David Frum: Complete Chaos

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Speaker 11 Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 11 I'm delighted as always to be here with my Fave, Staff Rider at the Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently, Trumpocalypse and Trumpocracy. I wonder what you think about Donald Trump.

Speaker 11 It's David Fromm.

Speaker 13 Hey there.

Speaker 11 Canadian David Frum.

Speaker 11 It's been a rough little bit for Canadians here. You know, Drake is losing his rap battle with Kendrick.
You know, basketball son Jamal Murray choked in game seven of the NBA playoffs. I don't know.

Speaker 11 How's the vibe up in Canada these days? I know you're not there right now, but you hear from Canadians.

Speaker 13 So I am only hazily aware of the world of sports and... popular entertainment.
In my high school career, I did quiz shows. And so long as the topics were like name obscure English monarchs,

Speaker 13 and then they would switch to name some things that are on TV, and it would be like, I'd be zero for eight.

Speaker 11 That sounds very, we're bringing a nice balance. Your job is to reference a couple of obscure monarchs over the course of the podcast, and I'll slip in some Drake mentions.

Speaker 11 When we were last together, you did say that one way you were paying tribute to Miranda was by unleashing opinions and thoughts you might have kept to yourself before.

Speaker 11 And I've been monitoring your commentary, and I will say you're living up to that in spades. And so, I hope, I hope we can do that here today.

Speaker 11 There's a little Twitter disagreement, maybe a disagreement. We're about to find out.

Speaker 11 And if you'll indulge me, I just need to reread for listeners listeners who do not suffer Twitter a paragraph from the Washington Post that I sent out. This is the Washington Post yesterday.

Speaker 11 Samantha Rosnowski, a former Trump supporter who recoiled from Trump's pivotal role in overturning Roe, was surprised to learn that Trump can continue running for president if he's convicted or sentenced to jail.

Speaker 11 That even if he was convicted, she didn't think that would change her calculus in November, saying that Trump is a man. And it was expected he would behave in tawdry ways.

Speaker 11 Her daughter, 18-year-old Lacey, was standing beside her.

Speaker 11 She hadn't seen anything about the trial, but she did remember hearing the false claim on TikTok circulated in an apparently satirical video that some took at face value that Biden was the first president to fail a random test of his ability to recite the ABCs.

Speaker 11 That left me in a pretty dark place about the state of affairs.

Speaker 11 You replied, quoting Edmund Burke, the individual is foolish, the species is wise. So try to uplift me after reading that anecdote.

Speaker 13 I'll give you one more quote to think about. Did you ever see the British series, The Thick of It?

Speaker 11 I did. I did.
Okay.

Speaker 13 Peter Mannion, who's not the cabinet minister, who's like the one more or less positive character in the series. He's this overweight, rumpled, Conservative Party cabinet minister.

Speaker 13 And one of the spin doctors says something to him, and he replies, well, that's just the public, and they're fucking horrible. And the spin doctor says, You can't say the public are fucking horrible.

Speaker 13 And Mannion replies, Yes, I can. I've met them.

Speaker 11 There you go. And so, how do you then take that to the David From view, which we did discuss last time? The David From view, as I recall, is that we have a coming Biden clear victory.

Speaker 11 Have you been shaken in that after listening to the public?

Speaker 13 I have not. And maybe this is more an article of faith than of scientific observation.

Speaker 13 But I mean, it's certainly true that the whole theory of democracy, the reply to democracy is always, okay, sit down with the average voter and listen to what's in their heads. And it'll startle you.

Speaker 13 You know, I remember reading years and years ago a selection from sermons of the Revolutionary War era.

Speaker 13 So we all know Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death and awe-inspiring ideals of the American Revolution, but it looks like most of the people who did the fighting in the American Revolution thought that King George III had a plan to turn America Catholic, and that they were fighting to stop him from turning America Catholic.

Speaker 11 That's a noble call.

Speaker 13 And voter ignorance is always, it's just a fact because that's the way we are constituted as individual human beings.

Speaker 13 And even those of us who think of ourselves as well-informed are still very ignorant about many of the things that it would be good for us to know. If you believe that that is,

Speaker 13 you're not going to have any kind of faith in democracy because it's always true. And yet somehow democratic systems do blunder their way to better outcomes.
And I find it hard to believe that

Speaker 13 if people didn't choose McClellan over Lincoln in the bloodshed of the Civil War, when there were a lot of good reasons to be tired of Lincoln.

Speaker 13 If they followed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not Charles Lindbergh, into World War II, which is a pretty scary and unappetizing project, the idea that they'd fail now with this easy test, I refuse to believe it.

Speaker 13 I don't think they'll fail this test.

Speaker 11 What do you think the impact would be?

Speaker 11 Our friends at National Review had a column this week about how, you know, us self-indulgent, self-important Democrats and never Trumpers, if indeed you were wrong, David Fromm, and Donald Trump does win, will blame our fellow Americans for this instead of our own folly.

Speaker 11 And my response to that was kind of like, yeah, I think I probably will.

Speaker 11 I don't know. I do think I would be pretty disappointed in my fellow Americans if we elected our stupidest member for the second time.
I don't know. So are you prepared for that to be shaken?

Speaker 13 I think if Donald Trump does return to office one way or another, we are going to be plunged instantly into a crisis of such severity that the question of whose fault it is is going to have to wait for the history books because the emergency will be instant and overwhelming.

Speaker 13 And the emergency I see, I'd worry less about the Project 2025 things that, you know, the Donald Trump having a rational plan to consolidate power.

Speaker 13 I worry about that a lot in the Mexican election that is coming next week, where we may see the demise of Mexican democracy or what remains of Mexican democracy.

Speaker 13 What's going to happen in the United States, in my opinion, if Donald Trump is instant, massive instability and crisis. His first priority is going to be to escape his legal troubles.

Speaker 13 Now, his legal troubles are of such variety, federal, state criminal charges, civil charges, trials at varying stages of process. He's not going to have a one-stop answer.

Speaker 13 He's going to have to do a lot of different things to close down the American legal system.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 13 it's not going to be like you say the Harry Potter cheat code, and everyone says, oh, okay, sure, you can fire everybody in the Department of Justice. You can terminate prosecutors.

Speaker 13 You can pardon yourself. If Donald Trump does return, he's going to return with at most a plurality of the vote and quite likely a minority of the vote.

Speaker 13 And he will do so in the face of a Congress that is way less aligned with him than the Congress of 2017. He may only win one House of Congress.
He may win neither.

Speaker 13 If he does win both, his margins will be tiny.

Speaker 13 And there is going to be massive protest, massive pushback, and we're going to be plunged into a world where everything is going to go into the streets because the institutions, the institution that is our final arbiter, the Supreme Court, has completely discredited itself.

Speaker 13 When Donald Trump says, may I pardon myself, and a 5-4 majority of Alito, including Alito and Thomas, say, yes, you may, people aren't going to salute that the way they saluted other unpopular decisions in the past.

Speaker 13 They're going to say, this whole thing is crooked.

Speaker 13 And then the streets of America are going to look like the streets of Tel Aviv a year ago, with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe more people in the streets saying the president is breaking the law.

Speaker 13 The president is a criminal. The president can't pardon himself.
And there'll be impeachment crises in Congress. It's going to be upheaval after upheaval.
You're going to have resignations.

Speaker 13 Every general, when Trump orders the National Guard to suppress the protests in the streets, every colonel and general officer is going to be consulting the counsel to the army. Is this a legal order?

Speaker 13 I mean, I can go to prison for following an illegal order. Is this a legal order?

Speaker 11 No, but the president will be pardoning, will be offering pardons.

Speaker 13 Yeah, but is that a legal order? Because one of the themes of the Trump years is that while Trump himself got away with a lot of stuff, the people who worked for him, they went to prison.

Speaker 13 Navarro, Bannon's on his way back, so many others. And you say, do I want to be one of those January 6th morons who takes the fall for this guy?

Speaker 13 And the people believe in him, maybe, but you're a colonel in the National Guard. Are you quite sure you want? And so some colonels will, and other colonels won't.
It's going to be chaos.

Speaker 13 And so when people are blithe about this, I don't think we're on the path to consolidated power, maybe after three or four years of power struggle.

Speaker 13 But Trump does not have the kind of mass following that would enable him to do that. He doesn't have the hold on institutions that would enable him to do it and the lack of a mass following.

Speaker 13 And meanwhile, he's got a lot of very immediate problems where he's going to have to do things that are going to look pretty unlawful to lots and lots of people.

Speaker 11 You left me a lot to follow up with there. And so I just want to put a pin in a couple of things.
Can we just do a three-minute aside on the Mexican election? Because you piqued my interest.

Speaker 11 And I've been following it with a Twitter level of knowledge. I've been intrigued by leading candidates, woman and Jewish, apparently.
And so a lot of what you referenced there, I'm not familiar with.

Speaker 11 So Mick, can you just give us a quick briefing on what's happening in the coming Mexican election?

Speaker 13 I've written a lot about this for the Atlantic, but one of the problems of modern journalism is your editors know exactly how much readership each of your articles has got and where in the article people stop reading.

Speaker 13 And so, while they're always, okay, David wants to write about Mexico some more. I guess we have to let him.

Speaker 11 Here's the good news: I don't have an editor on this podcast, so we can do seven minutes on Mexico right now if you want to. We can come back to the Trump Occaleps after.

Speaker 13 So, Chris Hayes, who may be a friend of yours, had a tweet this morning which he said, How exciting! Mexico is about to have a Jewish woman president whose ancestors left Hitler's Germany.

Speaker 13 And I think, ah, I see you're new here.

Speaker 11 Yeah, it's like from an identity politics lens. You know, it's like, oh, that seems intriguing.

Speaker 13 So I interviewed Claudia Scheinbaum, who was then mayor of Mexico City last January. And her English is okay.
And we had to translate it to Mexico.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 I don't want to say she's a Stalinist because

Speaker 11 that's not a great way to start a description of somebody after I've interviewed this woman and I'm not quite ready to say she's a Stalinist, but that's not a great intro.

Speaker 13 Continue. But she is a very doctrinaire leftist who was chosen to head her party because of her political weakness.

Speaker 13 So the outgoing president, Andres Manuel Lopez-Oberdor, is a reactionary authoritarian of a kind of leftist flavor. That is, he says he's hostile to the rich, he's hostile to the United States.

Speaker 13 And so the fact that he is the same as Victor Orban doesn't get seen because he does enough left-coated things to appeal to American progressives that they interpret him as different from Victor Orban, but he's not.

Speaker 13 And what he's done to the institutions of the Mexican state, and Mexican democracy is quite young and quite fragile, but they've built some impressive and important institutions, including one of the world's most honest election systems.

Speaker 13 So that's what they had. And that was built in the 1990s.

Speaker 13 And that has been his number one target, the integrity of elections, and destroying the independence of the election system, destroying the independence of the courts. People get murdered there.

Speaker 13 I mean, not by him, but the murders have impunity. Politicians are murdered.
Judges are murdered. Journalists are murdered.

Speaker 13 And not just in the remote countryside, not just obscure people, but I interviewed a journalist who was the anchor for one of the top three Mexican, and there had been an attempt on his life in one of the fanciest neighborhoods in Mexico City.

Speaker 13 Immediately after the president denounced him at a press conference.

Speaker 13 Now, again, the president didn't send the gunman, but the way Mexico works is it's understood there are people under protection and there are people not under protection.

Speaker 13 When you, as an American tourist, travel around Mexico City, everyone with a gun understands you're a person under protection. If they kill you, it will be a real problem.

Speaker 13 So unless you're strongly motivated to do it and have powerful protection, don't do it.

Speaker 13 But if there's a journalist in a small town who takes a photograph of the daughter of the narco trafficker at her wedding day, he can be murdered with impunity and no one will do it.

Speaker 13 The state won't care. And so that person does get murdered.
So Lopez Oprador has been breaking every rule except one, the ban on re-election. Six-year term, no re-election.

Speaker 13 That is a central creed of Mexican life, and even he didn't dare do it.

Speaker 13 So what he instead went to looking is, how do I find a person with the least backing in my political movement, a person who will be entirely dependent on me?

Speaker 13 Well, if she's a woman, that makes her weaker. If she's Jewish and the child of immigrants, that makes her weaker.
If she's got a communist background, that makes her weaker.

Speaker 13 So I'm going to choose her over other people who had more popular following as my hand-picked successor.

Speaker 11 It's like a Medvedev situation.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and then I'm going to put another gun at her head, which is I'm going to institute, although there's been a six-year term, a three-year recall.

Speaker 13 where the head of the party can organize a recall campaign against the next president if she displeases him in any way. And oh, by the way,

Speaker 13 I have completely debauched and corrupted the military by doing things like putting huge engineering projects in their hands, putting them in charge of the customs.

Speaker 13 I've got a lot of rich generals who are beholden to me and know that I know their secrets. And I'm going to put her in charge of this political system.

Speaker 13 And by the way, in an election which follows Hungarian tradition and those of other backsliding democracies, this election will be free in the sense that if you go to the polls and cast a ballot, your ballot will be counted.

Speaker 13 You will be allowed to do that and your ballot will be counted. But it won't be fair because the media are completely distorted.

Speaker 13 But even more important, Mexico is an incredibly violent country right now.

Speaker 13 Mexico has a population of about one-third the United States, and it has, at least according to the official count, about half again as many homicides.

Speaker 13 So 30,000 homicides in a country of 130 million versus about 20,000 homicides in a country of 330 million. And of those homicides, 95% are never solved.

Speaker 13 So violence breaks out at polling places in areas where the ruling party is weak, and it doesn't break out in polling places where the ruling party is strong.

Speaker 13 And so people come to the polling places where the ruling party is strong and are frightened away in places where it's weak.

Speaker 13 And so the risk is not only that the party of Lopez Obador is going to win the presidency, that looks pretty probable, and they could probably do that on the merits.

Speaker 13 They do have an important social base, unlike other authoritarians, but they're going to win enough of a congressional and state mandate that they will have the power to alter the constitution, which will mean an end to what remains of the independence of the courts, an end to what remains of the nonpartisan electoral commission, and a return to the bad old days of the Mexican past when it was essentially a party dictatorship.

Speaker 11 And the downstream impacts on us?

Speaker 13 One, you'll get more migrants because of the insecurity. But the other downstream,

Speaker 13 this is where it reflects not so well in the United States, is he's sort of a fake leftist. He rails against the rich.

Speaker 13 He rails against the whites, although three of his grandparents are immigrants from Spain.

Speaker 13 But at the same time, he is willing to do things to stop the flow of people that are much more violent and ruthless than American. And Trump knew that he was doing it, and Biden knows that.

Speaker 13 And everyone sort of understands, if you will keep the Central Americans at bay using whatever methods our press won't report on,

Speaker 13 we will then overlook as you destroy what remains of Mexican democracy. So you'll notice in 2024, the flow of people has been substantially reduced from what it was in 2023.

Speaker 11 We're down like 20% or something, 25%.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I had a meeting with, I won't name him because it was off, but with a very senior administration person and foreign policy and asked, all my Mexican friends believe there's a deal between the Biden administration and Lopez Obrador.

Speaker 13 You stop the flow of immigration for my election and I overlook how you install your handpicks. And he just turned on me this look of hurt.

Speaker 13 Who says, who would say these terrible things about, how could anyone believe, us, us who are defending democracy here in the United States? How could you even think these?

Speaker 13 Let me get my person on this, on it right away, and he'll reply to you. People in Mexico do believe that there's a deal between Biden and Lopez Oprador.
You turn down the immigration for my election.

Speaker 13 I don't ask too many questions about how you get Claudia Scheinbaum elected.

Speaker 11 The identity stuff is interesting. The other thing I saw in this was Vincente Fox just sending out just straight anti-Semitic tweets against her, right?

Speaker 11 Like trying to promote the other side, which I guess is the thing to do.

Speaker 13 Two things about that to make it a little bit more complicated.

Speaker 13 First, Vicente Fox does seem to have adopted a hobby in his retirement years, and the hobby is drinking, starting at about 10 in the morning.

Speaker 13 It's a common hobby among ex-statesmen. I don't recommend it.
But the second thing is what he was reacting to was a very specific thing she did, which complicated.

Speaker 13 So although she is halakhically Jewish, she campaigns wearing a rosary. The thing that prompted his anti-Semitic, it was more xenophobic.
He said, she's Mexican. I thought she was Bulgarian.

Speaker 13 Her father's family are from the Baltic Republics. Her mother's family are from Bulgaria.

Speaker 13 But she campaigns wearing this honking big cross, which which is A, funny because she's halakhically Jewish, and B funny because, as I say, I don't think she's technically a Stalinist, but she does come from that kind of very doctrinaire, hard left, opiate of the masses view.

Speaker 13 Opiate of the masses? Doctor, give me a prescription for that.

Speaker 11 We have a real cruel intentions run off if she has cocaine inside the cross that she's wearing.

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Speaker 11 Okay, back to Donald Trump. That was a very educational aside.
I appreciate it. I'm glad that, thank you for doing that.

Speaker 11 The other thing that you were talking about, though, about the Trump instability, which I think you're right about, which is there is this, isn't it, a misapplied panic about which things to be panicking about, which is kind of, I guess, doesn't really matter that much.

Speaker 11 You know, if the predictions are correct about what to be worried about, probably not.

Speaker 11 But I think that people do miss, and it really relates to the Project 2025 in some ways, which is the element of the staffing of this next administration.

Speaker 11 And I was listening to Trump with Tim Poole, this like far-left, you know, horseshoe podcaster yesterday.

Speaker 11 And he floated for Attorney General, Devin Nunes, the guy in charge of his fake social media scam, or Cash Patel, one of the people who was organizing the coup, who has no qualifications.

Speaker 11 Now, neither of these people could be confirmed by the Senate, of course.

Speaker 11 But is Trump going to care about that? You know, I think that as you look ahead to the next thing, to me, that is the first. crises that would happen if Trump would get in.

Speaker 13 Let's play out those cards with a little bit more detail. I wrote in 2017 for The Atlantic, a piece, warning that Trump was aspiring to build an autocratic form of government at the United States.

Speaker 13 And this was at a time when the prevailing view was you're hysterical. He's going to be erratic and lazy and ignorant and maybe corrupt.

Speaker 13 I wrote then, I don't think the normal people are going to be able to restrain him. The institutions are not as strong as Americans think.
They seem strong because no one's ever tested them.

Speaker 13 because everyone has automatically complied with them, at least since Watergate and really, you know, through the modern history of the United States, there's been a lot of voluntary compliance.

Speaker 13 It didn't occur to anybody that you could even do these things. Nobody even wanted to, not even Richard Nixon, really.
And when they were tested, they proved weak.

Speaker 13 But what the second thing we're going to discover is the instrumentalities of power that Trump wants to use are also weak. So let's say he sends forward Cash Patel as an attorney general.

Speaker 13 So the Republicans may have, at best, 51 senators. I don't know about at best.

Speaker 13 How many at best?

Speaker 11 Well, they get West Virginia, that's 50. They get Ohio and Montana, 52.
You win one of these other states, 50, Nevada, maybe 53. I think 53 is a realistic number.

Speaker 13 Okay, so

Speaker 13 let's say they have 53, and let's say

Speaker 13 they have a slim, slim, slim margin in the House of Representatives. Now you try to cram through a January 6th conspirator as Attorney General.
Is there not going to be a filibuster?

Speaker 13 Is there not going to be chaos? Is that not going to be issue number one? Is there not going to be protracted debate?

Speaker 13 And as Trump discovered with his Federal Reserve appointees in his first administration, people get nervous and defect.

Speaker 13 But even supposing they hold fast, and it still is going to take months and months and months to cram this project through.

Speaker 13 In the meantime, Trump's legal difficulties don't give him a lot of margin for time. He may be convicted.
The trials are going to be beginning. They may be completed.

Speaker 13 So he's going to have to do his sabotage with non-confirmed people. Are there not resignations? Does the system work?

Speaker 13 And by the way, what does the governor of New York and the governor of Georgia say when the federal government starts saying, and by the way, we want you to pardon Trump for his state criminal convictions.

Speaker 13 The system just spins because, I mean, there are levers, but installing the levers is going to be hard.

Speaker 13 And then pulling the levers, they may not be connected to the mechanisms that Trump needs them to be connected to, which is not to say it won't be a very, very bad situation.

Speaker 13 But this is not going to look like a smooth consolidation of autocratic power. It is going to look like just months of chaos and protest and mess.

Speaker 13 I mean, it's good news for all of America's enemies because the government will not be able to do anything. Maybe passports will continue to be issued.

Speaker 13 Air traffic control, I assume, continues to work. But yeah, Ukraine will be sold out.
Israel will find itself alone and all kinds of other allies.

Speaker 13 And Mexican democracy, by the way, this will be a green light to completely destroy Mexican democracy with implications for Latin America, the region that really should be America's top geopolitical concern and somehow never is because we managed to keep it just stable enough that we don't have to think about what's going on in our neighbors' houses.

Speaker 11 Aaron Powell, Jr.: One other thing that you mentioned in the lengthy discussion about the potential instabilities and the concerns is the Supreme Court credibility.

Speaker 11 We had a new story from the Times this morning where the Alito neighbor is actually interviewed.

Speaker 11 You'll be surprised to find out, I know I was, that the story about turning the flag upside down at the home because Martha and Alito was called the C-word was not actually accurate.

Speaker 11 And that the hostile exchange with the neighbor, which included a police call, apparently, happened a month later. So curious your thoughts about that.

Speaker 11 And just maybe to expand on on your aside from earlier about the questions of Supreme Court legitimacy.

Speaker 13 Well, I have a speculative thought and a hard thought. When I began to hear this story, I had somewhat more sympathy for the Alito family than I do now because

Speaker 13 it felt to me like alcohol was a factor in a lot of these activities.

Speaker 11 A little armchair psychology to determine who's a drunkard or not. We've already got Vincente Fox, Mrs.

Speaker 15 Alito.

Speaker 11 Anybody else you want to throw out there as a possible retiree?

Speaker 13 I think it's a popular pastime.

Speaker 13 And I think it affects people. And in ways, if you're that it's very difficult for American media institutions to report on because it's always speculative and they don't like to do it.

Speaker 13 And they have properly strong boundaries about people's private lives.

Speaker 13 But the way that these disputes ran out of control, but I think we're now in a situation where it looks like a Justice of the Supreme Court, confronted with an embarrassing but not overwhelmingly disabling problem, responded to it by telling lies.

Speaker 13 As he has responded to other embarrassing but not crushingly disabled, like his salmon trips and so on.

Speaker 13 None of these are good. They're not the end of the world.

Speaker 11 Error in judgment,

Speaker 11 I'll stop going on free Harlan Crow salmon fishing trips. I'll pay for my own vacations now.

Speaker 13 You make a good point here. You make a good point here.
Or even just, you know, yes, I did it. I'm not ashamed.

Speaker 13 You know, other judges have done other things, and I believed I was in the right, and I'm going to continue to do it. But the error in judgment is much less important than lying.

Speaker 11 And smearing people while you lie also. Smearing the media is very, yeah.

Speaker 13 Like the idea, you're not chosen here because of your commanding executive ability. You're not chosen because of your, the way the people in the executive branch are.

Speaker 13 You're not chosen because of your people-pleasing ways, like the legislators. You're chosen because of your integrity.

Speaker 13 And whatever you may think, most of you aren't that much smarter than any other 2,000 people who could do this job as well or better than you.

Speaker 13 Maybe 5,000 people could do the job as well or better than you. You're chosen because you're presumed to to be people of the highest integrity.

Speaker 13 And if you don't have that, why should anybody listen to you? So when you, Samuel Alito,

Speaker 13 then say, I've been searching the annals of the Convention of 1787, and I have decided that contrary to what most people think, they did intend to give the president the power to pardon himself, we need to know that you're on the level.

Speaker 13 And if we can't trust that you're on the level, then why should your opinion about 1787 count more than the actual historians who've studied it and know it 100 times better than you do.

Speaker 13 I wrote this big article for The Atlantic about the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. I won't detain you on the article, but there's an ant.

Speaker 11 Honestly, since we already did Mexico, I do not think we can do Woodrow Wilson, but I did, I had prepped to do a whole Woodrow Wilson segment with you the last time we were on.

Speaker 11 We just, it was hard to fit in. So maybe in 2025 we can do Woodrow Wilson.

Speaker 13 Here's the point of the story. So Woodrow Wilson is a demon figure on the American right for a lot of reasons.

Speaker 13 In the opinion in which the Supreme Court struck down EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, there is a concurrence by Neil Gorsuch, this lengthy personal diatribe against Woodrow Wilson.

Speaker 13 From my article, I read the footnote, and I then began to reverse engineer how was this thing written.

Speaker 13 And what you see is whoever wrote this footnote, whether Gorsuch himself or the clerk, went to Glenn Beck's book and took a bunch of quotes from Glenn Beck's book and crammed them in and presented them.

Speaker 13 I mean, this is the kind of garbage history. they do at the Supreme Court.
If you then put the quotes back into context, they're not great, but they're not as bad as they're made out to be.

Speaker 13 And pretty clearly, the person who wrote this footnote either willfully disregarded or was never aware in the first place of the context because they were relying on secondary or tertiary material.

Speaker 11 Are you implying that Glenn Beck did not use a researcher of the highest order for this book?

Speaker 13 So Gorsuch relying on a researcher who relied on Glenn Beck, who in turn relied on some crackpot at the Claremont Institute, who in turn... Okay.

Speaker 13 So this is all going to come up with the self-pardoning. Because does the president of the power to self-pardon? Never been presented before.

Speaker 13 And the question is going to be: is Samuel Alito's work on this question trustworthy? Is it a work of integrity? Is it at least good faith? Even if you don't like it, is it good faith work?

Speaker 13 Well, if he lies about this stupid flag incident, how can you trust him? And if you can't trust him, why are you listening to him? Is there more of you than there are of him?

Speaker 13 As Hamilton said in the Federalist paper, the Supreme Court only has judgment. That's all it's got.
And if you can't trust their judgment, why do you listen to them? They have nothing.

Speaker 11 What do you think about the delay on

Speaker 11 this question of whether Trump was immune from prosecution in his presidency?

Speaker 11 Do you think that it was reasonable? Because

Speaker 11 the defense argument at the Supreme Court is that John Roberts is like, well, we should take this opportunity

Speaker 11 to actually carve out where the lines are. Do you trust that that's right? Do you think that there's a delay happening?

Speaker 13 I think two things are coming together. I think there are at least two bad faith actors on the Supreme Court on this question who actually just want to just want.

Speaker 13 What's the answer where Trump wins? can we just get to the Trump wins part

Speaker 13 and then I think Roberts' core motivation is leave me out of this just leave me out I'm not for Trump I'm not against him I'm just trying to steer my little bureaucracy through these gales and he's got I think a complete bureaucratic protection mission in mind but the idea we're writing a statement for the ages that's not how these things are done That's the worst approach to this.

Speaker 13 You can't write a statement for the ages on what do we do in this extreme case.

Speaker 13 When the courts have in the past had to deal with presidential liability, Nixon versus Fitzgerald, which asked the question whether the president was civilly liable for official acts, the Supreme Court answered that in the narrowest possible way.

Speaker 13 They said the president was not liable in civil court for his official acts. We don't say anything about his criminal liability and we don't say anything about his unofficial acts.

Speaker 13 We're just saying that if you're a disgruntled federal employee who wants to sue the president personally because the government did something you don't like, no, you can't sue the president personally because the government did something you don't like.

Speaker 13 That's it. That's the opinion.
And then a century from now, when there's a real case or controversy involving the next question, we will leave it to our successors to sell those other.

Speaker 13 And then indeed, the Clinton case comes up. Well, what if the act is not official? What if it's flashing your generals at a government employee? Okay, that's clearly not an official.

Speaker 13 And then the Supreme Court has said, okay.

Speaker 11 For Lyndon B. Johnson, that actually was an official act, but we'll set that aside.

Speaker 13 So we have Nixon versus Fitzgerald that said one thing about one tiny set of presidential actions, and the Clinton cases, which said another thing about over the span of a quarter century, we have two rules.

Speaker 13 No liability, civil liability for official acts, yes, liability sometimes for unofficial acts, and no statement ever about criminal acts.

Speaker 13 So the correct answer is when you get the Trump case, you deal with the question narrowly presented.

Speaker 13 The argument is: we don't want some horseshoe crackbot trying to haul President Obama into court because he used drones in a way that some people don't like.

Speaker 13 Those are official acts of the United States, and the right way to deal with Obama using drones is to run somebody against him.

Speaker 13 We're not going to haul him in front of some criminal tribunal because the drone fired by the military chain of command killed somebody. So I get that point.

Speaker 13 Clearly, overthrowing the Constitution of the United States is not an official act of the president. Or maybe there's a factual finding.
Maybe it is.

Speaker 13 But the courts should say, you can have an argument about whether this was an official act or not.

Speaker 13 If it's an unofficial act, which is certainly what it looks like, then we will settle the question of whether an ex-president can have criminal life.

Speaker 13 And that's a narrow question, like the Fitzgerald and Clinton question.

Speaker 13 Sorry, for going on so long about this, but I don't think it's a good faith response that we need to deliver an answer for the ages, and that will unfortunately take us into 2025. Sorry.

Speaker 11 No, it's good. I like having that longer sentence because I think that there is this sense from people in the center, you know, for people of good faith to just look at some of the

Speaker 11 more hysterical responses to the Supreme Court on the left. And it's just like, oh, they, you know, this is illegitimate.
They should be recused.

Speaker 11 And not consider the more serious underlying question about, you know, how they've undermined their credibility.

Speaker 13 A key way to keep your mental health on social media is try to avoid arguments about arguments.

Speaker 13 So there is a school of thought, and we can name the people who do it, who say, so somebody raised a point and say, well, there's something, but yeah, but some lunatic on Twitter presented a hysterical version of this thing.

Speaker 13 That's an argument about an argument. Just deal with the argument.

Speaker 11 That is wonderful advice that we should all take. And we'll learn to pull out that clip to use at a later date, maybe a self-reprimand of the host of the podcast.

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Speaker 11 The other failure of the host of this podcast is we're now about 30 plus minutes in and I haven't asked you about the trial that is actually ongoing today.

Speaker 11 So right now, as we speak, the jury's been given instructions by Judge Murshan. We had in the bulwark, Marca Puto, reported that the Trump team at this point is pretty negative on their chances.

Speaker 11 They are pitting their hopes on one juror because of a body language doctor that said that this juror was very excited when J.D. Vance walked into the room.

Speaker 11 I will say very few people get very excited when J.D. Vance walks into the room these days.
So there's maybe something to that.

Speaker 11 I'm wondering what your thoughts are now that the trial is concluded, just on the veracity of it, potential impact. Just run wild.
Any big picture thoughts on the trial?

Speaker 13 I've never had a good feeling about this trial. I wrote it when it started, when the indictments came down.
I've I've never had a good feeling about it.

Speaker 13 And it's unfortunate that the important trials got, Trump was able to successfully delay them. And so this is the trial.

Speaker 13 I think it's very imaginable that the way the trial results is the jury convicts him on, as I think viewers here know, there's a two-step.

Speaker 13 You have to show, first that he altered the business documents, and second, that he did so for a criminal purpose.

Speaker 13 If you can prove that he altered the criminal documents, but you can't prove the criminal purpose, then it's just a misdemeanor. It's a misdemeanor.

Speaker 13 I have a bad feeling that that's where this is going to end up. It's just going to leave everyone sort of baffled as to why we underwent all of this.

Speaker 13 And I have a bad feeling, too, in that the American system of government is quite good at dealing with the tawdry, sleazy aspects of the Trump presidency and very bad at dealing with the parts that have been dangerous.

Speaker 13 I wonder if a jury doesn't have the same reaction that the John Edwards jury did when he was indicted for

Speaker 13 not the same, but similar offenses, which is

Speaker 13 he did it. He broke the law.
The law is very clear. We hesitate to send someone to prison because he wrote a check to a woman to cover up an affair.

Speaker 13 And even though in Trump's case, the reason he covered up the affair was not to save his marriage, as it was for John Edwards, but to deceive the public.

Speaker 11 Which is obvious. It's an obvious difference because John Edwards, this was happening in real time, and Donald Trump was paying off somebody that he slept with 10 years, but prior.

Speaker 11 If it was to save the marriage, he would have done it in 2008 or 2009.

Speaker 13 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right. And plus, the contract that he has with Melania for her services, I'm sure was well drafted to include, you know, infidelity does not vitiate this contract for services.

Speaker 11 Not an official comment at the bulwark. We will leave it in the podcast, though.
I'll let Jeffrey Goldberg deal with that.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and he can sue his lawyer for malpractice if they didn't carve out the permission for that. So the jury may pause.
about actually sending a former president to prison over this.

Speaker 13 So I've never had a good feeling about this prosecution.

Speaker 13 I mean, it'll be, people will be able to say, if he isn't convicted and sentenced, we'll be able to say he's a criminal.

Speaker 13 But in the end, it's sort of missing the point because of all the terrible things that Donald Trump did in his career as a candidate, in his career as president, this is like not one of the top 10 worst.

Speaker 11 Or 100. Or 200, maybe.

Speaker 13 And the fact that this is the one that the system was able to hold him to account for, that is a sobering reflection on the defects of the system of justice.

Speaker 11 I have one more big topic to get to.

Speaker 11 This is also a big topic, but really quick, just because we were discussing Mexico and immigration, I am just always interested in your thoughts on this as kind of a social moderate from the the center right, but who has pretty strong views on the importance of border security.

Speaker 11 And we talked about how the number of crossings is down this year. Biden, it seems like, has been mulling whether any executive action is appropriate for, I don't know, years now, for a long time.

Speaker 11 Is it too late for him to do anything? You know, if they called you, would you have any advice for them on what they can do at this late date about the border?

Speaker 13 Ideally, on... In January of 21, you don't drop the Trump enforcement actions.
Failing that at this point, you messaged your intentions.

Speaker 13 As we've seen with the fact that people remain upset about prices even as inflation subsides, they want to know the direction, they want to know your attitude.

Speaker 13 So, a strong law and order message on the border could help.

Speaker 13 But, you know, he's got a more fundamental problem, which is Americans don't believe that this is the tightest labor market in the history of the United States, but the rest of the planet knows that this is the tightest labor market in the history of the United States.

Speaker 13 The United States is putting a giant help-wanted sign under three flashing red claxons. And the whole world is hearing the sign.
Labor is wanted in the United States.

Speaker 13 So there may not be a level of enforcement that can do much about this. The thing that makes me a border hawk is I've never believed this thing.
It's about asylum and the world's persecuted.

Speaker 13 No, they're coming to work, which is

Speaker 13 maybe a social problem. I mean, it's commendable in the individual.

Speaker 13 If you were them, if you were in Eritrea right now, Of course, you'd be building the raft yourself and, you know, doing everything you could to get to some place where the job market, where your life was better.

Speaker 13 I don't blame anybody for making that decision. It's not morally wrong.
It's also not morally wrong for countries to say, this number is fine, this number is too much, and to enforce it.

Speaker 13 But the driver, the fundamental cause of the problem is this super hot labor market. And so part of the messaging that you need to say is, all you people are complaining about my economy.

Speaker 13 You know who doesn't think the economy is bad? The rest of Earth who is trying to get here desperate for their tiny piece of the Biden economy.

Speaker 11 I literally had a long argument with Trumper on this podcast called Press Advance yesterday. We'll put it in the comments on this exact same point.

Speaker 11 So if people want a longer version of how actually the economy is a magnet right now, they can listen to that. All right, I want to close with Israel, but we need a we need a palate cleanser first.

Speaker 11 We have a new segment on the Bulwark podcast called The Right Stuff.

Speaker 11 This man, if you don't know him, Johnny McIntye, he's going to be in charge of the hiring and firing of the next Trump administration.

Speaker 11 He also runs a dating website called The Right Stuff for conservatives, looking for other conservatives. Problem with the site is that it's mostly men on it, and so the site has not done that well.

Speaker 11 But his social media account promoting the site has done quite well. And he's put up a couple of his recent TikToks I just want to share with you.

Speaker 13 Women really saw their husbands come back from 12 hours of work miserable and tired and thought, gee, I want to do that too.

Speaker 11 How about the other one? Let's listen to the other one.

Speaker 13 So a man who doesn't want to take care of his kid is a deadbeat dad, but a woman woman who doesn't want to is pro-choice?

Speaker 11 Goddess.

Speaker 11 What is this giving you hope or dread that a man like that would be a prime figure in a Trump 2.0?

Speaker 13 Well, I haven't been on a date since the Reagan administration.

Speaker 13 So I'm maybe not the best person to turn to for comment on this.

Speaker 11 It is a little shocking that this is the MAGA youth.

Speaker 13 Wasn't he also the person who fired the Secretary of Defense?

Speaker 11 He was, yeah. That's him.

Speaker 13 We're talking about messaging.

Speaker 13 Maybe the messaging for the Trump administration is, you know, there are a lot of places in America where you hear a lot of like petty naysaying about experience and qualifications before you can have a senior job.

Speaker 13 Come to work in the Trump administration where you can be 22, totally unqualified.

Speaker 13 And so long as the president thinks you look the way he likes young people to look, you can be in charge of the Defense Department or the Justice Department or everything.

Speaker 13 By the way, brains and education, not required.

Speaker 11 Blonde hair required.

Speaker 11 Football can throw a good spiral.

Speaker 11 I will say, and maybe the counter-argument for the Biden administration this fall and for the youth that seem to not be as attracted to them as they've hoped in recent polling is that that person will be in charge of the Defense Department.

Speaker 11 It's an argument that works for both sides. All right,

Speaker 11 I want to do Israel. There's some slight differences on this.

Speaker 11 My case here, I want to restate for people, because sometimes it's hard for people to hear what they want to hear, is not that what Israel has been doing is not righteous.

Speaker 11 It is. Getting rid of Hamas is a righteous goal, especially in the face of the attack and in the face of the amount of hostages that still remain.

Speaker 11 But the way that they've conducted the war has alienated allies. They never really had a chance with Europe, but it's alienated our European allies, in addition to the ones in the region.

Speaker 11 He seems to be antagonizing the Biden administration as much as possible. They're unwilling to offer a post-war plan.
They've had minimal successes lately in actually getting hostages.

Speaker 11 So even if the goal is righteous, is the damage here, both on a humanitarian and strategic side of things, making this not worth the continued effort.

Speaker 13 So, what's the question?

Speaker 11 The question is: what

Speaker 11 you think it is? You think that what they're doing in Rafah is worth the

Speaker 11 continued push, continue to try to eradicate Hamas? While it might be a righteous goal, I don't know that they have a strategy to implement it that is effective or smart.

Speaker 13 So, I don't have military opinion. I have no opinion on the tactics of this.
I just don't have anything like the information or knowledge. I remember

Speaker 13 about a decade ago taking my son on a tour of the front line of the First World War, where two of his great-grandfathers fought.

Speaker 13 And the way the First World War is often taught is these generals were morons. They sacrificed men needlessly.
And the First World War has long been a serious study of mine.

Speaker 13 And the thing I want to impress on my son, in memory of his two great-grandfathers, was sometimes the problems are just too hard. And it doesn't matter how smart you are.
The problem is too hard.

Speaker 13 And the tools you need to solve the problem haven't been invented yet. Someday they will be.
Someday there will be planes and trucks and tanks. But right now there aren't any.

Speaker 13 The only way through is you have to go on foot through the barbed wire or let the other guy win. And those are your choices.

Speaker 13 I defer to the leadership of the Israeli military that these problems are really hard and that the reason wars are to be avoided is because they are never surgical.

Speaker 13 And the tragedy of all of this is the people who started this war, Hamas, their strategic goal was to maximize human suffering. Because the Hamas can't destroy Israel.

Speaker 13 Maybe an Iranian nuclear strike could destroy. There's no other military force in the region that can destroy Israel.
So what's the point of starting this stupid war? What are you going to do?

Speaker 13 The point is, well, we want to cause as much misery as we can in the hope of changing the political dynamic. And then there's a lot of misery.

Speaker 13 And you think, well, congratulations, you guys got what you wanted. But it's not, I don't know that there's a way for Israel to manage the level of misery.

Speaker 13 The last thing I want to say, because I know you've had some words with, I want to say to some of my friends in the pro-Israel world.

Speaker 13 I don't think they appreciate how solid a friend to Israel Biden has been. President Reagan, of sainted memory, never visited Israel once during his time as president.

Speaker 13 The first president ever to sell arms of any kind to Israel was John F. Kennedy.
The first president to offer military aid without cash was Richard Nixon. Reagan never visited.

Speaker 13 The idea that American warships fired weapons to knock down drones heading toward Israel, drones and missiles, that is unprecedented.

Speaker 13 The idea that an American president would visit Israel during wartime, not just once, twice, at tremendous risk to his own safety, the prolonged backing.

Speaker 13 During the 1982 Lebanon war, Jews get very upset when some professor somewhere calls, says that this is a genocide or a Holocaust.

Speaker 13 President Reagan, during the 1982 war, compared what Israel was doing to defend itself in Lebanon to the Holocaust. So people need to adjust their markers to know how solid Biden has been.

Speaker 13 And he's not done absolutely everything you would want exactly the way you would want it done. Call me when you get a president who does everything you want exactly the way you want it.

Speaker 13 That would be a remarkable thing in any vector. But he's done a lot.
And I think he deserves a lot of thanks and people who care about Israel.

Speaker 11 100% agree with that. Just one more item on this from the news of the week.
I saw you shared, there was a tweet from a former Israeli government spokesperson.

Speaker 11 There was this discussion this week, I think, where you can see how this stuff gets very heated, right? Where there's an IDF attack, it kills two Hamas leaders.

Speaker 11 The immediate response is it was in a humanitarian evacuation area. It seems like what actually happened was they bombed outside of the humanitarian evacuation area, killed two Hamas leaders, but it's

Speaker 11 such a dense area that there was some other weapons cache or something that exploded, you know, causing a fire that resulted in deaths in the evacuation area. And I think this speaks to your point.

Speaker 11 And across every vector, to use your word, this is much more complicated than I think that the people

Speaker 11 on social media that are condemning Biden are condemning one side or the other want to make this seem.

Speaker 13 Well, this is an unusual war in that one combatant has as its top tactical goal, and even its top strategic goal, maximize the number of casualties among its own people, or at least the representation of them.

Speaker 13 So, I try to avoid commenting on these individual tragedies before you know the details, which takes often weeks.

Speaker 13 The war opened with accusations that Israel had struck a hospital.

Speaker 13 Well, it turned out the hospital had been struck by falling debris from a Hamas rocket, and the number of casualties had been exaggerated by Hamas people from their own rocket.

Speaker 13 And whether this fire was caused by ricochet from the Israeli strike some meters away, or whether it was caused by the Hamas's own weaponry striking inadvertently or advertising striking its own weapons cache.

Speaker 13 Someday the answer will be known. Gosh, when and if the U.S.
government closes down TikTok, boy, will we all be so much smarter?

Speaker 11 We can leave it there, dude. From, as I mentioned, rough month for Canadians.
It seems like maybe possibly a rough month or time ahead for the Mexicans.

Speaker 11 And we've been discussing a lot of our problems here in America. So I don't know.
Some instability in North America.

Speaker 11 I'm grateful that we have David Frum to give us guidance and wisdom as we travel through these turbulent times. Hope to have you back on the Bulwark podcast soon.

Speaker 13 Thanks for your hospitality, as always. Bye-bye.

Speaker 11 We'll see you back here tomorrow, possibly with an update on the Trump trial with Ben Wittis. Possibly not.
We'll be playing it by the seat of our pants this week as we await the jury to come back.

Speaker 11 We'll see you all then. Peace.

Speaker 11 from England,

Speaker 11 we're lied. No.

Speaker 11 We bit our planes, at all trades, till we think we might die.

Speaker 11 Far from North America,

Speaker 11 where the buildings are old, and you might have lots of mimes.

Speaker 11 Uh-uh, uh, uh-uh.

Speaker 11 I hate the feeling when you look, you're not me that way.

Speaker 11 Cause we're North Americans.

Speaker 11 But if we act all shy, it'll make it okay.

Speaker 11 Mexico go away.

Speaker 11 But I don't know, I don't know where to begin

Speaker 11 when we're North American.

Speaker 11 But in the end, make the same mistakes all over again.

Speaker 11 Come on now, come now.

Speaker 11 We are North America.

Speaker 11 We are North America.

Speaker 11 We are North America.

Speaker 11 We are North America.

Speaker 11 Take me back to Saints Man.

Speaker 11 North America.

Speaker 11 When we could be all we wanted, we're not a river.

Speaker 11 North America,

Speaker 11 where the DJ

Speaker 11 The Bullworth podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 15 This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culturalistos with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 16 This is Bowen Yang from Los Culturalistos with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

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