← The Focus Group Podcast
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- [00:00]
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- [00:45]
Sarah Longwell
i'm interested in this idea that conspiracy is the price we pay for getting smarter about stuff I'm going to think about. I will be haunted by that statement. Hello everyone and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark and this week we are going to grapple with a couple of news events that have rocked Washington. First, there was the shooting outside the ballroom where the White House Correspondents Dinner was being held this past weekend. And I think the way our focus groups have processed this event says a lot about the state of our information environment right now. Second, this week, former FBI director James Comey was also indicted for posting seashells reading 8647 on Instagram, which some, including the Department of Justice, says was a violent threat against the president. Others, including some of the Trump voters we Talked to, say 86 is a common slang word often used in restaurants. We'll, we'll get into more of that before I bring in my guest. Go get your tickets for our live shows in San Diego and Los Angeles on May 20th and 21st. I'll be there with Tim Miller and Sam Stein and some extra friends. Go to the bulwark.com events to get your tickets. Right now, my guest today is the great, the good, the awesome David Frum, staff writer for the Atlantic, host of the David from podcast. David, my friend, thanks for being here.
- [02:13]
David Frum
Oh, I'm, it's always such a pleasure to talk to you.
- [02:15]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, you're one of the best people to talk to. I'm going to start this with a bit of a level setting conversation because as we, as we process political violence in the various ways in which it's currently percolating, you have this description of your podcast, which is it says to defend democracy, one has to believe in it to Believe in democracy, one has to understand it. And I love this because I talk a lot about how I ask voters in the focus groups about democracy all the time. And democracy has both become a very polarized word to Americans. They do not understand democracy as sort of an idea so much as they understand it as the thing we do here in America. Yeah, see why you. Why? That is your tagline for your podcast.
- [03:04]
David Frum
So if I were to carve my democratic faith in a single sentence on the plinth, whatever you call that element above the two columns, it would be a sentence from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolutions in France. Revolution in France. And the sentence is, the individual is foolish, the species is wise. So if there. I know you do a lot of focus groups and some of the things you discover are pretty surprising, but if your democratic faith was based on the idea that the individual was well informed, paying a lot of attention, made judicious decisions as an individual, then your faith was misplaced. And, and of course you're going to be upset by what you discover, because none of that is true. Here are the things that are true. First, if we aggregate millions of opinions, it's amazing how much sounder they are than any one of ours. And that's especially if you think you're smarter than everybody else, Mr. Ms. Smart Guy, because ultimately you're not. Second, the Democratic faith does not begin in the belief that the individual has such great ideas, and it originates in a concept of self defense. The individual has a right not to be stepped on, not to be exploited, not to be dominated. Democracy is, is a doctrine of protecting the interests of the. Of the many against the capabilities of the few by giving them a vote as a weapon of self defense against the few. So that's, that's where I, I begin. I. There's a book by two political scientists, Achin and Bartles, and the title of the book says everything Democracy for Realists. We need to understand the system we're protecting, why it's the best available. Not that it's perfect and not that every individual person in it is so judicious. Last thought. If there were a Sarah Longwell in 1775 conducting focus groups among patriots resisting the British in what would become the American Revolution. And you ask them, what is this war about? Or the soon to be war. What are you, what are you fighting? What are you, what are you afraid of? I think you'd be astonished by how many of them would say, George III and the British government have a plot to make America Catholic. Look, whatever you say about George iii, he's not doing that. That's crazy. How can you believe that? Well, he passed the Quebec act, didn't he? And he's giving Catholics the right to serve on juries in Montreal and Quebec City. Where is that going to lead? I think that was in the minds of a lot of people. But despite that complete misunderstanding of what the war was about, they came to a good outcome.
- [05:27]
Sarah Longwell
When I think about the bulwark, it's funny, we've been getting sort of incoming from all sides over because everybody's tense right now. Everybody's arguing, everyone's mad at each other, and there's a lot of things to argue about. And I think some of our friends on the right, and I think you had a conversation with Tim like this too, where there's like, many of you used to be conservatives or Republicans, and now it feels like you're siding with Democrats and like, aren't you just betraying your principles? And I think that my response to this has always been I think we traded, like, pure ideology for first order principles. And so when it comes to the rule of law, when it comes to free speech, when it comes to the things that undergird our liberal democracy, we see Trump as the greatest threat to those things. And we will basically get into allyship with people whose individual positions we may not like on a variety of policy issues, because those higher order issues matter more. And I think that, I don't know if you're familiar with the phrase people will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right. And I also think, as Trump demonstrates what a threat he is to liberal democracy in this moment, that a lot of the people who said, well, Kamala Trump, they'll probably be about the same are, are mad at us, at how right we were about the threat he presented.
- [07:02]
David Frum
Well, the bulwark is indispensable and brave. And your present amazing success should not cause people to forget the incredible chanciness and riskiness of the enterprise at the beginning. And so you all deserve tremendous honor made. You made sacrifices. So did your colleagues, by the way, or your, your counterparts at the Dispatch. Many of them made tremendous individual sacrifices. And again, it's worked out, but no one knew that at the beginning. The fact that you chose well and wisely does not mean that you didn't choose bravely. So all honor to you for that. But we're going to have some differences and some disagreements and let me just throw out how I think about this, or one man's view of it. There are a lot of things I think you and I had in common. I mean, you're considerably younger, so you would have had some differences in experience. But I believe in free markets. I believe in free trade. I believe in business enterprise. I believe in letting people create wealth, keep the proceeds of their success. I believe in American leadership in the world and collective security and the whole post World War II order. I believe in the rule of law. I believe in a lot of things related to that. And I agree with you that Donald Trump was a paramount threat to all those things. I found myself working with others with whom I in important ways did not agree in order to stop the threat. But there's a one of the things I tried to safeguard myself and I was willing to make some sacrifices for that. So I wrote about this. I thought Biden's student loan relief program or Obama's before, I thought it was wrong. That was bad policy and I thought it was unjust in important ways. I also thought it's not the end of the world. The US Government has had a lot of bad lending policies. There are a lot of, a lot of the farm supports I don't like either. And if this is the thing that is necessary to put Biden or Harris over the hump in 2024, I'm just going to have to swallow it. Little as I like it. And that's part of the price I'm paying for my party nominating Donald Trump is I don't get all of my preferences because my party made a bad, a morally bad, a constitutionally bad choice. I have to work with others to mitigate that choice. And I'm going to take some lumps here, put up with things I don't like for my own mental health and intellectual consistency, I need to remember that I don't like those things. I can't let myself be dragged along into pretending to like things I don't like. But I also have to keep things in perspective. And a lot of someone I think you probably knew, Haley Barber, the greatest ever chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a saying, the main thing is to keep the main thing, that main thing. And that's, I think that's been the priority. However evil that is inherent in Trumpism is not unique and specific to Donald Trump. He's the face. He's a very successful face. But these wrongs that are deeper than policy can show up in other ways, in other places and in other parts of the political spectrum. And when I hear anyone who is systematically demeaning even though they're not Trump, I think they're dangerous too. And those are the people. Those moral lines I think are important. And in particular, I've got obviously a personal interest, but a moral interest in anti Semitism, the treatment of women. And I've increasingly thought, especially in the post Cold War age, that how we treat gays and lesbians has become a marker, along with anti Semitism, of a society that understands and protects the rights of minorities. So I look for those things. And when I hear people who are hostile or contemptuous to women or hinge with anti Semitism or who show contempt and just hatred toward gays and lesbians, I think, you know, you're, you're incarnating many of the things that led me to oppose Donald Trump and to put up with the student loan program that I never liked to stop him. I'm going to put up with other things that I don't like to stop these people.
- [10:42]
Sarah Longwell
I think for me and part of the way that I hope that the Bulwark interacts with the world and as a publication, I was interested in it because you like themed your podcast in the way that I sort of, we sort of theme our publication rooted in democracy. And the reason I wanted to start here is that if you draw your line not as right versus left, but instead liberal versus illiberal, which is how we have started, I think, to think about things. Which doesn't mean we have some very conservative people at the Bulwark, as we've added people. We have people who are more politically liberal. But all of us believe that we want to have a publication that is rooted in sort of faith in that liberal democracy is a good thing. And I think one of the most essential pieces of liberal democracy is that it uses. It gives us a bunch of tools to keep us from being violent against each other. I appreciate your idea about, you know, being intellectually consistent. And that matters to me because I still share a host of views like that haven't changed. I also am a capitalist. I also had believed in American leadership in the world. It does get difficult to believe in it when our leaders show the kind of moral reprehensibility that makes you distrust them so much that you do not believe that they're necessarily acting good in the world. But my point is, is that violence is the thing that makes one like it is one of the most essential things that makes a person illiberal. And whether it is violent rhetoric. And by violent rhetoric, I don't mean the Republicans right now are like, you said 86. You said we're gonna go to war, you know, like whatever, like not stupid rhetorical sayings that we use. But when you're like, I'm going to kill this guy, you should kill this guy, these people deserve to be killed. That kind of rhetoric, it is anti liberal, it is illiberal and for me, those are my lines, much less so than look, do I believe that Medicare for all, again, good is like good policy. Yeah, I, my lean would be no. All my previous beliefs would say no. That being said, I listen to voters day in and day out and I think they are more receptive to that than they might ever have been before because people feel so pinched and I'm, I have voters in my head so much now that part of me, not in a populist way but almost in a democracy, needs to be responsive to people kind of way. I've started to sublimate my own sort of just bespoke policy beliefs for what I think can cause this country to like find itself again as a group. And so I'm just less invested in some of the individual policy fights we used to have.
- [13:25]
David Frum
When I say consistency, I've changed my mind about lots of things. I, I, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the view. I had an idea back when I owned a Sony Betamax and by God I still have that same point of view and I've never revisited it. But I do think if you're someone who writes and talks and thinks for a living, when you change your mind, you owe the world an explanation. Not because they're so interested in you, but yeah, as just as a matter of good practice. Health care is actually a perfect example. And this is a view I've had I've changed my mind on. 15 years ago, 16 years ago, I came around to America needs a more universal form of health insurance. Not Medicare for all exactly, but some kind of universal guarantee that everybody will have health insurance. I didn't used to before that.
- [14:07]
Sarah Longwell
Now I am, I think I am too.
- [14:09]
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- [14:23]
Sarah Longwell
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- [14:26]
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- [14:36]
Sarah Longwell
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- [14:39]
David Frum
I didn't used to be for, for any form of gun control and now I'm for some. I used to be against gay marriage and I pretty radically changed my mind on that as, as I became apparent in the post Cold War age that, that a lot of the energy. This has unfortunately changed back. But between 1990 and 2020, a lot of the impulses that used to express themselves as anti Semitism then began to express themselves as, as anti gay feeling. I thought, okay, I'm recognizing, I recognize this disease and it's important to fight it in, in every manifestation. So I've changed my mind. But in every case when I have, I've written something. Not again because I have any delusion that the whole world is interested. But if anyone says why you were here and now now there so well, here I, I, I said I took the trouble of setting in writing, recording what I used to think. I'm not denying my former view. It's there and here's how I got from A to B in these cases. And I think it is consistent within a larger framework. Now that's this language of violence. I think people are just unaware of how many metaphors they use come from the military. I mean.
- [15:46]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah.
- [15:48]
David Frum
When a union walks the picket line, do they remember that that's a Civil War expression that meant the outermost limit of bayonets that defended a position against the incursion of enemy. No, but it was a, it's a world war. It's a Civil War metaphor. Firing line is a Civil War metaphor. We still, it still has some kind. I think people have some awareness of it. But Bill Buckley was not saying when he called a show Firing line that I intend to revisit to reanimate the War between the States. Yes, the whole 86 things. I've done some reading about that. We don't know exactly where the phrase comes from. As you say, it probably comes from the restaurant industry. The earliest I looked it up, the earliest reference to the phrase comes from a Walter Winchell column in the 1930s where he cited it as a piece of soda jerk slang. It occurred to me, if you imagine a New York soda fountain, most of the employees don't speak English, but the owner does. And it's really noisy. Clatter, clatter, clatter. And the soda jerk shouts, we need some cherry soda. Cherry sprinkles. And the owner who speaks English says, we're out of stock. We're out of stock. Out of stock. 86. I think that's maybe how it happened. And the first time that it was used as a verb, I looked this up was in variety in 1947 where they talked about a disc jockey losing his job and the headline was Harris 86, not Harris remained alive. He just wasn't just employed anymore.
- [17:15]
Sarah Longwell
Yes, I. This idea that it is a term that self evidently means kill is news to a lot of people who have been using that phrase very differently for a very long time. Okay. Now that David and I have had our little discourse or big discourse, good discourse on democracy, I do want to jump into some conversation about political violence and how the voters receive it. So this group that we're going to start with is with 2020 and 2024 Trump voters who disapprove of his job performance. Right. Now, we already had this on the books, this particular group before the shooting happened. But I think I expected people to feel like shook by the events or at least bring them up, but they did it. Let's listen to what they said instead.
- [18:07]
David Frum
I think it's a psy up.
- [18:08]
Trump Voter 1
Just like the him getting shot in Charlie Kirk thing. He had some weird, some weird manifesto
- [18:17]
David Frum
or something that came out and all of a sudden all the conservative pundits are talking about ballrooms.
- [18:23]
Trump Voter 1
It just doesn't make sense to me that we have our leader who is supported, slash protected, quote unquote, by what is supposed to be the, at least, if not the most, one of the most dominant military forces on the planet. It doesn't make sense to me that there have been this many close attempts on his life when we have all these other presidents recently who haven't really had that issue.
- [18:53]
Trump Voter 2
I can't even go to a baseball game and bring in a can of Diet Coke to a baseball game or a concert without a metal detector or them empty in my pocket. So the idea of somebody having a gun, especially where the President is, makes no sense. And I can tell you one thing. I was in Washington one time in a hotel and I was already a guest there. And Mitt Romney happened to come there for whatever reason when he was running. They evacuated everybody out of the hotel for a certain amount of time. So the guests in the hotel, if they knew they were having the dinner there, more often than not, the Secret Service makes everybody evacuated. They do a sweep of all the rooms.
- [19:34]
Trump Voter 3
From a person with a lot of firearm experience. This, this isn't something that just happens. First of all, you're not getting through security with a weapon. I feel like it was a ploy to get his ballroom that he wants and that's his reason. Because literally that is the first thing that he talks about after it's. See, this is why I need the ballroom at the White House, because he almost got shot. Like, that's, that's literally the first thing he talks about after this happens. That's. That's not normal. That's not, that's not what people think about after you about get shot.
- [20:18]
Trump Voter 4
Certainly the security was very lax. His approval ratings are in the tank. And then, yeah, just referencing to Baller, like there was even, like, I don't think it hit the mainstream, but there was actually a cop that went to the roof. The guy who ultimately got killed, pointed the gun at him, he ran away. But, like, why wouldn't that other cop, like, address the other personnel to get the kid, get the kid off, off the roof.
- [20:49]
Trump Voter 5
I used to watch a show called House of Cards and I was like, there's no way these people are just getting murdered in D.C. like journalists or what have you. But I have got to tell you, this is the first time in my life, because of Donald Trump in the presidency that I. It's like the curtain has been pulled back and I can't unsee what I now see. So whether it's the French president and his husband slash wife, whether it's these NASA people who have just a dozen of them died or been murdered or had accidental deaths within the last year, whether it's the Charlie Kirk total cover up, I just feel like this particular shooting, I'm almost becoming desensitized.
- [21:37]
Sarah Longwell
Okay, let me just set the table on this because we did five groups this week all across the political spectrum, not a single one brought up the White House correspondence dinner situation. Nobody brought it up organically. And I mean, so in five groups where we said, how do you think things are going in the country? And people were talking about how things feel like a powder keg and nobody brought this up. And so you mentioned our age difference before. It feels to me like any time there was a kind of a notable assassination attempt on a president, that that was the kind of thing that everybody focused on. That was like a big meaningful moment. What do you think is happening? I mean, she says it right there. We're getting desensitized. Why? This with voters just isn't becoming a thing.
- [22:23]
David Frum
Let me toss a couple of ideas. The first is, I think conspiracy theories may be the price we pay for the rising level of education and information in our society. So I was struck. I mean, if you really paid a lot of attention to exactly how this incident happened that the, as you say, the assailant or the alleged assailant was pinned before he reached the security perimeter. A gun was discharged, but the alleged assailant never apparently fired his own weapon. And he didn't, he brought a sort of weird weapon. You don't shoot a president with a, with a shotgun. So there's a lot about this thing that there are a lot of strange details, but these people know much more about the details of what happened very fast than would have been the case in a previous era when information was less available. And they've reached their own views, which are some, some of them pretty shocking. In some cases not fully informed. In some cases they have a misremembered piece like that. When a candidate speaks at a hotel, they order people out of the rooms and vacuum out the rooms. I don't want to say that never happens, but it very seldom happens, if ever. Yeah, but these are, these are well informed people who are reconstructing reality for themselves rather than deferentially relying on authority figures to give them their reality. And, and unsurprisingly, they make mistakes, but the mistake comes from their self confidence. So it may be that the conspiracy theories that we're now all exposed to, people have more ideas about medicine than they did 30 years ago. And so they do their own research on Covid. They don't do sufficient research, but they do more than their parents or grandparents could have done. And a lot of them come to wrong answers because it's not sufficient, but it's still more than in the past. So I think that's, that's one thing that's going on. Second, I, I don't know how we chart this, but I will go grubbing for whatever evidence I can to support my perception that American society has become less violent over time, certainly as compared, compared to the late 60s and early 1970s. And I also would argue there's a lot of violence, that we have this line about what is political and what is not. So school shooting is not political and this incident with Trump is political. I don't know that that's true. There's a lot of violence that is, that looks political but maybe wasn't. And I don't know we'll know how, how political this attempted shooting is and how much mental illness. But in the 1960s and 70s there were just bombs going off all the time. There was a crippling of George Wallace, there were two attempts on the life of Gerald Ford at almost point blank rage range. Reagan was hit at very Close range security services have gotten better since then. They do a better job of tracking. And one last thing, I think the difference, I think the reason why these latest incidents may have hit less than things like the genuine murder of John F. Kennedy. John F. Kennedy was dead in a spectacular and terrible way. Martin Luther King was genuinely was dead, not just shot at and Bobby Kennedy was dead. I think in those days the country was much more like a powder keg than it is now. There are massive urban riots during the time of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. There was a cold war on and people connected these terrible and upsetting acts of violence against authority figures to larger, larger possibilities. It wasn't clear that the murder for a long time, for some time, that the murder of John F. Kennedy was not the prelude to a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States. Murder of Martin Luther King was followed by a wave of urban riots. And the murder of Bobby Kennedy might have been followed by the same thing people might have feared. And it's precisely because we don't think really that the society is trembling on the verge of massive disturbance that these incidents which then are quickly resolved, which left in the White House correspondence dinner event, left Trump uninjured and never at any risk. The Butler event, he was very lightly injured. They look less grave. And that allows people to maybe to indulge some of these theories that they get from their own research and their own thinking when maybe this is the time to rely a little bit more on the expertise of others.
- [26:22]
Sarah Longwell
Look, I'm always looking for optimism in the world. So you grubbing for ways to say that actually it's not as bad and that's good. Perspective. Perspective. I'm interested in this idea that conspiracy is the price we pay for getting smarter about stuff. I'm going to think about, I will be haunted by that statement and I will turn that over because I, you know, I did a whole chapter in my book called Conspiracy Land that I feel like is already getting outdated because people are, I hear it in the groups all the time. The extent to which at listen. And this is where, when I listened to this group because I wanted quickly to understand whether or not voters knew about the shooting and what they thought about it. These were, like I said, pre set. We had already had this group scheduled of disaffected Trump voters. Like they voted for him twice, but they don't think he's doing a very good job. Mostly they thought he's doing this because his numbers are tanking and he wants his ballroom and like that's that's why they think this happened, that it was somehow set up.
- [27:26]
David Frum
Okay, I didn't grasp your point that these are wavering Trump voters. And that's very interesting to me. And again, a thought that comes to me. If you build a political movement that is based on appealing to the most disaffected, least trustful, most alienated people in American society, and then you don't deliver for them, what happens? They turn their mistrust, their alienation on the source of their dissatisfaction. If you were from a more sort of pro social movement, and the leader of that movement turned to his supporters, even if things were going not so well, and said, I just survived a near death assassination attempt, they would say, well, you know, we do believe the system, so we'll believe you when you say that. But when you have very mistrustful people now, they don't trust Donald Trump either. And that may be the price he's paying for the nature of the political movement he built.
- [28:14]
Sarah Longwell
That is a fantastic point. And what I'm going to steal to make myself sound smarter, which is the idea of, like, if you build a coalition of conspiracies theorists, right, which he has by being the conspiracy theorist in chief, like, we're talking about the conspiratorialist nature of these voters. But actually, Trump literally launched his political career by saying that Barack Obama was a Kenyan Muslim socialist who was not born here and like, demanded his birth certificate. And so when you are a president who has built a community around you of conspiracy theorists, it should not shock you when those conspiracy theories come for you too.
- [28:47]
David Frum
And if you're boorish and graceless, you stand on weak ground when you complain about the Borishness and gracelessness of others. For example, the Trump administration is trying to shut down the Jimmy Kimmel show because Jimmy Kimmel made a joke that suggested that the first lady, Melania Trump, would not be sorry. When Donald Trump met his maker, she'd inherit his money and she'd be glad to be rid of him. That was the joke. So that's. And it was said, by the way, apparently before the actual shooting. So it was not, it was not a joke about the assassination. It was just a joke about the lack of love and that marriage. So that was not a nice thing to say. And Donald Trump had been the victim of a previous assassination attempt. But Donald Trump himself makes that joke all the time. When, when he, when he consoles widows, he will say this. The widow seems really sad. That's unusual. That's his favorite. That's One of his go to jokes at funerals and he makes jokes at funerals. Your widow seems really sad. The widow seems really sad and wouldn't happen to everybody. So one of the, there's a famous book written in the 80s called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. And the book about the Trump era is When Bad Things Happen to Bad People. So again, I don't think you should make that joke about how happy the first lady in the United States will be when her husband expires. But Donald Trump doesn't have a lot of standing to complain about it since that's his favorite joke. And the celebration of the suffering of others. Donald Trump is famous for that, whether it's the terrible affliction that overcame the family of Rob and Michelle Reiner, the death of Bob Mueller, I mean, that is that again, he exalts in the death of his enemies and the grief of those they leave behind and for his supporters, and then say, no, we must, we must remember the correct attitude that would have been struck by, with regard to George W. Bush or Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter or any president who behaved on, on the appropriate occasions like an appropriate person. And we, we don't do that ourselves ever. But we expect it. There's this kind of one way traffic which is we expect good manners from everyone else, but of course, we exempt ourselves from even basic decency. Yes, this can't work. It can't be the rule that you get to exalt about the terrible suffering of the Rob Reiner family. But when, when it's you, then everyone has to pretend that there's this, there's this code of conduct that you blew up. I, I agree that people should have been appropriately subdued after the terrible murder of Charlie Kirk, on leaving behind a wife and children. If that's the rule, the people who want to enforce the rule have to obey the rule. They can't say we never obey it, we only enforce it.
- [31:14]
Sarah Longwell
That's exactly right. Hard. Agree. Okay, we're going to keep going to get to more voters, but you made that point excellently. So. We also did a focus group of Democrats from Maine this week and I will, well, in a separate podcast, I will talk to you about how things are going for Democrats in Maine. Janet Mills dropped out today. That's kind of some of the big news. But we got their reactions to the White House correspondence dinner as well. And they're also what you might not expect. Let's listen.
- [31:41]
Democrat Voter 1
I, I feel like every single one of them has, has been staged and that there's no truth to any of them. And that it just starts a conversation about his security, which is really unnecessary because when he was leaving office the first time he wanted. He wanted extra security that he wasn't given. And now he doesn't want security. So I think it, it's just all. And I don't think, I don't think that this was a real assassin assassination attempt.
- [32:16]
David Frum
I don't care what your opinions are. You don't try to kill somebody over, you know, what they're doing. And if he makes a mistake, I mean, he'll pay it for it in some way later on, who knows?
- [32:29]
Democrat Voter 2
I don't want to believe in conspiracy theories. I don't want to go there. I want to be able to look at the facts and to trust the reporting that's going on. But the fact is that because of all of, all of the lies and all of the gaslighting and all of the theater productions that this administration puts on, like, it's really hard to believe them when they say that this, it was just a fluke. Like we've had three attempts now and they've all miraculously been flukes. Like, yes, political violence in the country is increasing, but this really seems like there's something else going on or like, is secrets. Is the Secret Service just really that much of a mess? It's really hard not to get sucked down into those conspiracy theory holes. And I am seeing it in my own life with people that I talk to of people are really buying into the conspiracy side of it. But we just don't have the information or the trust in what we're seeing to know if it's true or not.
- [33:42]
Democrat Voter 3
I don't look into conspiracy theories at all. I don't. I don't really care about that. I guess I'm more. I'm just wondering, like, why. Why is the security. Why does it take so long to get to the person, like, how do these people get through in the first place? Like, it really questions like, what is the security doing that? This is like three times this has almost happened.
- [34:10]
Democrat Voter 4
I'm not a conspiracy person at all. But there are a lot of red flags here. First of all, we have to realize there have been multiple presidents assassinated in this country and multiple estates. Attempts against presidents that were unsuccessful. I don't know enough about this latest incident other than I think security is lax. But as a physician, there are so many red flags about the one in Pennsylvania where his ear was bloodied or whatever. First of all, there was nothing about his Emergency room visit, any of the tests or scans. When Reagan was hurt seriously, that was all in the open. His medical reports or whatever. An ear in an nearly 80 year old person does not heal that quickly.
- [35:02]
Democrat Voter 5
I'm not so much into conspiracy theories, but I did notice that when it was all over, he had two things that he had to get out there in the clear. One was he did not fall down. They told him to get down, but then he stood up because he wanted to see what was going on. I mean, that was nonsense. He fell. And the other thing he said, the presidents who've had assassinations and assassination attempts have been the ones who are impactful and therefore he was the target because he's been so impactful. Yeah, it's just his. Every time he opens his mouth, I just cringe.
- [35:39]
Sarah Longwell
So here's the thing again. So the first group is Trump voters. These are Dems. Everybody thinks that. Trump is. Not everybody. There's one woman who is just like, violence is bad. Everybody shouldn't shoot people over opinions. Basically. Everybody else is like, I would like to start by saying I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I'm not into conspiracies. However, here's my theory about why Trump is lying to us about these assassination attempts.
- [36:06]
David Frum
Actually, in the main group, some of the people are saying things that are not exactly conspiracy theories. I mean, the man who said it was disgusting that Trump said that impactful presidents get the assassination attempts and that. That's, that's not. That's true. Trump did say that, and it was disgusting. And by the way, the, the assassination attempt on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and there was a grave one happened before he was sworn in. How did that man have the foresight to know that. That Franklin Roosevelt would be one of the most impactful presidents when he shot him in. What was it in Florida in this. In the winter of 1932 before he was sworn in, or shot at him and killed the mayor of Chicago instead of. So it's a disgusting thing to say. And the person in the pocus group was right. And I think that goes back to this basic problem with Trump is that there's a lot of when bad things happen to bad people, he doesn't follow the rules of decency. And when he doesn't, and then when there's this potential national tragedy that threatens him and he escapes mercifully, and it looks like the amount of harm was very limited. I think there's a Secret Service man wounded, but he was wearing a bulletproof vest and it looks like he will recover. That's at least the information I have as I speak. Then people say, you know what? The thing I am taking away from this incident is your gracelessness and boorishness and self centeredness, not the fact that the country nearly lost a president or could have.
- [37:24]
Sarah Longwell
You're right. That, that guy, he started it by saying, the thing that I noticed is that what Trump wanted to talk about was that he didn't fall down. And his point is that it's really weird that you're not like, oh no, someone was shooting at me. That your immediate response is, actually, don't let anybody say I fell down. Because you're such a narcissist. You wouldn't want to be seen that way.
- [37:44]
David Frum
Or at Butler, you say, God spared my life. There's a person who was killed, killed right behind you. Yeah. Did God, God took him? Like, is that your, your theology? You know, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Oswald also killed a secret Serviceman, who. And Jacqueline Kennedy made a point of reaching out to the widow of the slain Secret Service man and mourning with her and bringing her into, into the ceremonies and trying to arrange for her, her husband also to be buried in Arlington Cemetery. I don't think it was successful, but she tried it to say, I, in the middle of this profound grief, I mean, my husband killed in front of me, his brains on my bond, my dress. And I still have enough empathy to understand another family also suffered a loss that day and they're less famous and the world is not paying attention. But I, I can remark that even in the midst of my own terrible suffering, that's sort of the attitude we want.
- [38:36]
Sarah Longwell
Yes.
- [38:37]
David Frum
Not God spared me. Sorry about, you know, but God took that poor fool. Well, God, you know, I guess that proves he wasn't impactful because if he'd been important, God would have spared. Like, it's just there is this problem that Donald Trump cannot respect the decencies of life. But he, like every suffering human being, he needs the decencies of life. And when, when he calls for them and looks for them, where are they? Well, he himself has torched them.
- [39:02]
Sarah Longwell
You know what I like about you, David? I like that the way you seem to be receiving these voters. Because even I, who listens to a lot of voters and feels tremendous empathy toward all of them, just all of them as humans, because they live in an absolutely bonkers information environment. But you're not taking this as man, look how conspiratorial these people are. Because I'm telling you, even I was sort of like I got my hair blown back by the Trump group and how much they think it's a false flag operation. You're saying, if I could just say it back to you, that Trump has created an environment that is so low in trust, so devoid of decency, so devoid of empathy, that it shouldn't shock us that the American public sort of show that back to him in some way.
- [39:47]
David Frum
I don't want to say he's created, he's profiteered from it, and he's now a victim of it, as little as I like him. But violence is abhorrent, political violence is abhorrent, and it is the test of the decency of society that we. We repel it and reject it. So I don't want in any way to suggest that Trump's getting his just dessert.
- [40:04]
Sarah Longwell
Right?
- [40:05]
David Frum
I'm just saying that he, when he looks back at his followership and says, who are these people who won't believe me when I tell them I was nearly killed? Well, they're the same people who, who did believe you when you told them that Barack Obama was born in the United States because his mother. This is one of the things about the conspiracy theory, mind, because you believe that I. Look this up. His mother, in 1961, eight or nine months pregnant, got on a plane in Hawaii, because we know she was in Hawaii in the spring of 1961, got on a plane in Hawaii and flew to Los Angeles, then flew from Los Angeles to New York, then flew from New York to London, then flew from London to Nairobi and then took a bus, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, to a village and gave birth, and then did the whole thing in reverse, by the way, with people smoking all the way at every stage of the trip. And all of this. I looked it up. The cost of a single leg of that trip was greater than her annual tuition at the University of Hawaii.
- [40:57]
Democrat Voter 2
You.
- [40:57]
David Frum
That's. That's what you want us to believe? That crazy story? If you think about it for three minutes, it's not. Not only is it not true, not only is it full of racist conjecture, it's also, you just have to look at how did airline travel work in 1961? Or maybe she went by boat. Maybe she went by ship from Hawaii to Kenya and back again eight months pregnant. Madness. Madness. But you trolled the world looking for people who would believe such a crazy thing, and then you're shocked that they don't believe your story of how you escaped death twice or three times.
- [41:30]
Sarah Longwell
All right, so I want to close by talking about the indictment of James Comey. The second indictment of James Comey for his Instagram post with, I don't know, violent seashells. And they're supposedly violent because, as we've discussed, they spelled out 8647.
- [41:49]
David Frum
Yeah.
- [41:50]
Sarah Longwell
So. And 47 is Trump's. He's the 47th president. So we asked a group of Louisiana Republicans about the indictment and whether they thought 86 was a violent term. Let's listen.
- [42:02]
Louisiana Republican Voter 1
He's going to have to explain, you know, what he meant. In my opinion, it was not. He was not calling for an assassination of the president. I think it was, you know, in my opinion, to 86 something. I mean, they said it to. About Biden and they said about other presidents to 86. I mean, to get rid of them, impeach him, remove him.
- [42:24]
Sarah Longwell
I think in action movies and, and video games and everything, the. The term 86 is used as code to kill. I work in the restaurant industry. 86 is a term that we use all the time. And so that's why my mind goes to, like, it's not necessarily violent.
- [42:44]
Democrat Voter 3
We use it for everything.
- [42:45]
Sarah Longwell
So that's why I don't think it's necessarily intentionally violent.
- [42:50]
Louisiana Republican Voter 2
86 is also used very commonly as a way to say, get rid of it. You know, we don't need anymore that file anymore, just 86 it. I mean, I understand the concern about it, but it's also been used in very. In ways that are not offensive. Am I the only one that's ever heard something like that, you know, 86 the file. That thing's broken. 86 it.
- [43:20]
Sarah Longwell
You had a great tweet after the Comey indictment that said if James Comey had said 23 skidoo, the Trump DOJ would have indicted him for conspiracy to steal a snowmobile. Is it remarkable? I just, I found, except for the one person was like, yeah, no, I heard it means this in video games. Most people are like, that's not what it means. These are Trump voters from Louisiana who are like, yeah, no, I think people
- [43:45]
David Frum
have common sense on that point. And, and again, because the. It's not quite passed out of. I mean, it's an old piece of slang, but it's not quite extinct. And so people do remember its restaurant industry connection. And as I speculated, beginning how it was immigrant workers mishearing the phrase out of stock and converting it to 86. But there's something else about this that is bizarre. The United States is now involved in a major shooting war with Iran, the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism. Iran has a long history of using extraterritorial terrorism, including on this continent, as a tool of war. It does look like at least some of the terrorism that has happened in London and England against the Jewish community there has some Iranian connection in this war that has been going on for now weeks and is not going well against the leading state sponsored terrorism. You would think the FBI, the premier counterterrorism organization in the United States, would be entirely focused on protecting Americans from the possibility of an Iranian attack on American soil. The idea that they are taking time and the director seems to be especially focused on this, on the Seashell threat, pay attention to what they're not doing. And just as the Trump people don't seem to have thought about, well, what isn't. The obvious Iranian counter move to close the Strait of Hormuz and won't that be expensive? Shouldn't we plan for that? Another obvious Iranian counter move is terrorism on American soil or elsewhere in this hemisphere or against American allies. And if there's time for the Comey indictment, that's time deducted, especially since there are a lot of reports they cash Patel's FBI has got, has gotten rid of or 86 many of America's leading experts on counterterrorism and Iranian threats.
- [45:19]
Sarah Longwell
To me, so much of what's happening right now, and it's not like voters are like, I care so much about for or against the ballroom. It's they're like, why is he so focused on the ballroom when we can't afford groceries, right? It's like, why are they so obsessed with Comey when we're literally at war? So much of it is about how they spend their time on petty vendettas or sort of narcissistically driven, building, you know, an ark when Americans are suffering. All right, David, you're one of my favorite people to talk to. Tell me. I learned so much when I talk to you. But before I let you go, your wife Danielle, who I also know and who is a wonderful person, has a new book out called Dispatches from Grief. I'm gonna just tell us about it before we end here.
- [46:03]
David Frum
Well, as some may know, my wife and I lost our eldest daughter Miranda in February of 2024. We're both writers and the way we process a thing like that is by writing about it. And Danielle has been, who's a writer and a wonderful writer, has written books before. She was just lay prostrate for a long time by this terrible loss in our family. But she found the determination and the courage to Sit down and try to write about the experience of loss. Because when she was suffering so badly, she turned to a lot of the grief books and there's a big literature on this, but they emphasize it's America, very optimistic healing stages, the things you get through. Check, check this box here. Here's your 10 point action plan. And she, she thought, that's not true to my experience. This isn't, I'm not healing and this is not, I'm not drawing lessons from this. I'm just suffering. And so she wanted to write something that expressed what this kind of suffering is like, to give voice to people, to. Maybe words don't come as easily. They can say, how do I talk about this? How do I, how do I explain to people what, what it's like? How do I help people to understand what they can do for me? How do I find some kind of therapeutic remedy? So she's written this, this astonishing, it's, it's, it seems weird to describe it as a very beautiful book, but it is, it's very powerful. I'm immensely proud of her. It releases in a couple of days and I'm just, I'm, I'm looking forward to doing a lot of dog sitting while she does a lot of podcasts, talking about the important things she's done. And I'm just, it's, it's written from the heart. It's beautiful and I'm proud of her.
- [47:35]
Sarah Longwell
Well, I'll just say I, I, I very much look forward to, to reading it. I do think that this act of sort of laying your guts on the table after a loss like that, I think it is both a gift to other people who are trying to make sense of the world and make sense of their own grief. But it is also, it's the kind of thing that by being public about it, by laying it bare, you invite people in, in a kind of a communal way to like, be together in their humanity, which I sort of think we're lacking right now. And so I think it's a fitting way to end this podcast in which we're talking about a lot of anger and senseless violence with, like, why it matters to us so much to like, love each other and take care of each other and what that loss is
- [48:29]
David Frum
really like and to show, I think one of the things that makes the book proud, it is a love story. Danielle and Miranda intensely loved each other. We all loved her. And one of the things she talks about in the book is the, as a mother, she wanted to take care of her own of her children and of me and our grief. And she wasn't able to do it for the longest time and how she felt she didn't have the strength to do that. And now she's recovered some measure of strength, and she's going to try to share this with other people who are afflicted or who are in the neighborhood and vicinity of those afflicted. So thank you for asking about it.
- [49:02]
Sarah Longwell
David from you're the Best. Give my best to Danielle, guys, thanks to all of you for listening to another episode of the focus group podcast. We'll be back next week, but in the meantime, remember to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to the book on YouTube, you know, bulwark.com do bullwork plus all the things, guys. All the things. Be well. Talk soon.
- [49:23]
David Frum
Bye. Bye.