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- [00:08]
Tim Miller
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is our first episode of 2025, and so I'm delighted to be here. With Favor of the Pod Staff writer at the Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently Trumpocalypse, it's David Frum. How are you doing, David?
- [00:23]
David Frum
All right, thank you. Although I think we have to take, since you're in New Orleans, a moment of horrified silence for this terrible incident. More details are known, but just the carnage just looks horrifying. And what a terrible thing for your city.
- [00:36]
Tim Miller
It is horrible and it's a sad way to ring in the new year. And we had 15 are dead here and many more injured. So TBD, on a final count there, the perpetrator was driving a truck with an ISIS flag and turned onto Bourbon street off of Canal. They're usually bollards there to protect against us, but they were replacing them for the Super Bowl. So unclear whether that was bad luck or timing on behalf of the perpetrator. Also, there's the cybertruck attack in Vegas. There was a mass shooting in Queens last night at a nightclub. The CNN headline, I was just making sure I had my facts right. This morning, looking through everything was, New Orleans attacked, deadliest since Maine. Mass shooting. Yeah, I don't even remember the main mass shooting, which I think tells you a little something about American life. So I'm just wondering if you have any other top line thoughts based on what we know now.
- [01:30]
David Frum
It's a violent society, more violent than pure nations. And there are reasons for that that Americans, I think, probably do not want to change, which is the country has just got weaker interior policing than its European peers do. I remember being in Britain at the time of one of the Conservative Party conferences and going into the police control room that was monitoring the safety of the city and looking at the feeds from all the closed circuit TV cameras that fed into the police station. They could, you could pick out somebody that the camera wanted to follow and just follow him over the whole course of his itinerary for as long as you wanted to follow that person through one camera after another. Americans don't want to live like that. Americans are also very attached to guns. That's not the murder weapon in New Orleans. And but it's, it is a deep national commitment. And to those. I grew up in Canada. It seems unreasonable to me. I understand why if you're a farmer trying to protect your chickens, you need a shotgun. I understand why if you're a hunter, you need a rifle. I don't understand why. Why, if you're an urbanite, you need to carry a personal arsenal that would impress an Afghan warlord. But a lot of people seem to disagree with me on that. And there has been no move, if anything, over the past 20 years, gun laws have become more permissive, not more restrictive. I'm going to forget now the writer who said this that it's a big, raw, rough, unpoliced country and violence is the price Americans pay for it. But that seems to be. That's the verdict. And there are enough different kinds of violent people that whatever sociological or political conclusion you want to draw, you want to draw the rednecks are bad, Muslims are bad. You want to draw school children are bad, school children are good. You want to draw any conclusion you want. There is a crime, a mass crime, a horrifying crime that will support whatever theory you want to. You want to propound.
- [03:17]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I think the darkest part of our soul that is revealed to me. I mean, the violence itself is obviously the greatest problem, and it's horrific, but I think it's a window into the soul that, like when an event like this happens now and, you know, you get online, you get on your social media of choice, or what? Or, you know, even unintentionally, you know, you're on social media and what you see is not really. I mean, some information, you get misinformation and sometimes correct information, which is always going to be the case in a developing story, but you also just get a preponderance of people basically rooting for the perpetrator to be of the. Of a political tribe that they dislike. Yeah, and that seems to be a cross partisan sickness. You see this in every incident. You would expect that our leaders would be a little bit more restrained in this element of the sickness. We're not getting that from the incoming president. He bleeded on his social media yesterday before we even knew who the suspect was. Criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country. Blaming this on migrant crime. His son said that Biden's parting gift is migrant terror. Hawley, Josh Hawley. Sander Hawley was tweeting, demanding mayorkas accountability. The suspect was born in Texas and is US army veteran, obviously is Muslim and was carrying an ISIS flag. So it would have been. Had they waited a couple of hours, there could have been another group that they could have waited to target. But it's pretty telling that we have a president elect, you know, like, popping off, like a radio call in person an hour after an attack such as.
- [04:50]
David Frum
This, if it's not too soon for this joke, it just also reveals this problem of Trump of constantly running America down. What do you mean? American criminals are not the greatest in the world. I think if there was a mandate for anything for Donald Trump, it was that he would be someone who would talk up. American criminals are the best, the biggest, the most violent. Everyone else is at best second, a distant second. Why are we importing Mexican criminals when our criminal anyway? That's too simple. I would say there's a social media effect and I was thinking about this with the murder of the United Healthcare insurance executive. I am sure that the proportion of the human race that is born sociopathic is just a biological constant. Go back to caveman times, it'll be the same percent as it is today. And I'm sure when the Great Chicago Fire erupted in the 1870s, that there were people who came down to the watch the scene and cheer for the fire. That there's always a certain predictable number of human beings. But what used to happen is they didn't have a way to get easily in touch with one another. And although they enjoyed carnage, they were aware that their neighbors thought differently. Many of their neighbors thought differently. And so they, they were a little more circumspect when something sad happened, to pretend to feel it in way that a normal person would feel it. The Internet and social media especially have created these immediate artificial communities where everyone who is who would once have had the thought, I hate health insurance. I'm glad that assassin murdered would have had that thought in silence somewhere or maybe shared it in a saloon with other disreputable people. Now they can all find each other and I think they activate. There must be people who are sort of like near sociopathic, who have a little bit more of a conscience or at least a little bit more sense of etiquette and the appropriate who would refrain. And now and now you get these movements of exaltation. And you know, social media is mostly a good thing. The Internet is certainly a good thing, but just we paid a price for it. One price is the return of measles and another price is the empowerment of the sociopaths.
- [06:46]
Tim Miller
There was a South Carolina Republican Party chair who is not that bright of a guy otherwise and was deeply conservative. I was interviewing him, I was expecting it to be like a lot more hostile. This was maybe back in 2021. He's Trumpy, so conservative in the Trumpy sense. And I was asking him about Lin Wood and I don't know if you remember Lin Wood, he's one of the many characters of our time and he was one of the leading proponents of the most insane edge theories around the 2020 election that obviously at that time the President Trump glommed onto and this South Carolina had tried to tell him to tamp it down essentially and had this huge uproar against him and the state. I was like, did all these people exist? Like, what happened? How did this happen that everybody became so delusional to buy? And like, Lin Wood's theories were literally like that Trump was still controlling the nukes after Biden was already president. And he's like, you know, he said these people always existed, but there were two of them at every county Republican meeting. But the ones in Greenville did not know the ones in Colombia. And that is not the case anymore. You know, they've been able to meet and organize and multiply. Yeah, and I do think that that is true across kind of across verticals. There's one other thing that I do want to mention with regards to the New Orleans event that is going to overlap with our politics. One of the early press conferences, one of the FBI officials said that this is not a terrorist event. It's a pretty dumb quote, I would say. And that was going around on right wing social media. But added on top of that were a of attacks. Marsha Blackburn found some old post where the New Orleans FBI officials were protecting the Taylor Swift concert and had some Swift bracelets on. She thought that was inappropriate. It was a diversity hiring event. I've seen top Republican consultants say mass firings must take place at the FBI. John Barrasso, who is ostensibly one of the more normal ones, was like, this shows we need to confirm Cash Patel and the national security team immediately. This rationale to take this horrible event and potentially some mistakes, of course, that people at the FBI aren't perfect from the FBI and turn it into we need a hack for Donald Trump to be confirmed immediately is pretty alarming to me. I don't know what your thoughts are about that and Cash generally.
- [09:12]
David Frum
That is a great point. So first, police do often have an impulse to minimize the severity of what's happened because they're trying to avoid public panic. They're also often trying to, if there was a police lapse, to minimize the police lapse that enabled. So there are. The natural instinct of police at a press conference is always to say it's a less big deal than it looks and that's bad. I mean, just as they shouldn't go, they shouldn't dial the dial up. They shouldn't dial the dial down. Just the facts, ma'am, as they say in the old police drama. Second, I think FBI people do sometimes operate with a very specialized definition of terrorism that is narrower than the one that would. I mean, for most of us, you see a man who has an ISIS flag is killing people in a way calculated to spread terror. Terrorism. But the FBI may have some more technical definition they have in mind, and they're talking police talk rather than normal talk. But when people say this makes the case for Cash Patel, it would be interesting to hear them spell out exactly what that means. One of the things that I think a lot of the MAGA people mean is if we had fewer black and women police officers.
- [10:15]
Tim Miller
The person at this press conference, by the way, was a black female police officer. I don't know if you knew that or not. That was intentional. Intentional.
- [10:22]
David Frum
And as Trump said in a police event in his first term. And if the police could go back to cracking the heads of suspects on car doors, if we could go back to policing the way it used to be, where the police knew which kind of people were to be protected and which were not, who was to be respected, who was not, we knew what a police officer looked like he should be, you know, ideally a Mormon, failing that, a Catholic, but certainly not anything else. And if that's the message, is that the offer from Kash Patel, or if it's what we need is a much a police force, a national police force that answers directly to the head of the government, perhaps it might have greater levels of secrecy. A secret police force that answers directly to the head of the government and that goes after the enemies of the head of the government. Is that what you're spelling it like? Why exactly does this. I mean, because if it means what we need is more smart people in policing, that's the case against Cash Patel. If it means people who, you know, follow the facts wherever they go and do their job and without fear or favor, that's the case against Cash Patel. He's been very clear. What he is offering is a politicized police force to answer directly to the head of the government. That's the offer. And with fewer minorities and women in it, that's the offer. So spell it out and explain how such a force would have done a better job. My guess is they would have been so busy wiretapping people at Washington 501C3s that they wouldn't have any time to follow terrorists or would be terrorists. But who knows?
- [11:38]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I think that also part of it is that they want. Again, this goes back to that sickness that I was talking about, immediate social media. Like, they want a FBI director that is engaging in that online political war immediately. Yeah, right. So, like, oh, we're gonna leak that this person is a Muslim terrorist, not a good MAGA American. Right. Like, we want people to know that immediately. That is going to be the first hit that we leak. If there's any suspicion anywhere that somebody that is trans, you know, committed a crime, you know, we're gonna have a press conference on that to focus on that. We're gonna minimize the crimes focused by political allies. Like, I really think it's that. I think there's this sense that. I think it's an incorrect sense, but there's a sense that the FBI or federal officials play up crimes such as January 6th crimes such as Daniel Penney, whatever, and not these other crimes by their perceived foes, racial or political. I think that's what it is. That would be obviously a pretty embarrassing thing to spell out. So I don't think that they would spell that out.
- [12:39]
David Frum
As the Daniel Penny to story reminds. And again, I'm going to say something Canadian here. In my mind, one of the great evils of American life is that local prosecutors are elected. And so, of course, it is going to be true that in very liberal jurisdictions, there's going to be a strong liberal bias toward certain kinds of prosecutions. And in conservative ones, the opposite. Because the district attorney is thinking, I need to show some scalps, some heads on pikes of the kind that will please the voters who will matter to me, especially in my party primary. My great danger is I lose the Democratic or Republican primary to someone else who wants to be the da. So, yeah, it's probably true that in a different jurisdiction, Daniel Penny would never have been charged, but. But New York is not going to change its jurisdiction. So the way you deal with this problem is to say, you know what? The DA of New York, there's. There should. Sorry, there should be a professional prosecutorial service, and if you do a good job in Des Moines, you get promoted to be New York. That's like the premier job and people from all over the country get it. And you have very little to do with New York politics. And don't get me started on the election of judges.
- [13:42]
Tim Miller
Well, unfortunately, I think that we have more serious things in front of us in the election of judges to cover, though, again, I don't necessarily disagree with that critique on Cash. We've not spoken since the election, I guess, on this podcast. And so I guess I'm wondering your assessment of the Cabinet writ large and what things are the most alarming to you. We're coming up here in the next couple of weeks. We're gonna have some of these confirmation hearings. Is cash at the top of your list or other?
- [14:11]
David Frum
Well, let me say a preliminary thing, which is I've been thinking very hard about how to cover, how to write, about how to do my work during this second Trump term. As I look back on the first Trump term, I think my overwhelming perception assumption was a feeling of wrongness, that here was someone who had lost the popular vote and not narrowly, but lost it decisively, lost it by two and a half points, something like that, and who had been helped into office by a foreign intelligence operation. So that made the Trump presidency a very sinister and dangerous thing, but it also led the voters to a great deal off the hook. You could say this is something that was done to America, not done by America. And I think that assumption influenced a lot of the way I wrote, and it made it easy to get drawn into a kind of atrocity, outrage. Atrocity, outrage cycle, because can you believe what these interlopers have done next? So I think with Trump, too, there's just no getting around this. The country's implicated. You didn't do it. I didn't do it. But we play by rules, where the majority gets to speak as if they were the country. And for all functional purposes, they are. And the majority was not deep enough, but broad enough, two houses of Congress, that this is some kind of. If there is such a thing as a popular voice, this is it. And so that means you have to respond to that in a different way than Trump won. And that means, for my case, it means sort of taking longer, being less rapid, being more deep and not responding to everything and being more discerning about which are the real emergencies. Because one more thing has happened. When Trump won was kind of an outside hostile takeover of the Republican Party. There were lots and lots of Republicans who didn't like what Trump was doing. Maybe they weren't very courageous about it, even electives, maybe they weren't very courageous. But if you knew them a little, you could talk to them and you'd hear plenty of dissent. What we now have is a friendly merger, which is not to say that there isn't a difference between Trump and the people around him and the more institutional elements of the Republican Party. But for all intents and purposes, they're cooperating. Trump is as we saw with the argument over H1B is a much more openly oligarchic figure than he was in the first term. The populist economics are out the window, except for the tariffs, and they're not very populous in this case. Populist means is code for people don't understand how they work, not that they represent the popular will. And the party is going to cover for him on more things that there will be no more. Trump is not making any pretenses to separate himself from his businesses. Not making any pretenses that there isn't going to be a massive looting of the public treasury by his friends. And not making any pretenses that the public policy of the United States is not up for option. See the TikTok ban. See the H1 we who. He who pays gets what he wants. So now the Cabinet. I group them into four main types. The first types are the more or less normal appointees. These may be desirable, they may be not desirable. I don't think of Marco Rubio as a man of great principle, courage and integrity. But it's not crazy that a senior Republican with an interest in foreign affairs would be Secretary of State. You have to know a lot about Rubio to know that this may not be an ideal appointment, but on its face, yeah, seemingly. Okay, so you have the more or less normal people. Then you have, I think, the. The sad, weak, broken people, like the Pete Hegseths. I think deep down Pete Hegseth is probably not an unpatriotic person, but he's got these dependencies, he's got these bad habits. And he's attractive to Trump because of his weakness and brokenness. Plus he's on tv. But there's something that Trump has this kind of predator sense for who is someone he can work through.
- [17:45]
Tim Miller
There's a danger to that.
- [17:46]
David Frum
Oh, yeah, they're dangerous for sure, but they're different kind of. They're dangerous because they're tools. They're not dangerous because they're co authors. Then you have the people who have really radical, serious personality flaws. These may not even be super ideological people, but they are people who are full of hatred and rage and they want to work with Trump. And then you have the people who are actually outright committed to ideologies that are hostile to the existing institutions of the United States. That's where I put the cash, Patel's and the Tulsi Gabbards. So you have a different set of problems. Problems. It also depends a lot on how big and powerful the agency is that the person is appointed ahead. The primary mission of the uniform military is not having to listen to what the civilians who think they're in charge of the Pentagon tell them to do. And what the Pentagon dreads above all things is an intelligent, well informed, committed, hard working civilian, a Bob McNamara or Donald Rumsfeld. They're just going to have lots of ideas that the military doesn't like and they're going to have the clout to impose them on the military. But the military loves is an absentee landlord and Pete Hegseth is going to be that. So they're just. The information won't flow. The Pentagon will win any fight they have with Pete Hegseth. I'm guessing the Pentagon wins. But Director of National Intelligence, that's a tiny little bureaucracy and the director is going to be able to impose a lot of her will, including she can do a lot of harm just if she talks too much to the wrong kind of people.
- [19:07]
Tim Miller
So that's why the Tulsi thing is what is more alarming to you?
- [19:11]
David Frum
I would say Kash Patel is the most alarming because the FBI, although it's bigger than the Directorate of National Intelligence, it's still relatively small agency compared to the Pentagon. And it is full of people who are predisposed to like Trump. The FBI director has a lot of small benefits in his favor. He can move you, you know, your wife gets a promotion to another town. The agent comes in and says, could I be moved to that town? The director can make that easy or the director can make that hard. The director can bring people to Washington and send people out of Washington. Congratulations, Mr. Constitutional Stickler. You're the new head of our Albuquerque Border Patrol office. And we're taking Mr. Maga from Albuquerque and bringing him here to washing and putting him or her in charge of investigating political opponents of Donald Trump. So that the ability to remake the FBI without outright firing people is pretty large.
- [19:58]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And a lot of investigations that can happen before checks. That's to me why cash is the most alarming. Right. I mean like even I get even when Gates was going to be a doj, there was plenty of potential harm there. But like pretty quickly you get to, well, we need a grand jury. You know, like there are other checks into place. Like the FBI has a lot of surveillance and investigation capabilities before you know where he gets Mr. Maga from Albuquerque to start looking into people before anything anybody else gets involved.
- [20:26]
David Frum
And in American criminal law, it is the investigation that is the punishment because the investigation ties up your life. Investigation costs 10. I mean, if you are investigated and no charges are ever brought, I mean, if you're acquitted, you might have some way to get some help with your legal fees from the government. But if they investigate you and say, you know, we spent three years, we've cost you $200,000, you're right, there was nothing to see here all along. You're free to go. You don't get the $200,000 back and you don't get the hours of your life that were taken away from you back.
- [20:54]
Tim Miller
I want to go back to just Tulsi for a second because it relates to the New Orleans incident. Again, more stuff developing. To me, what we know so far about this, the suspect is that this is a person that was like that's personal life was a disaster and gets divorced and is unable to see his family and. And then it gets radicalized and so TBD on what kind of associates he did or did not have. But my colleague at the Borg, Will Selber and others have been talking about how the threat of radical Islamic terror is back on the rise. We have this very uncertain world, obviously, with what has happened in Syria. We have Tulsi now headed into this very sensitive post and at times she's actively working against our interests. And so I do just given the threat landscape around the world world. I wonder how you look at the Tulsi nomination in that context.
- [21:51]
David Frum
Yeah, well, she's also obviously cultish and gullible, which is not something you want in a Director of National Intelligence. And one of the challenges of these top jobs is the United States is at the center of everything. So it's surrounded by threats. Radical Islamic terrorism, domestic and international, very, very serious danger to the United States needs a lot of attention. You cannot respond to that by saying, and therefore we pay no attention to the actions of Hindu nationalist groups, even though they have carried out assassinations on Canadian soil and plotted assassinations on British and American soil. That's also a threat vector and maybe, maybe a less large and important one. But you have to that every threat vector needs to be taken on its own merits, from a point of view of a general idea of the American national interest, rather than because you're a partisan for some threats, because you've been radicalized in favor of them, because of your dislike of others. So if you say Islamic terrorism is the only thing I'm going to be worried about, you're going to miss a lot of things. And as you say, the pattern that you described of this seeming pattern of the New Orleans Killer. There are a lot of people with that, a lot of men with that life situation who, depending on the cultural influences upon them, will choose one or another ideology to express the rage that they began by torturing cats when they were a child and ended up oftentimes killing their wife or partner and harming their children before going on to the mass killing. Because they're dealing with again, this constant seething volcano that erupts in a certain number of souls.
- [23:23]
Tim Miller
And again, it seems like the case in this instance. I said that he was planning to kill his family. It didn't work for some reason. And to your point, it's just the inverse of the MAGA complaint, which was the military intelligence services or Mark Milley or whatever were too focused on the, the white nationalist threats, the people that have been radicalized by far right ideologies at the expense of this. And the answer is just to flip that around.
- [23:51]
David Frum
I guess in government no one ever sends you bond bonds to thank you for the bad things that could have happened, but didn't. All the terrorist plots that are thwarted, maybe there's a quiet medal bestowing ceremony for those, but the public doesn't know or care. There's something ironic when you say you're too focused on this thing that didn't happen. It's in the Bible. Do you remember when Jonah is sent to preach to the city of Nineveh and he doesn't want to and when God confronts him, why didn't you want to do it? He said, because, God, I know you're a very forgiving God. And when I bring this message of doom to the people of Nineveh, they're going to pray and you're going to change your mind. And I, Jonah, will look like a moron because I told them you're going to smite them and you didn't smite them. And what does that do for my prophetic reputation?
- [24:29]
Tim Miller
It sounds like what I was like when I saw Matt Gaetz in Arizona two weeks ago. I said, you made me a bad pundit. I thought that you were going to fight through this all anyway. To your point about stopping, we should give the Fed some credit. On the other hand, Virginia Mann had weapons, cash, used Biden photo for target practice was the largest weapons weapons cache in history. That was stopped. That throw was stopped at the same time that this, this threat in New Orleans unfortunately was not. You'd mentioned the, the populism that is tariffs or the non populism. I wanted to share with you something that I feel like David Fromm is particularly suited to respond to. We have Mark Andreessen, one of our new oligarchs, a big venture capitalist, advisor to Trump, seed investor in the free press. He posted this. This is a really remarkable chart of tariffs as a percent of total federal revenue. And essentially what it shows is that from 1790 through the Civil War, about much of the federal revenues came from tariffs over 80%. From the Civil War through basically World War I, it was above 50%. That drops greatly after World War II and then continues to drop greatly. Andreessen writes that this shows that the second Industrial revolution, which was perhaps the most fertile for technology development and deployment in human history, happened during this period where tariff revenue was above 50%. Donald Trump then retweeted his new friend Andreessen saying the tariffs and the tariffs alone created this vast wealth for our country. Then we switched over to income tax. We were never so wealthy as during this period. Tariffs will pay off our debt.
- [26:06]
David Frum
So what you see here is Andreessen taking an ignorant but not stupid point and converting it into a genuinely stupid point. So Andreessen's making the point that industrial growth was faster when tariffs were high, which is wrong, but you have to know a little something about the subject to know that it's wrong. Trump converts that to saying that America in 2025 is less wealthy than it was in 1890, which is just obviously moronic. If you showed the American living standard of 1890 to, to a typical lower middle class person in Taiwan, they would recoil with horror. I mean there isn't a bathroom in the whole tenement building. Not one, not, not obviously there isn't like one per child, but, but, but not one per, not one per house, not one per floor. Just like zero in the whole tenement. Not a single bathroom. Not a single bathroom in the whole tenement. So that's crazy. Let me address the and recent point because this is a point you hear from a lot of people who think they know something about tariffs, which is the industrial United States appeared to industrialize between the Civil War and the first World War. The tariffs were generally high in the period from the Civil War to 1913. Therefore one must be causing the other. So a lot of people actually are interested in this subject, which is a pretty recondite one, but have looked. Why is this not true? So the first thing was tariffs mattered a lot less than the United states in the 19th century because for two reasons. One is shipping costs were very high. So the tariff actually did not do that much to keep out many, many Goods because the shipping costs already did the job. You're not going to bring a lot of things that were low margin, were not going to move from England to the United States because they couldn't overcome the burden of the shipping costs. The second thing to remember is the reason tariffs are bad is because they disrupt the efficiency of having a large market. Well, the United states in the 1890s was already the largest internal market in the world. So even though it could have been more efficient, they efficient had it traded freely with Britain and Germany and other major industrial products. Belgium, northern Italy, the United States was already the largest internal market. So it was capturing many of the benefits. Finally, the United States appeared to industrialize factor because economists distinguish between what they call intensive growth, that is squeezing more productivity out of the existing factors of production and extensive growth, which is just adding more factors of production. The United States in the post Civil War period was adding enormous numbers of people through immigration and developing huge new iron ore fields and other sources of natural resources. So a lot of that growth was real, but it was extensive. That is by adding more factors of production, not intensive, by getting more value out of the factors you already have. So it's just not true. And what people forget when they look at, they see the industrialization between 1965 and 1913, they don't see repeated severe depression after severe depression, radical populist movements, uprising because the, the tariffs enriched some and impoverished others. If you were a southern cotton farmer in the post Civil war period, the tariffs made you really poor. Because a tariff functions not just as a tax on import, but mathematically it also taxes the export. So if you're in an export favored sector, like cotton, you lose on the one hand and then you lose again because you have to pay more for your clothes and your yarn and so on. So sorry for that last lecture, but Andreessen is not a fool. He can read a book on this subject. He really could. He could talk to some economists who know what they're talking about. Trump is on this subject, just a fool. So there's no helping. But they're both wrong. And if you start putting the tariffs back in place now, you will do enormous damage. Can I say one more thing? I know this is a long lecture.
- [29:33]
Tim Miller
Yeah, please. No, this is, this is why, this is why I put it on the T for you.
- [29:36]
David Frum
Okay, so tariffs represent a very small fraction of government revenue. That's true. But where the tariffs are still in place, they impose very large costs on the people who pay them, who are typically the poorest. People in society. I've written about this for the Atlantic, and the Ed Gresser at the Progressive Policy Institute has done some work. If you are buying a pair of Prada loafers, the tariff is a negligible factor in the cost of the Prada. There are still tariffs on shoes, but if you're going to Walmart and buying three pairs of the cheapest sneakers for your three children, the tariff actually is quite a substantial component of the price. And there is this weird pattern where tariffs on women's clothing are higher than tariffs on men's clothing. Tariff on plastic plates is going to be higher than the tariff on China plates, which is less than the tariff on fine china. That you can just see there's a sex and class bias. Probably not that anyone put there on purpose, but it's more that why does the tariff get taken off? Is it somebody is the clout to get it taken off and they didn't. But in general, in the life of the poor, tariffs are an important cost. And if you have more tariffs, they will be an even more important cost to the lives of the poor.
- [30:44]
Tim Miller
I don't even know if Andreessen's making a dumb point or if he is just buttering up Trump. The idea that he sends this is one thing, but that Trump then sees it and he's advising Trump. To me, this seems like the kind of thing that I know make Mr. Trump happy. And I have this kind of contrarian point I can make. I'm going to make it and I'm going to show it to you.
- [31:02]
David Frum
I think Andreessen, it's real because I can see this spreading in the Silicon Valley world where they're very upset and mad at China. There has been this interest in sort of glib. No one's going to read the real articles or the real history of tariff policies in the United States or take the they're too important to work. They have. They employ people who summarize to do the work for them, who summarize what's in the work and tell them what they want to hear anyway. So I think Andreessen really does believe that higher tariffs led to industrialization. I mean, he might get they're not efficient. But the idea that that's not true either. Even his own more sort of upmarket version of the Trump point, it's not true either. And it's just uninformed to say such a thing.
- [31:44]
Tim Miller
The relation to this, to your point about the oligarchic element of this, that Trump can also use the Tariffs to curry favor takes us to of course, Elon Musk, who has a lot of potential businesses that could be harmed by tariffs. I suspect that it will not be his that are targeted. There was Lt. Gen. Russell Honorary wrote in the Times that Elon Musk is national security risk. A couple days ago wrote about Musk's various dealings with China. I'm interested in your take on that kind of relationship, like the Musk China element of it and how it is going to overlap with, with our new oligarchy.
- [32:24]
David Frum
Well, you don't have to make it personal. So one of the great writers about trade was a man named Henry George who wrote 150 years ago and he has a wonderful image. He said to introduce a tariff bill into a Congress or Parliament is like throwing a single banana into a cage of monkeys. Soon they're all screeching and stamping for it and demanding one of their own. And so this is just the universal nature of tariffs. Tariffs make politics oligarchical because everybody is lobbying to get their tariff taken off, off. And this happened to the Biden administration too. President Biden put on heavy tariffs on electric vehicles to keep out Chinese tariffs. So our allies and friends in Europe said, wait a moment, BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, they all make electric vehicles and we're helping in Ukraine. Can you do something for us? Biden didn't want to create an exception. So what he did was he introduced or his administration introduced an exception that said if your electric vehicle is leased, the tariff doesn't bite. Now high end cars tend to be leased, the Jaguar, BMW and Mercedes. So that was a little special favor. And not one person in a thousand knows about it. Not one person in probably a million knows about it. But it's just a little special favor that was done for friends in Britain and Germany. And those are the kinds of things that the tariff system invites. Whenever you have a law that is generally oppressive, you get. You unleash a scramble for favors and even a generally clean administrations like Biden, Biden, like Biden's will. They will lobby. They will listen to strategic arguments like hey, we're helping you in Ukraine. Can you do something for our electric vehicle missile? Trump will respond to more crude and direct incentives, but it will be the same process. And the answer is don't put on the blinken tariff.
- [33:59]
Tim Miller
We have a couple of David Frum special topics we have to get to. The first is what the hell is happening in Canada. We have Trump now talking about how Justice Trudeau is Governor Trudeau making jokes at the 51st state, Trudeau went down to Mar a Lago to make an appeal to Trump directly. Trudeau has his own major domestic problems and there is a conservative kind of rising, it looks like, to challenge or potentially upend Trudeau. In Canada, everybody kind of uses the Trump of whatever shorthand and he seems like a more traditional conservative to me. But so I'm curious your view on both, both sides here, what Trump is doing and what's happening up in and up north.
- [34:40]
David Frum
What's happening in Canada is a very familiar Canadian process, which is Canadian federal governments tend to last six months or 10 years. It's very rare to get a four year Canadian government. After year 10, the roof falls in. And that process is happening to Justin Trudeau. Now, the roof falls in for different reasons. Every time it's the 10 year, 10 years are up. So his reasons are special to him, but he's generally falling into 10 years or yeah, it will be 10 years next year the roof falls into. So what's ailing him are an inescapable everywhere problem, a profoundly deep problem, and then a special little spicy irritant. So the, the thing that is really crushing him is housing costs. Canada is a much more urbanized society where the job markets are really the most. The biggest job markets are four cities. Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa. Vancouver is oceans on one side, mountains on the other. Building is hard. Toronto is, is flat, but it's surrounded by a green belt. Plus, eventually, when you get big enough, the city chokes on its own traffic. So you can't extend in all directions because people don't care about how many miles they are from the center. They care about how many minutes they are from the center. Same thing is happening in Ottawa and to a lesser degree, Calgary. So where the jobs are, housing is not being billed in sufficient numbers. Plus, Trudeau dramatically expanded immigration to Canada. Canada has had a successful immigration policy where the immigrants tend to be higher end, better educated, more affluent. But guess what? That means they're more effective competitors and bidders in the housing market. So there's this national housing shortage where the jobs are and it's making everybody crazy. Young people can't move out. And that's a big problem. Underlying that is a deeper problem, which is that Canadian productivity growth has fallen far behind American productivity growth. And this gap has been widening over the Trudeau years. I won't take time to speculate about why that's so. And then the last thing is the special extra spicy seasoning is Trudeau put himself at the heron of the parade about these alleged mass graves found at Indian residential schools lower the fags for the longest period of public mourning in Canadian history. And the story was known then by experts, it is now known by everybody to have been, if not a complete hoax, exaggerated to a point where they took things that were tuberculosis deaths that happened in 1895 and made them seem like mass murder that happened in 1985. And Trudeau's role in publicizing this act of defamation. The parliament of Canada unanimously adopted a resolution self accusing Canada of genocide. I don't think that's why he's in trouble. But that just means that's like the last sprinkling on the cake. 51st state. Canada's 40 plus million people over 4,000 miles. Got to be at least five states.
- [37:17]
Tim Miller
I'll take it.
- [37:18]
David Frum
Yeah. And like Chuck Schumer would take it. I just know.
- [37:23]
Tim Miller
Whatever. You got a deal, Mr. Trump.
- [37:25]
David Frum
So what happens to the United States Senate if. If you admit five Canadian states, at least British Columbia, two Democratic senators. Maybe the Prairies would send one of each. But Alberta is and Saskatchewan are kind of conservative, but Manitoba is very progressive. Ontario would you know, is Bush conservative country. What are you gonna do with Quebec? I don't think Trump likes the press. Two for Spanish. How is he gonna like it when French is press? 1 for English press too.
- [37:53]
Tim Miller
This could be the Maga Quebecois alliance that you've been waiting for, David. You know, they give them their freedom and the little island. Amidst the American expansion.
- [38:04]
David Frum
There's an old Canadian joke about what does Quebec want which is an independent Quebec within a united Canada. So you can now deal with this mishigas because they want to be leaving but they don't want to actually leave.
- [38:14]
Tim Miller
I'm getting a bunch of the guys last name but I just, I have to ask you what you think about. That's Pierre Palavere.
- [38:21]
David Frum
Palavere, yeah.
- [38:22]
Tim Miller
Who's I guess likely the next prime minister of.
- [38:25]
David Frum
Yeah, yeah. I think as I said, if the roof falls in, whoever is the leader of the opposition steps into the job. And this is a familiar pattern and often with very big majorities. He did do some trumpy things during the pandemic. He was in the vicinity of vaccine skepticism. He was very anti lockdown. He has kept a broad church for some of the more radical elements of the Canadian right. But he himself is a highly intellectual and well informed person with deep knowledge of policy. He's been in politics his whole life, starting as an intern. He knows absolutely how the system works. He's the single best debater in the House of Commons. That's why he became leader of the Conservative Party. He would be very much in camp Normie in American politics. Definitely a conservative person. More conservative than say Brian Mulroney, the last long term conservative prime minister. Maybe as conservative as Stephen Harper, but but very much Team Normal, not Team Trump and not going to be an ally on the Trump fortress America economic policy Canada lives breathes depends on open trade and not just open trade with the United States, but open trade with the world.
- [39:32]
Tim Miller
I also would be remiss if I did not ask you about the little kerfuffle with our friends over at Morning Joe. For folks that don't recall before the holiday, you made a joke, which I thought was a quite funny joke actually, about how if Pete Hegseth was notably drunk at Fox, you'd have to be, I think you said you'd have to be very drunk indeed to be notably drunk to stand out at Fox. Potentially referencing Judge Jeanine. I don't know who you might have been referencing there. And I guess producer implored you to kind of back off the joke. There was a public back and forth about this, a friendly one with Scarborough, you know, kind of about this kind of circles back to the question of how to handle the new Trump administration. I'm wondering how you feel about all that now. Maybe now not in particular about Joe Scarborough, but broadly about whether you are continuing to observe in the media a culture of fear, of people sort of editing themselves out of concern about the next Trump administration.
- [40:30]
David Frum
I think the Scarborough people got whipsawed by two things, each of them very, very sympathetic. And I want to stress, I am completely sympathetic situation. Trump watches the show. He doesn't read the Atlantic, but he watches the Scarborough show. And everyone involved in that show is subject to a level of violent threat that most of us can hardly begin to imagine. And at the same time, for reasons of dignity and self respect, but also for reasons of caution and prudence, they don't want to go public with the degree of violent threat that they're under. So they're trapped between those they are under threat in a way that I'm not. And they can't talk about it in a way that I can hardly begin to imagine. And so that's what leads to the impulse false to be careful. And again, I want to say I am not in any way criticizing them for this because, you know, I get occasional disobliging comments on social media. I've had the FBI come to my house. Was my name appeared in the list with many, many other people. Some you know, who person was arrested, but a specific stalker coming after. Me personally, I've never experienced such a thing, and many people on television do. And you shouldn't have to be, you know, a superhero hero to be a TV journalist. I think they're called on to be quite brave. But what has happened since 2015 is different. But you can see media organizations are baffled at a time when the media industry is in crisis. You can see the Atlantic has made a couple of hires from the Washington Post, because again, I don't want to make any specific comment about the Washington Post, but obviously the place is in turmoil and we need all of these institutions. And so I think generally the lowercase D Democratic camp needs to have a policy of sympathizing with each other's troubles, solidarity in the face of threat, and not being quarrelsome.
- [42:10]
Tim Miller
Do you think that just at the broadest level, do you remain concerned that some of these institutions are preemptively backing down in a way that is going to allow the incoming administration to get away with things they might not otherwise have?
- [42:26]
David Frum
It's inevitable. Look, how do journalists find out things? It's very rare that Deep Throat shows up under your window with the flower pots and gives you a government secret for, for free, if that story was even true in the first place. Most things you find out is because somebody in a position of power engaged in a quarrel with someone else in a position of power, recruited the journalist as an ally in an internal squabble. And the journalism is, is not. He's not trying to serve the public. He's trying to get revenge on the person down the hall. And so that's why the information comes out and in Trump won. I mean, I think it's now pretty notorious that some of the people most close to Trump, Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, were where these were the most important leakers, and they were doing it in the course of bureaucratic warfare against other people in the Trump administration. So the journalists have to work those angles, and they don't have the option of only talking to nice people because the nice people often don't know things that they need to know. And so the New York Times, the Washington Post, other kinds of institutions like that, they're all based on a series of transactions, which means they can't, they can't be entirely a voice of conscience because their, their work would not be possible. So, yes, it is not by having pure attitudes that you can protect the society against what has been and what is coming that this. This is the presidency. This is the executive branch of the government, backed by House and Senate, backed by the courts. What is going to happen is. Is really bad, and they have the point of leverage and the bigger lever to make it bad for everybody.
- [43:52]
Tim Miller
I want to end by asking you about you in this regard. Actually, when we. We last spoke at. I believe it was the day before the election, and you were contemplating in a Kamala Harris administration in an alternate universe that you might be backing away from this kind of work altogether. It seems like that is not the case, given our current predicament. But you kind of alluded to this at the top. Even thinking about how you're going to work in a Trump administration. I'm wondering how you're thinking about that now.
- [44:21]
David Frum
Yeah, well, as you know, because we went through this literally together on the day it happened, I've had a very terrible event in my life, and it's forced me to rethink a lot of things. A thought that kept me working through 2024 was I insisted to myself that Harris was going to win. And so I had this tape. If I could just run through the tape in November, I'd break the tape and then I'd be free, and then I would write about other things I was interested in. I would not be dealing with all of this stuff. And it was a promise I made to myself. And I was so. So I really persuaded myself that it was going to happen, admittedly, because I wanted it so badly, not because I cared so much about Harris. I wanted out. I just wanted out, and God didn't give me that. So now, like everybody, I have to think, what do I do? And given the problems in the media, given the weakness of many of our institutions, if you have the good fortune to be at an institution that is not so subject to pressures, if you personally have no more ambitions left, so there's nothing anybody can take away from you, then you've got some duties here. And so I'm going to try to live up to those. Figuring out how to do it is going to be difficult, and finding the spiritual strength to do it will be difficult. But in an attic somewhere, we've got an old World War I recruiting poster that belonged to a relative of my wife's. And we framed it and put it upstairs. And it's a picture of the British commander in chief, General Kitchener, in the First World War, saying, basically says in fancy language, are you going to wait to be drafted or are you going to volunteer to do the job? You know, you should do so, I guess I'm not going to wait to be drafted.
- [45:52]
Tim Miller
I want to give you and the Catholics we have the gesture of the pen of the cross on your forehead and your lips and your heart. I want to let you know you're okay. You're free. You're free. If you need to be free of this, there are other people that can carry the mantle. You know, you did run through the tape. Have you contemplated that?
- [46:11]
David Frum
Contemplated it all the time. And I contemplate it all the time. I'm not here with answers. I'm just, I'm here with, with some struggles.
- [46:19]
Tim Miller
Yeah. Okay, well, we all have struggles. I, I, I feel like, what the fuck else am I going to do? I've not gone through the tragedy that you have. And so I'm, I'm empathetic to you and to, and to wanting to, to free you, to, to find fulfilling stuff. But, and here we are. To me, I think that there's some value in showing up every day and doing this and working through it with smart people such as you. So I'm grateful that you're sticking with it.
- [46:47]
David Frum
And we can't let the fuckers win.
- [46:50]
Tim Miller
Haven't the fuckers won already?
- [46:52]
David Frum
They think they have, but remember, there's a line of T.S. eliot. There's no such thing as a lost cause because there's no such thing as a one cause. There's a poem that Winston Churchill quoted during World War II, and people remember little snatches of it. And I recommend it to people if they are online is found. It's called say not the struggle not availeth. And it's a dialogue by someone who said, someone written to somebody in despair. And the poet is saying to him, you think that you failed and you're losing. And what you don't see is it's just immediately in front of you that you're losing. And that while you can't make any progress against the waves behind you the currents are running. And that's the poem from which ends. And this is the thing Churchill quoted during World War II. And not through eastern windows only when daylight comes in the light in front, the sun rises slowly but westward look.
- [47:41]
Tim Miller
The land is bright, may it be so. We'll leave it there. I appreciate you very much, David Frum. Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bulwark podcast. Peace.
- [47:52]
David Frum
Bye Bye.
- [47:53]
Katie Cooper
We will stand on the banks of the river up where we'll need to part no more saints all that city there Our loved ones have gone on before we will stand on the banks of the river where we'll meet To God no more we'll walk right through the streets all that city where our love once have gone on before we will stand on the banks of the river where we'll meet Two Horns those who mop, guide me over Great Jehovah pilgrims through this Maryland I am a weak Mother Almighty, hold me with.
- [50:22]
Tim Miller
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.