David Frum: Sociopaths and Political Tribalism

Hello and welcome to the Bulldog Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
It is our first episode of 2025. And so I'm delighted to be here with Favor of the Pod, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently Trumpocalypse.
It's David Frum. How are you doing, David? All right.
Thank you. Although I think we have to take, since you're in New Orleans, a moment of horrified silence for this terrible incident.

More detail. apocalypse it's david from how you doing david all right thank you although i think we have to take since you're in new orleans a moment of of horrified silence for this terrible incident more details are known but just the carnage just looks horrifying and uh what a terrible thing for your city it is horrible and um it's a it's a sad way during the new year and we had 15 are dead here and many more injured.
So, so TBD on a final count there,

the perpetrator was driving a truck with an ISIS flag and turned onto Bourbon

street off of canal.

They're usually bollards there to protect against us,

but they were replacing them for the super bowl.

So I unclear whether that was bad luck or timing on behalf of the perpetrator.

Also there's the cyber truck attack in Vegas. There was a mass shooting in queens last night at a nightclub the cnn headline i i was just kind of making sure i had my facts right this morning looking through everything uh was new orleans attacked deadliest since main mass shooting yeah i don't even remember the main mass shooting which i think tells you a little something about american life So I'm just wondering if you have any other top line thoughts based on what we know now.
It's a violent society, more violent than pure nations. And there are reasons for that that Americans, I think, probably do not want to change, which is the country has just got weaker interior policing than its European peers do.
I remember being in Britain at the time of one of the Conservative Party conferences and going into the police control room that was monitoring the safety of the city and looking at the feeds from all the closed circuit TV cameras that fed into the police station. And they could say, you could pick out somebody that the camera wanted to follow and just follow him over the whole course of his itinerary for as long as you wanted to follow that person through one camera after another.

Americans don't want to live like that.

Americans are also very attached to guns.

That's not the murder weapon in New Orleans.

But it is a deep national commitment.

And to those – I grew up in Canada.

It seems unreasonable to me.

I understand why if you're a farmer trying to protect your chickens, you need a shotgun.

I understand why if you're a hunter, you need a rifle.

I don't understand why if you're an urbanite you need to carry a personal arsenal that would impress an afghan warlord but a lot of people seem to disagree with me on that and there has been no move if anything over the past 20 years gun laws have become more permissive not restrictive. I'm going to forget now the writer who said this, that it's a big, raw, rough, unpoliced country and violence is the price Americans pay for it.
But that seems to be, that's the verdict. And there are enough different kinds of violent people that whatever sociological or political conclusion you want to draw, you want to draw the rednecks are bad, Muslims are bad.
You want to draw school children are bad, school children are good. You want to draw any conclusion you want.
There is a crime, a mass crime, a horrifying crime that will support whatever theory you want to propound. Yeah, I think the darkest part of our soul that is revealed to me, I mean, the violence itself is obviously the greatest problem and it's horrific, but I think it's a window into the soul that when an event like this happens now and you get online, you get on your social media of choice or even unintentionally, you're on social media.
And what you see is not really, I mean, some information, you get misinformation and sometimes correct information, which is always going to be the case in a developing story. But you also just get a preponderance of people basically rooting for the perpetrator to be of a political tribe that they dislike.
And that seems to be a cross-partisan sickness. You see this in every incident.
You would expect that our leaders would be a little bit more restrained in this element of the sickness. We're not getting that from the incoming president.
He bleeded on his social media yesterday before we even knew who the suspect was. Criminals coming in are far worse than the criminals we have in our country.
We're aiming this on migrant crime. His son said that Biden's parting gift is migrant terror.
Josh Hawley, Senator Hawley, was tweeting demanding Mayorkas accountability. The suspect was born in Texas and is a U.S.
Army veteran, obviously a Muslim, and was carrying an ISIS flag. Had they waited a couple hours, there could have been another group that they could have waited to target.
But it's pretty telling that we have a president-elect popping off like a radio call-in person an hour after an attack such as this. If it's not too soon for this joke, it just also reveals this problem of Trump of constantly running America down.
What do you mean American criminals are not the greatest in the world? I think if there was a mandate for anything for Donald Trump, it was that he would be someone who would talk up. American criminals are the best, the biggest, the most violent.

You know, everyone else is at best second, a distant second.

You know, why are we importing Mexican criminals when our criminal?

Anyway, that's too simple.

I would say there's a social media effect.

And I was thinking about this with the murder of the UnitedHealthcare Insurance Executive.

I am sure that the proportion of the human race that is born sociopathic is just a biological constant. Go back to caveman times, it'll be the same percent as it is today.
And I'm sure when the great Chicago fire erupted in the 1870s, that there are people who came down to the, watch the scene and cheer for the fire, that there's always a certain predictable number of human beings. But what used to happen is they didn't have a way to get easily in touch with one another.
And although they enjoyed carnage, they were aware that their neighbors thought differently. Many of their neighbors thought differently.
And so they were a little more circumspect when something sad happened to pretend to feel it in the way that a normal person would feel it. The internet and social media especially have created these immediate artificial communities where everyone who would once have had the thought, I hate health insurance, I'm glad that assassin murdered her health, would have had that thought in silence somewhere or maybe shared it in a saloon with other disreputable people.
Now they can all find each other. And I think they activate, there must be people who are sort of like near sociopathic, who have a little bit more of a conscience or at least a little bit more sense of etiquette and the appropriate who would refrain and now and now you get these movements of exaltation and you know social media is mostly a good thing the internet is certainly a good thing but just we we paid a price for it one price is the return of measles and another price is the empowerment of the sociopaths.

There was a South Carolina Republican Party chair who was not that bright of a guy otherwise and was deeply conservative. I was interviewing him.
I was expecting it to be like a lot more hostile. This was maybe back in 2021.
He's Trumpy, so conservative in the Trumpy sense. And I was asking him about Lin Wood.

And I don't know if you remember Lin Wood.

He's one of, so conservative in the Trumpy sense. And I was asking him about Lin Wood.
And I don't know if you remember Lin Wood. He's one of the many characters of our time.
And he was one of the leading proponents of the most insane edge theories around the 2020 election that obviously at that time, the President Trump glommed onto. And this South Carolina party chair had, you know chair had tried to tell him to tamp it down, essentially, and had this huge uproar against him and the state.
I was like, did all these people exist? Like, what happened? How did this happen that everybody became so delusional to buy? And like Lin Wood's theories were literally like that Trump was still controlling the nukes after Biden was already president. And he's like, you know, he said these people always existed, but there were two of them at every county Republican meeting.
But the ones in Greenville did not know the ones in Columbia. And that is not the case anymore.
They've been able to meet and organize and multiply. And I do think that that is true across verticals.
There's one other thing that I do want to mention with regards to the New Orleans event that is going to overlap with our politics. One of the early press conferences, one of the FBI officials said that this is not a terrorist event.
It's a pretty dumb quote, I would say, and that was going around on right-wing social media. But added on top of that were a series of attacks.
Marsha Blackburn found some old posts where the New Orleans FBI officials were protecting the Taylor Swift concert and had some Swift bracelets on. She thought that was inappropriate.
It was a diversity hiring event. I've seen top Republican consultants say mass firings must take place at the FBI.
John Barrasso, who is ostensibly one of the more normal ones, was like, this shows we need to confirm. Cash Patel and the national security team immediately.
This rationale to take this horrible event and potentially some mistakes, of course, that people at the FBI aren't perfect from the FBI and turn it into, we need a hack for Donald Trump to be confirmed immediately is pretty alarming to me. I don't know what your thoughts are about that and cash generally.
That is a great point. So first, police do often have an impulse to minimize the severity of what's happened because they're trying to avoid public panic.
They're also oftentimes to, if there was a police lapse to minimize minimize the police lapse that enabled it. So the natural instinct of police at a press conference is always to say, it's a less big deal than it looks.
And that's bad. I mean, just as they shouldn't go, they shouldn't dial the dial up, they shouldn't dial the dial down, just the facts, ma'am, as they say in the old police drama.
Second, I think FBI people do sometimes operate with a very specialized definition of terrorism that is narrower than the one that would, I mean, for most of us, you see a man who has an ISIS flag, is killing people in a way calculated to spread terrorism. But the FBI may have some more technical definition they have in mind, and they're talking police talk rather than normal talk.
But when people say this makes the case for Kash Patel, it would be interesting to hear them spell out exactly what that means. One of the things that I think a lot of the MAGA people mean is if we had fewer black and women police officers.
The person at this press conference, by the way, was a black female police officer. I don't know if you knew that or not.
I'm sure that was intentional or not intentional. And as Trump said in a police event in his first term, and if the police go back to cracking the heads of suspects on car doors, if we could go back to policing the way it used to be, where the police knew which kind of people were to be protected and which were not, who was to be respected, who was not.
We knew what a police officer looked like. He should be, you know, ideally a Mormon, failing without a Catholic, but certainly not anything else.
And if that's the message, is that the offer from Kash Patel? Or if it's what we need is a much a police force, a national police force that answers directly to the head of the government, it perhaps it might have greater levels of secrecy, a secret police force that answers directly to the head of the government, and that goes after the enemies of the head of the government. Is that what you're spelling? Like, why exactly does this? I mean, because if it means what we need is more smart people in policing, that's the case against Kash Patel.
If it means people who, you know, follow the facts wherever they go and do their job and without fear or favor, that's the case against Kash Patel. He's been very clear.
What he is offering is a politicized police force to answer directly to the head of the government. That's the offer.
And with fewer minorities and women in it, that's the offer. So spell it out and explain how such a force would have done a better job my guess is they would have been so busy wiretapping people at washington 501c3s that they wouldn't have any time to follow terrorists or would be terrorists but who knows yeah i think that also part of it is that they want again this goes back to that sickness that i was talking about immediate social media.
Like, they want a FBI director that is engaging in that online political war immediately. Yeah.
Right? So, like, oh, we're going to leak that this person is a Muslim terrorist, not a good MAGA American. Right? Like, we want people to know that immediately.
That is going to be the first hit that we leak. If there's any suspicion anywhere that somebody that is trans, you know, committed a crime, you know, we're going to have a press conference on that to focus on that.
We're going to minimize the crimes focused by political allies. Like, I really think it's that I think there's this sense that I think it's an incorrect sense, but there's a sense that, you know, the FBI or federal officials like play up crimes, such as Januaryth, crimes such as Daniel Penny, whatever,

and not these other crimes by their perceived foes, racial or political, I think that's what it is. That would be obviously a pretty embarrassing thing to spell out.
So I don't

think that they would spell that out. As the Daniel Penny story reminds me,

and again, I'm going to say something Canadian here. In my mind, one of the great evils of

American life is that local prosecutors are elected. And so of course it is going to be true

Thank you. story reminds me and again i'm going to say something canadian here in my mind one of the great evils of american life is that local prosecutors are elected and so of course it is going to be true that in very liberal jurisdictions there's going to be a strong liberal bias toward certain kinds of prosecutions and in conservative ones the opposite because the district attorney is thinking i need to show some scouts some heads on pikes that of the kind that will please the voters who will matter to me, especially in my party primary.
My great danger is I lose the

Democratic or Republican primary to someone else who wants to be DA. So yeah, it's probably true

that in a different jurisdiction, Daniel Penny would never have been charged, but New York is

not going to change its jurisdiction. So the way you deal with this problem is to say, you know

what, the DA of New York, there should be a professional prosecutorial service

Thank you. But New York is not going to change its jurisdiction.
So the way you deal with this problem is to say, you know what, the DA of New York, there should be a professional prosecutorial service.

And if you do a good job in Des Moines, you get promoted to be New York.

That's like the premier job.

And people from all over the country get it.

And you have very little to do with New York politics.

And don't get me started on the election of judges.

Well, unfortunately, I think that we have more serious things in front of us in the election of judges to cover, though, again, I don't necessarily disagree with that critique. On cash, we've not spoken since the election, I guess, on this podcast.
And so I guess I'm wondering your assessment of the cabinet writ large and what things are the most alarming to you. We're coming up here in the next couple of weeks, we're going to have some of these confirmation hearings.
Is cash at the top of your list or others? Well, let me say a preliminary thing, which is I've been thinking very hard about how to cover, how to write about, how to do my work during this second Trump term. As I look back on the first Trump term, I think my overwhelming perception, assumption, was a feeling of wrongness.
That here was someone who had lost the popular vote, and not narrowly, but lost it decisively. Lost it by two and a half points, something like that.
And who had been helped into office by a foreign intelligence operation. So that made the Trump presidency a very sinister and dangerous thing.
But it also let the voters to a great deal off the hook. You could say this is something that was done to America, not done by America.
And I think that assumption influenced a lot of the way I wrote. And it made it easy to get drawn into a kind of atrocity outrage, atrocity outrage cycle.
Because can you believe what these interlopers have done next? so I think with Trump too there's just no getting around this the country's implicated you didn't do

it I didn't do it. But we play by rules where the majority gets to speak as if they were the country and for all functional purposes they are.
And the majority was not deep enough, but broad enough to houses of Congress that this is some kind of, if there is such a thing as a popular voice, this is it. And so that means you have to respond to that in a different way than Trump won.
And that means, for my case, it means sort of taking longer, being less rapid, being more deep, and not responding to everything, and being more discerning about which are the real emergencies. Because one more thing has happened.
But Trump won was kind of an outside hostile takeover of the republican party there were lots and lots of republicans who didn't like what trump was doing maybe they weren't very courageous about it even electeds maybe they weren't very courageous but if you knew them a little you could talk to them and you'd hear plenty of dissent what we now have is a friendly merger which is not to say that there isn't a difference between trump and the people around him and sort of the more institutional elements of the Republican Party, but for all intents and purposes, they're cooperating. Trump is, as we saw with the argument over H-1B, is a much more openly oligarchic figure than he was in the first term.
The populist economics are out the window, except for the tariffs, and they're not very populist. In this case, populist means is code for people don't understand how they work, not that they represent the popular will.
And the party is going to cover for him on more things. That there will be no more – Trump is not making any pretenses to separate himself from his businesses, not making any pretenses that there isn't going to be a massive looting of the public treasury by his friends, and not making any pretenses that the public policy of the United States not up for option see the tiktok bans see the h1 we who he who pays gets what he wants so now the cabinet i group them into four main types the first types are the more or less normal appointees these may be desirable they may be not desirable i don't think of marco rubio as a man of great principle, courage, and integrity, but it's not crazy that a senior Republican with an interest in foreign affairs would be Secretary of State.
You have to know a lot about Rubio to know that this may not be an ideal appointment, but on its face, yeah, seemingly okay. So, you have the more or less normal people.
Then you have, I think, the sad, weak, broken people, like the Pete Hegseths. I think deep down, Pete Hegseth is probably not an unpatriotic person, but he's got these dependencies, he's got these bad habits, and he's attractive to Trump because of his weakness and brokenness.
Plus, he's on TV, but there's something that Trump has this kind of predator sense for who is someone he can work through. There's a a danger to that oh yeah yeah they're dangerous for sure but they're different kind of they're dangers because they're tools they're not dangers because they're co-authors then you have the people who have really radical serious personality flaws and these may not even be super ideological people but they are people who are full of hatred and rage and they can work rage and they want to work with Trump.
And then you have the people who are actually outright committed to ideologies that are hostile to the existing institutions of the United States. That's where I put the Kash Patels and the Tulsi Gabbards.
So you have a different set of problems. It also depends a lot on how big and powerful the agency is that the person is appointed to head.
The primary mission of the uniformed military is not having to listen to what the civilians who think they're in charge of the Pentagon tell them to do. And what the Pentagon dreads above all things is an intelligent, well-informed, committed, hardworking civilian, a Bob McNamara, a Donald Rumsfeld.
They're just going to have lots of ideas that the military doesn't like, and they're going to have the clout to impose them on the military. But the military loves is an absentee landlord, and Pete Hegseth is going to be that.
So, they're just, the information won't flow. The Pentagon will win.
Any fight they have with Pete Hegseth, I'm guessing the Pentagon wins. But Director of National Intelligence, that's a tiny little bureaucracy.
And the director is going to be able to impose a lot of her will, including she can do a lot of harm just if she talks too much to the wrong kind of people. So that's why the Tulsi thing is what is more alarming to you? I would say Kash Patel is the most alarming because the FBI, although it's bigger than the Directorate of National Intelligence, it's still a relatively small agency compared to the Pentagon.
And it is full of people who are predisposed to like Trump. The FBI director has a lot of small benefits in his face.
He can move you. Your wife gets a promotion to another town.
The agent comes in and says, could I be moved to that town? The director can make that easier. The director can make that hard.
The director can bring people to Washington and send people out of Washington. Congratulations, Mr.
Constitutional Stickler. You're the new head of our Albuquerque Border Patrol office.
And we're taking Mr. Maga from Albuquerque and bringing him here to Washington and putting him or her in charge of investigating political opponents of Donald Trump.
So, the ability to remake the FBI without outright firing people is pretty large. Yeah, and a lot of investigations that can happen before checks.
That's, to me, why cash is the most alarming, right? I mean, like, even when Gates was going to be at DOJ, there was plenty of potential harm there. But like, pretty quickly, you get to, well, we need a grand jury, you know, like there are other checks into place, like the FBI has a lot of surveillance and investigation capabilities before, you know, where he gets Mr.
Maga from Albuquerque to start looking into people, you know, before anything, anybody else gets involved. And in American criminal law, it is the investigation that is the punishment.
Because the investigation ties up your life, investigation costs 10. I mean, if you are investigated, and no charges are ever brought, I mean, if you're acquitted, you might have some way to get some help with your legal fees from the government.
But if they investigate you and say, you know, you know, we spent three years, we cost we cost you two hundred thousand dollars you're right there was nothing to see here all along uh you're free to go you don't get the two hundred thousand dollars back and you don't get the hours of your life that were taken away from you back i want to go back to just tulsi for a second because it does it relates to the to the new orleans incident you know again more more stuff developing to me what we know so far about this the suspect is, is that this is a person that was like, his personal life was a disaster and, you know, gets divorced and, you know, is unable to see his family and then, you know, it gets, you know, radicalized. And so TBD on what kind of associates he did or did not have.
But my colleague at the blog, Will Selber and others have been talking about how the threats of radical Islamic terror is back on the rise. We have this very uncertain world, obviously, with what has happened in Syria.
We have Tulsi now headed into this very sensitive post. And at times, she's actively working against our interests.
And so I do just given the threat threat landscape around the world i wonder how you look at the tulsi nomination in that context yeah well she's also obviously cultish and gullible which is not something you want in a director of national intelligence and one of the challenges of these top jobs is the united states is at the center of everything. So it's surrounded by threats.

Radical Islamic terrorism, domestic and international, very, very serious danger to the United States, needs a lot of attention. You cannot respond to that by saying, and therefore, we pay no attention to the actions of Hindu nationalist groups, even though they have carried out assassinations on Canadian soil and plotted assassinations on British and American soil.
That's also a threat vector and maybe a less large and important one, but you have to, that every threat vector needs to be taken on its own merits from a point of view of a general idea of the American national interest, rather than because you're a partisan for some threats, because you've been radicalized in favor of them because of your dislike of others. So if you say Islamic terrorism is the only thing I'm going to be worried about, you're going to miss a lot of things.
And as you say, the pattern that you described of this seeming pattern of the New Orleans killer, there are a lot of people with that, a lot of men with that life situation who depending on the cultural influences upon them will choose one or another ideology to express the rage that they began by torturing cats when they were a child and ended up by oftentimes killing their wife or partner and harming their children before going on to the mass killing because they're dealing with, again, this constant seething volcano that erupts in a certain number of souls. And that was, it seems like the case in this instance, I said that he was planning to kill his family.
I don't know, it didn't work for some reason. And, and, you know, to your point, it's just the inverse of the MAGA complaint, right? Which was middle military intelligence services or Mark Milley or whatever, we're too focused on the, you know, white nationalist threats, the people that have been radicalized, you know, by far right ideologies, you know, at the expense of this.
And, you know, like the answer is just to flip that around, I guess. In government, no one ever sends you bonbons to thank you for the bad things that could have happened but didn't.
All the terrorist plots that are thwarted, you know, maybe there's a quiet medal bestowing ceremony for those, but the public doesn't know or care. There's something ironic when you say you're too focused on this thing that didn't happen.
It's in the Bible. Do you remember when Jonah is sent to preach to the city of Nineveh, and he doesn't want to? And when God confronts him, why didn't you want to do it? He said, because God, I know you're a very forgiving God.
And when I bring this message of doom to the people of Nineveh, they're going to pray and you're going to change your mind. And I, Jonah, will look like a moron because I told them you're going to smite them and you didn't smite them.
And what does that do for my prophetic reputation? This is what sounds like what I was like when I saw Matt Gaetz in Arizona two weeks ago. I said, you made me a bad pundit.
I thought that you were going to fight through this all. Anyway, to your point about stopping, we should give the feds some credit.
On the other hand, Virginia man had weapons cash, used Biden photo for target practice was the largest weapons uh weapons cash in history that was stopped that throw was stopped at the same time that this this threat in new orleans unfortunately was not you'd mentioned uh the uh the populism that is tariffs or the non-populism i wanted to share with you something that i feel like david from is particularly suited to respond to uh we've marked andessen, one of our new oligarchs, who a big venture capitalist, advisor to Trump, seed investor in the free press. He posted this.
This is a really remarkable chart of tariffs as a percent of total federal revenue. Essentially, what it shows is that from, you know, 1790 through the Civil War about, you know, much of the federal revenues came from tariffs over 80%.
From the Civil War through basically World War I, it was above 50%. Then it drops greatly after World War II, and then it continues to drop greatly.
Andreessen writes that this shows that the Second Industrial Revolution, which was perhaps the most fertile for technology development and deployment in human history, happened during this period where tariff revenue was above 50%. Donald Trump then retweeted his new friend Andreessen saying, the tariffs and the tariffs alone created this vast wealth for our country.
Then we switched over to income tax. We were never so wealthy as during this period.
Tariffs will pay off our debt. So what you see here is Andreessen taking an ignorant but not stupid point and converting it into a genuinely stupid point.
So Andreessen's making the point that industrial growth was faster when tariffs were high, which is wrong, but you have to know a little something about the subject to know that it's wrong. Trump converts that to saying that America in 2025 is less wealthy than it was in 1890, which is just obviously moronic.
If you showed the American living standard of 1890 to a typical lower middle class person in Taiwan, they would recoil with horror. I mean, there isn't a bathroom in the whole tenement building.
Not one. Obviously, isn't like one per child but but but not one for not one for house not one per floor just like zero in the whole tenement not a single bathroom not a single bathroom in the whole tenement so that's crazy i was let me address the end recent point because this is a point you hear from a lot of people who think they know something about tariffs which is is the United States appeared to industrialize very fast between the Civil War and the First World War.

The tariffs were generally high in the period from the Civil War to 1913.

Therefore, one must be causing the other.

So a lot of people actually are interested in this subject, which is a pretty recondite one,

but have looked, why is this not true? So the first thing was tariffs mattered a lot less to the United States in the 19th century because for two reasons. One is shipping costs were very high.
So the tariff actually did not do that much to keep out many, many goods because the shipping costs already did the job. You're not going to bring a lot of things that were low margin.
We're not going to move from England to the United States because they couldn't overcome the burden of the shipping costs. The second thing to remember is the reason tariffs are bad is because they disrupt the efficiency of having a large market.
Well, the United States in the 1890s was already the largest internal market in the world. So even though it could have been more efficient had it traded freely with Britain and Germany and other major industrial products, Belgium, Northern Italy, the United States was already the largest internal market.
So it was capturing many of the benefits. Finally, the United States appeared to industrialize factor because economists distinguish between what they call intensive growth that is squeezing more productivity out of the existing factors of production and extensive growth, which is just adding more factors of production.
The United States in the post-Civil War period was adding enormous numbers of people through immigration and developing huge new iron ore fields and other sources of natural resources.

So a lot of that growth was real, but it was extensive.

That is by adding more factors of production, not intensive by getting more value out of the factors you already have.

So it's just not true.

And what people forget when they look at, they see the industrialization between 1965 and 1913, they don't see repeated severe depression after severe depression, radical populist movements uprising because the tariffs enriched some and impoverished others. If you were a Southern cotton farmer in the post-Civil War period, the tariffs made you really poor because a tariff functions not just as a tax on import, but mathematically, it also taxes the export.
So if you're in an export-favored sector like cotton, you lose on the one hand, and then you lose again because you have to pay more for your clothes and your yarn and so on. So sorry for that last lecture.
But Andreessen is not a fool. He could read a book on this subject.
He really could. He could talk to some economists and know what they're talking about.
Trump is on this subject just a fool, so there's no helping him, but they're both wrong. And if you start putting the tariffs back in place now, you will do enormous damage.
Can I say one more thing? I know this is a long lecture. Yeah, please.
No, this is why I put it on the tee for you. Okay.
So tariffs represent a very small fraction of government revenue. That's true.
But where the tariffs are still in place, they impose very large costs on the people who pay them, who are typically the poorest people in society. I've written about this for The Atlantic and Ed Gresser at the Progressive Policy Institute has done some work.
If you are buying a pair of Prada loafers, the tariff is a negligible factor in the cost of the Prada loafers. There are still tariffs on shoes.
But if you're going to Walmart and buying three pairs of the cheapest sneakers for your three children, the tariff actually is

quite a substantial component of the price. And there is this weird pattern where tariffs on

women's clothing are higher than tariffs on men's clothing. Tariff on plastic plates is going to be

higher than the tariff on China plates, which is less than the tariff on fine China, that you can

just see there's a sex and class bias. Probably not that anyone put there on purpose, but

Thank you. is going to be higher than the tariff on China plates, which is less than the tariff on fine China, that you can just see there's a sex and class bias.
Probably not that anyone put there on purpose, but it's more that why does the tariff get taken off? Is it somebody has the clout to get it taken off and they didn't? But in general, in the life of the poor, tariffs are an important cost. And if you have more tariffs, they will be an even more important cost to the lives of the poor.
I don't even know if Andreessen's making a dumb point or if he is just buttering up Trump. You know, like the idea that he sends this is one thing, but that Trump then sees it and he's advising Trump.
To me, this seems like the kind of thing that I know would make Mr. Trump happy.
And I have this kind of contrarian point I can make. I'm going to make it and I'm going to show it to him.
I think Andreessen is for real because I can see this spreading in the silicon valley world where they're very upset and mad at china there has been this interest in sort of glib no one's going to read the real articles or the real history of tariff policies in the united states or take that they're too important to work they have they employ people who summarize to do the work for them who summarize what's in the work and tell them what they want to hear anyway. So I think Andreessen really does believe that higher tariffs led to industrialization.
I mean, he might get they're not efficient, but the idea that that's not true either, even his own more sort of upmarket version of the Trump point, it's not true either. And it's just uninformed to say such a thing.
The relation to this, to your point about the oligarchic element of this, that Trump can also use the tariffs to curry favor, takes us to, of course, Elon Musk, who has a lot of potential businesses that could be harmed by tariffs. I suspect that it will not be his that are targeted.
There was Lieutenant General Russell Honore wrote in the Times that Elon Musk is a national security risk a couple of days ago, wrote about Musk's various dealings with China. I'm interested in your take on that kind of relationship, like the Musk-China element of it and how it is going to overlap with our new oligarchy.
Well, you don't have to make it personal. So one of the great writers about trade was a man named Henry George, who wrote 150 years ago.
And he has a wonderful image. He said, to introduce a tariff bill into a Congress or Parliament is like throwing a single banana into a cage of monkeys.
Soon they were all screeching and stamping for it and demanding one of their own. And so this is just the universal nature of tariffs.
Tariffs make politics oligarchical because everybody is lobbying to get their tariff taken off. And this happened to the Biden administration too.
President Biden put on heavy tariffs on electric vehicles to keep out Chinese tariffs. So our allies and friends in Europe said, wait a moment, BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, they all make electric vehicles and we're helping in Ukraine.
Can you do something for us? Biden didn't want to create an exception. So what he did was he introduced or his administration introduced an exception that said, if your electric vehicle is leased, the tariff doesn't bite.
Now, high-end cars tend to be leased, the Jaguar, BMW, and Mercedes. So that was a little special favor.
And not one person in a thousand knows about it. Not one person in and probably a million knows about it but it's just a little special favor that was done for friends in britain and germany and those are the kinds of things that the tariff system invites whenever you have a law that is generally oppressive you get you unleash a scramble for favors and even a generally clean administrations like biden like biden's will they will lobby and they will be listen they will listen to strategic arguments like hey we're helping you in ukraine can you do something for our electric vehicle so it would trump will respond to more crude and direct incentives but it will be the same process and the answer is don't put on the blink and tariff we have a couple of uh david from special topics we have to get to the first is what the hell is happening in Canada.
We have Trump now talking about how Justice Trudeau is governor. Trudeau making jokes at the 51st state.
Trudeau went down to Mar-a-Lago to make an appeal to Trump directly. Trudeau has his own major domestic problems.
And there is a conservative kind of rising, it looks like, to challenge or potentially upend Trudeau in Canada. Everybody kind of uses the Trump of whatever shorthand, and he seems like a more traditional conservative to me.
So I'm curious your view on both sides here, what Trump is doing and what's happening up north. What's happening in Canada is a very familiar Canadian process, which is Canadian federal governments tend to last six months or 10 years.
It's very rare to get a four-year Canadian government. After year 10, the roof falls in.
And that process is happening to Justin Trudeau. Now, the roof falls in for different reasons.
Every time it's the 10, your 10 years are up. So his reasons are special to him, but he's generally falling into 10 years or his next, yeah, it will be 10 years next year, the roof falls in.
So what's ailing him are an inescapable everywhere problem, a profoundly deep problem, and then a special little spicy irritant. So the thing that is really crushing him is housing costs.
Canada is a much more urbanized society where the job markets are really the most, the biggest job markets are four cities, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa. Vancouver is oceans on one side, mountains on the other.
Building is hard. Toronto is flat, but it's surrounded by a green belt.
Plus, eventually, when you get big enough, the city chokes on its own traffic. So you can't extend in all directions because people don't care about how many miles they are from the center.
They care about how many minutes they are from the center. Same thing is happening in Ottawa and to a lesser degree, Calgary.
So where the jobs are, housing is not being billed in sufficient numbers. Plus, Trudeau dramatically expanded immigration to Canada.
Canada has had a successful immigration policy where the immigrants tend to be higher end, better educated, more affluent. But guess what? That means they're more effective competitors and bidders in the housing market.
So there's this national housing shortage where the jobs are, and it's making everybody crazy. Young people can't move out, and that's a big problem.
Underlying that is a deeper problem, which is that Canadian productivity growth has fallen far behind American productivity growth, and this gap has been widening over the Trudeau years. I won't take time to speculate about why that's so.
And then the last thing is the special extra spicy seasoning. Trudeau put himself at the heaven of the parade about these alleged mass graves found at Indian residential schools.
Lowered the fags for the longest period of public mourning in Canadian history. And the story was known then by experts that is now known by everybody to have been, if not a complete hoax, exaggerated to a point where they took things that were tuberculosis deaths that happened in 1895 and made them seem like mass murder that happened in 1985.
And Trudeau's role in publicizing this act of defamation, the Parliament of Canada unanimously adopted a resolution self-accusing Canada of genocide. I don't think that's why he's in trouble, but that's just me.
That's like the last sprinkling on the cake. 51st state.
Canada's 40 plus million people over 4,000 miles. Got to be at least five states.
I'll take it. Yeah.
And Chuck Schumer would take it. I just, I know what everything says.
You got a deal, Mr. Trump.
So what happens to the united states senate if uh if you admit five canadian states at least british columbia two democratic senators maybe the prairies would send one of each but alberta is and saskatchewan are kind of conservative but manitoba is very progressive uh ontario would you know is bush conservative country what are you gonna do with quebec i don't think trump likes the press two for spanish how is he gonna like it when french is press one for english press two i mean this could be the mega quebecois alliance that you've been waiting for david you know they give them their freedom and the little island amidst the american expansion there's an old canadian joke about what does quebec want which is an independent quebec within a united canada it's like so so you can now deal with this because they don't they want to be leaving but they don't want to actually leave i'm gonna butcher the guy's last name but i just i have to ask you uh what you what you think about it's pierre palèvre palèvre yeah who's i guess likely the next prime minister of you know yeah yeah i think as i said if the roof falls in whoever is the leader of the opposition steps into the job and uh this is a familiar pattern and often with very big majorities he did do some trumpy things during the pandemic he was in the vicinity of vaccine skepticism he was very anti-lockdown he has kept a broad church for some of the more radical elements of the Canadian right. But he himself is a highly intellectual and well-informed person with deep knowledge of policy.
He's been in politics his whole life, starting as an intern. He knows absolutely how the system works.
He's the single best debater in the House of Commons. That's why he became leader of the Conservative Party.
He would be very much in Camp Normie in American politics. Definitely a conservative person, more conservative than, say, Brian Mulroney, the last long-term conservative prime minister, maybe as conservative as Stephen Harper, but very much Team Normal, not Team Trump, and not going to be an ally on the Trump fortress America economic policy.
Canada The Liz breathes, depends on open trade and not just open trade with the United States, but open trade with the world. I also would be remiss if I did not ask you about the little kerfuffle with our friends over at Morning Joe.
For folks that don't recall before the holiday, you made a joke, which I thought was a quite funny joke, actually, about how if Pete Hegseth was notably drunk at Fox, you'd have to be, I think you said, you'd have to be very drunk indeed to be notably drunk to stand out at Fox, potentially referencing Judge Jeanine. I don't know who you might have been referencing there.
And I guess the producer implored you to kind of back off the joke. There was a public back and forth about this, a friendly one with Scarborough, you know, kind of about this kind of circles back to the question of how to handle, you know, the new Trump administration.
I'm wondering how you feel about all of that now, maybe not in particular, you know, about Joe Scarborough, but broadly about whether you are continuing to observe in the media, a culture of fear of people sort of editing themselves out of concern about the next Trump administration? I think the Scarborough people got whipsawed by two things, each of them very, very sympathetic. And I want to stress, I am completely sympathetic situation.
Trump watches the show. He doesn't read The Atlantic, but he watches the Scarborough show.
And everyone involved in that show is subject to a level of violent threat that most of us can hardly begin to imagine and at the same time but for reasons of dignity and self-respect but also for reasons of caution and prudence they don't want to go public with the degree of a violent threat that they're under so they're trapped between those they are under threat in a way that you know i'm not And they can't talk about it in a way that I can hardly begin to imagine.

And so that's what leads to the impulse to be careful. And again, I want to say I am not in any way criticizing them for this because, you know, I get occasional disobliging comments on social media.
I've had the FBI come to my house as my name appeared in a list with many, many other people. It was some, you know, a person was arrested, but a specific stalker coming after me personally, I've never experienced such a thing.
And many people on television do. And you shouldn't have to be, you know, a superhero to be a TV journalist.
I think they're called on to be quite brave, but what has happened since 2015 is different. But you can see media organizations are baffled at a time in the media industry is in crisis.
You can see, you know, The Atlantic has made a couple of hires from The Washington Post because, again, I don't want to make any specific comment about The Washington Post, but obviously the place is in turmoil. And we need all of these institutions.
And so, I think generally the lowercase d Democratic camp needs to have a policy of sympathizing with each other's troubles solidarity in the face of threat and not being quarrelsome do you think that just at the broadest level are you do you remain concerned that that some of these institutions are preemptively backing down in a way that is going to allow the incoming administration to get away with things they might not otherwise have. It's inevitable.
Look, how do journalists find out things? It's very rare that Deep Throat shows up under your window with the flower pots and gives you a government secret for free, if that story was even true in the first place. Most things you find out is because somebody in a position of power engaged in a quarrel with someone else in a position of power recruited the journalist as an ally in an internal squabble and the journalism is is not he's not trying to serve the public he's trying to get revenge on the person down the hall and so that's why the information comes out and in trump one i mean i think it's now pretty notorious that some of the people most close to trump bannon carol conway were um where these were the most important leakers and they were doing it in the course of bureaucratic warfare against other people in the trump administration so the journalists have to work those angles and they don't have the option of only talking to nice people because the nice people often don't know things that they need to know and so the new york times the washington post other kinds of like that, they're all based on a series of transactions, which means they can't be entirely a voice of conscience because their work would not be possible.
So, yes, it is not by having pure attitudes that you can protect the society against what has been and what is coming. This is the presidency, this is the executive branch of the government backed by House and Senate, backed by the courts.
What is going to happen is really bad, and they have the point of leverage and the bigger lever to make it bad for everybody. I want to end by asking you about you in this regard, actually.
When we last spoke, I believe it was the day before the election, and you were contemplating in a Kamala Harris administration in an alternate universe that you might be backing away from this kind of work altogether. It seems like that is not the case, given our current predicament.
But you kind of alluded to this at the top, even thinking about how you're going to work in a Trump administration. I'm just, I'm wondering how you're thinking about that now.
Yeah. Well, as you know, because we went through this literally together on the day it happened, I've had a very terrible event in my life, and it's forced me to rethink a lot of things.
A thought that kept me working through 2024 was I insisted to myself that Harris was going to win, and so I had this tape. If I could just run through the tape in November, I'd break the tape, and then I'd be free.
And then I would write about other things I was interested in, and I would not be dealing with all of this stuff. And it was a promise I made to myself.
And I was so, I really persuaded myself that it was going to happen, admittedly, because I wanted it so badly. Not because I cared so much about Harris.
I wanted out. I just wanted out.
And God didn't give me that. So now, like everybody, I have to think, what do I do? And given the problems in the media, given the weakness of many of our institutions, if you have the good fortune to be at an institution that is not so subject to pressures, if you personally have no more ambitions left, so there's nothing anybody can take away from you, then you've got some duties here.
And so I'm going to try to live up to this. Figuring out how to do it is going to be difficult, and finding the spiritual strength to do it will be difficult.

But in an attic somewhere, we've got an old World War I recruiting poster that belonged to a relative of my wife's and we framed it and put it upstairs. And it's a picture of the British Commander-in-Chief, General Kitchener in the First World War saying, basically it says in fancy language, are you going to wait to be drafted or are you going to volunteer to do the job you know you should do? So I guess I'm not going to wait to be drafted.
I want to give you, in the Catholics, we have the gesture of the pen of the cross on your forehead and your lips and your heart. I want to let you know you're okay.
You're free. You're free if you need to be free of this.
There are other people that can carry the mantle. You know, you did run through the tape.
Have you contemplated that? Contemplate it all the time. And I contemplate it all the time.
I don't know. I'm not here with answers.
I'm just, I'm here with some struggles. Yeah.
Okay. Well, we all have struggles.
I feel like, what the fuck else am I going to do? I've not gone through the tragedy that you have. And so I'm empathetic to you and to wanting to free you to find fulfilling stuff.
But here we are. To me, I think that there's some value in showing up every day and doing this and working through it with smart people such as you.
So I'm grateful that you're sticking with it. And we can't let the fuckers win.
Haven't the fuckers won already? They think they have. But remember, there's a line of T.S.
Eliot's, there's no such thing as a lost cause because there's no such thing as a one cause. There's a poem that Winston Churchill quoted during World War II, and people remember little snatches of it.
And I recommend it to people if they are online. It's called Say Not the Struggle Not Availeth.
And it's a dialogue by someone who's written to somebody in despair. And the poet is saying to him, you think that you failed and you're losing.
And what you don't see is it's just immediately in front of you that you're losing. And that while you can't make any progress against the waves, behind you, the currents are running.

And that's the poem from which ends, and this is the thing Churchill quoted during World War II, and not through eastern windows only when daylight comes in the light. In front, the sun rises slowly, but westward look, the land is bright.
May I be so. We'll leave it there.

I appreciate you very much, David Frum. Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Borg Podcast.
Peace. Bye-bye.
We will stand on the banks of the river

Where we'll need to part

No more Thank you. We will walk through the streets of that city Where our love once have gone on before

We will stand on the banks of the river Oh, oh, oh to part no more. Oh, we will walk right through the streets

Of that city

Where our love ones had gone on before. We will stand on the banks of the river where we'll need to find no hope hope Guide me over the great Jehovah Pilgrims through this married land I am weak, but thou art mighty.

Hold me without thou pain.

The Board Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.