizen hostage families and also some of these Israeli families, and they check in with them regularly, often. And they have felt compassion and concern at the highest levels from the president, from the vice president, from everybody. So the one hostage family I know best, I mean, their, their words are much more intimate and less, and much more direct. Their boy is in a dungeon being tortured and starved. But the Donald Trump view of the world, which is you bring down violence on people and then they do what you say, that's a kind of childish view of the world. It doesn't really

work that way. And when the war is over, Israel's most important trading partners are in the European Union, not the United States. Israel needs access to European Union markets. It needs to be able to travel easily. Israelis need to be able to travel easily and smoothly to and from the European Union. Alliances matter. And the idea that the idea that. that you're going to have America alone as a good friend Israel. I just, that's just not true. And there is this problem that when, when and if Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, see the United States abandon Ukraine, which they will under a Trump administration,

what conclusions they draw about everybody else? Well, I pray that no matter who's elected and maybe with the death of Sinwar, that your relative and the hostages will get home even before the election. But let me challenge you outside of the hostages, the raining down. weapon, you know, power will get you what you want. Don't you think with Iran that seems to work that when you actually fight back and you and you hit them that they do seem to retreat? Well, let me give credit to Trump here for one of his, there's three or four things he did as president that I think were smart and it did work out. And that was his willingness to

kill Soleimani, the head of the Iranian terror force. Other presidents have apparently had the opportunity and they always thought it would cause more problems than it solved. Trump, with his kind of direct approach to things, did give the order, and it turned, and it's turned out to be a big success, so it seems that Iran paid a price. There was retaliation against U.S. troops, but which Trump was not sympathetic enough to the individual troops who suffered the concussions and other from the attack, but the United States won that round, from a great power point, if you won that round. And it sort of served as proof of concept that when Israel began to systematically, as it's done, eliminate these terrorist

leaders in Hezbollah, in Iran, and Hamas, that it would work and that it would be, it would pay off. And that decision, Operation Warp Speed, the Abraham Accords, those are some of the genuine successes of the Trump administration. There weren't zero. My vision of American leadership is that it works, that the alliance is a force multiplier, both in Europe and in the Pacific, that you can can't separate military and economic cooperation, and that one of the real weaknesses of the Biden administration has been, because of its hostility to offering trade agreements, it's not been able to bring into being the kind of China balancing partnership that we need in the Pacific, because when Biden people visit Indonesia, Vietnam, these are not necessarily

countries that share a lot of values with the United States, but they do share some interests, but they ask, what's in it for us if we cooperate with you against China? Yeah, we get some measure of security. Nice. We're pretty powerful states ourselves. What do we get from you? We'd like some market access. And the Biden people always have to say no.

And the Trump people will say, market access. Are you kidding? We're going to take away what market access you have. One more policy question on before we get to the threat Trump raises. And it's a policy you joked earlier that some people would say having you on talk about conservative supporting Harris or you're a rhino. But you were a border hawk for a long time, much more in many ways, hawkish than I was. I wonder whether you're concerned about her position on the border compared to where, you know, the Republicans are.

Look, the first piece I wrote for the Atlantic after the 20, after the inauguration of Biden, when he were, was that he, he, he, he, by one of his first action, an officer versus the Trump border measure. I said, this is his biggest and most dangerous and expensive mistake. And so it proved because the big problem with the way Biden and Harris and people like them think about immigration is they think that the realest, reason there is these mass movements of tens of millions of people around the world is because people are so impoverished and so victimized and so miserable that they are fleeing to the United States. That's not true at all. People are paying, and I should say it's not true at all, it's somewhat true, but what's much more true is that we have lived in a world of rising prosperity where there are millions and millions of people who can afford to pay $10,000 or $30,000

to give a member of their clan an opportunity at entering the United States. I was on the Hungarian border with Serbia in, I guess 2016, and watched as the Hungarians intercepted some border crossers into the EU space. And it was very common to hear people who tell a story where, well, my father was an important person back in our village in the Middle East or Africa. He had four sons and one is taking over the farm, one's gone to the capital of the country, and I was given my share of the inheritance in the form of $10,000 to pay the smuggler to get me to Europe and seek my fortune here. It was an active agency and efficacy and self-empowerment.

And in some ways, very admirable. You don't blame the people making these choices. But there are a lot of those people in this world. And travel costs are coming down and wealth is rising. And they are going to be on the move in search of the opportunities in the developer world. So if you don't control that movement, you're going to have an unlimited flow. And I worried about that in 2021. And that is what has come to pass. And the Biden people took a long time to understand when they were not being pushed by misery, they were being pulled by opportunity. And since the opportunity, the number of people who could be pulled is basically limitless. And since the opportunities are vast, the movements will be correspondingly vast.

I hope the Harris people have learned their lesson from this. They've corrected some of the mistakes. I fear they have not. But look, we're moving into a period of what's likely to be very intense labor shortages in the United States. And I'm not sure I trust a Trump, a second Trump administration, which is now much more swayed by business interests than the first Trump administration was that it won't reverse itself on this issue, too, because Trump has very few beliefs. He's for sale. And the people who are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in this campaign, they're not

paying that money to raise the cost of labor. Before I ask you what you think the threat of Trump is, it popped in my mind when you listed what you thought were the successes of. Trump, Operation Warp Speed, the Abraham Accords, taking out Soleimani. I forget what the fourth one was. It makes me wonder, if not for January 6th. Obviously, there's things that you didn't like about the first Trump term. Like, I didn't like about the first Trump term, and I thought the first impeachment was justified, which was also during his term. But those are pretty solid achievements for any presidency. I guess, A, if not for January 6, would you be more open to voting for him this

time? And B, if not for January 6th, would that place them among the better presidents of the 21st century? January 6th was both an event and a symbol. So first, there were a lot of abuses of power along the way to January 6th. The retaliation against Time Warner and its merger deal because he didn't like the coverage on CNN. The retaliation against Amazon and contracting with the Pentagon because he didn't like Jeff Bezos's management of the Washington Post. These are things that were often kind of hard to get attention to, and he was often defeated by either internal opposition within his administration or by his own lack of understanding of how the government worked. First term Trump, a lot of his bad instincts were mitigated by his lack

of experience in government, his unawareness of he's never run a large organization. The Trump company was a mom and pop, even when it had money, was a mom and pop operation. I mean, never run a big corporation. He didn't know how to make things happen. And he was surprised that how little the people he's surrounded with him agreed with him about the things he really cared about, which is punishing his enemies. But can just stop you there for a second? I agree with everything you said there, that it's a symbol of greater corruption that he did on a lower level that didn't get attention.

But if January 6 doesn't occur, which is what will history books will remember, I mean, I don't think they'll remember the Time Warner deal either, if January 6 does, it doesn't happen. If he ends with Operation Warp Speed, the Abraham Accords, taking out Soleimani and putting Iran on his heels, does history remember him positively? But why did January 6th happen? It happened because in 2016, Trump lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. He lost the popular vote by three. He lost the popular vote. That's a hard trick to repeat. Generally, the Electoral College does more or less map to the popular vote.

So Trump, from the beginning, has to understand at some deep level that he is running an anti-popular government. that the majority of the American people reject what he wants to do. And so elections are dangerous for him. In some ways, he can't allow elections to unfold properly because if they do, he will lose. And because he will not accept defeat, it's not like an incidental, it just happened to work out that way. It was baked in from the beginning that he was not going to get the popular vote a second time because he has never tried to get it. He's always been a minority president. And that's true.

So let me reframe the kind of factual bit. with everything you're saying, I agree with. If he decided because he knew he can't win, that he didn't run, and ended those four years with those achievements, how do you think history would have remembered him? When you're young and in love, you walk with your sweetheart on a moonlit night, and you ask her or she asks you, would you love me if, even if? And then she creates some, you create some complete counterfactual.

And, of course, in the moonlight, you say, yes, darling, I would love you even if. But the truth is, if things were different, things would be different. And so if your question is, how would history remember Donald Trump? If he weren't the deformed character he is, they would remember him differently. But the problem is that a lot of his deformities were what made him successful in the first place. In 2016, I read about this in the book, so forgive me if I don't have, if I now slip on some of the details. But my recollection is a few months before the 2016 election, there was a poll done that asked people to compare Trump and Hillary Glenn. And Trump did not do well on the questions that cares about people like you.

knowledgeable and well-informed, patriotic. Hillary Clinton trumped him, or beat him on every one of those grants. But there's one domain where he beat her very interestingly, and that was honest and truthful. And you want to say, that's incredible. I mean, Donald Trump's like the biggest liar ever in the presidency. But Donald Trump would talk directly. Hillary Clinton talks like a politician.

She tries to avoid lying. And so she's there for evasive, circumlocutious, changes the subject. And everyone could hear the politician not. trying not to lie, but also trying not to say anything that will get them in trouble. And that is what talking like a balding meets and he's being evasive. Donald Trump was never evasive because he was willing to lie. And that's why he, to many people, I think, seemed so refreshing and exciting in 26th. Because he said all of these terrible things, but many people had never heard a politician say them and it was exciting.

So you can't ask for, you can't delete the trumpiness from Trump. You're going to get the whole package. And his determination is unwillingness to play by. rules. That is essential to who he is. So as we said in the beginning, this is in many ways the case for Harris is a negative case against Trump. So here's my question. Paint the downside picture of a second Trump term. What is the threat that you believe Trump poses in a second term? I think the threat and the most glaring threat and the most likely danger are quite

different. The most likely danger is this. If he returns to office, his highest and immediate priority will be to shut down all the legal investigations against, civil, criminal, state, and federal. His power to do that is very uncertain, but he will try. And he will instantly plunge the country into a series of intense controversy. Can a president pardon himself? Can a president fire a U.S. attorney who looks into him? Can a president put pressure on a state government to stop a criminal action by the state against the president? Past presidents didn't get themselves into so much legal trouble. We don't know in 220 plus years of constitutional history the answer to these questions. So it will be test to them. And there will be uproar. And if the Democrats

win the House of Representatives, there will be a third, a third impeachment process starting pretty early. It will be chaos. And he will try to mobilize repressive resources, the FBI, the military, the National Guard against the chaos. And those institutions, some will comply, others will break in his hands. We may have questions of institutions refusing to obey what they think are probably illegal orders from the president. So I think 2017 Trump, if he'd known how to do it, might have been more successful consolidating power. 2025 Trump means chaos and the breaking of important institution,

including the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the president's authority over the National Guard. Do you think he would leave office or do you think he potentially would try for a third term? I think it is, there's going to be enormous pressure on him almost instantly to become a kind of figurehead in favor of his vice president. That Vance was a bad choice from the point of view of maximizing the vote. He was, but he was for the people who promoted that candidacy. He is a much more to the big donors to the party.

He's a much more attractive way of doing authoritarian politics than Trump. He's less crooked. He's more reliable. He's smarter. He works harder. He's also been so far a very trusted servitor of those interests. Whether that will stay, whether he will keep faith with them or break faith with them, it's hard to predict.

But you will see an attempt to shift power also from Trump to Vance. And that will begin, I think, quite early, Vance will be party to it. I always thought that actually Trump was savvy enough to pick more of a human zero as his running mate. I thought he would pick Tim Scott because he wouldn't have to worry about being betrayed. but the money that came with J.D. Vance was irresistible. And so he took Vance with the risk of internal betrayal that he will face. How does that, how do you think that happens? I mean, are we talking about the 25th Amendment?

I mean, how do you think Vance takes, I guess, over from Trump or at least in the background is the main driving force? Trump gets in the first term, Trump would typically get to the Oval Office about 11, sometimes noon. I don't imagine he's any earlier eriser today than he, he's. used to be. So Vance gets to his office at 7 a.m. and starts doing things. And how many things can you do between 7 and 11 at noon when the president shows up? A lot. And then Trump will come in at noon. And then you get them, then you distract them. Then you get them excited about something. And it'll pretty quickly become clear that the vice president is the true operational authority. And the president is not paying a lot of attention, especially when the new donor structure

to the Republican Party, much prefers the vice president. president to the president. I mean, this is a question that perhaps you uniquely can answer, David, because you knew J.D. Vance way back when before he was the J.D. Vance of today in his new positions. If he does have the power, are you sure what his positions are? I mean, are you sure he's going to remain the J.D. Vance that he is now versus the J.D. Vance that you knew back when? That's a great question. And the answer is no. I think he, and I think there There will be some reinventions along the way. But those get harder and harder to do the longer you're in politics.

And also, why would he? I mean, that he's pretty locked into a lot of positions that are not popular, at least not popular with most ordinary people. They may be popular within a donor set. So he's taken some risks for those positions. And so I don't know if at the heart of his soul at two in the morning, he really wants to ban so many abortions. as he said he's done, but he's, he said it often enough, and he's, he's taking a lot of heat for it.

My guess is he probably will try seriously to do what he said he would do. Do you think Trump is all there? I mean, I know there's been some speculation. I could see arguments on both sides, but do you think he's all there? He's obviously diminished, but the parts, he's not all, he's not as able to carry on a lengthy monologue as he used to be. But the essential attributes of his, he doesn't seem to be a changed person. The essential attributes of his personality are there.

And the vengefulness seems much more pronounced than it was in 2017 when he sort of fluked into the presidency and, you know, must have been happy for at least a little time to be there. You painted the downside of Trump. Can you see, can you paint a non-catastrophic upside? Is there a potential of a possibility in your mind that it's not as bad as, that you suspect it will be? There's a saying that's attributed to many different people that God looks after children, drunks

in the United States of America. So maybe if there's divine protection. But I don't think that that's not the way to bet. I mean, yeah, of course I can conjure up a series of fantasies where it works out. But I think we are much more likely to be in a situation where we're paralyzed at home. We meet and we meet foreign challenges abroad.

One of the things that is very dangerous about the Ukraine war, here's a way to think about international politics. Of those states who can project power beyond their borders, and there are many states that can't, but of those states that can project power beyond their borders, there are basically two kinds of states. One are the states that are more or less satisfied with the world that it is.

The United States, the countries of the EU, Britain, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, they're basically happy with the world as it is. They can think of improvements. It's nothing that it justifies large-scale balance. And then you have the states that can project power were dissatisfied with the world as it is. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, a few others. And the good news is the states that are satisfied are much richer and stronger than the states that are dissatisfied.

And the other piece of good news has been the states that are satisfied are cohesive and able to cooperate. And the states that are dissatisfied hate each other and feud. What has happened in the Ukraine war is that Iran, Russia, North Korea and China have discovered an operating coalition of interest. And they are, there are reportedly North Korean troops in Ukraine. That may or may not be true. There's certainly millions and millions of North Korean shells. China's economic aid has been indispensable to the survival of the Russian state.

Iran is a provider of weapons technology to Russia. Russian, in turn, has helped Iran with getting, with many of its security needs. And so you have this kind of coalition of these four dissatisfied states. At the same time, as President Trump would sever the ties between the United States and his other many allies. So you'd have a, the status quo world would be segmented and the revisionist world would be cooperative. It's a very dangerous pattern, especially when the decision-making at home gets broken by

Trump chaos. You want Harris to win. Do you hope that Republicans control the Senate in the House or does that, are you indifferent to who controls the Senate in the House? My ideal outcome would be that I would normally say, I hope the Republicans control the House, I think this majority has been really irresponsible, and especially on the question of aid to Ukraine. That bill, those bills are going to continue to flow, as they should, we're going to have

to join with other friends to pay for reconstruction of Ukraine and that's going to take some money. So I would prefer a Democratic House that would vote for military and security assistance and maybe chasen some of the zanier members of the Republican caucus. And I've been very impressed by Speaker Johnson. I have developed a quite high opinion of him. And I think he needs some tools. I think he'll be back. I think he'll be back in 2020. But he needs to be able to say to the weirdos in the caucus, you cost us the majority in 24. And I'm not listening to you anymore. And we are going to support our friends around the world. What I ask from the Republican Senate is they just not play politics

with national security confirmations. We're going to need generals. We're going to need a joint chiefs of staff. You know, fight about judges all you want. That's normal politics. But we have to have a Secretary of Defense. We have to have our Secretary of State. If they confirm those people,

we'll be very happy that they then fight President Harris on Spanning. And if the Republicans will nominate in 2028, I really do look forward to voting for a Republican nominee for president again. I just want to see somebody who's economic freedom at home. non-interference in the private market, global free trade, international security, supports

alliances. And I see some politicians in the Republican world who, you know, a Glenn Young can, Brian Kemp, those are people who look like the kind of Republican that I remember and hope to see again someday. If Trump loses, do you hope that the cases against him continue or do you, in the name of unity, hope that the vice president would pardon, pardon the federal cases that she can and maybe try to get the others dismissed? Well, he's in criminal jeopardy in the state of New York.

And so that is the wishing the president's authority is necessarily limited. If they were asking me, my advice would be commute sentences, but don't part. That is that Trump should wear the infamy, especially of his January 6th actions, he should wear the infamy of that. I don't think he, I don't relish the thought of a past president of the United States actually incarcerated. So commute the sentence, but the, the, the, the, the, the, the same. the sentence, commute the sentence, but the verdict should stand.

In our remaining time here, let me just throw a few other questions outside of the 2024 race at you. Israel, in response to Iran, do you think it should go after Iran's nuclear sites? I'm way outside my expertise here. I have talked to people who know a lot more about this than I do, and they tell me that Israel is not capable of, at this point, inflicting the kind of enduring, wide enduring damage on the Iranian nuclear program. So the worst outcome would be to strike the program in a way that is ineffective and that gives Israel all the odium of such a strike without any of the results. You're from Canada. Pierre, I don't know how to say his name, Polivier. He's become somewhat of a sensation for his answers, both on Israel and other two reporters.

Tell us about him for Americans who don't know about him. Well, I'm speaking to you from Toronto right now and you're hearing some Canadian background noises. Those people in the background are spoofing Canadian. There are two big issues in Canadian politics that Pierre is an answer to. The first is Canada's had very rapid population growth driven by immigration at the same time as it's made it increasingly difficult to build housing in the four centers where the jobs are concentrated. Vancouver, Calgary is easier to build. It's very difficult to build in Vancouver, very difficult to build in Toronto, which is the biggest job market of them all. Calgary and Ottawa a little easier, but housing has fallen way short of population growth.

by government action in both cases. And young people are priced out of being able to start their lives. So that's the red-hot grievance that is driving the collapse of the Justin Trudeau government. But there's something else which he stands for it, which is Canada suffers sometimes from what I call issue envy. The United States had slavery and Canada didn't. And instead of being happy about that, Canadians are a little disappointed. Can we conjure something out of our own history that's like slavery so we can feel bad to?

And so Canada has had some of these, has had this very, accusatory approach to its own history under Justin Trudeau. A lot of it based on flat-out falsewoods or serious exaggerations and distortions. And I think the patriotism of a lot of Canadians has been wounded by the lack of regard for their country's history that has been expressed by the Justin Trudeau government. And Pierre has given voice to, I've known him for a long time, so forget me, has given voice to that kind of injured pride that says, you know, you shouldn't be lowering the Canadian flag to atone for crimes against humanity that never existed. I mean, you said you've known him for a long time. He seems to just for Americans, don't pay

attention to Canada, kind of popped up as these viral videos talking to journalists in a certain way. Where does he come from? Are you surprised? He's now next in line. Is he something that you thought when you met him would be a future Canadian Prime Minister? So I think he was, I mean, he was very young when I first met him. So he is an adopted child of school teachers in Saskatchewan, which is the big sort of rectangular shaped province in the middle of Canada, probably one of the flattest places in the world, center of Canadian agriculture, wheat, potash. He was a precocious reader and admirer of free market thinking, went a little libertarian but then got pulled back and sort of more normal free market

politics, and went to Ottawa and started taking jobs in the Stephen Harper government. got elected to parliament at an early age. Well, I've met him when he was a young MP. And I think he'd been in parliament now for a dozen years. So he's not out of nowhere. And in parliament, he proved himself by far the most effective parliamentarian race. This ritual of question period where the opposition gets a certain number of minutes per week to ask questions of anyone in the front bench of the government, prime minister, the cabinet members.

And he was always by far the best performer in question period. So he's had a lot of parliamentary attention to him for a long time. And I think people have thought about him as a likely leader of the party. And the conservative party has rotated through a number of leaders under Justin Trudeau that, for one reason or another, often not their fault, didn't succeed. Canadians tend to keep their federal governments in place for a while. You have these prime ministerships that collapse after three or six months like John Turner, if those, Those names mean anything to you or Joe Clark or Kim Campbell. But if you don't collapse within the first year, you tend to last for a decade.

And so in that decade, the Conservatives have cycled through some good leaders, but their time wasn't right. They didn't hit the mark. But Paul Everett just really did. And he's been a great performer in Parliament. And he has put his finger on this issue, which is Canadian families want to start their lives. They need a house. They need a condo. They need something they can afford.

and they can't get their hands on. Two final questions. One is a theme of this show and love to get your thoughts on how did we get a student population on campuses across the country that come out in mass

and effectively pro-Hamas demonstrations. I like the theory that these Hamas demonstrations are the proof of the thing that every parent is suspected that, which is that colleges don't assign enough on work. Let's just test the theory.

How many are there, really? How popular are these movements that I am struck at how much of what they do is aimed at creating visuals for Instagram. And there's a kind of cooperation between some of the pro-Israel voices and some of the anti-Israel voices to make these demonstrations seem much bigger than they are. I have on my computer a shot I took, I preserve to remind me of how to understand modern media. Do you remember the Gilles-Jean, this movement in France of people wore orange vest to protest to the price of guests? And they had a big demonstration in, I think, about 2012, and there was an iconic photograph of the Arc de Triumph seemingly engulfed in flames. And somebody took a photograph of how this photo was produced, which is there's the Architrient, way, way down there, way here in the foreground, like a kilometer away, is a little bonfire of sticks. And here are all the photographers crouching to shoot the Arctic Tril off through the bonfire to create the total illusion of the Architonf, which is completely fine.

It has been engulfed in planes. And so you see these scenes that they're always cropped very tightly. And one of the things I besiege people to keep in mind when you see a viral video, always ask yourself, what's happening outside the frame? What happened three minutes before? What happened three minutes after? And that, you know, when the Covington images went viral and those kids were harassed, you know, I would just be all my more liberal friends who got upset. is just let's just wait till you see the wider shots that are going to come what was actually going on in the same way. I think you'll see a lot of people playing Ultimate Frisbee all around those protests and most students aren't involved.

Where students break the rules, campuses need to reassert rules. But I wonder whether there really is kind of hyper, I mean, it's obviously hyperintest, whether there's this mass movement against Israel on campuses in a way that pro and con would invite people to believe. Finally, you cover so many different issues. You're often looking at things that much of the media is not paying attention to. What is the most undercovered important issue, do you think that the American media might not be focused on? A great economic historian said, once you start thinking seriously about economic growth, it's very hard to think about anything else. And so I tend to think about that. I think about a especially in connection with America's

troubled neighbor Mexico, which I read a lot, which is now under an authoritarian new president. And first woman, congratulations. First person of Jewish heritage, congratulations again, but a very authoritarian person. If I worked on the visit of Vicente Fox to the White House in 2001, the first Mexican president chosen in free and fair competition from the opposition party, there was a huge breakthrough movement, followed the signing of NAFTA in 1994. If the Mexican economy had grown since NAFTA at half the pace of the Chinese,

economy. Mexico today would be somewhere between Portugal and Spain as a in terms of as an income per person. It would be a very comfortable neighbor for Americans to have. A prosperous OECD, you know, not as rich as the United States, Portugal and Spain are poor in the United States, but still a comfortable neighbor. And that didn't happen. And we need to think about why. And we need to think about how all over the world, there are people tell you the solution to problems, the problems can be solved when there's less resources. Degrowth. No, you need to have, to every problem is easier to solve when you have money and economic growth produces the resources with which to solve problems. And so I think about that a lot. I think about an application

to Mexico a lot. There's a saying that Americans will do anything for Mexico except read about it. I try that. And I can, the statistics at the Atlantic bear that out. But I'm going to keep writing and I hope people will keep reading or start reading. David Frum, thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. Thank you. You know what I'm going to be. Thank you.