David Frum: Both Pro-Jesus and Pro-Sex Trafficking

Cupcake Vineyards grow their grapes in the finest wine regions on Earth, like Marlboro, New Zealand, for their Sauvignon Blanc. It's called Cupcake.
Okay. Cupcake Vineyards.
Serious wine, unserious name. Copyright 2024.
Cupcake Vineyards, Livermore, California. Cupcake Vineyards grow their grapes in the finest wine regions on Earth.
That's why they travel to Marlboro, New Zealand, to craft their delicious, award-winning Cupcake Sauvignon Blanc.

Sorry, am I reading that right?

Cupcake Vineyards?

They make a delicious wine from New Zealand and call it Cupcake?

Okay, then.

This is Cupcake Vineyards.

Serious wine, unserious name.

Oh, well, at least they're aware.

Copyright 2024, Cupcake Vineyards, Livermore, California. Hello and welcome to the Borg Podcast.
I'm your host, Tim Miller. He's back.
He's a staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently, Trumpocalypse. It's David Frum.
What's happening, Frum? Hey there. I'm just back from almost a month in Austria.
So now catching up with the world. How are the folks in Austria thinking about what's happening here stateside? Well, I have to confess, I was mostly talking about ski snow quality.
Good. How was the ski snow quality? We were very lucky with the ski snow quality.
But we were escaping the month of February, and on a ski hill, my wife and I, and two little dogs. Well, that sounds lovely.
Well, on the topic of Trumpocalypse, I was perusing your social media feeds and I saw this nice summation of where things stand. Egg shortages, fatal measles outbreaks, airplane crashes, crypto scams, tariffs, betrayal of allies, pardons and special favors for insurrectionists, crooked mayors, and online pimps.
The American people have voted for change. I guess we'll get to all of those topics.
Which one? I guess dealer's choice on which one you want to start with. Let's talk about eggs because I have a serious point to make about that.
Okay. It goes to a big structural problem in American politics.
So the price of eggs has almost quadrupled since fall. If you're in the restaurant industry and you're buying sort of high-end eggs, you're looking at $8 a dozen.
If you go to Walmart in the D.C. area, it's about $6 a dozen.
There are some at $5.97, but a few at higher than $6. now everybody listening to this podcast every democratic politician in congress knows this

isn't exactly trump's fault there's an avian flu the herd of egg-laying chickens has been culled, and there's a genuine economic shortage. So Democrats are hesitant to blame the president for something that's obviously not his fault.
In 2022, the price of beef ran up. And it ran up for because during COVID, there had been people in the beef processing plants that had to sit farther apart from one another, reducing the efficiency of the plants.
There was a drought. And so beef cattle were arriving at slaughter less heavy than usual.
It wasn't Biden's fault. Did that stop the Trump people? It did not.
There is a great novel about the rise of the Nazi published in 1934, very prophetically called The Oppermans. And I recommend it to you.
And at one point, one of the characters says, our opponents have a great novel about the rise of the nazi published in 1934 very prophetically called the operments and i recommend it to you and at one point one of the characters says our opponents have a great advantage over us and that is their absolute lack of any sense of fairness and i think you see in the beef versus the eggs that dynamic at work the trump people knew it wasn't biden's fault that it was you know there was a pandemic uh the people in the processing plants had to sit farther apart a lot of the processing workers got sick there was a drought so the beef cattle were less heavy. It wasn't Biden's fault.
There was a pandemic. The people in the processing plants had to sit farther apart.
A lot of the processing workers got sick. There was a drought, so the beef cattle were less heavy.
It wasn't the president's fault that the price of beef went up. That didn't stop them.
Democrats know it's not the president's fault. The price of eggs is up, but it does stop them.
I don't know how you do politics in a country where people respond to price cues so intensely. And one party says, we're going to be responsible about economic causation.
And the other party says, the hell with that. No, we're not.
That's a fair point. And I think I've been thinking about this on the eggs thing, because you do see pundits, like liberal pundits talking about it a lot, or anti-Trump pundits more than politicians.
So you see it some for politicians. I think Ruben Giego mentioned it on the pod on Wednesday.
One thing I notice is the other side also has the benefit is they're so shameless in the argumentation. Trump is so shameless that it's almost easy for him to say, this is Sleepy Joe's fault.
He's asleep at the switch. It's Joe Biden's fault.
And sometimes even when the Democrats, I notice, do try to pin this on Trump, it's almost, it's like in an ironic way where I almost feel like they're criticizing the voters, not Trump themselves. Like the voters were too dumb to know that the egg prices, you know, he wasn't going to fix.
And so I sometimes I feel like the egg prices commentary is an attack on the voters. And if you're really going to play their game, it's got to be what you're saying, which is the shameless attack on Trump and the politicians.
Years ago, an acquaintance of mine who is a literary person, hard up for money, as a gag, wrote a kind of romance novel under pseudonym and sent it to one of the big, one of these generic pulp, you know, Boone and Mills kind of things. And he was hoping to pick up $1,200.
And he sent it to the company and he got back a rejection letter that said if you want to write this stuff you have to believe in it right yes exactly and that which takes us to george costanza which is uh which is that was his advice as well right it's like uh it's only a lie if you believe it right what was the exact line shit it's not a lot it's not a lie if you believe a lie if you believe it. Yeah, there it is.
But there's just a structural infirmity because event in the past 24 hours that Trump people have done this big rollout of the so-called Epstein files, which are of course things that have been available on the internet for a decade. There are no revelations.
You know, we know that Bill Clinton flew on Epstein's plane. We know that Trump and Epstein were very close friends.
We know nothing today that we didn't know 48 hours ago. There's a big hullabaloo of some of the most shameless people in Trump world.
But I don't want, that's not my point. My point is this happened on the very day when thanks to high level intervention by people in the Trump administration, the two Tate brothers, the worst kind of sex abusers, sex traffickers were released from a legal process in Romania to fly to the United States as political asylum.
They're both US citizens, so they have a right to enter the United States, but they were under a travel ban in Romania because they were facing trial for so many charges. They also have charges pending against them in the United Kingdom.
They got their freedom because of a personal intervention by Richard Grinnell, who met the Romanian foreign minister at the Munich Security Conference and said, I, meaning the United States government, take a great interest in the fate of the Tate brothers. This is the same Richard Grinnell, by the way, who's now president of the Kennedy Center, where he's planning a big Christmas extravaganza to put the Christ back in Christmas.
So Christ, sex trafficking, we can have both. So the point is not that the Epstein thing is a hullabaloo.
The point is the same people who think that Epstein is the worst criminal in America believe that the Tate brothers who did the same and worse because Epstein, at least as far as I know, was never violent. The Tate brothers were.
I think the girls were younger. I mean, you know, we're splitting hairs here at this point, but in the Epstein case, yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
But the Tate brothers involved minor girls too. And direct personal violence, which they talk about, they use beating as a tool of control, not just mind games.
And you're right, we are splitting hairs and they're both bad. But there's no one who defends Epstein.
There are people who defend Tate. And the Tate brothers escaped justice because of this.
and by the way the the uh when they arrived in the united states one of the tate brothers i forget which told reporters that it had been that they gave credit to the personal intervention of baron trump in their case which if true and it may not be true they're big liars if true is even more astonishing yeah um i know you're writing about this for the atlantic but the um which people should check out but i like the layers of hypocrisy, like even go deeper than that and shamelessness, right? I mean, they were also literal groomers. Yeah.
And like, this was the big attack on gays from the magos over the last few years. That why they don't say gay in schools and all that was that, you know, there are the gays against groomers, which I, I guess Richard Grinnell considered himself a monk, you know, as, as a MAGA that would show up to these events.
And now it's, in this case, we have two men that were, in the most literal sense, grooming women that they're also trafficking. And then for people who didn't follow this, using them in pornography, I think the seven women that are at the center of the Romanian case, they put in a house in Bucharest, they turned into a porn den, and they, you know, against their will, showed, you know, allegedly, showed pornographic videos of them.
And, like, that is, you know, it is on the nose of what they, you know, had accused the left of, as you say, on the same day that they released the Epstein files. Yeah.
Nobody cares about hypocrisy, though. I do wonder, is there, like, like to me the more interesting thing is the evangelical side of the party like the christian the social conservative side of the party there's just there's nothing like how does how can mike johnson who monitors his own son's porn use like also live coherently in a party that celebrates these two men and step back to something you said a minute ago you're right no one says it cares anything about hypocrisy you just have to do it so in this vast country parties need complicated they don't need complicated messages but they need complicated message groupings look i confess i'm another touch east coast elitist i know the price of eggs because i looked it up on the walmart site i don even like eggs that much.
So that's not a message that's actually going to change my vote. I'm about democracy.
I'm about Cash Patel and anger management problem. Don Bongino running the FBI.
I'm about the predicates being put in place for what looks like some kind of military backing of the president if he defies a court order. That's my issue.
And me and my neighbors

here in Ward 3 of the District of Columbia, we're going to be motivated by that. And we're going to

get to the polls at 5 a.m. and stand in the queue.
And we're going to vote for school board, too,

while we're there. You talked to us one way.
The people who decide this election care about the

price of eggs. And you have to talk to them.
And this is the thing that the Trump people did with

a lot of people for whom English was not their first language new to the country they did actually kind of politics in some ways the right way uh which is you know we're gonna we're gonna go into this neighborhood people weren't born here may not have english as their first language and we're gonna talk to them about they care about because they their votes count too that's like democracy done right if it weren't done for such evil ends ultimately but the process is done right and that's something that those who want to save democracy have to do which is you know what yeah there are people in ward three in dc who know that it's not literally the president's fault the price of eggs is up but the people who feel the price of eggs don't know that and don't care so you just go there every day and you say when will trump eggs reach a dollar an egg because right now they're 50 cents an egg they're on their way to a dollar an egg, Trump, Trump, egg, when will Trump eggs reach a dollar an egg? Because right now they're 50 cents an egg.

They're on their way to a dollar an egg.

Trump, Trump, egg, egg, Trump, Trump, dollar an egg.

And maybe the answer to this is there isn't any, but I just, I'm going to extend your

remarks and use the Tate brothers as an example.

We know that the evangelical leaders and that the political types in the Republican Party

have completely sold their soul to Trump and don't actually care about these issues anymore. Is there not eight people in the church on Sunday, though, a conservative church, mega church in Georgia that do care about this, right, that you could peel off by speaking to them about this if they learned about it, if it wasn't for the fact that their information silos didn't inform them about this? I don't know.
Maybe the answer is no, But to your point about them, the Republicans doing regular politics, that was Trump's case with black voters. Trump didn't think he was going to win black voters by 50%.
It was like, can I get the highest Republican number by pandering to them and appealing to them? I think the same principle applies there. I'm not a Christian.
I'm moderately but not super religious. But I've had the privilege of knowing some intensely religious Christians.
And the ones who really mean it have always responded to revelations of bad behavior in high places by saying the Christian response to that is to not talk about it, to say, what have you done? what have you done? Search your soul and you will find there greed and hate and envy and resentment and anger and lust and all all the things that are christian sins we're not here as the morality police for others jesus talks a lot about this right like you know cast the first stone you know like the whole point of the jesus teaching is you do not criticize others you criticize yourself and so if they were saying look this is that bill clinton or donald trump or the tape brothers these are occasions to remind people to improve their own behavior and just check their own stools and understand by the way that their behavior necessarily is going to be imperfect is refallible even that would be a very holy thing on the other hand if they're going to be police then you have to be the rule can't be that if if you give us free parking for our megachurch and give us the zoning abatements we want then you get to do what you like and if you don't you don't the rule should not be that i don't know if it can't be i think it may be in certain cases um i want to go back to the economy and the eggs because you're you're focusing on this on the messaging side of this and message matters. It's not everything.
Life experience, people experiencing the economy in their own ways matters probably actually more. I played this yesterday, but I want to play it again because I think that for various reasons that you laid out on eggs, I don't think it is anybody is particularly incentivized to say things might get very bad with the economy right now.
Like the Democrats don't want to seem like they're rooting for that. The media doesn't want to predict it and be wrong.
But here's Steve Cohen, who's a conservative hedge fund guy, donated to Trump in the past. So not somebody with TDS talking about the economy as it stands right now.
This is one of those moments where there's really a lot of uncertainty. I mean, tariffs cannot be positive.
It's a tax. Taxes are never positive.
On top of that, we have slowing immigration. And in addition, now you have doge.
Wherever you lay on the doge issue, I mean, that's austerity. It's got to be negative for the economy.
We think growth is going to slow to 1.5% from 2.5% in the second half. The reality is we've got a brew of sticky inflation, slowing growth, and austerity in the government.
And so I'm actually pretty negative for the first time in a while. And it may only last a year or so, but it's definitely a period where I think the best gains have been had.
It wouldn't surprise me to see a significant correction. Sticky inflation and slowing growth, that doesn't seem like a great combo.
No, I think that's right. I think that is good dispassionate analysis.
Of those factors, the tariffs, I think, are the most important. Well, you'll notice that the stock market, which briefly went up, the U.S.
stock market has now given up all of its post-Trump gains as the stock market. It doesn't want to believe that Trump could be serious.
I mean, the tariff policy is so stupid, so destructive. The stock market and the people on it don't want to believe that any of this could be real.
And when Trump talks about it, he sounds like such a moron to educated people. And they think, oh, even if he says these crazy things, the Secretary of the Treasury will throw his body in front of the tariff train and save us all.
And maybe that will happen. Trump did a lot of tariffs in first term.
He started late. He started in 2018, not right away.
This time, he's starting from the beginning. And of course, the economy reacts not just to the imposition of tariffs, but to the threat of tariffs.
If you have a $10 billion investment to make in a new facility, How hard are you going to look at Mexico?

Because you're going to think, you know what? Okay, they haven't laid heavy tariffs on Mexico yet. But Trump's made clear that he is not going to abide by the terms of the trade treaty with

Mexico that he signed in his first term. He now says that treaty was signed by the stupidest

people in America. He's manned that's a point, broken clocks and all.

So your $10 billion investment decision is going to be held hostage to the risk that these

Thank you. and he's man that's point broken clocks and all so your 10 billion dollar investment decision is going to be held hostage to the risk that these tariffs might be coming next week you certainly won't make that decision hastily i don't think people understand that a tariff a tariff is a tax but it's a tax with much greater potential for harm than other taxes because other taxes just you know take money pockets.
Surprise, demand. Tariffs Vineyards, Livermore, California.

Cupcake Vineyards grow their grapes in the finest wine regions on earth. That's why they travel to

Marlboro, New Zealand to craft their delicious, award-winning Cupcake Sauvignon Blanc. Sorry,

am I reading that right? Cupcake Vineyards? They make a delicious wine from New Zealand and call

it Cupcake? Okay then. This is Cupcake Vineyards.
Serious wine, unserious name. Well, at least they're aware.
Copyright 2024, Cupcake Vineyards, Livermore, California. Speaking about what, maybe not the stupidest people in America, but the most gullible, I'm obsessed with this because it just seems so obvious to me.
I've not gotten very wealthy. I assume people that got very wealthy did so because they are smart about risk reward calculations and such.
But anytime I talked to a rich person or finance person, in the lead up to the election, I was like, why are so many people at the CEO level on Wall Street, like either neutral, sitting this race out,

or even leaning Trump, or actively for Trump in this case, when the risks seem so obvious to me.

Here we are, we're one month in, Semaphore article is quoting some CEOs. It's a difficult

time to invest. Everybody's paralyzed.
I'm sorry, I can't be particularly positive. The chaos that

is raining right now is causing everyone to sit on their hands. Headline, America's business leaders are turning on Trump fast.
What did these fucking people think that they were going to get? Okay, let me try this two ways. So first, like you, I'm not an especially successful economic actor, but my late father was, and he started with literally nothing and built a considerable business before he died.
One of his sayings was, God blesses you by making you lucky, and then he curses you by making you think you're smart. And he would tell story after story about how you're driving the car in the Mario Kart video game, the rocks are falling, and you don't know whether the swift turn to the left or the swift turn to the right is the right move.
And a lot of people are just as smart as you make the swift turn to the right and the rock falls on them. You happen for reasons of dumb luck to make the swift turn to the left, the rock misses you and you get another chance to play the game.
So for the entrepreneurs, I think that entrepreneurs are people who are not necessarily the most highly analytic people. They have a kind of nerve and courage and self-belief that drives them.

And as we're seeing with Elon Musk, I mean, you can be a great entrepreneur and not be an ordinarily intelligent person, which he seems not to be, at least not now. Maybe he was different

15 years of drug use ago. I think he might've broken his brain with the social media company

he bought, but yeah, sure. But a CEO is different.
A CEO is not an entrepreneur. A CEO is more like

a politician than like an entrepreneur. And so the CEO has to manage all kinds of expectations.
And let's say you run the 14th biggest financial firm on Wall Street. Your scope from freedom of maneuver, especially in political matters, is quite limited.
You have investors who have beliefs. You have regulators.
You have your peers. You're trying to be not too unconventional a person.
And when you have a bad quarter, you don't want to have a bad quarter in some freakish individual way. You want to have the same bad quarter that everybody else did.
And then you have an excuse. And so it's not surprising to me that CEO types, especially in the financial industry, who are mad at Biden for a host of reasons, would say, ah, we're going to bet on Trump, because that's what all our friends and buddies are doing.
No one ever got fired for giving money to the Republican candidate. So we'll do that.
And we'll hope for the best. And we'll hope that some wiser heads at Treasury stop the tariffs.
And now they're confronting the fact that, no, it's wrong. And the tariffs may really be coming.
And that's not just a tax. That could be the end of all kinds of efficiencies that make a real difference to American production.
It's your sense, though. I mean, we don't have a crystal ball.
Things don't look good economically, right? Here's why the immigration piece is important. The United States had this extraordinary burst of productivity growth in the 1990s, but that productivity growth has slowed.
And the reason the American economy has continued to grow as well as it has is not just because there's intensive growth, that is, using each factor of production more efficiently as we did in the 1990s. So there's extensive growth.
In a country that would otherwise have a shrinking population, it has a growing population because of immigration above all. And whatever the merits of that from a social policy point of view, if you start not only stop the immigration, but send it into reverse, yeah, that's going to have an effect both on costs and consumption.
It's going to have an effect on cost because you're taking people who were doing work, taking them away. The MAGA people are very clear.
They want the price of landscaping services to go up. They want the price of construction to go up.
But half the people in the construction industry in the fastest growing states are immigrants. And I assume a lot of them, especially like in the most dangerous work like roofing, are illegal immigrants.
So again, I'm not endorsing any of this. I'm an immigration enforcer.
But understand it makes costs go up. And also, every immigrant is a buyer.
They buy houses and shoes and cars, and all of that is being subtracted for the economy. And yeah, it's a shock.
Well, David, we are going to add some to the economy, though. We like to be fair-minded here at the Boulder Podcast.
They do have a plan for bringing some people in. It's called the new gold card.
It's going to solve the debt and bring new fresh blood into the economy. I want to listen to Donald Trump talking about this plan the other day.
If we sell 10 million, which is possible, 10 million highly productive

people coming in or people that we're going to make productive, they'll be young, but they're

talented, like a talented athlete. That's $50 trillion.
That means our debt is totally paid off.

We're going to sell 10 million gold cards at 5 million a pop. What do you think about that? Well, every country, including the United States, has programs where they do sell visas in exchange for a certain amount of investment.
You don't pay it directly to the government because this is or was a free market country. It's not a golf club with dues.
You pay to Bedminster. The old idea was that you would, if you made a $5 million investment in something that wasn't personal real estate, this is not a new thing.
And many Singapore has it. Canada has it.
The United States has it too. So it's not a completely outrageous idea, but the Trump gold card comes CNBC reported this with a special loophole.
The United States has a regime of taxation, where if you are a high net worth

individual, high income individual, and you come to the United States, you are taxed on your global

income. So you don't just get taxed on what you make in the United States, you get taxed worldwide.

And that's one of the reasons why the United States is not a haven for the international

criminal rich in the way that say the United Kingdom is, because it has this global tax system.

CNBC reports that the Trump gold card is going to come with a proviso that you only will pay tax on your US-based income if you get one of these visas, which is a loophole unavailable to US citizens, unavailable to normal green card holders, unavailable to anybody except these Trump oligarchs. And it's exactly the kind of thing that has made London the haven for all kinds of bad actors that it is, because you can have your money in Russia or wherever it is and not be taxed on that.
You're only taxed on whatever you earn on your US savings bonds. So why Trump, who is America first, and so anti-foreigner, is going to give a certain subset of foreigners a unique tax benefit, unavailable to America's own indigenous rich.
That's a remarkable thought. America first.
America first. It's also just like, as a practical point, I'm with you, right? Giving visas to people that are going to invest is something Canada does to effect.
Seems sensible to me. This is, according to a study from 2023, there are only 8.4 million people globally worth 5 million or more, right? So unless the plan is for Saudi Arabia or Putin or somebody to buy a bunch of these or some billionaire, maybe a Chinese crypto billionaire, we'll get to that next, to just pay Trump off personally, this is not a sensible plan.
Look, and if you need to raise $5 million each from rich people, the United States has a lot of billionaires. You could just raise their taxes by $5 million each.
We don't have 10 million unfortunately we don't have 10 million billionaires to pay off the whole debt but uh we could again i'll quote my my father's business acumen he in the days of handwritten cafe bills in european cafes he had this line he would say if they were just bad at math you'd expect half the mistakes to be in my favor so trump is is bad at math. I mean, he's really bad at math.
And it's not true that half the mistakes are in the customer's favor. All the mistakes are in his favor.
And whether he's lying about how much aid was provided to Ukraine, whether he's lying about the impact of these things, that I mean, he's a con artist, and he sells these cons. But I think the back in mind is there is somebody who said to him, I would to come to the united states i will pay five million dollars for that privilege if i don't have to pay tax on my global income and donald said sounds and don there'll be something in it for you too and trump said that sounds good to me but everyone else in america pays tax on their worldwide income if you tax the golden visa people on their worldwide income, you're not going to sell

all those millions of golden visas.

They want the tax benefit

that comes with the visa.

Cupcake vineyards grow their grapes

in the finest wine regions on earth.

That's why they travel

to Marlboro, New Zealand

to craft their delicious,

award-winning cupcake Sauvignon Blanc.

Sorry, am I reading that right?

Cupcake vineyards?

They make a delicious wine from New Zealand and call it Cupcake? Okay then. This is Cupcake Vineyards.
Serious wine, unserious name. Oh, well, at least they're aware.
Copyright 2024, Cupcake Vineyards, Livermore, California. Cupcake Vineyards grow their grapes in the finest wine regions on earth, like Marlboro, New Zealand, for their Sauvignon Blanc.
It's called Cupcake. Okay.
Cupcake Vineyards, serious wine, unserious name. Copyright 2024, Cupcake Vineyards, Livermore, California.
Speaking of those scams, I do want to revisit the crypto story because I've mentioned this yesterday, but we have an update. The judge did grant the sec's request for a stay in the case of justin's son justin's son has given reportedly over 50 million invested over 50 million in the various trump bitcoins so chinese bitcoin magnate just essentially paying trump directly and getting the government off his back for his fraud for his alleged frauds.
The crypto industry is at bottom, it's a regulatory arbitrage bet. What is crypto? American law says, if you're a security, you're regulated by the SEC, who have lots of expertise and a kind of a very tough attitude to fraud.
If you're a currency, you're regulated more lightly, because I mean, obviously, you know, if the Dominican Republic wants to issue a new currency, that's not going to be regulated by an American financial. And if you want to trade Dominican Republican cruiseros or whatever they are, they're issued by the Dominican Republic.
So it's regulated not by the SEC in a more light way. So the reason it's called cryptocurrency is so that it's not regulated by the SEC.
But nobody who invests in crypto is investing in it in order to go to another country and buy things they're investing in it because they think it's a security there it's an investment it's a store of wealth unless they're criminals they're they're they're using it for currency if they're criminals but if they're the non-criminals they are buying a security and they were afraid the reason that the crypto bet so heavily on Trump against Biden was they were afraid that the Biden administration was going to say, you know what, this is obviously security and it needs to be regulated with proper kinds of disclosures and statements of risk and conflict of interest statements by management. And all the fancy things that got us into trouble in 2008 have to do now.
Crypto should have to do it. And the crypto was, no, no.
While we want the united states government to bail us out and buy vast quantities of crypto we do not want to tell people the things that we would have to tell them if we were regulated as a security yeah and actually there was a statement also just yesterday on this point uh from the sec where they said that these meme coins are essentially a collectible they see them as, essentially, baseball trading cards. And so in the same way that a currency is regulated more lightly, the baseball card market is regulated more lightly.
And that's great news for meme coin scammers like the president of the United States, the secretary of commerce, and many other people in their orbit. And tragically, the president of Argentina on whom so many hopes rested.
I had a lot of time for him, and I think he may have been suckered in this Libra coin thing he got mixed up in, but it may be the economic reform in Argentina fails again, this time because somebody got, I think in this case it was the president's relatives who were behind it, got him involved in a dubious meme coin venture and discredited him. It is disappointing just because he could have just done a mea culpa.

Yeah.

You know, that really was the most disappointing thing about Malay,

that he got so defensive of it and started attacking people for attacking him.

It was such an obvious fraud.

Yeah.

Just say I got duped.

But I guess these guys, it's part of the machismo side of this.

You can't say that you got duped.

I think there's also something which is the very thing that makes him such an outlier in argentina and argentinian politics is he's a little crazy and until now it's worked for him that he wasn't trapped in the usual self-destructive patterns of their politics but the same thing that makes him a little crazy makes him unable to do the mea culpa or to put some discipline on his relatives and say you know this is a chance to turn this country around. You will all behave yourselves.
And if I succeed, believe me, you will all be sitting on the board of the Chase Manhattan Bank and making a lot of money in very respectable ways. Just call it.
Patience. Be respectable.
The other scan they have going is the strategic Bitcoin reserve. Saw a post that you had about that.
I to kind of hear your take on the strategic bitcoin reserve plan my line on it was the strategic

bitcoin reserve was as a device to respond to the looming greater fool shortage in the united

states because these coins are sold to greater fools eventually you run out of greater fools

and people ask what can i do with this thing and the fact that warren buffett has always said stay

away is is a warning that maybe you should stay away. The biggest pool of fools is the government run by a fool, you know? Right.
And also the fools in this case don't get a choice. The people who will make this decision are probably not fools.
They're probably in on the con. Yeah, that's true.
So, if you can infiltrate the government with people who have large crypto holdings themselves. Which has happened.
Which and make them get them not only make favorable rulings like the sec will not regulate our industry i think this is so telling that trump is about to reenact the plot of goldfinger at fort knox and meanwhile what he's actually going to do is give away not the gold but the actual money of the united states to buy these stupid bitcoins for what what is the what is the problem to which a bitcoin is a response the strategic response yeah the united states holds reserves of gold and and euros and yen because in case there's suddenly a fluctuation in the movement of the dollar and you need to go buy dollars you need to buy the dollars with something so you buy it with gold but the idea that you're going to do this with something as mercurial and unpredictable as Bitcoin is, it's not a currency because currencies don't move up and down by a thousand percent. Cupcake vineyards grow their grapes in the finest wine regions on earth.
That's why they travel to Marlboro, New Zealand to craft their delicious, award-winning cupcake Sauvignon Blanc. Sorry, am I reading that right? Cupcake vineyards? They make a delicious wine from New Zealand, to craft their delicious, award-winning Cupcake Sauvignon Blanc.
Sorry, am I reading that right? Cupcake Vineyards? They make a delicious wine from New Zealand and call it Cupcake? Okay, then. This is Cupcake Vineyards.
Serious wine, unserious name. Oh, well, at least they're aware.
Copyright 2024, Cupcake Vineyards, Livermore, California. Cupcake Vineyards grew their grapes in the finest wine regions on earth, like Marlboro, New Zealand, for their Sauvignon Blanc.
It's called Cupcake. Okay.
Cupcake Vineyards, serious wine, unserious name. Copyright 2024, Cupcake Vineyards, Livermore, California.
To the autocracy and idiocracy and caucus-tocracy altogether. You wrote this, Trump tried a seizure of power in 21.
It didn't work because he relied only on a violent mob. Military and FBI stayed loyal to the Constitution.
This time with the approval of the Republican Senate, Trump has installed anti-constitutional putschists at the FBI, DOD, and Pentagon. Since then, he's added the Joint Chiefs onto that list since you wrote that, I think.
What is your alarm level when it comes to this? It's getting pretty high because he has understood the elements of power in a way that he didn't in the first term. And I think he's also come to grips as he did in the first term that he's not a hugely popular president so a lot in term one was lying you think

so yeah i think so because otherwise in term one when he was doing all that he didn't bother

making sure that the military and the fbi were on board because he he had that big map of how

you know the 3 000 counties in the united states all the ones with tumbleweed voted for him

and all that stuff about the crowds that was i think a lot of the narcissist reassuring himself

that he is beloved and if you're beloved then you don't need the violent seizure of power

Thank you. about the crowds that was i think a lot of the narcissist reassuring himself that he is beloved and if you're beloved then you don't need the violent seizure of power his plan to corrupt the 2020 election came up really was done very much at the last minute he didn't start working on that on the first day in off like a different kind of you know putin started working immediately on destroying russian democracy trump postponed and postponed and did it at the end in very careless way i think he's you're now seeing a much more systematic effect with buy-in grudging or not from republicans to say what are the power ministries how do you secure them and the fbi is the most extreme i i mean it's incredible they confirmed cash patel dan bongino is now up and he mean, I've had run-ins with him, and I'm sure you have.

I mean, you wouldn't hire him to be deputy sheriff of Mayberry.

He's erratic.

You certainly wouldn't want him to be a school teacher.

Yeah.

You know, like you wouldn't want him to manage your store if you had many stores and you couldn't oversee him day to day because you wouldn't know if he'd start screaming at a customer.

If he'd smack a kid.

Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I've personally witnessed him lose his cool. And I won't tell too much about that.
My colleague Jonathan Shade is writing that story for The Atlantic. It'll be up shortly.
I personally witnessed it. He's not someone who should be in charge of men with guns.
And the other thing about the FBI, as compared to the military, is it's a relatively small bureaucracy. and the FBI director has a lot of power

to ruin people's lives

in warframe because And the other thing about the FBI, as compared to the military, is it's a relatively small bureaucracy. And the FBI director has a lot of power to ruin people's lives in the work frame.
Because as Patel is doing, when you say we're moving 500 agents to Huntsville, Alabama, what you're really giving is of the 500 agents, suppose 400 are in serious relationships or married. You're forcing a large proportion of the 500 to make some important career choices as to whose career will be followed.
And by sending people to Huntsville, you can put a lot of pressure on them to leave the agency altogether and create vacancies for you to hire more politically malleable people. And I think that's a big part of what Patel has in mind.
Yeah, among the politically malleable people, we have a couple stories from Cash on what he has in mind. He wants to live part-time in Las Vegas, apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal.

He lives in a home there with a timeshare scammer, rich guy.

I guess we don't know if he lives with him, but he lives in that man's home, according to the Nevada Independent.

And he has a plan for hiring MMA fighters into the FBI.

Let's hope that that's a romantic relationship, because if not, this was long ago, but there was a serious scandal in the District of Columbia when I first got here that the chief of police was living in this 3,000 square foot condo in a fancy building of the Navy Memorial that belonged to somebody like this. And they were not romantic partners.
It was just a bribe. And eventually the the whole thing came down and this chief of police had to resign.
But the head of the FBI should not be accepting free stuff from people. No, no, he shouldn't.
But I don't. That might end up being the least of our problems.
Then we have also Raisin Cain, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The way Trump tells the story, Cain is a three-star generalstar general, told him in 2018, I guess when he's still a general, that he loved Trump, he would kill for him, and slapped on a MAGA hat on his head.
There's kind of this cute Politico story as if it's 1998, where they're writing about how this might be a problem for him, because that is against the rules and regulations of the military, and maybe Tom Cotton or somebody will say something about this. I find that hard to imagine, but that's a little alarming.
You have to separate Kane in one way from some of these other people because he did have a very distinguished career and he does seem to have been unlike Cash Patel where, again, you wouldn't let him run a store. This guy, he was a very admired three-star general.
It's also true that being a three-star general is a very different job from being a four-star general. A four-star general is managing this giant global supply chain.
We assume that they are personally courageous because they were once one-stars, two-stars, and three-stars, but four-star work doesn't take a lot of personal courage and shouldn't. I mean, you're sitting in an office building, moving billions of units of stuff around the planet.
And it's a political job. What you want in a four-star is, you know, there's a reason that they never made Douglas MacArthur chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Brilliant and brave as he was, he was unstable. They made George Marshall because, you know, he was stable.
And those are important qualities. And the most important thing in that job is the ability to look at the president and say, no, sir, that would be illegal.
Sir, may I have your order in writing, and then I will give you my resignation in writing, sir. That doesn't seem likely from somebody that says that they loved Trump and would kill for him, but who knows? I would love to be surprised.
Cupcake vineyards grow their grapes in the finest wine regions on earth.

That's why they travel to Marlborough, New Zealand,

to craft their delicious, award-winning Cupcake Sauvignon Blanc.

Sorry, am I reading that right?

Cupcake vineyards?

They make a delicious wine from New Zealand and call it Cupcake?

Okay, then.

This is Cupcake Vineyards.

Serious wine, unserious name. Oh, well, at least they're aware.
Copyright 2024, Cupcake Vineyards, Livermore, California. Cupcake Vineyards grow their grapes in the finest wine regions on Earth, like Marlboro, New Zealand, for their Sauvignon Blanc.
It's called Cupcake. Okay.
Cupcake Vineyards. Serious wine, unserious name.
Copyright 2024. Cupcake Vineyards, Livermore, California.
Lastly, I wanted to talk about Ukraine. So Trump and Zelensky are meeting today, right about now, as we're taping.
So by the time this is out, the meeting will already have happened. This is reportedly about inking the deal on the rare earth minerals.
So I'm wondering what you're thinking about the state of play. I would encourage people to watch that clip where Trump is asked, did you call Zelensky a dictator? And he said, did I? I don't remember.
Did I say that? Because that story is being played as if he's senile. Yeah.
But when you watch his face, he's like daring the media to call him on it. Like he knows perfectly well what he did.
He is toying with somebody. He's enjoying power without responsibility.
He's enjoying the cruelty of what he said. And Trump, I think, is in some ways mentally deteriorated from the man he was 30 years ago, but he is not out of his mind.
And you need to take that seriously into account. The deal, it's so shocking and upsetting because now the Ukrainians have done a good job of rewriting this deal.
So it doesn't mean very much and it's not as predatory, but when this war is won, it will be the responsibility of the developed world to collectively find ways to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine. And that's going to be the the World Bank, I think, estimated the other day, more than a half trillion dollar project over many years.
But a half trillion dollar. And so some of the money will need to come from frozen Russian funds.
Some of it will come from the European Union. Much of it will, but some will have to come from the United States if we're to get the Europeans on board.
And the thing everyone needs to understand as they gird for this is this is going to be a fantastic investment, as Marshall Aid was, as the reconstruction of Eastern Europe was in the 1990s. You get the money back in richer customers, better trading partners, secure allies.
You get it back to the point where if you were to tell people how much the Marshall Plan cost, they wouldn't believe how little it was and what you got in return, this, secure world, where, by the way, Americans don't have to learn foreign languages because all their allies learn English instead. Thank you very much.
And we can use visa in Bangkok. It'll be worth it because wise countries have a generous long-term view of their economic interests, not a predatory view.
Trump thinks like a bandit out of the Middle middle ages you go in there seize the stash of coins and run out again and the idea that that real wealth is built by investment and long-term contracts and building rules of law and from products that don't exist yet but will in 30 years some ukrainian entrepreneur who's like in a cradle is going to invent and sell to the world like the whoever in Denmark invented Ozempic, you know, that's billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth created by some Danish chemist.

I'm just searching for a positive here.

One green shoot.

And so feel free to take that, take that away from me.

Is there anything to the idea that Trump is kind of tricking himself into having to do more for Ukraine than he otherwise would?

Because he wants to feel like he's getting this good deal.

I can this deal. I'm getting the rare earth.
We're going to invest there. Some of my cronies are going to make money and then they're going to give it back to me buying my coin or whatever.
And so that we'll have to, we'll have to, you know, defend them at some level to make sure we can get our rare earth.

The test of any Trump deal in Ukraine is, are there not just meaningful security guarantees, but foreign bodies? And whether that's couched in NATO terms or not, there's an old joke that was told about the Cold War, but it actually dates back even earlier. Before the 1914 war, the British and the French were doing defense planning.

The British general asked the French,, the British and the French were doing defense planning.

The British general asked the French, how many British soldiers do you need to defend northern France? And the answer was just one. We'll get them killed in the first five minutes.
And the same way, that was how many Americans did it take to defend Germany from the Soviets? Just one. Just one.
But we need to know you're there. So whatever the guarantee is, this idea of British and French troops in Ukraine, that is the test of success and backed by some American presence to say, you know, the Russians aren't there for territory, but whatever the ceasefire line is, whatever the line of control, whatever is free Ukraine, that part of Ukraine needs to be a place where investors can invest hundreds hundreds of billions of dollars in security and that means they need to know there is a tripwire there backed by britain backed by france backed by the united states if the russians ever try this stunt again um they're going to feel the wrath of the world not indirectly but directly yeah i'm sorry you said the russians aren't there for territory the russian attack on ukraine is not the trump fantasy that they want this is about taking control of some one fifth of Ukraine.
That's nonsense. They were there to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign entity.
So if Ukraine keeps sovereignty over 80% of its territory, that's a win for the West. If Russia can find ways to sabotage and corrupt Ukrainian sovereignty by, for example, saying that Russia insists that Ukraine have an election.
That is not a Russian decision to make when the Ukrainian, if they are able to write that into the schedule, then they have corrupted and weakened Ukrainian sovereignty. And that's a loss.
When you say, can I be optimistic? I think there are things you can say about the Trump administration that are going to be positive. I've always believed that there are gifts of Trump, that he forces, he's forcing a deepening commitment to democracy in the United States.
We are having to think about institutions in a way we never did. Why did Congress give all that power of trade to the president? People have been warning that that was a danger for a long time.
Now we can see, maybe we'll fix it. Should Europe have a more serious approach to its own security? Yes, yes.
And they're going to be forced to do that. Those are inadvertent gifts of Trump, but it can't be at the expense

of the brave people of Ukraine who have sacrificed so much for their freedom and who are winning this

war. All right.
Last thing, you wrote a cautionary tale for the Trump appointees,

was related to these negotiations and how Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz might learn something from the past. I'd love for you to just share a little bit of that cautionary tale with people.
Well, this is based on the sad career of someone who's not well remembered now, but Richard Nixon's Secretary of State, William P. Rogers.
So Rogers was a very distinguished lawyer, both in public life and private life. And Nixon enticed him to be Secretary of State with the promise that he would have large authority over the two most important issues of the day, the Vietnam War, winding it down and peace in the Middle East.
And then Nixon immediately created a secret channel via his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. And so while Rogers thought he was negotiating the end of the Vietnam War, Henry Kissinger really was negotiating the end of the Vietnam War.
And the war had not gone well. Kissinger didn't get very good terms.
And so the final agreement meant basically the death of South Vietnam and the abandonment of the American commitment. And guess who got to sign that agreement? Not Henry Kissinger, but William P.
Rogers. The guy who had had no power became the fall guy for the disaster.
And the piece said, this is going to be the fate of Rubio. What Rubio is doing with Lavrov is not the real negotiation.
The real negotiation is being done by, I don't know, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, Bayer, Elon Musk, some sinister shadowy figure. And the real negotiation is a pretty grim one.
Yeah. So if you're Rubio, who is, for whatever his weakness of personality, you know, who is a patriot and has had an amazing career and does stand for good and important principles or does articulate.
Yeah. It does articulate.
Good. Yeah.
There you go. Let's not overdo it.
Yeah. But does he want to be the man whose signature is on the cellar of Ukraine? Yeah.
I mean, he's already learned this lesson kind of in the micro where where Henry Kissinger, the role of Henry Kissinger was played by the 23-year-old Doge guy,

Big Balls, where, you know, Marco said, I, you know, as Secretary of State, we're going to

protect the good parts of USAID, PEPFAR, a couple of other things. And, you know, then when Doge

took over the payment systems, the little 23-year-old's like, actually, no, we're not going to pay for PEPFAR. We're going to override the Secretary of State on this.
Yeah. PEPFAR, you know, it originated in the Bush administration.
One of its leading advocates was someone who's now deceased, Michael Gerson, the head of the speech writing office. You may have known him.
Very devout and committed person. And Bush is entangled in the Iraq war.
It's not going well. And it's one of those moments where the president, who's always described as the most powerful man in the world, doesn't feel very powerful at all.
He can't make things happen. And a small cadre in the Bush administration said, let's just do something good.
Hundreds of the penny in the national budget, a figure that no one, it won't even show up. It's not even a rounding error because it's too small even for that.
But let's go save tens of millions of lives from the HIV epidemic in sub Saharan Africa. It will cost us nothing in relative terms.
It's a good thing. It's an exercise of personnal power.
And when George W. Bush goes to meet his maker and God says, what did you do with this power? He can say, well, this is the thing that's going to head the list this is what i did and here are 10 million souls beside me to testify that i made a difference like how can you begrudge that with the vast wealth and power of the united states it's nothing and yet it means so much well um i guess when you only care about oneself, I think is the answer to it.

And that's the situation with Trump.

Gerson, I was recently reminded of one of his,

he had many good turns of phrase,

but one recently,

when the king is a liar,

truth becomes treason.

Very good.

Michael Gerson.

He is missed.

David Frum, thank you for the time, as always.

And we'll be talking to you again soon.

Thank you.

All right, everybody else.

We will be back Monday for a Lundy Grah edition of the Bullword Podcast.

We'll see you all then.

Peace. Tra-la-la-la-la.

Tra-la-la-la-la-la-la.

Tra-la-la-la-la. Trouble, now, none of it

Trimpa, Trimpa, Trimpa, tallowala

Whoa! Thank you. Troll along, titty na, girl patina, troll along, girl patina, little mama wants a dollar to drive, titty na, day.
Thank you. guitar solo Tra-la-la-la

Tra-la-la-la

Tra-la-la-la

Tra-la-la-la-la

Tra-la-la-la Thank you. The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.
Cupcake vineyards grow their grapes in the finest wine regions on earth. That's why they travel to Marlborough, New Zealand to craft their delicious, award-winning Cupcake Sauvignon Blanc.
Sorry, am I reading that right? Cupcake Vineyards? They make a delicious wine from New Zealand and call it Cupcake? Okay, then. This is Cupcake Vineyards.
Serious wine, unserious name. Oh, well, at least they're aware.
Copyright 2024, Cupcake Vineyards, Livermore, California. Cupcake Vineyards grew their grapes in the finest wine regions on Earth, like Marlboro, New Zealand for their Sauvignon Blanc.
We'll be right back. Vineyards grow their grapes in the finest wine regions on earth.
That's why they travel to Marlboro, New Zealand,

to craft their delicious, award-winning Cupcake Sauvignon Blanc.

Sorry, am I reading that right?

Cupcake Vineyards?

They make a delicious wine from New Zealand and call it Cupcake?

Okay, then.

This is Cupcake Vineyards.

Serious wine, unserious name.

Oh, well, at least they're aware.

Copyright 2024, Cupcake Vineyards, Livermore, California.