David Frum: Leveraging Violence as a Tool of Power

Summary

The Bulwark Podcast

Episode: David Frum: Leveraging Violence as a Tool of Power
Date: September 12, 2025
Host: Tim Miller
Guest: David Frum (Staff Writer, The Atlantic; Host, The David Frum Show)

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Episode Overview

This episode features a wide-ranging and urgent conversation between Tim Miller and David Frum on the rising tide of political violence in America—in particular, the assassination of Charlie Kirk—and how both the far-right and far-left are responding. They connect these events to international instability, specifically Russia's aggression in Europe and shifting American foreign policy, and discuss the alarming erosion of democratic norms, weaponization of government power, economic policy chaos, and generational malaise. Frum is passionate, sobering, and occasionally wry; Miller balances tough questions with characteristic wit.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Poland, Russia, & Trump’s Foreign Policy (03:31–08:04)

• Frum explains Poland's dual power structure—a reactionary, rural-sourced president vs. a modern, urban-sourced prime minister—and how Trump has openly interfered in Polish politics to support far-right, anti-center elements.
• Trump has also snubbed traditional diplomatic protocol (e.g., inviting Poland’s president to the White House without notifying the prime minister).
• Frum stresses Trump’s “reinvent Europe as a network of far-right parties” approach, often sympathetic to Russia:

  "This global far right pro-Russia movement does not speak for the interests of any individual nation. It's loyal to Trump. It's infatuated with Putin." (06:40)

Notable Moment

• David Frum pushes back on the 'nationalist' label:

  "He's not a nationalist. He is a globalist too. He's just a globalist of the far right." (06:40)

2. NATO’s Future & Russian Aggression (09:04–15:00)

• Frum gives a stark assessment of NATO:

  "What NATO ultimately is... is a confidence by the NATO members... that the President of the United States will use nuclear weapons to protect a NATO country. Does Putin believe that? He does not... So in that sense, isn't NATO already dead?" (09:47–10:50)

• Miller and Frum discuss the Trump administration’s lack of response to Russian incursions and what that signals to allies and adversaries.
• European countries may be forced to become independent military powers—a shift Frum warns could undermine U.S. leverage on global issues like China.

Notable Quote

• On Trump’s approach:

  "The Trump policy is the only friends we want are Saudi Arabia, El Salvador and half of Israel." (14:28)

3. Ukraine War: Stalemate, U.S. Politics, and Trump’s Calculations (11:54–15:36)

• U.S. support for Ukraine is weakening, driven by Trump’s ambiguous signals and desire to retain GOP hawk credibility.
• Trump keeps promising action but never follows through, offering just enough rhetorical cover to keep supporters guessing:

  "Any minute now, I'm going to do something. So you don't want to force my hand... Now that minute never happens." (12:27–13:06)

• Europe has the economic resources to support Ukraine but lacks ready military supplies.

4. Tariffs as Trump’s Unilateral Revenue Stream (16:33–24:32)

• Frum highlights the constitutional crisis of Trump using tariffs to amass billions without Congressional approval:

  "He's got a source of revenue that doesn't depend on Congress. First time... Congress provides the money. The President can spend it, but only after Congress gives it. Trump has broken free." (16:33–17:41)

• Discussion of negative effects on consumers, legal challenges, and the pending Supreme Court case:

  “If the American Constitution... says one thing, it says the president cannot create a system of revenue independent of Congress...” (21:28)

• If tariffs are struck down, only importers get refunds—consumers don’t benefit.

5. Political Violence & the Charlie Kirk Assassination (27:01–39:51)

Moral Consequences and the Nature of Democracy

• Frum insists on principled, immediate condemnation of violence, regardless of the victim’s politics:

  “The grief over a human death is in no way dependent on your opinion of the human life... Any act of political violence is an attack on you.” (27:01)

• Democracy:

  "There's a stake of power, but the commitment is the competition for power must be peaceful." (27:48)

• The risk isn’t just the act, but the pretext it provides the government to suppress free speech and dissent.

The Danger of Retaliation and Weaponizing the State

• Trump and allies are poised to leverage the tragedy to justify repression—targeting opposition, fundraising platforms, and peaceful protestors:

  “The goal here... is to suppress speech, to suppress fundraising, to have more arbitrary arrests. This is a tool of power and that... also has to be resisted.” (28:37)

The American Experience of Political Violence

• American assassins often lack coherent political motives; they tend to be isolated, mentally unstable, unlike members of organized movements in Europe.
• Frum warns against overinterpreting partisan polls that show rising acceptance of political violence, especially among youth:

  "Maybe when you're 22, it's easier not to think about [the consequences of violence]" (36:50)

• The lack of empathy and alienation—possibly exacerbated by technology and the erosion of community—are part of the pattern.

Notable Exchange

• On how we remember the victims and uphold norms:

  "The prohibition here has to be absolute... In this violent country with firearms available everywhere, with a lot of loners cut off from community, the potential for violence is always there and our only resource against it... is our shared sense of right and wrong." (39:00)

6. FBI Purges and Incompetence under Trump (41:58–43:50)

• Discussion of the hollowing out of the FBI—DEI purges, reassignments, and general incompetence—after the Kirk assassination investigation.
• Frum broadens this to all of government:

  "If you're purging all that kind of independent person, you're going to lose a lot of confidence and it's going to have, it's demonstrated today at the FBI, it will be demonstrated tomorrow somewhere else." (43:50)

7. The J.D. Vance Conundrum: Campaigning by Being Cruel (44:36–48:37)

• Frum diagnoses JD Vance’s behavior as performance to prove his MAGA loyalty, because he lacks the natural affinity and credibility of others like Charlie Kirk.
• Vance's sociopathy is described as both strategy and potential psychological defense against guilt.

8. America as the “Black Hat” Abroad: The South Korean Incident (49:33–52:19)

• The ICE raid on a Georgia plant leads to South Korean citizens being deported and welcomed home as heroes—making the U.S. look like an authoritarian state to its allies.
• Frum: Trump’s economic policies are incoherent, demanding both capital inflows and strict immigration/trade barriers.

9. Israel, October 7th, and Trauma’s Role in Policy (52:19–59:04)

• Frum, reflecting personally, describes how the trauma of the Holocaust and October 7th affect Jewish and Israeli attitudes:

  "For a thousand years, you know, you've had the random genetic mutations that make Ashkenazi jewelry born either with an optimistic or pessimistic disposition. And what happens is in a time of trouble, the optimists stay and they don't have grandchildren and the pessimists leave and they do." (57:35)

• He insists the war must end, and Israel must aim for reintegration with the world, not just survival.

10. A New Kind of Heroism: Officer David Rose (59:04–62:02)

• Miller highlights an under-covered incident: Officer David Rose, killed defending CDC employees from a vaccine-misinformed attacker.
• Frum underscores that leaders must model moral clarity and decency after such attacks, contrasting this with the persistent, callous indifference of some officials to victims not on "their side."

11. Closing Reflections: Generational Turnover and Grandparenthood (62:04–63:34)

• Frum draws a parallel between the wisdom of stepping aside in public life and in family:

  "...It's not altogether an unhappy experience to move to the side and then be ready to move off the stage because you're making way for people you care about. And, you know, just be great. If you've lived long enough to see the end of your term, don't fight that. Embrace it..." (63:09)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• David Frum on the far-right’s “globalism” (06:40):

  “He is a globalist too. He's just a globalist of the far right.”

• On the hollowness of NATO under Trump (10:50):

  “If you think of NATO as a guarantee, it's a promise. And everyone knows the promise will not ultimately be honored.”

• On Trump's tariff power (16:33):

  "He's got a source of revenue that doesn't depend on Congress. First time."

• On the moral imperative after violence (27:01):

  "Any act of political violence is an attack on you. Whatever you think of the person... your system... the thing that protects your liberties, that keeps you safe... that's what was attacked."

• On the need for societal empathy (39:00):

  "...our only resource against [political violence]... is our shared sense of right and wrong."

• On the trauma in Jewish/Israeli consciousness (57:15):

  "I just don't trust that you're going to be there. So... the lesson is don't wait to find out how bad this is going to be."

• On intergenerational transition (63:09):

  "...It's not altogether an unhappy experience to move to the side... because you're making way for people you care about."

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:31] – Poland, Russia, Trump’s Europe gambit
• [09:47] – NATO’s collapse, nuclear guarantees
• [11:54] – Ukraine’s war, status quo & U.S. inaction
• [16:33] – Trump’s tariffs, constitutional stakes
• [27:01] – Charlie Kirk assassination, principle vs. politics
• [41:58] – FBI purge, government hollowing out
• [44:36] – JD Vance’s campaign positioning
• [49:33] – South Korean ICE raid, US foreign relations
• [52:19] – Israel–Gaza, trauma, and global standing
• [59:04] – Officer David Rose: unsung political violence
• [62:04] – Grandparenthood, embracing generational change

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Takeaways

• The U.S. is at an inflection point: the lure of using violence as a tool of power is tempting not just to the far-right, but is becoming generationally normalized.
• Trump's presidency, according to Frum, is eroding not just norms of democracy at home but alliances and moral soft power abroad; tariff policy and government purges foreshadow a deep constitutional crisis.
• The response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk will be a test—not just for political leaders, but for the private morality and civic responsibility of citizens of all stripes.
• Only by reaffirming an absolute prohibition on political violence, regardless of partisanship, can democracy and pluralism endure.
• At the personal level, empathy, generational humility, and a willingness to let others take the stage are as vital in families as they are in nations.

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The Bulwark Podcast remains a must-listen for those seeking clear-eyed, reality-based commentary and deep analysis amidst the turbulence.

Transcript

[David Frum]

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[Tim Miller]

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. In honor of our favorite Canadian guest, we've got today, I got a quick announcement for our friends up north Toronto. We sold out the event in two weeks on September 26th in like two seconds. There's so many Canadians who wanted to come, which we really appreciate. Maybe they want to come just to throw tomatoes at Sam Stein. We don't know. But we are looking to add a kind of a brunch encore show on Saturday, September 27th. So if you're in Toronto or somewhere else in Canada or looking for an excuse to go to Toronto Detroit, keep an eye on the bulwark.com events early next week. We we might have some extra tickets coming. All right, Our guest, he's a staff writer at the Atlantic. He's author of 10 books including Trump Ocracy his podcast is the David Frum Show. It's kind of new. It's going up the charts. We're loving it. New episodes released every Wednesday. It's David Frum. How you doing, man?

[David Frum]

Hey, thank you.

[Tim Miller]

We've got a bunch to discuss, obviously about the political violence in this country, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I'm going to get to that in a minute. As we are taping this right now, there's a press conference happening in Utah. So I want to make sure we get the listeners the latest on what we know. It seems like we have a suspect in custody. So first, I want to start with a different news item that I've been able to get to this week, which is on Wednesday, Russia sent a swarm of drones into Poland. NATO scrambled fighter jets to shoot them down. Our president has now been asked about this twice. Donald Trump yesterday said, could have been a mistake, could have been a mistake. Repeated that twice this morning. And Fox and Friends, he said that Poland thing, they were actually knocked down and they fell into the air. I don't know why that makes it better. In both cases, he kind of caveated. He's a little frustrated with Putin. What do you make of the state apply?

[David Frum]

Well, you need to step back and understand. Poland is very important to Trump and the Trump administration. He has been playing politics inside Poland in a really blatant way, much as his vice president has been playing politics inside the UK In a blatant way. You know, for nationalists, these guys are very globalist. So Poland has a political system where it has both a president and a prime minister. The prime minister answers to Parliament. The prime minister makes most of the decisions. The president has a big, powerful veto. Poland, like the United States, is very divided between the dynamic metropolitan areas. Poland, where Poland's economy is thriving, where Poland is benefiting from international trade, where life is very modern, and a countryside that is doing much better than it did under communism, but not as well as the cities. And as the gap widens, the envy intensifies. The president comes from the countryside. He's very reactionary, very socially reactionary, anti abortion, anti gay. And you can't be pro Russia and survive in Poland. He's not. But he is someone who is definitely hostile to Ukraine and the Ukrainian presence inside Poland. Meanwhile, there's a prime minister who is the product of a majority in Parliament. He has most of the day to day responsibilities and represents modern, successful Poland, which is about to join the G20 as a trillion dollar economy.

[Tim Miller]

I saw this crazy chart about Poland compared to some of the other, just like the GDP growth in pol. And as compared to some of the other more stagnant like Hungary and then some of the other more stagnant European countries is pretty remarkable.

[David Frum]

Well, this is a moment to recall you to your Republican roots. What has Poland been doing right? Low, steady taxes, favorable regulatory environment, consistent monetary policy. I mean, all the things that Republicans.

[Tim Miller]

Used to make friends with other free countries that have dynamic economies they can trade with.

[David Frum]

Yeah, exactly. Letting go of old grievances that, you know, western Poland, you're a couple hours from Berlin and you know what Berlin loves? Farmers markets. So instead of tanks heading, heading one way, you laid up your truck with expensive endive and drive it into central Berlin. And you know, they let those grievances go. But Trump invited the president of Poland to the White House just last week without notifying the prime minister, snubbing the foreign minister, defying the entire Polish government. And he. Not only that, but during the recent presidential election, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem went to Poland to endorse the candidate of the far right over the candidate of the sort of the center parties. So Trump has been playing a lot of politics in Poland to favor the far right. That's what Vice President Vance was doing in, in Great Britain on his summer holiday. Again, he was playing politics inside a divided political system for the far right and against the center right. Understand, they have views and Poland is ground zero for Trump's attempt to say, it isn't that we're writing off Europe, it's we're trying to reinvent Europe as a network of far right parties to that identify with Trump and are as sympathetic as possible to Russia. Again, in Poland, you can only be so sympathetic to Russia, but to the extent you can be pro Russian in Poland, that's what they want.

[Tim Miller]

So you are then tying that backstory of Trump having the more nationalist president of Poland in last week, how Directly to the Russian incursion or just tying kind of to Trump's lukewarm response.

[David Frum]

I'm going to be pedantic for a moment.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, please.

[David Frum]

I wouldn't call him a nationalist. He, that that far right president campaigned on the slogan Poland first. So what kind of nationalist? He's like a, the local Wendy's franchiser. He sees what he does, a trip to, you know, the Midwest, sees that Wendy's works, buys the Polish whites rights to Wendy's and brings him back to Poland. He's not a nationalist. He is a globalist too. He's just a globalist of the far right. And I, I think it's worth it. Battling for terms about nation because this global far right pro Russia movement does not speak for the interests of any individual nation. It's loyal to Trump. It's infatuated with Putin. The people who are looking out for the interests of the everyday poll are the people who have delivered this blistering GDP growth by running a modern state in Poland. They are the ones who are truly putting Poland first. But these other guys take the slogan and they shouldn't be allowed.

[Tim Miller]

Did you see the. I guess Alexander Dugan is on substack. I don't know. It was such a weird world.

[David Frum]

Speaking of Wendy's franchises.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. He is the kind of people call him the spiritual advisor of Putin or he's like the Bannon of Russia for kind of a shorthand. Maybe you can correct me on that shorthand, but his post yesterday was who killed Charlie Kirk? Question mark. From Utah to Ukraine, it's one global war. Yeah, and I just raised that because that speaks exactly to what you're talking about. They might position themselves as nationalists, but they see it as a global. They're just globalists in their own way.

[David Frum]

You know, one of the things that has been a real problem for this kind of conspiratorial far right is remember when Glenn Beck used to draw those charts on his blackboard?

[Tim Miller]

Of course. Oh, yeah.

[David Frum]

People have been doing the metaphorical equivalent of these charts for 150 years. And the center are always the Jews. So and for Dugan, I'm sure the Jews are at the center. But if you're in America, America's like one of the world's less anti Semitic countries. And the American far right is uncomfortable with this. And unfortunately a lot of Jews attracted to the American far right. So that box doesn't have Jews in it. The Jews are sort of from a thermodynamic engineering point of view, because there's gotta be somebody who's masterminding the conspiracy. And globalist is just so vague and insubstantial. Globalists, who are. They know you need Freemasons. Well, no one really remembers them. So to do this kind of territorial Rothschilds, now we can get excited about that. So I think Dugan's pretty clear about who is running this war, but his American disciples get a little blurrier about it.

[Tim Miller]

Okay, so back to the kind of the military side of this. Our friend of the show and your colleague wrote for the Atlantic, Bob KAGAN, that those 19 drones from Russia going into Poland are the beginning of the end of NATO. Maybe the beginning of the end already happened, but, you know, we'll give them a rhetorical flourish. And obviously, all the European NATO countries rallied immediately to Poland's defense. Our president didn't do anything. And this is happening. It's not just Poland. Meanwhile, I guess it was less than a week ago now that the biggest area assault of, on Ukraine, of the entire war happened. There are over 800 drone attacks from Russia into Ukraine. So what do you make of the state of play on the. On the war side of what is NATO?

[David Frum]

It's a big building in Brussels. It's a set of treaties and agreements. It's a set of conferences. But ultimately it's a guarantee. And it's a guarantee that flows from the United States to America's allies that says, if need be, the United States will defend you as if. As it would defend itself. And so what that means ultimately, and we hope to God it never comes to this, if you're a NATO member and you really need it, there will be an American nuclear response to protect your sovereignty once you're in NATO. That's the ultimate guarantee. Now, nuclear responses are decided not by Congress, but by the President entirely on his own. He's a nuclear absolute monarch. So what NATO ultimately is, it ultimately rests on, is a confidence by the NATO members and their potential adversaries that if push really comes to shove. So don't do it. If push really comes to shove, the President of the United States will use nuclear weapons to protect a NATO country. Does Putin believe that? He does not. He knows if he attacks Poland, there will not be an American nuclear response. If he attacks Estonia, there will be no response at all. So in that sense, isn't NATO already dead?

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[David Frum]

If you think of NATO as a guarantee, it's a promise. And everyone knows the promise will not ultimately be honored. And the fact that the building is still there and the treaties are still there and all the people go to work in the building, they get off the trams, but what are they doing?

[Tim Miller]

It's kind of like that big Washington Times building in Washington, D.C. it's this huge building. When you're coming into town, it says Washington Times on it. The building is still there. And I think they have a website still. But if you go into it, it's empty.

[David Frum]

There's no one there, and it doesn't do the job it was created to do.

[Tim Miller]

I wonder if you have any other thoughts on kind of where we are with the war. I was reading the Kyiv Post this morning, and some of their sources say the EU feels like the US Is finally coming around. I feel like we've heard this story the entire term, but they report this. The EU is pushing for formal sanctions on businesses and financial institutions that retain t to Moscow, while the Trump administration is eyeing trade tools like tariffs to erode Russia's capacity to bankroll the war. Meanwhile, Ukraine is still attacking petroleum sites, energy sites inside of Russia, and have had some success with that. What do you make of that state of play?

[David Frum]

We need to. In the complicated politics of the Ukraine war, Ukraine has enemies and it has allies, and some of the allies are more effective and some are less so. It remains true, I think, that a majority of the Republican senators in Congress are allies of Ukraine. And to the extent they can, those senators, or to the extent they dare, those senators are pushing every day. And meanwhile, the President of the United States is on Russia's side now. The president of the United States is more savvy and canny. As crazy and stupid as he often acts, he does have a real sort of rodent's instinct for survival.

[Tim Miller]

Yes.

[David Frum]

And one of the things he knows is he can't get too far away from. I mean, if he were to outright say, you know what? Putin's right. Putin's my friend. Putin's right. I want to see the Russian flag flying in Kiev. That might cost him Lindsey Grah. That, that's, that might be the thing that, that breaks Lindsey Graham. So he needs to give Lindsey Graham and people like him, the other senators who feel the same way, some cover. Any minute now, I'm going to do something. So you don't want to force my hand, because I'm. And that's what he was doing today. Every time Putin does something bad, Trump then has some imaginary process to comment. You know, I'm really rethinking this, or I'm getting very fed up, or I'm any minute now, I'm about to do something. Now that minute never happens.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. Here's this exact quote today, asked if he's running out of patience on the Fox and Friends couch. Yeah, it's sort of running out and running out fast. So it's running out sort of. And quickly.

[David Frum]

Right, Right. It's like the jailbird's girlfriend who is this close to being done with him forever, but then he remembers her birthday and brings her flowers and the romance is back on.

[Tim Miller]

So given that, and you don't have a crystal ball, but your sense is a status quo. We're in a status quo situation.

[David Frum]

Yeah. Here's the good news. Ukraine is becoming a militarily very capable power. Russia has an economy the size of Italy. Europe together has an economy about 3/4 as big as the United States. They have certainly the economic resources to back Ukraine. They don't have as much abundant military supply ready, but they can make it. One of the things that's important to understand that what Trump is doing is Trump is forcing Europe to turn into an independent military power. And the Trump people say, oh, we love. That's the thing we've always wanted is an independent military Europe, really. Because an independent military Europe is not going to agree with you about China. They're not going to agree with you about China. They're going to say, you know what? China's as far away from us as it's possible to get. We have no interest in tangling with them. We trade with them a lot. You know, America's. You told us to be on our own, we're on our own. And congratulations, you also are on your own. The, the central security challenge of the 21st century is that for the first time since the United States faced the British Empire in The War of 1812, the United States is facing a potential adversary that is as big as the United States, as rich as the United States, as tough as the United States, as smart as the United States. The old Soviet Union and even Nazi Germany were basically pretty decrepit empires and much smaller in population and wealth. In the United States, China is a near equal. And if you're going to balance China, you need friends. And the Trump policy is the only friends we want are Saudi Arabia, El Salvador and half of Israel.

[Tim Miller]

The China policy has been hard for me to discern from this administration because on the one hand, you have a decent amount of China hawks inside the administration. There's some tough talk. I guess in some ways it's similar to Russia. Trump himself, though, whatever your thoughts are on the policy, kind of got crossways with the China hawk side on allowing whatever it was, 600,000 students from China to come into the country. And he's talking about being very sensitive to Xi. He, you know, the TikTok ban. Obviously he's going against the law to not enforce that. Obviously, his USAID and soft power policy is empowering China. How do you translate what's happening?

[David Frum]

Trump is a domestic culture warrior. He's not interested in geopolitics. I mean, he's interested in collecting bribes from foreign countries, and those buy you some goodwill. I mean, it looks like the Trump administration tipped off Qatar to the Israeli raid on Hamas HQ and that tip off may have saved lives of the Hamas people gathered there. That's still kind of blurry story. Qatar got something for the jet. It gave. It gave Trump. So he's interested in collecting bribes. The thing that the China hawks would say is we need to balance China, and that means we need technology policies here at home. That means we need a re. Industrialization, but it means we also need to work with new kinds of friends. India and Vietnam. And Trump's not interested in working with friends. I mean, the Vietnamese people allowed him to build a corrupt golf course.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. Really big fancy one.

[David Frum]

Very fancy. But in the end, they still got hit with the tariffs because maybe it wasn't a big enough bribe or.

[Tim Miller]

I mean, tariffs are a little less than the other other countries. They got a visit to the new, you know, Panera Rose Garden Club out of it.

[David Frum]

Exactly. One of the things that needs to be said about the tariffs, this is, I think, a secret reason or an undeclared reason why Trump loves them so much, is the tariffs give Trump what no American President has ever had before, what nobody in the Anglo American tradition has had since the days of the Stuart monarchs in the 1600s. He's got a source of revenue that doesn't depend on Congress. First time. If you were to say to the people in Philadelphia in 1787, what's, like, the one thing you're trying to make sure of? What is, like, one thing here? Well, the number one thing is to make sure that the new ruler of America cannot have revenue that Congress didn't give them. That's. That's Article 1, baby. There's a reason it's Article 1. Congress provides the money. The President can spend it, but only after Congress gives it. Trump has broken free. And to give you an idea, in the month of August, he raised $31 billion from tariffs. How much is that? Well, the entire no tax on tips gimmick, which expires in 2028. Most people don't know that, but it's temporary. Over the entire life of that gimmick, it's worth about $30 billion. So in one month in August, he collected, without Congress, more revenue than the treasury will pay for the entire no tax on tips program.

[Tim Miller]

Wow. That's telling me about what that impact is on working people, like actual working people. I did notice. One thing I don't think I've mentioned in the podcast is they're still kind of defining who qualifies. What qualifies as a tip. In the recent guidance streamers and content creators, our Tips count. So if you give a little tip on the YouTube page, we don't gotta pay taxes on that, which is a nice bribe, a nice way to get those streamers to be nice to you. And maybe I get a little trickle down out of that deal. Couple cents.

[David Frum]

But there's a number, right? Trump would say there's some number at which Tim Miller sees the error of his ways.

[Tim Miller]

He would think so. Said for sure. I was joking with Nicole Wallace the other day. I was like, I was like, the thing that you gotta hand Trump is he'll try to bribe you. And if you turn, you know, I said to Nicole, I was like, if you put on the red hat, if you go on MSNBC one day and say, surprise, pop. Red hat. I've been. The scales have fallen for my eyes. You'll be invited to the Rose Garden Club, Mar a Lago the next day. Like, there's no.

[David Frum]

Or be released from prison, right?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. Like, yeah, that's all it takes, right? And, and there's something. And that's obviously not a good moral trait or a good trait in a human that you'd want, but it is, politically speaking, if you're trying to expand your coalition, it's something maybe the left could learn from a little bit.

[David Frum]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

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[David Frum]

Adam Smith famously said there's a lot of ruin in a nation. And what he meant by that is people are always saying, oh this thing, this is certainly the ruin that happens a lot. It's an accumulation of things. But yeah, the economy is definitely trending down. Things are becoming more expensive for most people. Wages aren't keeping up, job growth has stalled. For the young people, job growth has gone into reverse. If you're 24, 25, this is a recessionary economy. If you're under 25 and pretty close to a recession if you're under 30. So far the middle aged already have a place to live, are doing better but it will catch up to terrible housing market. And the tariffs just they work their way through. And what we're going to have is a really fascinating test in October of is there any integrity left in the US Supreme Court? Two courts have said the tariffs are illegal. The Court of Trade and the D.C. circuit. Now this case is going to the Supreme Court. They're obviously illegal. If the American Constitution, as I said, if the American Constitution says one Thing it says the president cannot create a system of revenue independent of Congress and he can't invoke some imaginary emergency. World War II was a pretty big emergency. Franklin Roosevelt got his taxes from Congress. Trump has to get in this not imaginary emergency. Trump has to get his taxes from Congress. He's created a non congressional source of revenue that has to be unconstitutional and illegal. Two courts have said so. And we'll see what the Supreme Court does.

[Tim Miller]

We will see what they do. I wonder if they do render it illegal, the verdict that it is unconstitutional, what he's doing. I was talking to Steph Rule about this earlier this week. In some ways, it's kind of a bailout maybe of him. Gives Trump what he wants, where he can sort of blame whatever the deep state and the road people and the Freemasons again. And so he was doing his best to make, to bring about a golden age. On the other hand, in this case, he's just so dug in on it. I do want. Doesn't he just try to go, you know, use a different, you know, you know, go around, you know, whatever the ruling was and use some different justification for the tariffs and then it goes back to the courts again and he kind of does the thing that he did on his, all of his criminality where it's just stalling, kicking the can, stalling, and eventually he's, you know, either out of office or an authoritarian.

[David Frum]

There are other tariff routes he could try beyond the emergency tariffs that he's imposed. The revenue is really important. A lot of his fiscal plans depend on the promise that he's going to raise a lot. I mean, the thing that makes the tariffs so important to him is exactly the thing that makes them so illegal that he's looking to get a lot of revenue out of them. They're also going to trigger, if the Supreme Court does the right thing, a really nasty scramble inside American politics. So the tariffs are the check to the government issues from whoever imports the original product. If the government is told you have to pay this money back, then all the people who wrote that check, those checks to the government get their money back. But of course, the costs have been passed down from importer to producer to fabricator to ultimate consumer. No one down the chain is going to get their money back. So the person who imported the sound system for the new minivan, they wrote the check to the treasury, they get the money back, but the carmaker doesn't get the money back. And certainly the people bought the minivan, they don't get their money back.

[Tim Miller]

Hey, everybody. We are going on the road this fall and I want to see you. Sadly, our Toronto tickets have already sold out, so I'm plotting a return to Canada. You guys just wait on that. But there's still tickets left for our events in Washington, D.C. and New York City in October. Come join me, Sarah jvl for two nights of camaraderie and joy and resistance and podcasting and maybe some special guests at the D.C. event. We might give a big middle finger to the masked agents of Donald Trump that are roaming the city's free streets. And we'll be back in New York a couple times later. First time we've been in New York in ages. The last time we had a live New York event, it was, I can remember because it was during the Nuggets title run and me and a handful of the folks who came out went and watched Jamal Murray like put up 40, I think on the Lakers after. The podcast was quite enjoyable. Maybe we'll have a similar night. We'll see. And if you really want more time with us and you don't want to just place a bet that you'll end up at the same bar with me after, because you never know. You could pay for VIP tickets. They're included in the sale. It'll give you earlier entry into the show and you can hang with us for an intimate Q and A. You can check out all the details and get [e-mail] events. For more, that's thebullwork.com events. See you all on the East Coast. I'll move on to Kirk. Here's what we know as we're taping this morning. Trump in his way, like he's kind of like, you know, the national commenter was live streaming what he has learned about this on Fox and Friends this morning, telling them that he thought that they had the shooter. That has turned out to be correct. The reports indicate the Suspect is a 22 year old from Utah who confessed to a family member and then they turned him in. So it was not Kash Patel didn't track him down at a press conference. That's happening as we are recording right now. They do have. There are some questions about the carvings and the bullets. There were some reports about that yesterday. The carvings that they have here on the fired bullet. This is unintelligible to me. Notices bulges. What's this? This seems like kind of some Internet speak. There's another one that says, hey, fascist, catch. There's another one that says if you read this you are gay. Lmao. So I don't know what to really make of all that. We'll learn more, but at least the purpose in custody. What do you make of all that? And just sort of broadly your initial thoughts on the political violence we've seen this week.

[David Frum]

So first, the grief over a human death is in no way dependent on your opinion of the human life. Any act of political violence is an attack on you. Whatever you think of the person on the other end, you were attacked. That your system, the thing that protects your liberties, that keeps you safe, that makes you a free person, that makes you proud to be an American. That's what was attacked. The victim was the immediate target, but you are the ultimate target. So just quell. Whatever. This is not the time to express your views on the value or importance or worth of turning Point usa. That has nothing to do with what happened here any more than the assassination of Malcolm X turns on your opinion of Black Muslims any more than your opinion of any other act of political violence.

[Tim Miller]

Just expand on this a little bit because JVL wrote about that this week too. Why? Why do you think that is?

[David Frum]

So what is democracy? There's a classic definition which I would endorse from Joseph Schumperter. Democracy is the belief that political power should be competed for peacefully by the process of free and fair balloting. There's a stake of power, but the commitment is the competition for power must be peaceful. And there are many people in that competition you would like to see loose. There are many people in that competition you might regard as sinister or some other way unworthy or breaking the rules.

[Tim Miller]

And in the case of Charlie Kirk, it should be worth noting that he was part of the group that instigated the attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. Right?

[David Frum]

And he defamed Paul Pelosi when Paul Pelosi was a victim of violence. None of this depends on who he is. It depends on who you are. That's what you're fighting for. Is that the way you react to a thing like this is not a statement on the victim, it's a statement on the person making the statement.

[Tim Miller]

Statement.

[David Frum]

So we begin by saying this is horrifying and unacceptable and more dangerous than ordinary criminality, as dangerous as that is. And we all have a shared stake in this next thing. President Trump and the people around him obviously want to use this as a way to suppress their political opposition in advance of the dangerous 2026 elections for them. Trump in April tried to shut down ActBlue by personal order. The Democratic fundraising platform. That investigation is still pending. And his speech to the nation was all about how he wants to go after people who stand for order. His target base is anyone who does anything that he doesn't like to anybody he does like, whether that's peaceful protests, whether that's proper competition. So the, the goal here, and you can see it taking form, is to suppress speech, to suppress fundraising, to have more arbitrary arrests. This is a tool of power and that, that also has to be resisted. At the same time as you're clear about condemning the horror of the violence. The last thing is, of course, it's really important to have no opinions before you have information about who the killer is and what muddle of crazy motives led him to the attack. But without predicting anything, just a context. When political assassinations take place in Europe, they usually take place for reasons that make sense within the political system of that country. When, when the IRA blew up Mountbatten in 1979, the, I guess the close relative of the Queen of England, the IRA struck for reasons that any English person would understand. Why did the IRA do what they're doing? It made sense that they're terrorists for getting the British out of Ireland. They attacked a member of the royal family. It all was horrible. It was wrong, but it made sense. American killers don't tend like shooting Ronald Reagan to win the affection of Jody Foster. Not a coherent plan. Even if you kill him, she's still not going to like you any better.

[Tim Miller]

Than she did before. Well, so you're saying there's a chance.

[David Frum]

So you have to find. It's pretty unusual for American political killers to have motives that make sense within the normal political framework. And normally the typical practice is for them to have quite crazy and bizarre and idiosyncratic motives and to be acting for their own reasons in their own ways. Again, I make no statement about who this person is. I don't know.

[Tim Miller]

Sure.

[David Frum]

But just the idea that you're going to find, oh yeah, they were a paid up member of their local political committee of whatever party. That's almost certainly not going to be true.

[Tim Miller]

A couple of thoughts on that. First, on the Trump and the power grab side of it. So again, as I said, he was on Fox and Friends this morning. A couple of notable quotes from that One was he was asked kind of surprisingly responsibly by Ainsley Earhart, one of the co hosts, about the radicals on the right and what his concerns are about that. Trump says, I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are Radical because they don't want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the real problem. And then when it comes to the protesters, as you mentioned, he talks about the left, how they have professional agitators that get paid for it. Soros and others, we're going to look into that. This is more than protest. So I'm just already laying the groundwork for crackdown for maybe not as directly as maybe you did with stand back and standby, but some rhetorical comfort, maybe for vigilantes.

[David Frum]

Yeah, look, the people who interrupted Trump's dinner at Joe's Stone Crab were trespassing. They're engaged in misdemeanor mischief of all kinds. And I'm sure they broke many, many laws. And they all should be arrested and fined and sentenced to whatever, you know, 30 days probation. What do you get for showing up in some, in a restaurant where you don't have a right to be and disrupting dinner? There are consequences for that. So that's not true. Peaceful protest. True peaceful protest is standing in front of Lafayette Square in a public place and showing your placard. But they knew what they were doing. In that sense, they probably were professional, that they, they assumed, they understood that there are consequences for shouting in Joe's Stone Crab. They accepted them. And in a free society, say, okay, a thousand dollars in 30 days probation, that, that's the price. You've made your point, and now we're going to make our point, and that's that. That's the system sort of working. And most American politicians, and most certainly almost all presidents, would understand. I don't love having my dinner disrupted at Joe Stone Crab. But. But it's not exactly a danger to the republic that it happens.

[Tim Miller]

The inverse, actually, is. The danger to the republic, I guess, is the point. Right. Like the fact that the President of the United States would use the power to try to shut these people up, to try to intimidate them. Who knows?

[David Frum]

Yeah. Send them on a plane to a torture dungeon in El Salvador or Florida or Louisiana.

[Tim Miller]

We just opened one at the old Angola prison here. And I think that's the thing that scares me at some level. It hasn't been quite as bad as I thought on that front, as much as I don't.

[David Frum]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

You know, as much as some of the hagiography of Charlie and I've spoken about Charlie, and I think that there, you know, there's something to be said for, again, as you mentioned, for open debate, and I don't know that there's a ton to be said about slandering dead people. But, you know, the hagiography of him at some level is a little out of step with reality, and it's beside the point. It is beside the point, I guess, but the point that I'm making is that in some ways I would rather them focus on that than on the retribution. Like the real. The scary part here is using it as a pretext for government retribution.

[David Frum]

Yes. And not just retribution out of vengeance, but retribution because Trump is heading toward. He's in a situation where free and Fair elections in November 26 mean a lot of trouble for him. And unlike many MAGA people, Trump, I don't think deceives himself, at least not in the second term, about his political vulnerabilities. And so with that rodent like instinct for survival that he understands, well, if I can't prevail in a free and fair election, I guess the election's gonna have to be not so free and not so fair.

[Tim Miller]

I want to throw one more thing at you that worries me about all this, that has been worried about this week. There's several. And I think that there's been maybe. Well, I'm sure there's been some place besides the bulwark, but there are very few places besides the bulwark that have been committed to sounding the alarm about right wing domestic terrorism, about Trump and the MAGA movement and the kind of violent tendencies that he's stoking and the threats that that brings to all of us, to the country, to the republic, to us individually. In addition to that, there's some other scary stuff that's happening to me in the fallout of the Kirk assassination. He looked at a poll recently of, yes, violence can sometimes be justified. 65 plus 3%. 45 to 64, 8%. 18 to 29, 20%. That's pretty notable. Jump the idea that you don't have to. There's another poll I don't have in front of me, but something to the effect of do you have to be upset about the death of political figures no matter what their ideology is? And it was. People on the left were like, it was like 33% or something. It was a disturbingly small number of folks that felt that way. I'm not trying to create a false equivalence. I'm more worried about right wing domestic terrorism, but I'm also just worried kind of about a broad based view among young folks, maybe driven by TikTok and algorithms, that this stuff is part of a society and that people deserve it.

[David Frum]

I always want to be cautious with These broad social indicator polls fair. Because with polling it's always so important to think. There's the question that the pollster asks, the question that I think I hear and the question that maybe the respondent hurt and. And maybe there's something that has gone wrong in that transmission. It's also possible that the young don't understand the loss and pathos of death the way the older people do. Like, whatever you think of Charlie Kirk, what do you think of his wife and his two little kids?

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[David Frum]

This is a crime that's going to reverberate through the lives of those two young children forever. And through their children. It's going to change them. It's going to change his. His wife who, you know what, what do they do to you?

[Tim Miller]

So the people in the crowd, I had to watch it and I watched that video of that guy that was asking him the question at the time. He was a liberal guy that was asking him about mass shootings. Then he gets shot and that guy was tormented. I guess it's going to be. That's traumatizing.

[David Frum]

Yeah. Maybe when you're 22, it's easier not to think about that as you're so obviously going to live forever.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[David Frum]

So I think there's something there. It may be, as you say, TikTok, it may be kind of glibness. It may be that people get caught up in sort of the gamesmanship of politics. It may be that we're all kind of more alienated from our neighbors. Again, I was talking about the difference in American political assassination and others that the people who blew up Mountbatten in 1979, they had friends, they were part of a community, they belonged to a terrorist cell. The typical American political murderer is usually someone who doesn't have any friends, is completely isolated from community. Again, no predictions about this particular killer. We'll find out, sure. But that's very much the pattern. And as we all become a little bit more like that, self inflicted loners, maybe our human connection fades and our human compassion fades.

[Tim Miller]

I worry about that. I worry about the lack of connectedness we talk a lot about with experts on that on this pod. I worry about the social media side. I just, I also worry, I guess my last thought on this, I worry a little bit about cycle of violence stuff. There is, I don't. You know the streamer Hassan Piker, I've heard of him. Yeah. So he's a far left progressive streamer, very popular with the youth and he was live streaming when the Kirk assassination happened. And There was a lot of commenters in the stream. Again, it's very easy to say this on YouTube who were doing the he deserted stuff or whatever. And Piker was pushing back on that aggressively and was getting kind of emotional. And he was saying, essentially, look, I was supposed to debate Charlie next month in a public like this could be me and I'm stealing this. Thoughts? I apologize, whoever I'm thieving it from, but somebody observed that, like the young populist uprising, maybe they need to learn about why their ancestors, why their grandparents had the norms that they did and the rules that they did. Right. And I worry a little bit that we go through a cycle of violence period where the young folks are reacting like that because they didn't live through the 70s and 80s, their parents didn't live. It's so far away, that last spate of violence, or 9, 11 for that matter, so far away from them that they don't appreciate why some of those traditions and norms are in place. What do you make of that?

[David Frum]

There's a famous poem, I hope they still teach it in high school in the 17th century that said tells about the story of a man who hears a church bell toll, meaning someone's died and he sends a messenger out to find out who did the church bell toll for. And the poet says, it told for you. Like, I think that's what Piker heard. He heard that it could as easily have been Charlie Kirk being asked, what do you think about the murder of Hassan Piker and the prohibition here has to be absolute. It just. And in this violent country with firearms available everywhere, with a lot, with a lot of loners cut off from community, the potential for violence is always there and our only resource against it, especially in the age of the Kash Patel FBI, which doesn't seem to be much of a resource for anybody, is our shared sense of right and wrong.

[Tim Miller]

Wrong.

[David Frum]

And the family, if it's true that the family turned the killer and they had that, and that's. That's amazing. And that's. That's our social resource.

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[Tim Miller]

To Cash. Last item on this, which is where I wanted to go next. What I mean, what a clown show. I mean, lucky. He gets lucky. I guess that this, based on what we know that this, this perp is turned in. There's some elements of it that's like veepish and dark comedy. Some elements that are pretty scary, right? I mean, it's Cash himself kind of live tweeting their failed attempts to find the perpetrator in the, in the first day. Then on the more serious side, there's the firing of the woman who should have been the agent in charge in Utah. We don't exactly know why, but it's a, it's a Pakistani woman. So potentially part of the DEI purge. We do know that there have been several other top level FBI officials, experts who have been purged because either of DEI accusations or because they were involved in the investigation in Trump. Sometimes not. Sometimes just because they were doing their job, not out of any actual ideology. And so we have an FBI with like a totally incompetent person with beady eyes who looks scared at the press conference leading a hollowed out bureau. And for the people who are there reassigning them more to focused on migrants entirely, it's pretty alarming really.

[David Frum]

And it's happening across the government. I mean if it were a tornado, it could be the same story. The tariff situation is the same that just generally, if you want people in high office who are mindlessly obedient to the president, whatever he says, and no matter how much he changes his mind, those people are probably not going to be good at their jobs because the kind of people are good at their jobs are not mindless robots. They are not chosen for sycophancy and slavishness and you know, corruption. Competent people have an attachment to their craft and a belief in something bigger than the politics of the moment. So if you're purging them, if you're purging all that kind of independent person, you're going to lose a lot of confidence and it's going to have, it's demonstrated today at the FBI, it will be demonstrated tomorrow somewhere else.

[Tim Miller]

A couple other just rapid fire things I want to get your take on. I'm always wondering, you know what, what Fromm thinks about this. Let's start with this. Anytime J.D. vance dishonors himself. I'm wondering what David Frum thinks about this couple. Recently there's the Epstein situation where JD Came out and really slandered the Wall Street Journal saying that they had done wrong journalism, that the birthday letter could not have been Trump. It doesn't even exist, he suggested. Maybe it doesn't exist. Maybe it's just totally fabricated. This is a news outlet totally fabricating things. After they did summary execution of a of 11 Venezuelans who are allegedly drug dealers in the Caribbean and an online opponent of the administration said that this was war crimes. JD Vance replied to the person saying he doesn't give a shit. Wondering what you make of what we've seen from the vice president.

[David Frum]

So J.D. vance is running for the Republican nomination in 2028. Every single day. That's, that's, that's his job.

[Tim Miller]

It's kind of encouraging that he thinks that there's going to be an open effort for the Republican nomination of 2028. That's my, that's the only silver lining signing of his behavior. I Can think of.

[David Frum]

Well, he may or may not believe that, but he has to organize his time as if he did. Okay, well, just to put this in some comparison, so in 1984, Ronald Reagan is elected for a second term. In November, of course, George H.W. bush begins organizing the George H.W. bush for President campaign in December. He has lunch with Reagan in December of 84 and says, I just want you to know, I hope it doesn't put you out, but I'm beginning my own campaign. And Bush records in his diary that Reagan didn't look immediately pleased because, like. But okay, I get it. And By April of 1985, the entire bush for President campaign structure is in place. He introduces them to the family at Kennebunkport. He's got his campaign manager, his finance chair, all of them by April.

[Tim Miller]

Who was the campaign manager of HW in 88?

[David Frum]

Lee Atwater.

[Tim Miller]

Oh, was he the campaign manager? I thought he was like, in the Rove role. We'll pull it up. You keep talking. This is. I'm upset at myself for not knowing this. You keep going.

[David Frum]

Okay, so now imagine that JD Vance had a whole structure in place in April. April of this year, Trump would cut him off at the knee. So Vance has this problem, which is he has to campaign without seeming to campaign. And his other. His problem is, at some level, mega people know this guy isn't really us of blood and bone. You know, he is more at home in my dining room than he is with you. I'm sorry, it's true. Where he spent a lot of time.

[Tim Miller]

Was he that smarmy back then when he was in your timing room?

[David Frum]

No, no, no, because I didn't. The way to please me was not to be smarmy. So he was pleasing me in a different way. So that means he has to do extra. Like. Just suppose, as I think would have happened in a different universe, if Charlie Kirk were running for president, which I think was in the cards, he wouldn't have to do all this stuff. He would be going the other way. He would be reassuring, sort of normal American. That encounter that George Packer described, where Charlie Kirk was very good natured to. Packer introduced himself, I'm with the Atlantic. And Kirk said to him, ah, that's where we go to find out what the elites think in a kind of jokey way. Those are the moves that Charlie Kirk. But Vance can't do that. He has to be more obnoxious, more rude, more sarcastic.

[Tim Miller]

This is totally right. And this is my experience also, by the way, like Charlie himself. But also the more maga, the more they kind of are nice to me and like me and want to. Want to spar with me. And the more close they are, you know, the narcissism of small differences, the closer they are, the fact that they maybe if they know deep inside that there's something morally corrupt about what they've decided to do, they're the. They're meaner to me. Right. So it's more like to get somebody on this podcast who's MAGA than someone of the JD fans.

[David Frum]

Exactly. Exactly. Right. So I think that's a big part of what's going on because they don't trust him. He has to show himself extra personally sociopathic in a way that I think is probably not real. I think probably. I bet he's a great dad and a good husband and I bet his prayers when he's in church are compartmentalized, but I bet they're very fervent and he talks to God and I bet there is something there.

[Tim Miller]

I'm going to color myself skeptical on that. I'm happy with you. Maybe I'm more cynical. I allow you to have that view. But I don't know. I think it'd be more likely that he has a third faith in 2020 to match his names than that he has earnest prayers. But I would love to be wrong. I hope I'm wrong about that. Sometimes I regret.

[David Frum]

You mean like. Mr. Vice President, we've discovered a very interesting way to offset some of your weakness in the Utah primary.

[Tim Miller]

Okay, fair enough. I don't know. I guess. Do you. Don't you have to be a little sociopathic to pretend to be that? Sociopathic, I guess would be my follow up.

[David Frum]

Now we're going into deeper waters than I can go. But just why is he doing this? I mean, it's part of his campaign strategy. And I think, yes, maybe there's some authentic nastiness there too. And as you say, it may be shame and guilt that fortifies the nastiness. It may just be his nature. But it's also he's got something to prove in a way that if Charlie Kirk were running for president, Charlie Kirk wouldn't have that thing to prove.

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[Tim Miller]

It's just one random story. Caught my eyesight. I just want to get your take on really quick because it relates to what you're saying earlier about how our only allies are El Salvador and Saudi. Now, now South Korea. We had this ICE raid on the plant in Georgia. The 300 some odd South Koreans were caught up in it. The details of that are kind of less interesting to me than this story which is out of Korea. The Korean airlines jet carrying 316south Koreans touched down at the airport to a rousing welcome from anxious families and friends. The arrivals all buzzed in anticipation. Outside buses idled with with where family members and well wishers waved signs welcome back free and safe. There was cheering, relief, joy. And this is like people, this is like what we would do after, after we brought a hot Brittney Griner home from Russia. Like our ally, South Korea in South Korea is celebrating the return of their citizens from ill treatment in our country in a manner that I guess places us in the spot of being the black hat out.

[David Frum]

Yeah. And this is going to be felt and remembered obviously it's going to influence a lot of South Korean attitudes. It also this whole story remind just drives home the the incredible stupidity and incoherence of what passes for economic policy in MAGA world. Because foreign investment and trade deficits are two sides of the same accounting coin. All the capital inflows have to balance all the goods inflows. So when you're running a big deficit and getting a lot of capital investment and you're taking money from the world, you're going to end up also at the same time for the same reasons and in the same process having a big trade deficit. So the things that Trump wants are completely incoherent. And if you say not only do I want a lot of foreign investment but I don't want any Foreign people to come over to help set up the factory we've asked them to invest.

[Tim Miller]

That Americans will work in.

[David Frum]

How does any of the this can't work. And it's one that this whole MAGA economy is heading to the brick wall unless the Supreme Court bails them out. Their economic plans make no sense. They can't make sense. They don't care if they make sense. They don't even understand them well enough to why they don't make sense. I keep thinking of that scene where Tim Cook brought the plaque or what was it? The trophy.

[Tim Miller]

The trophy. And he's talking about how it's a great MAGA American and a veteran that did the trophy. Checking out the identity box, I keep.

[David Frum]

Thinking it's like a science fiction episode where the emissary from the advanced civilization says look, behold, I have here in my hand a device that contains all human knowledge but you can't possibly understand what it works. So for you I have this shiny rock.

[Tim Miller]

This is more fitted to. Your rock was carved by somebody who's a big supporter, a big fan of yours and you know, it's very special.

[David Frum]

More fitted to your primitive mentality. You.

[Tim Miller]

We could do have done a whole podcast of this. We're running out of time. But I, I just, I've open, I'm open ended your thoughts on what we're seeing out of out of Israel. The, the ongoing war in Gaza, but also as you mentioned earlier, the assassination in Qatar. There was a strike in Yemen, Syria, Hezbollah, Lebanon that continues fighting a multi front war with maybe declining friends around the world. What do you make of what we've seen from Israel?

[David Frum]

One is struck again and again by the American absence. I mean just think about the two most difficult or most violent political problems or geopolitical problems the United States faces are the security situation in the Middle east, the Ukraine, Russia war. Who would put the same person in charge of growth by the way? A person with no relevant experience, no ability to speak any of the languages, never set foot in any of these places before the president gave him the job job. And he's got both mandates. You know I'm generally very supportive of what Israel does, but the United States has its own independent views. But no one person can assert those views. They rest on decision papers. And when you're the superpower, wherever you go, the local partner or the local adversary, whoever has has a very set of very specific asks that they think about all the time and your representative never heard of them, doesn't understand why they're important, doesn't understand what they mean. Unfortunately, you're the superpower. So you have a giant bureaucracy back home, home that can have briefing papers that says, okay, we understand what's going on. When the Armenians ask for this from the Azerbaijanis, this is what's going on. You don't have to wing it. But Witkoff's view seems to be, you know, who wings it better than me? I don't need your stinking briefing papers.

[Tim Miller]

Not exactly George Schultz either, you know.

[David Frum]

Yeah, well, but George Schultz was George Schultz because he relied on experts.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, right.

[David Frum]

And because he, he went into the room, he said, okay, when the Armenians and Azerbaijani start talking to me, me, and they say, what about clause 28? What is this clause 28 and why do we care? And what has been the position that we've had going back to the Truman.

[Tim Miller]

Administration after mentioning George Schultz, I must say you were correct. Lee Atwater was the actual campaign manager. Roger Ailes was in the media advisor role. I think it was more like the Bush the Sun's model was to have more of a pal in the campaign manager's role. Oh yeah, I guess just last thing on Israel and then I want to close. So we were talking about this a little bit on the next level this week and I know that you who for a lot of reasons care deeply about the state of Israel and its relationship with America, do you worry that the actions of the last year risk Israel ending up in a sour spot with both parties? I look at what we're seeing right now in America and obviously Democratic Party, deep humanitarian concerns. What's happening in Gaza, Republican Party of kind of a rising, you can call it nationalist, you can call it anti Semitic, call it a variety of things, wing of people that are not as sympathetic as in the past. And I think Bibi might be making a bet that gets him crossways with both, both factions in this country. What do you think of that?

[David Frum]

I think Israel is not a country with the size of the scape to do indefinite protracted conflict. That the focus on the immediate problems and the immediate threats around you can blind you to the strategic, strategic problems that Israel needs support from the United States, it needs investment from Europe. The long term goal for Israel has to be to become a member state of the European Union and fully with the rights and responsibilities. And that requires some regard to the opinions of your neighbors. Even if you think those opinions are maybe kind of stupid and unfair, you have to at least take those into account. And look, October 7th was a deeply traumatized event and it's a deeply traumatizing event on top of the Holocaust memories which are not non Jews don't know how not far away those memories are. I mean I'll tell a personal story. I mean I lived all my life in comfort and security. I've had nothing but, you know, society's done showered nothing but blessings on me. But my grandparents moved to Canada from Poland in 1930. My father was born in 19311 most of their relatives stayed behind and they were almost all to the last person murdered. And if my grandparents had made a slightly different decision in 1930, my father would have murdered when he was 11 or 12 years old and I would never have been born. Now that's 90 years ago. Three generations on the other hand for me it's, it's not far away. It's in my head. And so October 7th happens. I whatever how other people think I should react. This is a movie. I know. This is a story. I know. And so one of the things that is a dispute and you see this on social media a lot is people invoke the so called lessons of the Holocaust. And the Holocaust wasn't there to teach lessons, it was there to kill people. But to the extent there were lessons non Jews look at say Jews, don't you see the lesson of the Holocaust is we should all be better. We should all be better. And Jews react to say I don't trust you that way. I'm sorry.

[Tim Miller]

Jews should be better.

[David Frum]

I don't mean this in a personal way. I don't mean this to be critical. I don't mean this to be harsh, but I don't, I just don't trust that you're going to be there. So the, to me, to me the lesson is don't wait to find out how bad this is going to be.

[Tim Miller]

Wow.

[David Frum]

It's one reason for a lot of the sort of. If you watched Larry David or Woody Allen before that, like the, the fabled story of Ashkenazi Jewish neuroticism.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[David Frum]

Which I fully inherit. Look, for a thousand years, you know, you've had the random genetic mutations that make Ashkenazi jewelry born either with an optimistic or pessimistic disposition. And what happens is in a time of trouble, the optimists stay and they don't have grandchildren and the pessimists leave and they do. And so you've genetically engineered a population over many generations, say I'm just not going to stick around to find out how bad this is going to get. And that's what is going on. In the post October 7th, this is an event with such deep meaning and, and the reactions it pulled strike a lot of people as and this, I remember having to say this to when I was growing up in Canada, you know, here we are in the city of Toronto and beyond Toronto is Mississauga, and beyond Mississauga is Oshawa. And after that you've got a thousand miles of nothing. And then you get Winnipeg, which is kind enough, then Regina, and then the Pacific Ocean. There's this huge margin. You have this huge, huge margin. And now you've got this group of people who feel they have no margin and they are going to react that way. So, so this war has to come to an end. Israel needs it to come to an end pretty fast. Then it has to do a lot of human and economic reconstruction and reintegration into its neighborhood. But if you're evaluating what is going on here, you need all to understand the reactions and the way this has landed on people and what its continuing meaning is and how in the end they're not afraid to be isolated because they think they're going to be isolated no matter what.

[Tim Miller]

Final topic, Bill Kristol's newsletter this morning, if you'll indulge me, I thought was extremely important and as we've discussed earlier in this podcast, I think that there is obviously significance, increased significance to political violence, political assassination, no matter who the victim is of it. But there was another political assassination that happened in the last month that I don't feel like got the appropriate attention because it didn't end up being as bad as it might have been. But there was a victim. His name is David Rose. I'm going to read a little bit from from Bill's newsletter. David Rose was the DeKalb county police officer who rushed to the CDC campus in Atlanta when employees that were under attack from a gunman who believed he had been poisoned by the COVID 19 vaccine. Rose had served as a Marine in Afghanistan and then decided to come back and serve at home in law enforcement. When he graduated from the police academy this past March, Rose, as a class leader, addressed the graduates at guests. He said, from the very first day, we learned that policing isn't just about enforcing the law, it's about protecting the vulnerable, standing for justice and being the person who runs towards danger when others run away. David Rose ran toward danger and gave his life in doing so. Let us now praise famous men. As the old saying goes, let us also praise men like David Rose. And I just think that it's really important to bring that up because, because this was also political violence with somebody who was radicalized by who knows what, but probably misinformation. Certainly believed a lot of misinformation that was pushed by political leaders. And he was trying to kill government officials at the CDC and ended up killing David Rose, who was a hero and didn't deserve it and deserves our honor.

[David Frum]

That's beautifully said. Yeah. It would also be well for someone to go interview Nancy Pelosi about how she feels about these calls for decorum and decency because, look, we can't control every sociopathic utterance by every random account on Twitter, many of which are computers anyway. But we can certainly expect from the son of then a past president United States, from a sitting United States senator, that they would react to a murderous, intendedly murderous attack on the husband of the speaker the House with something other.

[Tim Miller]

Than Glad Trump on FOX and Friends this morning. It was kind of a revealing moment. He does his weave, his internal monologue that he shares with us all the time. And during it, I don't have it right in front of me, but it says something to the effect of the other side's really having a hard time with this. He's like, you look at NBC, you look at cbs, you look at MSNBC and they're terrible and unfair, but even they've been like, this cannot be allowed to happen. That's what he said. Even they've been like, this cannot be allowed to happen. It was like it was a surprise to him that the mainstream media and the more left media acted as normal humans might, acted responsibly as opposed to how him and his ilk have acted in these sorts of events.

[David Frum]

Well said. Well said.

[Tim Miller]

I want to close this. Congratulations. You welcomed a new granddaughter last month, Abigail. Really happy for you. Your son, Nat, and it's so lovely. So have you got a time to spend some time with her?

[David Frum]

We spent some time with her. My wife has spent a little more than me, but we've had a chance to meet her. She will be turning this weekend. She'll be turning one month. And we'll be spending some time, in fact, together over the Jewish holidays ahead. And really looking forward to that. Grandparenthood is a very different kind of experience because it's all the fun with none of the responsibilities or not all the fun, but because, but a lot of, a lot of fun with very few responsibilities. And so that's a different kind of feeling. And you have then the pride and pleasure of watching your children and their spouses step into the role. And I think one of the things that there's a larger meaning here. One of the things that I think has troubled American political life over the past few years is people don't know when it's their time to move slightly to the side and then altogether off the stage.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[David Frum]

And one of the things from this experience is it's not altogether an unhappy experience to move to the side and then be ready to move off the stage because you're making way for people you care about. And, you know, just be great. If you've lived long enough to see the end of your term, don't fight that. Embrace it and say, you know, what is it? A miracle of modern medicine, you get to outlive your time. Action. Now turn it over to the next to the next group.

[Tim Miller]

Well, we're so happy for you, David. That's a great place to leave it. Everybody else, we'll be back here Monday with Bill Crystal. Have a wonderful weekend, and we'll see you all then. Peace. Back on the run. Back to the blue. Winning is fun, losing is two. Roses are falling? Roses from falling for you? Boom. The ache inside the hate? I found a way to sit and wait and now I can't? Your voice you face with without a trace? I'll wait for you? Roses are falling for you? Under your skin over the moon? Don't let me in? I don't know what I'd do? Roses are false? Falling Roses from falling for you?

[David Frum]

Boo.

[Tim Miller]

You know, darling, you bring out the worst in me. Sometimes when I'm around you I feel like pure evil. I guess they say nobody's perfect but they've never met a devil like you? Roses are falling for you? Roses are falling for you? Roses are falling for you? The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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