David Frum: American North Korea

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 7 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny, infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 10 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 13 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 9 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 14 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 7 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 17 Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
I'm delighted to be here with my favorite, David Frum.

Speaker 17 Yesterday, we lost Joe Lieberman Lieberman at the age of 82, obviously vice presidential nominee for Al Gore, a long time.

Speaker 17 Senator Bill Crystal wrote this in remembrance, a public servant of principle and decency, an American patriot, a proud Jew, a happy warrior, a kind man, an example to us all.

Speaker 17 May his memory be a blessing. Rest easy, Joe Lieberman.
David Fromm, thanks so much for being on the Bulwark podcast again. You get a green jacket for all of your appearances.

Speaker 16 Thank you very much.

Speaker 17 I wanted to start with you. It was about, well, I guess 11 months ago now, April 2023, you wrote the coming Biden blowout.
I've got some listeners who complain about my rain cloud tendencies.

Speaker 17 And so I thought,

Speaker 17 let's start on this Thursday with a little bit of hope, a little bit of uplift. How do you assess that 11 months on, your sense that Biden was in good shape in the election?

Speaker 16 All right. So it's a rainy day here in Washington, so I will bring some sunshine.
Okay, great.

Speaker 16 The prediction of a Biden blowout was not a prediction that Joe Biden would win a massive personal re-election win, like 1984 or 1972.

Speaker 16 It was a prediction that Democrats were going to do well, or rather Republicans would do badly, up and down the ticket.

Speaker 16 And I based that on the working out of the logic of Republican positions on abortion and generally on the so-called human life amendment.

Speaker 16 I keep thinking that the master key to understanding 2024 is a story, but filming the first Star Wars.

Speaker 16 George Lucas handed a page of terribly clunky dialogue to Harrison Ford, who scanned it and said, George, you can write this shit, but you can't say it.

Speaker 16 And that is the problem with where the Republicans are on in vitro fertilization and these other issues. They have signed up for a massive surveillance state for American women.

Speaker 16 They've signed up for a massive anti-fertility state for American women. And American women have noticed this and are reacting.

Speaker 16 And that's, I think, what is driving so many of these special elections in places where Trump and January 6th are all very far away.

Speaker 16 That the ballot question in January 6th is: shall North American women live in an American North Korea, constantly surveilled, where they're not even going to be allowed to cross state lines without a doctor's note or somebody else's permission, or won't they?

Speaker 16 Will they put up with this or not? And I think you're seeing all of that working itself out. And the Republicans are just trapped.
First, this is something that many of them sincerely believe in.

Speaker 16 And even those who opportunistically believed in it have signed up for so many pieces of legislation, there's no retreat. There's no way to alter this.

Speaker 16 George Lucas wrote the shit, but Republican candidates can't say it.

Speaker 16 And then add to that all the Trump factors, the January 6th and the increasing strength of the American economy, plus the dysfunction of the Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Speaker 16 And it looks like a year in which not that there's going to be a massive personal mandate for the president, but Republican losses up and down the ticket, state losses too, which are going to be very, very important in the rest of the decade.

Speaker 17 So how do you square that with the numbers that do not show the strength for President Biden? Show Trump doing all right.

Speaker 17 I show Trump basically stagnant with the same numbers he's had in 2016 and 2020, basically, high 40s.

Speaker 17 You know, Mike Donnellan will say that the democracy choice hasn't sunk in, that maybe the polling's wrong.

Speaker 17 Concerningly, I've heard several Biden people express that they think that there are issues with the polling. What's your assessment?

Speaker 17 Are there issues with the polling or is it just something not sunken in yet?

Speaker 16 The issue with polling is always you need to ask. very literally, what is the question and what are people hearing?

Speaker 16 Not what is the meaning you are fusing into the poll, but how to the person to whom the poll was presented. So let me ask you a question.
How do you feel about the dentist?

Speaker 17 Not good.

Speaker 16 Not great. Not good.
How do you feel about gum disease?

Speaker 17 Really bad.

Speaker 16 If the choice is the dentist. That means more dentists, though.

Speaker 17 More gum disease means more dentists.

Speaker 16 And that's the ballot choice. And it's gum disease versus the dentist.
I mean, Joe Biden, his best and worst qualities are the same, which is he's a throwback to a different America.

Speaker 16 And he's not talking to the America of today, for good or for ill, but he's also reminding us of a time when politics seemed to be more stable and more functional than it is today.

Speaker 16 But Donald Trump is going to insist that this election be a referendum on him. Back in, gosh, the 90s, I traveled with Phil Graham when he was running for president.

Speaker 17 This is my second Phil Graham mentioned this week. Bob Schrum last night at dinner was telling me about how terrible of a candidate Phil Graham was.

Speaker 17 He was like, all my friends, Frum and Crystal and all these guys, liked Phil Graham. And I was saying to all of them, he has no personality.
He's never going to win. That was his story, at least.

Speaker 16 I liked him. He was a considerable intellect.
Shrum is not wrong. It's not a surprise that Phil Graham ended ended up as a successful banker rather than as president.

Speaker 16 He had a lot of incisive opinions. And on this trip, we were talking to a loudmouthed local politician who was contesting a seat.

Speaker 16 And Graham said to him, when you are running against an incumbent, as this loudmouth was, there are only two issues, her record and you're not a kook.

Speaker 16 So that's what Donald Trump should be talking about is the Biden record and I'm finding some way to make himself acceptable.

Speaker 16 But instead, he insists on making the election a referendum on him, not on the incumbent. What you want in an anti-incumbent election is to say this question.
Anybody here got any complaints?

Speaker 16 And if enough people have complaints, as they did when Jimmy Carter ran against Gerald Ford, as they did when Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter, and going back into the past, if enough people say, yes, I do have complaints, then the incumbent loses, even if that incumbent like Ford has many fine personal qualities.

Speaker 16 But Donald Trump is not allowing this to be an election on got any complaints. He's making it an election about, do you all love me?

Speaker 16 And do you agree with me that the Constitution should be overthrown by violent mobs?

Speaker 16 And I just don't think he's going to find an American plurality that says, you know, thinking it over, I'm with the overthrow of the Constitution by violent mob scandal.

Speaker 17 Well, I hope that's right. And I appreciate you bringing up the dentist.

Speaker 17 I found a good pediatric dentist in New Orleans, but if anybody has a grown-up dentist recommendation, this reminds me I need to take care of that.

Speaker 17 I want one more pushback on this idea of optimism, though. It's compelling.
You're warming my heart already. The Bill Crystal pessimistic view on this would be more that the parallel is 92,

Speaker 17 right? That people do have complaints about Joe Biden. Maybe things are getting better.

Speaker 17 Maybe things are improving, but just not at the rate that people were hoping that they would improve, or it hasn't trickled down, so to speak, to their lives, their budgets, their impressions, and that people have kind of decided for whatever reason that the incumbent is feckless, that the economy isn't working for them.

Speaker 17 I don't agree with those arguments, but there's a concern that that is the parallel, and that would it'd be hard for Joe Biden to break out of that.

Speaker 16 As I think about 20 years of sometimes agreeing with Bill Kiss, a little about politics and sometimes disagreeing, I realize the core of our systematic disagreements going back over the time, and

Speaker 16 we agree on many issues, but we've disagreed on predictions and recommendations of actions, is that Bill tends to believe that candidates matter extremely.

Speaker 16 And I believe that candidates matter, especially at the presidential level, not nothing, but much less.

Speaker 16 The political system convinces people to see attributes in the candidates that literally aren't there.

Speaker 16 So a lot of normie Republicans, people who would have voted happily for Mitt Romney and reasonably happily for John McCain and very happily for George W.

Speaker 16 Bush, somehow persuaded themselves that Donald Trump was a Republican, a normal Republican. Now, that is so obviously not true.
In the effort of belief, of self-delusion, you have to muster.

Speaker 16 But lots and lots of normal Republicans, people who own car dealerships, people who are executive vice presidents in businesses convince themselves of this flagrantly false proposition.

Speaker 16 And meanwhile, lots of Republicans convince themselves that Joe Biden is a socialist Antifa candidate. And that's also crazy.
But beliefs about the candidate follow from partisanship.

Speaker 16 They don't drive partisanship, except at the extremist margin. That is where I would differ from Bill in a lot of my political analysis.
So, yeah, I think people have qualms about Joe Biden.

Speaker 16 express themselves and express in doubts about the economy. But the economy is indeed strong.
The election is not going to be about Biden. It's going to be about Trump.

Speaker 16 And Trump can't get north of 46% of the vote. And except with a very lucky bounce like the one he caught in 2016, 46% is not enough.

Speaker 16 If it were, well, John McCain had, I think, 45, but Mitt Romney, John Kerry, Al Gore all got more of the vote than Donald Trump did, not to mention Hillary Clinton herself in 2016.

Speaker 16 His share of the electorate is just not sufficient normally to make you president.

Speaker 17 Okay, which is a nice transition into the other way that it could. All right.
so you've convinced us in a binary option that maybe Donald Trump is not able to get to the share that he would need.

Speaker 17 RFK Jr., I saw a very interesting riff that you were making about him on the merits on CNN and about his craziness.

Speaker 17 I want to get into that, but on the politics of it first, the thing I worry about with RFK Jr., and there are a bunch of known unknowns still out there. Is he going to get on the ballot? And

Speaker 17 which states? And there's some particulars. But if he were to get on the ballot, I'm kind of of the view that his core base is pretty Trumpy.

Speaker 17 It's like crazy, you know, vaccine skeptic and like anti-establishment sort of weirdos.

Speaker 17 But then that next concentric circle out is some of the people that we're talking about, that are unhappy with Joe Biden at a low level, that don't like Donald Trump, that maybe he's an off-ramp for them.

Speaker 17 Maybe it's in some of the Biden constituencies where he's weaker, black voters, young voters, traditional Biden constituencies. So, how worried are you about the RFK element of all this?

Speaker 16 I am quite worried about him, but not in the way that you've just described. When people talk about RFK, they talk about the RFK campaign.

Speaker 16 And the RFK campaign is, I think it's going to be a boutique operation. He can't not talk about the vaccines.
His general views are pretty crazy.

Speaker 16 He himself is not RFK senior, and there are people alive who voted in 1968.

Speaker 16 I was just talking on the phone a few minutes ago to someone who's a very vigorous person in American politics who cast their first vote in 1968.

Speaker 16 So there are people who are less attuned than the person I was.

Speaker 16 Yeah. They could well make a mistake.
RFK Jr. will disillusion them or disabuse them of that.
I mean, he is not his father.

Speaker 16 But here's what I think about with the RFK campaign, which is the Super PAC, which has raised tens of millions of dollars and could easily raise more. Now, the Super PAC is independent from RFK Jr.

Speaker 16 It is Republican money run by Republican partisans. And as far as I can tell, and unlike much of the Trump operation, not run by thieves.

Speaker 17 That's a pretty big important distinction.

Speaker 16 So if they raise money, they use it for causes that are campaign-related. So whatever RFK Jr.'s campaign does, the super PAC is going to be an anti-Biden weapon.

Speaker 16 It's not going to run pro-RFK advertising. It's going to run anti-Biden advertising.

Speaker 16 And in an environment where the Trump money is being squandered or spent on lawyers or outright stolen, the RFK Super PAC could be important in 2024.

Speaker 16 In a media environment that's going to be dominated by much more Democratic money than Republican, but where the Republicans will have less than they usually do, the RFK anti-Biden super PAC may be part of the equation.

Speaker 16 And so may be the no-labels super PAC, if that comes into being.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Well, maybe there's some overlap in our concerns then, because with that RFK super PAC, as you rightly pointed out, I don't think I've mentioned on this podcast, I should have, that just the degree of which the Republican money that has been put into it already, eight figures.

Speaker 17 And, you know, what we saw in 2016 was a pretty unsophisticated effort by nefarious actors to tamp down core Democratic demos.

Speaker 17 You know, that was a lot of what the Facebook, Cambridge Analytica stuff was.

Speaker 17 If there's a well-capitalized RFK PAC trying to harm Biden more than it's trying to help RFK, there does seem to be some ripe targets for that, you know, as we've talked about the softness of the Biden support in some of these core demos.

Speaker 16 Yeah, the core of the Democratic, the fundamental Democratic strategic problem is they are a larger but baggier coalition made up of many groups that are at variance with one another.

Speaker 16 Biden appears both to some of the most grounded people in American life, people who are well-educated, who own their own homes, who are very secure.

Speaker 16 I mean, that's who basically the never-Trump Republicans are.

Speaker 16 And Biden also would normally appeal to some of the least connected people in American life, young people who are new to the workforce, who are renting, who are burdened by debt.

Speaker 16 So holding those two kinds of people in the same coalition is a much harder problem than the Republicans have with their smaller but much more cohesive coalition.

Speaker 16 And so Democrats are always vulnerable to campaigns that aim to break off part of their support. And that would be the smart play for a super PAC.

Speaker 16 That's what the Trump people and the Super PACs and the Russians did in 2016. They tried to push away parts of the Democratic coalition with highly targeted messages.

Speaker 16 And if you have an operation that's run by smart people, it could make an impact.

Speaker 16 One of the things that Biden has going for them is a lot of people in the Trump ambit and a lot of Republicans seem to have pretty stupid ideas about what's motivating the Democratic coalition.

Speaker 16 Raymond Arroyo has disappeared from the Fox airwaves for saying that black voters will turn to Trump because they like sneakers, which was too much to say even on Fox.

Speaker 17 And mug shots, yeah.

Speaker 16 Yeah. But a lot of people who write checks to Republican super PACs actually do believe that.

Speaker 16 And so they are vulnerable to making appeals to black voters in ways that are probably going to be counterproductive.

Speaker 16 But you can't assume that everyone who's running these super PACs is a corrupt idiot. Some of them are corrupt, smart people, and some of them are honest idiots.

Speaker 16 And they may accidentally happen on themes that are more powerful. And there are people in America who say, at least during the pandemic, I was getting a stipend of some kind.

Speaker 16 That stipend is gone and I can't find the kind of work that I want to.

Speaker 16 Or there are young men who say that because of the changes in the American workforce, women have certain skills that are more valuable and my skills are less valuable.

Speaker 16 I find it harder to get a girlfriend or a wife than my father did when he was my age. And I'm really mad about that.
And that drives my politics more than anything. There are older people.

Speaker 16 There are people who are burdened by student debt, who are unhappy that Biden didn't get rid of more student debt than he did.

Speaker 16 They go to the grocery market and they remember what groceries used to cost and they forget that they've also had a raise or maybe they think about those in different ways.

Speaker 16 The raise I earned, but the grocery prices just happened to me. And they're mad about that.
So there are lots of groups you could try to peel away.

Speaker 16 And that's going to be a big part of the Trump plan in 2024, the Trump universe plan, the anti-Biden plan, I should call it.

Speaker 17 Sure, sure, sure. I want to throw one notion at you from one of my brainchilds on the anti-Trump plan.

Speaker 17 I remember one of the times you're on with Charlie, you talked eloquently and insightfully about how people who are victims of scams don't like to admit that they're victims of scams, right?

Speaker 17 And right now, it's clearer than ever how big of a scam that Trump is running on his own voters as he can barely do events and they're paying for all of his lawyers, paying for his lifestyle.

Speaker 17 I do wonder one of the advantages that Republicans have about being corrupt, they might be corrupt and stupid, but they also are nefarious, right?

Speaker 17 They are willing to use these types of strategies to try to peel off, you know, low-info black voters or young voters who might be able to be tamped down by, you know, advertisements that aren't dishonest or prey on them.

Speaker 17 Do you think there is any appetite or any reason for Democrats to think about ways that they can turn the tables and having outside groups try to talk about how Trump has, you know, in red areas and rural areas with young men, you know, talk about how Trump has scammed them, talk about how the abortion issue might affect them if they're not ready to be fathers yet.

Speaker 17 I'm not seeing a lot of that from the Democrats, but I do think that there is potentially green shoots there. But the other hand of that is maybe these people aren't reachable.

Speaker 17 Some people might say that to me, that's a waste of time, Tim. These people aren't reachable.

Speaker 16 I think we're moving into a very different kind of map. When Democrats talk about going after Republican voters, they say, we have to appeal to the guys who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flags.

Speaker 16 I applaud the sentiment.

Speaker 16 Candidates should obviously try to compete for everybody, but but you're not going to win the guy who drives a pickup truck with the Confederate flag on it if you're a Democratic candidate.

Speaker 16 Meanwhile, they don't see who they are winning. So in 2018, Democrats flipped the House seat that was held by George H.W.
Bush in one of the most affluent parts of Houston.

Speaker 16 They flipped the seat that had been held by Newt Gingrich in the Atlanta excerpts. They flipped Eric Cantor's seat in the outskirts of Richmond.

Speaker 17 The seat where W lives goes Colin Allred, now the Senate candidate. They flipped.

Speaker 16 Where are Democrats making their gains?

Speaker 16 Not with people who drive drive pickup trucks and fly the Confederate flag, but actually with the kind of people who 50 years ago were the heart and soul of the Republican Party.

Speaker 16 People own their own homes, who are married, who have IRAs, who are basically content with life.

Speaker 16 Remember, if you watch Mad Men, all the partners in Don Draper's firm are all Republicans, not because they're super ideological. They're basically satisfied with their lives.
So they're Republicans.

Speaker 16 And the Democrats are the party of people who aren't satisfied with their lives. And not to make a moral judgment about which is better.

Speaker 16 It's just there are some people who are more content than others. And historically, they tended to be Republican.
Well, guess who Biden gets?

Speaker 16 But the way he gets them is not by saying, hey, you're pretty smug. Vote for me.
I just think about the ads that work on me.

Speaker 16 The ads that work on me are the ads that look like they're old ATT phone company ads. You know, people coming home and putting down their briefcase and hugging their kids and playing with the dog.

Speaker 16 You know, people working in a classroom with kids of every background, flags, statue of liberty, fireworks, American battleships.

Speaker 17 I'm susceptible to all this too. Yeah, same.

Speaker 16 Yeah, right. The Morning in America ad.
Now, that ad, when you watch it today, it's incredibly old-fashioned.

Speaker 16 Like the shots are so long, you cannot believe that six seconds of the Statue of Liberty, are you serious?

Speaker 16 You think we're going to live forever?

Speaker 16 But, and Biden, that's how he launched his 2020 campaign. It was, you know, do you love this country? Are you proud of this country? Do you think the country is basically right?

Speaker 16 Do you think we built something worth preserving? Do you have more to defend than you aspire to acquire? Those messages are very powerful in the George H.W.

Speaker 16 Bush, Newt Gingrich, Eric Cantor congressional seats. Those are the people who I think are going to put Biden over the top.
And one more thing, and this is about the bulwark.

Speaker 16 I can remember having been at this Never Trump business for a long time, back in 2017, when it was a clever joke to say Never Trump was a dinner party, not a political party.

Speaker 16 But in fact, we're not the base at all, but we're the people who are going to put Biden over the top. And he needs his base, and to appease them, he does things that Never Trump people don't like.

Speaker 16 When beef prices go up, he has to pretend it's because of the machinations of evil meat-packing companies, which is stupid and false and untrue.

Speaker 16 They didn't become better people when beef prices go down. Gasoline prices are not determined by the moral quality of oil companies.
That's childish.

Speaker 16 But the Never Trump people who are the margin of victory are the people who would normally be susceptible to Republican messages, but who respond to patriotism, to unity, to pride and country, and to dislike dislike of troublemaking and resentment and violence and threats of violence, and the lack of emotional control that you see from the Trump people.

Speaker 16 Who just, this guy should be in a psych ward, not running for office.

Speaker 17 Yeah, one data point in your favor on that from this week is there was a special election for a state house race in the Huntsville suburbs, Huntsville, Alabama.

Speaker 17 That was like a 25-point flip for the Democrat who has focused a lot on the IVF ruling in Alabama.

Speaker 18 Aprobecha los deals de early Black Friday and Los.

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Speaker 19 Tambien ahorasa 500 porciento en scaleras selectas en los.

Speaker 19 Los nos otros ayudamos.

Speaker 22 Tu ahoras.

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Speaker 23 Vicita tu Los Macercano in East Arcas Avenue in Sunnydale.

Speaker 4 Get Ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 7 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 10 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 13 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 9 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 14 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried.

Speaker 11 So keep your enemies close.

Speaker 7 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 18 Approvecha los Dios de early Black Friday en los.

Speaker 19 Ahoras es 50% en electrodomécoso selectos.

Speaker 21 Y está 25 porcento XTren combos electrodomesticos electros.

Speaker 19 Tambien ahoras es 5unta porcento en escaleras selectas en los. Los nos ayudamos.

Speaker 22 Tu ahoras.

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Speaker 23 Visita tu Los Macercano in East Arcas Avenue in Sunnyvale.

Speaker 4 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 7 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 10 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 13 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 9 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 14 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 7 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 17 Another article that you wrote recently that I wanted to get in was: The Good Republicans' last stand was about the Ukraine funding, how there was a cadre of the remaining good Republicans.

Speaker 17 I believe at this point, Mike Gallagher was still a sitting member of Congress, maybe was in this category. It was before Mitch McConnell had said that he was going to step aside.

Speaker 17 But there were some Republicans doing the right thing. And yet, here we are a few months later, and still nothing has been done because of the bad Republicans.
How do you assess?

Speaker 17 the state of play now and the good Republicans last stand.

Speaker 16 Well, I think this is the issue. When I say, why am I going to be in the line at five in the morning to vote for Biden in 2024? It's because of Ukraine.

Speaker 16 Biden has not been by any means perfect on Ukraine. I think he slow walked a lot of the weapons that they needed early on.

Speaker 16 He's been trying to micromanage this war to give them the Ukrainians just enough not to lose, but not enough to win. And who knows what that point is.
Many, many, many mistakes.

Speaker 16 And 2023 should have been the decisive year of the war. And because of bad choices by people in the Biden administration, it was not.
And so we are suffering and bleeding through 2024.

Speaker 16 But the republicans are selling them out and that is just shocking to me president biden asked for more money for ukraine on october 20th of last year we are nearing the six-month mark and that has been stalled and while there are majorities in both houses of congress for the aid because there's not a majority of the majority in the house of representatives the aid has been successfully stalled and republicans have not been willing to do what it takes to overcome their own leadership, including, by the way, people who, and one of the people I singled out was the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jim Risch, who has been a strong supporter of Ukraine, but it just goes, AWAL.

Speaker 16 I mean, behind the scenes, he's doing all kinds of things, but he doesn't even cast a vote before the scenes because he's so frightened of his own voters and Trump.

Speaker 16 There does seem to be enough assistance from Europe to keep the Ukrainians on the battlefield through the fighting season.

Speaker 16 They have found, thanks to the Czech government, a supply of artillery shells in Taiwan that does look sufficient to get, and the Europeans are paying for them.

Speaker 16 So they can eke it out, and we hope that the United States will be back in its responsible position of world leadership after this election, and especially if the Democrats retake the House of Representatives.

Speaker 16 But it is a terrible, terrible betrayal.

Speaker 17 It's rather astonishing the degree of the betrayal. I was talking, I had Stephen Hayes on last week, and we were discussing all this.

Speaker 17 And, you know, there's like a cadre of Republicans in the House and the Senate that are still holding on to the complaint that Biden isn't doing enough, right?

Speaker 17 That they try to speak as if it's the early 2000s or the 1980s and that they are the real hawks here and want more you know thinking about your mike mccalls your tom cottons

Speaker 17 but when it comes to actually trying to put pressure on mike johnson or actually do anything procedural to do i they're totally awall like there's nobody that is actually putting any real political pressure on mike johnson to get this to move on the republican side right am i wrong about that Yeah, no, you don't get to complain that your buddy is not giving enough charity if you yourself are going around town kicking homeless people.

Speaker 16 And that's what's going on here. I mean, Biden isn't doing enough on Ukraine.

Speaker 16 And more catastrophically, did not do enough at a time when doing enough would have really brought the war to a speedier end, which is in the early part of last year. He didn't do enough.

Speaker 16 He's succumbed to the classic problem of democratic foreign policy, which is trying to be too clever, trying to...

Speaker 16 specify the precise outcome that you're trying to hit 24 months out and then 24 months in advance trying to gauge precisely the degree of resource and effort you need to get to that mark.

Speaker 16 Instead of just saying, send everything, empty the arsenals. If the Ukrainians end up with too much stuff, well, that's money wasted, not lives lost.
Send them everything, send it fast.

Speaker 16 Don't worry too much about how this is going to play out. You don't know.
When people say, what's the end game? The end game is we win by applying maximum effort. maximally early.

Speaker 16 You can make that criticism, but you can't legitimately make that criticism if Mike Johnson is saying, I'm going to withhold aid from Ukraine altogether because Trump tells me and Trump is doing it because Putin tells him.

Speaker 17 Amen. I couldn't agree with that more.
Okay, moving down to Gaza briefly.

Speaker 17 We had a guest yesterday that was representing the view of that Biden should be putting more pressure on BB, that we should have it on the table.

Speaker 17 stopping providing weapons to Israel because of atrocities in Gaza. I do not share that view.

Speaker 17 Also had a guest a couple weeks ago that had the view that Biden was trying to distance himself from BB too much. That's another view I don't share.
I mean, I have some concerns.

Speaker 17 I think that a lot of what Israel's actions were in the first months after the attack on October 7th were totally defensible and understandable.

Speaker 17 And I'm concerned now that we have reached a situation where they don't particularly have a plan for achieving their objectives of eradicating Hamas.

Speaker 17 And the plan that they do have doesn't make a lot of sense.

Speaker 17 You know, you had Jared Kushner going around the other week talking with BB allies about how they're going to occupy Gaza and put condos there.

Speaker 17 I don't know that Mar-a-Lago, Gaza is a solution that is going to make a lot of sense in the region.

Speaker 17 So where do you kind of fall on this discussion about how Biden is calibrating this and frankly how Bibi is calibrating it?

Speaker 16 First, I want to make clear,

Speaker 16 I'm no kind of military expert and particularly not on the most difficult form of warfare, urban warfare. I have no idea what is the right strategy and what is the right tactic.

Speaker 16 To the extent that I had views, they've turned out to be completely wrong. I worried that Hamas had booby-trapped Gaza in all kinds of ways.

Speaker 16 And it really seems like actually one of the big surprises of the war is how little effort Hamas has made to fight and to defend the people it supposedly represents.

Speaker 16 I mean, its plan seems to be to save itself and expose the civilian population to maximum harm in hope of generating a response on TikTok, which is also not a good plan because a lot of people suffer while you're waiting for the TikTok brigade to bail you out, which they're not doing.

Speaker 16 I would say, first, I'm going to repeat what I said about Ukraine. Don't micromanage these things.

Speaker 16 The reason wars are to be avoided at almost any cost is because they are big, destructive, wasteful, cruel, unpredictable animals.

Speaker 16 Once Hamas made the decision to wage this war of atrocity against Israel, it unleashed responses that were just incalculable, but that were bound to be horrific.

Speaker 16 And because wars are so horrific, the most important thing is to get them over as fast as possible. And that means not meeting out your violence.

Speaker 16 The same criticism I have about the Biden people on Ukraine. You do not meet out your violence with an exact measuring caliper, hoping to hit precisely the right quantity.

Speaker 16 You do too much too early in hope of bringing it to an end as fast as possible, getting then to the work of restoration and peacemaking.

Speaker 16 Benjamin Netanyahu is pretty obviously fighting this war with one plan in mind, which is he knows that the moment the war is over, his political situation begins to wobble, so he doesn't want the war to be over.

Speaker 16 And he's then adopted maximalist goals that can never be reached, so the war will never be over. And so he will never be.

Speaker 16 So to my mind, one of the biggest Israeli mistake was saying at the beginning, okay, we are caught by surprise and we'll change the government as soon as the war is over.

Speaker 16 The government had to be changed immediately.

Speaker 17 Where were you on the Schumer speaking out about that? Did you think that was appropriate?

Speaker 16 I didn't think it was smart. No.
And also, it's late. Nanyahu should have resigned on the 9th of October.

Speaker 16 And if he wouldn't, he should have been forced out, but he should have been forced out by the Israeli public. And once...

Speaker 16 the Israeli political system reached its consensus, we'll change him afterward. You set in motion very perverse incentives.
On the American side, I think Biden has been stalwart.

Speaker 16 Some of my friends in the pro-Israel community are comparing Biden to their idea of what they would like rather than to what has ever existed before.

Speaker 16 The situation that this is very reminiscent of is the 1982 Israeli war in Lebanon. Thank you for that.

Speaker 16 That began when the PLO assassinated the Israeli ambassador to the UK in the streets of London, a really shocking crime, culminating a decade of terrible PLO atrocities, the attack on the Israeli Olympic team at the Munich Olympics, atrocious hijacking, some of them PLO, some of them PLO affiliates, and then this, attacking a diplomat on the soil of a NATO country.

Speaker 16 So Israel entered Lebanon to try to drive the PLO out. The war was very brutal.

Speaker 16 And the Reagan administration at first backed Israel, and then flip-flopped and began putting enormous pressure on Israel.

Speaker 16 And at one point, somebody in the administration, I don't think President Reagan himself, but a senior, used the language of Holocaust and genocide from the unnamed source of the White House against Israel, which is something that's so shocking and offensive when backbench congress people do it.

Speaker 16 But the idea that somebody in an administration would do it, if that's your benchmark, if Reagan 82 is your benchmark, then Biden has been a stalwart, stalwart friend.

Speaker 16 And it's unrealistic to ask him to do any more than he has done. And I think they have been able to be very generous with Israel, with information, with weapons, with high technology.

Speaker 16 Israel needs different things from what Ukraine needs. And Israel's needs have been met better than Ukraine's needs have.

Speaker 16 Now, maybe it'll be different if the war goes on for two or three years, but for right now, I don't think there are any reasonable complaints against against the Biden administration.

Speaker 16 But as to giving them advice, I don't have advice. They are facing, I lost track of the count of living hostages.
But there's still more than 100 Israeli hostages in Hamas' hands.

Speaker 16 People have been killed and maltreated in the most horrific ways on video with the intention of provoking the reaction.

Speaker 16 I don't know that there is any way off this path until we get to a true outcome of the war.

Speaker 17 I totally agree with John Biden. And

Speaker 17 obviously, I mean, the hostages should be freed. And this is all on Hamas.
I was encouraged for all the negative things that are happening on campus these days.

Speaker 17 I'm at USC this week and I was encouraged that there was a free the hostages gathering on the quad at USC that was unperturbed.

Speaker 17 And there was a rather big group that was, you know, I think there's some reasonable concerns that they might have been at least shouted down, not that their safety would be in question.

Speaker 17 And so I was encouraged to see that. My one just follow up on this, the one area where I think I would pick a nit with what you said is it's not about so much like the military strategy.

Speaker 17 That I'm not a military strategist. I'm not going to tell BB, you should do it this way, you should do it that way.

Speaker 17 It is if you're going to engage in an offensive action such as this that is going to have the number of casualties that we've seen in Gaza and the tragedy that we've seen in Gaza, I would like for somebody to be able to enunciate what the end game is.

Speaker 17 I don't think that they have offered one that makes a lot of sense. That's like, well, question mark, question mark, Israel's going to occupy it?

Speaker 17 No, there's going to be a foreign group that's going to occupy. Who is that? The Egyptians, they don't want to do it.
The Saudis, they don't want to do it. Right.

Speaker 17 And so we're going to continue to go in and to bomb without, I guess, maybe the only answer to that is, well, we're just going to do it until the hostages are released.

Speaker 17 And then we'll see kind of where we sit. But that's the element of this that gets me a little bit, that wishes we could bring it to the negotiating table.

Speaker 17 And I know that, again, that's on Hamas, but that's the part that I get queasy about.

Speaker 16 I'm going to give you a very candid answer to this, and

Speaker 16 maybe too candid for my own good, but please.

Speaker 16 I think the reason people don't talk about the end game is because there isn't a good one. There really isn't.

Speaker 16 Hamas did this thing on October 7th and did what they did in the way they did it with the video with the goal of making it impossible for Jews and Palestinians to live together side by side in neighborly state-by-state relationships.

Speaker 16 And I think for generations, I think they succeeded in that goal. So we have these impulses, which is, okay, we have to get back to negotiating the two-state solution.

Speaker 16 But Hamas said, what we want to do is we want to videotape ourselves or GoPro ourselves doing things to the Israelis so they can never, ever trust us.

Speaker 16 And not just us, Hamas, but us, the 15,000 people who came into their country every day from, I think that was the number, from Gaza to work, who are trusted people who worked on the kibbutzes and who gave away the identity and who participated, it looks like, in the rapes and robbery.

Speaker 16 We want to make it possible for them to ever trust those people.

Speaker 16 And in the same way, our military plan is one where we have no bomb shelters,

Speaker 16 we've stockpiled no food and water for what is technically our population.

Speaker 16 We're going to expose them to the vengeance of a highly advanced technological military state, which is seeking vengeance for what the terrible crimes we did to us, and they will inflict that vengeance in ways that make it impossible for our people ever to forgive them.

Speaker 16 And when this is over, so we say, what is the end state here?

Speaker 16 That's a technocratic question about a war that was designed to stoke so much hatred.

Speaker 16 And the authors of that war were Hamas, but the Israelis are the counter-authors because they behaved in exactly the way they had no human possibility of not behaving in.

Speaker 16 And it leaves behind only wreckage. Who is going to police Hamas? No one.
Anybody who does come in, it's going to be like Iraq. 2003, early 2004.

Speaker 16 If an Arab force or a European force goes in, Hamas will commit terrorist atrocities to drive them out, and they will probably succeed.

Speaker 16 So there's going to be no law and order in Gaza, except in the tiny zones that Israel retains, which means there's going to be no reconstruction. There's just going to be tents.

Speaker 16 There's just going to be poverty. And that was the goal of the people who started this war.
And I don't know that you can outsmart that or out-compassion that or bring anything good. Sometimes...

Speaker 16 malign people get their way, at least in the immediate term. And I fear very much in this case they have.

Speaker 16 And to say, well, let's come up with a plan to outsmart them is just asking human intelligence to do more than I think human intelligence in this situation probably can do.

Speaker 17 Thoughtful of quite depressing response, but on theme for this podcast at Times.

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Speaker 17 Final topic's not going to be much easier. So, when I took over this podcast from Charlie a couple weeks ago, months ago now, time flies.

Speaker 17 I said to Katie Cooper that in the first week I wanted to make sure we had my favorite recurring guest, which was you.

Speaker 17 And that was our plan until you got what I imagine was the worst call of your life, that your daughter Miranda had collapsed.

Speaker 17 I imagine most of our listeners know by now that she died a few weeks ago at the age of 32. You wrote beautifully about her life and her final gift to you in the Atlantic last week.

Speaker 17 I recommend everybody read that with some tissues. Many in the Bullerk family have had the privilege of knowing her, Mona and A.B.
and others. I did not have that privilege.

Speaker 17 I was hoping maybe you'd share a little bit about her for those of us who had never got a chance to meet Miranda.

Speaker 16 Well, we do have this intimate bond of this coincidence of time. I was to speak to you on the 16th of February.
Our call was to be at 11 o'clock. And at 10:40 a.m.

Speaker 16 that morning, I got what was, as you say, the most horrific call.

Speaker 16 And my wife and I raced to New York, where Miranda is. We live in Washington.
But of course, all we could do was

Speaker 16 plan a burial. There's a lot to say.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 I could take a lot of time to say it, and I won't, because one of the things that I've,

Speaker 16 when you go through this, you have to realize is suffering is the great human equalizer. And

Speaker 16 different people have different kinds of suffering, and some have it in their past, and some have it in their future, future, but we will all do this.

Speaker 16 And as a writer, you can only claim attention to your suffering, which is so raw to you, to the extent that you're able to make it part of the universal human condition and to speak to everybody's.

Speaker 16 This is a world full of suffering. So, what I tried to do when I wrote about it was to...

Speaker 16 Well, first, I didn't directly write about it because you can't. It's like the sun.
You can't look at it. It's like a rock that's too heavy.
You can only approach it indirectly.

Speaker 16 And so I talked about inheriting my daughter's dog, who's at my feet right now.

Speaker 16 And so I talked about that experience as a way to make things a little lighter, but also to try to talk about something that I think was the universal part.

Speaker 16 And this is what I talked about, which is when you're a parent, you're a parent. You're bringing these human beings along.
You're pulling them into the world.

Speaker 16 And that means you're not always their buddy.

Speaker 16 You try to be fun a lot of the time, but you can't be fun all of the time because you're the person who's in charge of saying no when they need to hear no and of saying saying you have to apply yourself in a certain way they may not want to and what you hope is at the end of a long and full life that the parent and the child can agree well it was worth i understand now and miranda lived long enough that we did have that understanding but not so long

Speaker 16 that i wasn't left with a lot of self-doubts about things that I had had done when I could have done better, been more understanding, more insightful.

Speaker 16 And in particular, the nature of her death was when she died because she'd had a brain tumor operation and it required constant interventions to adjust the hormone bile.

Speaker 16 The brain tumor had ravaged her endocrine system. And so she had to take pills to manage everything from her thirst to her sleeping hours to her immune system.

Speaker 16 And if you didn't hit that right and it had to be changed every few weeks, you were at terrible risk, more risk than any of us, I think, understood.

Speaker 16 So you're left with, well, what if we had paid a little bit more attention to this medical clue and moved the knobs a little bit this way? Would she be alive today?

Speaker 16 And so, like many people in my situation we're very tortured by those thoughts and so i wrote the piece to talk about what that dialogue at three in the morning of self-doubt and then the punchline of the piece was on the other hand she left us this really quite not a good dog dog

Speaker 16 i i i refer the piece to like ringo bites everything he bites rocks like who does that so i talked about living with ringo and just saying that she loved him so much and when i feel these torments i think well i'm taking care of ringo so whatever else i did wrong, I'm doing that right.

Speaker 17 Look, I mean, I could ask you a million things about her. There's one thing that I really wanted to, though.
I know that at least one of our listeners also had a child die not so long ago. And

Speaker 17 it's just a situation where I just can't imagine. It's just hard for me to wrap my head around.

Speaker 17 So I just kind of wonder for any others who are struggling through this, have been going through this, if there's anything that's been a bomb or a buoy amidst the grief.

Speaker 16 There are many things in the long run, but in the short run, let me me recapitulate a conversation I had with somebody that was weirdly helpful to me.

Speaker 16 I had a conversation with someone who had lost his daughter at age 33 two years ago. And

Speaker 16 similarly, very tight family. I was talking to this person, my wife and I were, and he said, look,

Speaker 16 if

Speaker 16 the angel of death were to come to you and say, if you and Danielle agree to jump off the top of this building, we can bring Miranda back, would you take that? Would you do it?

Speaker 16 And he said, of course you do it. You do it in a heartbeat.
You do it with a smile on your face. He said,

Speaker 16 this person was a Hollywood agent type. He said, but that's not on the table.

Speaker 16 And this phrase, but that's not on the table, that has been the best crutch we have. We just keep like whenever you say, but that's not on the table.
We can't have that. So what can we have?

Speaker 16 What can we do? So that's the bomb I would. is there are things you can do.
In my case, I could write a memorial piece. We can hold our family more closely together.
We can,

Speaker 16 in our hearts, and to the extent you do it in public, memorialize the person. You can make sure that their story is known to the people who want to know it.

Speaker 16 And you can try to live more by their values. Miranda was, she's not a fearless person.
She had fears, but she was very, very, very brave. And I've done some TV things since

Speaker 16 we lost Miranda. And one of the things I've gone at every show is saying, I always had an idea of things I might say and things I shouldn't say.

Speaker 16 And one of the things I've been doing since February 16th is saying, when I go on, the things I might say, I'm going to say them. Yeah.

Speaker 16 Because Miranda would have said. So I'm going to say them.

Speaker 17 I love that. Well, thanks.
Thanks for being willing to share that with us.

Speaker 17 And the article was Miranda's Last Gift. I don't know if I said that.
You also posted the eulogy that you and Danielle did on your social media feeds if people want to find that. And,

Speaker 17 boy,

Speaker 17 it was a tough one to watch, but it was full of love. Thank you, it was full of love.

Speaker 17 And at the beginning of the YOG, you recounted a memory of her singing a hauntingly lovely karaoke rendition of The Passenger. So I'm going to leave folks with that song as a tribute.

Speaker 17 And to the extent that we're able, know that many of us are trying to ride with you on this. And I hope to have you back on the podcast soon.
Thanks so much, David Crow. Thank you.
All right.

Speaker 17 We'll see you all tomorrow. Peace.

Speaker 17 I am the passenger

Speaker 17 And I ride and I ride

Speaker 17 I ride through the city backs

Speaker 17 I see the stars come out of the sky

Speaker 17 Yeah, the bright and hollow sky

Speaker 17 You know it looks so good tonight

Speaker 17 I am the passenger.

Speaker 17 I stay under glass.

Speaker 17 I look through my windows so bright.

Speaker 17 I see the stars come out tonight.

Speaker 17 I see the bright and hollow sky.

Speaker 17 Over the city is a ripped back sky.

Speaker 17 And everything looks good tonight.

Speaker 17 Sing la la la la la la la la

Speaker 17 la

Speaker 17 la la la la la la.

Speaker 17 La la la la la la la la la la la.

Speaker 17 Get into the car.

Speaker 17 We'll be the passenger.

Speaker 17 We'll ride through the city tonight.

Speaker 17 We'll the city's ripped back sights.

Speaker 17 We'll see the bright and hollow sky.

Speaker 17 We'll see the stars that shine so bright.

Speaker 17 A star is made for us tonight.

Speaker 17 Oh, the passenger,

Speaker 17 how high it rides.

Speaker 17 Oh the passenger

Speaker 17 and he rides and he rides

Speaker 17 He looks through his window

Speaker 17 What does he see?

Speaker 17 He sees a sight and hollow sky

Speaker 17 He sees the stars come out tonight

Speaker 17 He sees the city's ripped back sight

Speaker 17 He sees the winding ocean drive

Speaker 17 And everything was made for you and me.

Speaker 17 All of it was made for you and me.

Speaker 17 But it just belongs to you and me.

Speaker 17 So let's take a ride and see what's mine.

Speaker 17 I'll sing la la la la la la la la.

Speaker 17 La la la la la la la la.

Speaker 17 La la la la

Speaker 17 The Borg Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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