David Frum: The Kraken Is Never Coming

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny, infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 3 California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake.

Speaker 7 Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours.

Speaker 8 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage.

Speaker 4 The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days.

Speaker 11 Strengthen your home and help protect your family.

Speaker 12 Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.

Speaker 8 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com.

Speaker 14 Welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
It is September 29th, 2023, and it feels as if all the stars are aligned, at least for the Republican Party.

Speaker 14 I mean, they've been going through some things. So they are fresh off that chaotic, pointless debate the other night.

Speaker 14 They appear poised to re-nominate the defeated, twice-impeached former president who faces 91 felony charges. We are barreling toward a government shutdown.

Speaker 14 And Republicans decided this week would be a good time to take some time off to roll out their first hearing on the impeachment of Joe Biden. And it didn't go well.

Speaker 14 MSNBC put together a little bit of a montage of the Democrats reacting. And before you go, well, of course, Democrats are going to say that.

Speaker 14 Just keep in mind that the reviews across the board were pretty bad.

Speaker 14 I think there was kind of a universal assumption that this was a real shit show, that this was a dumpster fire inside a clown car wrapped inside of a fiasco.

Speaker 14 But you get a little flavor of the way that Democrats were reacting to James Comer's, I would say, underwhelming rollout hearing. So let's play that.

Speaker 15 All right, so let's get it straight.

Speaker 15 We're 62 hours away from shutting down the government of the United States of America, and Republicans are launching an impeachment drive based on a long debunked and discredited lie.

Speaker 16 What a day we are having here, isn't it?

Speaker 13 Right?

Speaker 16 I mean, listen, as a former director of emergency management, I know a disaster when I see one.

Speaker 3 And I want to say thank you to Mr. Donald Trump for calling this hearing today.
We see the long arm, but little hands of Mr.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump, whose fingerprints are all over this hearing and this sham impeachment.

Speaker 16 Donald Trump impeachments. Oh, how many impeachments? We got two there.
How many indictments? We got four. How many for Biden? Zero, zero.

Speaker 14 Donald Trump is right.

Speaker 16 He's sick of winning. He's just winning, running away with it.
And that's why we're here. They can't save Donald Trump.
They can't take away the two impeachments and the four indictments.

Speaker 16 But they can try to put some numbers on the board for Joe Biden. But the problem is when you sling mud, you got to have mud.
And they just don't have anything, Mr. Chairman.

Speaker 17 Honestly, if they would continue to say if or Hunter and we were playing a drinking game, I would be drunk by now.

Speaker 15 If the Republicans had a smoking gun or even a dripping water pistol, they would be presenting it today, but they've got nothing on Joe Biden. Come on.

Speaker 16 If you all think there's so much evidence, we're here. Call the vote on impeachment.
Impeach him right now. I dare you.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that's not likely. So to sort all of this out, our good friend David Frum, staff writer at the Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently, Trumpocalypse and Trumpocracy.

Speaker 14 So David, what is your hot take on what Republicans were up to? I mean, my reaction there was the Republicans were not bringing their best.

Speaker 14 This was not their best.

Speaker 13 This is their best. No, I think

Speaker 13 that's the mistake.

Speaker 13 When you listen to the second day reaction among Republicans and the rage of people like Cash Patel and Steve Bannon against this hearing, and they're denouncing it as vociferously as the Democrats are, you see a pattern that is very similar to what happened when Donald Trump began alleging election fraud in 2020 and 2021, which is the non-insane people, the people who remain on earth, are too weak to say no,

Speaker 13 but they are not insane enough to indulge all the fantasies so they they start something procedural they begin looking for holes and then the more radical element get angry and they say we want you to unleash the kraken remember that that's what sydney is all about to unleash the kraken and the others are saying uh there is no kraken it's imaginary and the people who believe in the kraken are crazy no no we want the kraken we want the kraken and and so it creates this kind of tension inside the republican coalition where comer would i mean okay he's obviously no genius but he's he's not a crackpot.

Speaker 13 But he understands the Kraken isn't imaginary, but he has to understand he has to do the build-up.

Speaker 13 Any minute now, Kraken coming, you know, countdown to the arrival of the Kraken, get ready, big Kraken. But he knows there's no Kraken, and he knows the people who think there is are crazy people.

Speaker 14 Okay, but does it actually matter?

Speaker 14 Here's my cynical question. And because in terms of actually lining up evidence, it was embarrassing.

Speaker 14 They brought in Jonathan Turley, they brought in this forensic accountant, and they both testified that, no, there's not enough evidence.

Speaker 14 These were their star witnesses, that there was not enough evidence to go ahead with the impeachment. But isn't a lot of this just simply counter-programming, David?

Speaker 14 I mean, isn't this basically: look, let's flood the zone.

Speaker 14 Let's at least have the news cycle talk as much about the alleged Biden crime family as they do about the 91 actual felony charges against Donald Trump.

Speaker 14 And to a certain extent, if you throw up enough smoke, if you get enough people with their nose pressed against the window, waiting for the Kraken to arrive, haven't you achieved at least something, at least in terms of the politics of distraction and whataboutism?

Speaker 13 Well, if your goal is to appeal to the hardest core people in America, then yes, this is a good way to raise money. It's a good way to make TV careers.
Do I think it's powerful politics? No.

Speaker 13 If you were actually trying to compete to run the government of the United States, and look, that's not the business that Matt Gates and Lauren Bolberg are in.

Speaker 13 But if you imagine you were, here are some things you'd want to bring against the Biden administration.

Speaker 13 I'm writing a story right now on an important new report on the extraordinary educational deficits that were caused by the COVID lockdowns.

Speaker 13 Disastrous. Disastrous.
Disastrous. And something that a Republican Party could indeed pin on the Democrats, because Democratic states kept their schools closed longer than Republican states did.

Speaker 13 The deficits are bigger among the children in Democratic states. And of course, Democrats, because of their obligations to teachers' unions, don't even acknowledge.

Speaker 13 They won't use the phrase learning loss. They talk about unfinished learning, not accepting that it's really gone and in danger of being gone forever.

Speaker 13 And the things that you'd have to do to overcome the learning deficits, cancel summer vacation and focus schools on intense drill in reading and math to recover the basics.

Speaker 13 Those are things that Democratic teachers' unions don't want to do. So there's a thing you can talk about.
Why was the Biden administration taken so by surprise in Afghanistan?

Speaker 13 There's something you could talk about. The border.
That's a real thing. That's not imaginary.
You could talk about that.

Speaker 13 And those would all be things that would frame a debate that would be useful for the country. And maybe you'd lose on those issues.

Speaker 13 But those would be real issues where voters need to make fundamental decisions and the two parties should be competing. So is this a win for the Republicans?

Speaker 13 No, because in the end, the kraken is never going to arrive. And there's 18 months till the day.

Speaker 13 And that's a lot of time for people to realize, as they did with the voter fraud, that there's no kraken. There's just nothing.
And you've wasted everybody's time. You've wasted your own time.

Speaker 13 And you haven't dealt with issues that are important to the voters.

Speaker 14 Okay, but they've made the calculation, haven't they, though, that at least their primary voters don't care about policy. They don't care about any of these issues.
They want the kraken.

Speaker 14 They're completely okay with the felonious, seditious former president who is threatening to give the death penalty to one of the nation's top most decorated generals, that this is what they do.

Speaker 14 So, I mean, I'm trying to like connect all the dots this week. I mean, that debate was so substance-free.

Speaker 14 It's sort of an indication of this is the non-Trumpian wing of the party, and they're just throwing spaghetti up against the wall. The Republicans in Congress are just fighting with one another.

Speaker 14 Nobody knows what their end game is or what it's really about, but they're going to shut down the government because it's all performative. And of course, you have Donald Trump extending his lead.

Speaker 14 So in terms of actually talking about government and public policy, they seem incredibly disconnected, don't they?

Speaker 13 Well, when you say they've made a calculation, if you zap a steer with a cataprod, it will move in the opposite direction from the catalypod. But it's not calculated.
It's just reacting.

Speaker 13 And even if the steer had a plan, which the steer probably doesn't, the steer is not executing a plan, it's just getting away from the prod.

Speaker 13 And I think that is the way to understand what Republicans are doing. There is no central committee.
There is no one who's making decisions. And when they have failures, they reinforce failure.

Speaker 13 So the people who are writing big checks in the Republican Party say, what we want is a candidate who is an alternative to Donald Trump who will never criticize Donald Trump.

Speaker 13 And we have two or three of those now, and they're not working. So let's add a fourth in the form of Glenn Youngkin.

Speaker 13 Maybe a fourth candidate who is different from Donald Trump but won't criticize him. Maybe that will be the term.
That's not a plan.

Speaker 13 The plan is always you have to consolidate and then you have to attack. That may not work, but at least it might work.
Whereas what you're doing now is guaranteed not to work. It's driven by fear.

Speaker 13 It's just the steers stepping away from the prod.

Speaker 14 So let's talk about this Yunken buzz, which broke out this week and appears to be wishcasting.

Speaker 14 That there are members of the donor class who are waiting for the unicorn to come over the hill and save them from Donald Trump. How seriously should we take this Yunkin talk?

Speaker 14 First of all, I mean, do you think that Glenn Young actually is interested in this? I mean, would he actually do this?

Speaker 14 Would he throw himself into the volcano in order to save the Republican Party at this point?

Speaker 13 If you could give a standardized aptitude test for presidential qualities, Youngkin would probably outscore any of the people in the

Speaker 13 capable business executive. He's been a reasonably responsible governor of Virginia.
He doesn't project a completely unattractive and offensive personality in the way that Ron DeSantis does.

Speaker 13 And he doesn't have a long record of cringing and cowering before Trump the way Nikki Haley does.

Speaker 13 So, yeah, like if somebody said, you, David Frum, have the only ballot in America, choose a Republican nominee, you know what?

Speaker 13 I think, yeah,

Speaker 13 I like the look of this guy, and I think he'd make a fine president, probably.

Speaker 14 But will he run? Will he actually pull the trigger, knowing what happens to him?

Speaker 13 He's a very wealthy man, so he doesn't need to act fast. And he's got, you know, a stable life and a lot of good options.

Speaker 13 So from his point of view, the smart play is write a book, Youngkin's Vision for America, and then after the likely Republican defeat, then start working the New Hampshire circuit and run in 2028.

Speaker 13 He's got time and just hope that Trump will go away. Like, why put yourself into this mess? And in a way, DeSantis can't say no to his donors

Speaker 13 because that's not just his political future. It's also his backup retirement plan.
He owes them everything. They will decide whether he goes on corporate boards.

Speaker 13 They will decide whether he has an economic future. He has no marketable skills.
Whereas Youngkin can't say no to his donors. He's got money in the bank.

Speaker 14 Before we move on to other things, your thoughts about that debate? Because I think the reviews were pretty uniform that this was one of the worst debates.

Speaker 13 The moderators were rolled over.

Speaker 14 There was a lot of yelling. It was a lot of screaming.
It did feel like the kids' table debate. It felt like a debate between the candidates who are vying for second place.

Speaker 14 Doesn't seem that it has changed anything in this race. I mean, I know it's lazy punditry to say that Donald Trump comes out the winner, but here's a guy who is 30 points ahead.

Speaker 14 He doesn't show up at the debates, and they don't

Speaker 14 really lay a glove on him. So what was your take about? And also, what does it tell you about the state of the non-Trumpian Republican Party?

Speaker 14 I mean, for the people who are looking for, okay, that stage is filled with people who are the alternatives, who will, who will pull us out and bring us past the era of Trump. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Well, one of the questions, if I were advising somebody who's thinking about running for president, I would ask them,

Speaker 13 since you're probably going to lose,

Speaker 13 because only one person wins. And the odds are statistically, even if you get to be like one of the top top 10 most likely people to be the Republican nominee, that's still a one in 10 chance.

Speaker 13 You're probably going to lose. If it comes to that, how would you like to lose? You hope to win.
You need a strategy to win, but you also need to think about the more likely option.

Speaker 13 So these people are going to be remembered as cringing weaklings, broken in advance, unworthy of the office. And that's what they convince you.
And I get it.

Speaker 13 There was a survey released yesterday, I think by, I'm going to forget which Republican group did it, that there's nothing you can say that doesn't make Republican voters like Trump more, because like women in an abusive relationship who have not yet made the decision to leave, he's been beating you for 20 years.

Speaker 13 So you have to defend that or else you look like, well, why did you put up with it for 20 years? So you have to create the structure of rationalization.

Speaker 13 That said, I think there's one thing to do in a debate like this. This is the debate after the indictments.

Speaker 13 You stand up there and your first line should be, a lot of people are asking, why me and not Donald Trump?

Speaker 13 And the answer is because we have to face the very high likelihood that Donald Trump will be in prison on voting day.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 13 And I give you my word, I I will not be in prison on voting day.

Speaker 13 And if you're not willing to confront the party with that reality, then why bother? Why bother?

Speaker 13 There are beautiful beaches, there are wonderful hiking trails, people have families, they have pets, interesting books to read, there's Netflix.

Speaker 13 I mean, there's just a lot of other things you can do if you're not going to do what it takes. And what it takes is to educate

Speaker 13 this.

Speaker 13 And you don't want to say too much to a Republican audience. That may be hopeless, but he really is in danger of going to prison and more than danger of going to prison.

Speaker 14 But won't that make Republican voters like him even more?

Speaker 13 That may make them like him even more. But Paul Ryan had an event, your friend, he was recently where he said

Speaker 13 he won't convert suburban women. That's an argument to try in 2020.

Speaker 13 But in 2023, you have to face, he's going to prison. He's going to have to commute between the different prisons where he's wanted.

Speaker 13 He's going to be wanted in a federal prison in one state and a federal prison in another state. And he's going to be wanted in a state prison, in another state prison.

Speaker 13 And by the way, his company is going to be dissolved. And that's probably going to trigger, trigger, along the way, more fraud charges in the state of New York.

Speaker 13 So they're going to have to have a fleet of buses to move around the different prisons he's going to be occupying.

Speaker 14 Will they have Wi-Fi at these prisons? Will he be able to deliver his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee via Zoom?

Speaker 13 Yes, yes, or with an ankle bracelet on.

Speaker 14 Or with the ankle bracelet on, which you know that my theory is, is that he steps from behind the podium, pulls up his pants leg, and says, you know, this is my ankle bracelet.

Speaker 14 I wear this as a badge of honor. I wear this for you.
And the crowd goes nuts, just completely nuts.

Speaker 13 It may be that the Republican Party has become a party so alienated from the institutions of American life and so deaf to ordinary ethics and morality that being a proven criminal is a plus.

Speaker 13 But the Republican Party is a minority of America, and that part of the Republican Party is probably half of the Republican Party. I mean, you're not going to win an election that way.

Speaker 13 And there's a book that's worth, I'm going to recommend to people, which is a biography of Mayor Curley of Boston called The rascal king the rascal king okay and curley was a criminal upon criminal he's active from i think the end of the 19th century until the through the 1930s and he's the point of the spear where massachusetts decisively swings in the late 19th century it's a yankee dominated state and then there's a period of swing and then it ends up being an irish catholic dominated state he's the point of the spear for that takeover and so what he's always able to say to the irish catholics is the yankees want to put you in prison as they did they want to stop stop you from voting, as they did.

Speaker 13 And so I represent you, and you have to overlook my stealing. And so it's a good model of how this can work.

Speaker 13 And you saw this in the period, you know, from the 1890s to the 1930s in the White South, where, again, people who felt beaten down by a hostile state would often put their trust in people who are blatant criminals.

Speaker 13 And so Donald Trump is doing that. But if we're at a point where we have that many people who are alienated in American society, Donald Trump is only an expression of the problem.

Speaker 13 I don't believe that Americans are that alienated.

Speaker 14 Hey, folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark Podcast.

Speaker 14 We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right and the center left for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous yet civil debate about politics and a lot more.

Speaker 14 And every day, we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to thebulwark.com and take a look around?

Speaker 14 Every day, we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact.

Speaker 14 To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bulwark Plus membership free for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebulwork.com/slash Charlie.

Speaker 14 That's thebulwork.com forward slash Charlie. We're going to get through this together, I promise.

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 3 California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake.

Speaker 7 Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours.

Speaker 8 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage.

Speaker 4 The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days.

Speaker 11 Strengthen your home and help protect your family.

Speaker 12 Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.

Speaker 8 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com.

Speaker 14 Okay, so this is what I wanted to talk to you about today, because, you know, amidst a great deal of Democratic bedwetting and angst, you have written a piece that argues that not only is Donald Trump not going to win next year, but that there's going to be a Biden landslide.

Speaker 14 Now, of course, since you wrote that, there's been a series of polls, some outliers, but generally, I would say, consistently showing this to be a very, very close race, that Donald Trump is very competitive.

Speaker 14 So make the anti-bedwetting case that assuming that you still believe that Joe Biden is going to roll next year.

Speaker 13 Okay, so I just want to be clear that I don't mean that he's going to win in a landslide and that he's going to get 56% of the vote. I think he's going to get 51, 52%.

Speaker 13 What I meant by a blow was I think it's going to be a down-the-ballot win. That is, it's not just, so Biden's going to win 51-47, something like that.

Speaker 13 But I think Democrats are are going to do unexpectedly well in down ballot races and especially in state races.

Speaker 14 Okay, tell me more about that.

Speaker 13 Well, first, we have some real-world experience, which is Biden has had bad poll numbers almost beginning at about month nine of his presidency.

Speaker 13 But despite those bad poll numbers, Democrats have consistently done well in elections in 21 and 22 and 23.

Speaker 13 And the election result that I pay the most attention to is their pickup of four state houses in the election of 22, which, as I understand it, the party of the president has not done anything like that since the 1930s.

Speaker 13 What that tells me, I had thought when the abortion decision came down, overturning Roe versus Wade, I thought abortion would be an important issue in 24, but it would be too abstract to motivate people in 22.

Speaker 13 And I was completely wrong about that.

Speaker 13 As consumed as you and I and people at the bottom are by the threat to American democracy, lots of people pay a little less attention to the structure of American politics say, what is happening is the Republicans want to police, surveill, and harass me and the women in my life and or if you are a woman, me personally.

Speaker 13 And I don't like that. I'm an American.
I don't want to be policed and surveilled and bossed around and told I can't travel across state lines if I'm pregnant.

Speaker 13 So the reaction to that, I think, is just enormous. And I think Republicans can't stay away from that, nor can they develop an answer.
They keep saying

Speaker 13 we need an answer to this question. And they can't do it because they're too committed.

Speaker 14 And yet, Donald Trump is pivoting on this issue. And you have Ron DeSantis and other Republicans who've gone along with a six-week ban with a lot of punitive legislation.

Speaker 14 Donald Trump is, isn't he, trying to pivot?

Speaker 14 And I wonder whether that's going to have an effect because Democrats have been assuming they're going to run on Dobbs and they're going to run against Republicans who are extreme.

Speaker 14 And here's Donald Trump going, okay, I am not one of these people. I am separating my, it was terrible.
They did the six-week ban.

Speaker 14 I'm now talking about a 15-week ban, which polls completely differently. So does that change the dynamics?

Speaker 14 Because clearly, Donald Trump looked at the midterms and he said it was abortion that killed us and he's not going to make that mistake.

Speaker 14 So this is like a weird moment to say Donald Trump is now more centrist than many other Republicans on this particular issue. Does that make a difference?

Speaker 13 Well, this is why I emphasize the down that when I say blowout, I mean down the ticket. I don't mean huge win at the top of the ticket.
I mean decisive results down the ticket.

Speaker 13 Trump will try to do that pivot and it may have some success for him, but he has so many other problems, including prison. But

Speaker 13 Republicans running for state office are not going to be able to pivot. They won't want to pivot and they won't be able to, and they're deeply branded.

Speaker 13 One of the things that we see is the parties have deep brand identities that are very, very hard to change.

Speaker 13 You can't say magic words and convince people that, like on the inflation issue, people believe the Republicans are the less inflationary party, even when they have been doing things since 2017 that are more inflationary than what the Democrats are.

Speaker 13 Yeah, because people have just, they remember that Republicans are always more comfortable with contractionary policies than Democrats are.

Speaker 13 And that goes back half a century, longer, goes back to the gold standard. So it's hard for you to say, I'm going to spend the next six months trying to change a century-established brand identity.

Speaker 13 And you have just so much tape of so many Republicans saying, yes, I want to put women in prison if they buy abortion pills for their daughters.

Speaker 13 And indeed, right now, there are women in prison in Republican states who are buying abortion pills for their daughters.

Speaker 13 So it's going to be hard to say that didn't happen because there's the woman in Nebraska who's in prison for buying an abortion pill for her daughter.

Speaker 14 The point you're making about brand, I think, is really, really important.

Speaker 14 So for example, you can have the Republican Party supporting the January 6th rioters who attack police and still claim to be the pro-police party. And people actually think they are.

Speaker 14 They think that they can block all the military promotions and still be able to pose as the pro-military party. These are very, very difficult things to do.

Speaker 14 What did you make of Joe Biden's speech in Arizona yesterday?

Speaker 14 He went down and opened a library for John McCain and delivered one of his strongest denunciations of how dangerous and extreme Donald Trump is. And once again, laid out the threats to democracy.

Speaker 14 Now, I agree with you that I think that this is the most serious threat, the existential threat. I'm not sure that's the way most voters are thinking about it.

Speaker 14 Your reaction to Joe Biden's speech, which I actually thought was kind of a laying out the gauntlet, laying out the fact that, okay, I'm going to take this fight to Donald Trump and I'm going to hit him hard.

Speaker 13 Yeah. President Biden has given a version of that speech before.
He gave it in Philadelphia just before the 22 election. That was the one where he had the red lighting that looked very dramatic.

Speaker 13 That speech had the effect of poking Donald Trump into intervening in the 22 election.

Speaker 13 That speech was very powerful to the good Democratic results because the Republican strategy in 22 is don't talk about Donald Trump. This is not a referendum on Donald Trump.

Speaker 13 This is a referendum on post-COVID price increases and the price of gasoline. And if it had been such, Republicans would have done well or better.

Speaker 13 Instead, Biden said, let this be a referendum on Trump. And Trump, who was supposed to keep silent, then said, damn right, it's a referendum on me.
And if you vote Republican, you get me and more me.

Speaker 13 And that's one of my tells about what's going to happen in 24, when you remind people that this is not an opportunity to protest gas prices. This is a vote for Donald Trump.

Speaker 13 And when Donald Trump cooperates, and I think one of the things that Biden did in that Arizona speech, and it's a different point in the cycle, so it doesn't have the same impact.

Speaker 13 But those pictures of Joe Biden with Cindy McCain, I mean, if your project as a Republican is to convince people that Joe Biden is a dangerous radical, which is a pretty difficult project.

Speaker 13 But if that's your project, Joe Biden, Al Sharpton, same. That's your project.
Joe Biden's images with the wife of John McCain

Speaker 13 and being applauded by the McCain family. And we're going to be in a situation in 24 where it's going to be like the last scene of Richard III, when all the different warring factions of the,

Speaker 13 I'll say, okay, you know, know, you're blanket, we all hate each other, but we're telling you this guy, he's the worst.

Speaker 13 So you're going to have the Romans and the Bushes and the McCains symbolically saying,

Speaker 13 we don't mind Joe Biden. I mean, we don't love him.
He's everybody's second choice, but he's running against everybody's last choice.

Speaker 14 No, this is a really interesting point. Virtually every Republican, every non-crazy Republican in America wants 2024 to be a referendum on Joe Biden, right?

Speaker 14 Except Donald Trump wants to make it a referendum on him, which changes the dynamic. I have a confession to make.

Speaker 14 When Joe Biden is telling the story about how he was responsible for John McCain meeting Cindy McCain and getting married, you know, I'm thinking, oh man, this is Joe Biden.

Speaker 14 This is another corn pop story. And then Cindy McCain's asked about it and said, yeah, that's absolutely true.
Joe Biden introduced McCain, which is like,

Speaker 14 there's kind of a flashback to when politics was completely different, when these guys would have these personal relationships, when they were human.

Speaker 14 I mean, I'm old enough to even remember when Lindsey Graham was asked about Joe Biden, and he says he's the best person. He's the best human being ever.
And of course, that was from the before times.

Speaker 14 It is a counter image, isn't it?

Speaker 13 I mean, it is a reminder of how long Joe Biden has been around. And that is a lot of people find that unnerving.

Speaker 13 You know, you're talking about how I introduced somebody to his widow, someone who did not die tragically young,

Speaker 13 lived a long and full life, and he's gone, and I'm still here. And I was a little bit older at the time even than he was then.

Speaker 13 Still older. There is that.
But yes, it gets the humanness, but mostly it gets the point.

Speaker 13 If you're trying to sell that this guy is some kind of Bolshevik radical, it's always been an implausible project.

Speaker 13 And the more he looks like this kind of rambly, grandfatherly figure, the harder it becomes to sell the idea that Joe Biden is going to be the man who achieves Afro-socialism in America.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, I guess that's the cognitive dissonance.

Speaker 14 On the one hand, they are arguing that he's so senile that he's sitting drooling in the corner and he doesn't know what day it is and he can't put his own socks on.

Speaker 14 On the other hand, that he is this architect of the deep state that is going to destroy America and destroy the church as we know it. But you know, it is interesting.

Speaker 14 You know, now I'm going off on a digression, how the conservative media incorporated, you know, obviously thrives on outrage and anger and it needs a villain. It needs a cause all the time.

Speaker 14 And you've written about this very, very extensively. Do you have any thoughts about

Speaker 14 the last week? And

Speaker 14 everything seems to have been happening in the last week. We have so many of the MAGA influencers who've decided, okay, who can we vilify? Who can we attack this week?

Speaker 14 And they've decided to go to war with Taylor Swift.

Speaker 14 I think it's another reminder that these guys are not real men of political genius, that they've decided that she's woke. And so go to war with one of the most popular figures in American culture.

Speaker 14 And at the same time, go after her boyfriend, who is one of the most talented NFL stars.

Speaker 14 It's like, there's another reminder that there's not like a brain trust that sits around with a whiteboard thinking, what is the smartest move that we can do this week?

Speaker 13 No, it tells you something else. And we're talking here not about Republicans.
We're talking not exactly about even MAGA.

Speaker 13 What we're talking about is this hyper-online radical right world and how much of that is driven by thwarted male sexual desire. All of it, that's their politics.

Speaker 13 And so, of course, they hate Taylor Swift.

Speaker 14 She's never going to date Roger Kimball. Right.
It's just never going to happen, right?

Speaker 13 I'm sort of surveying my demographic, which is one of the most vulnerable male over a certain age, over a certain income. And we are just completely.

Speaker 13 So, and yet I see a certain number who don't succumb. And you think, what is the most powerful inoculating factor for people in my demographic? And the answer is personal happiness.

Speaker 13 You're happy in your life. You just don't resonate to this message.
And the Taylor Swift thing makes it, you know, you can't get so angry about this if you have a profile of your own.

Speaker 13 But if you don't, because Taylor Swift is this huge, because she's not just, she's a very talented musician, obviously, but she's also joins that to being an object of sexual desire for so many people.

Speaker 13 And they can't have her and they don't have anything and they never will. And they're in a rage about it.

Speaker 13 Certainly describes many of the creators of this content. And it absolutely describes just about all of the consumers of this content.

Speaker 14 Well, it is an interesting paradox that you have this movement that is so invested in masculinity. You have, you know, Tucker Carlson talking about irradiating testicles and everything.

Speaker 14 And yet you also have at the same time, you know, all of this manliness with that sort of incel culture, right? That I really hate these women because I don't know. They don't like manly men like me.

Speaker 14 And of course, most of them are not that manly men anyway. Most of them would not want to walk into a locker room and say to Travis Kelsey the things that they're saying online, right?

Speaker 14 I mean, these keyboard warriors would not really want to be in a room with Travis Kelsey.

Speaker 13 One of my suggestions back in 2016 for the Hillary Clinton debate prep was that she should arrive on the stage with a vacuum-sealed jar of pickles, hand it to Donald Trump, and say, I bet you $100 you can't open this.

Speaker 14 I like that a lot.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I propose that some phrases.

Speaker 13 That's a little too.

Speaker 14 No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't think that one has expired yet either.

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Speaker 14 Okay, so you were at the Atlantic Festival this week talking about the future of conservatism. Our good friend Tom Nichols was ill.
I have not been able to read anything about it.

Speaker 14 So, you know, I'm asked this question all the time, and I find it very, very puzzling because you have to define what you mean by conservatism. You have to define what the timeline is.

Speaker 14 What did you say? What was your takeaway from this conversation about the future of conservatism, especially

Speaker 14 given this week when we're seeing what conservative candidates for president do, what the conservative voters or quote-unquote conservative voters, what a conservative Congress is doing?

Speaker 14 Where are we going?

Speaker 13 I've been working on a book for the summer about this.

Speaker 13 It may take a bit of a while, and it's a very different book from anything I've ever done before because it tries to be a little bit more poetic and visionary rather than highly specific.

Speaker 13 But one of the things that when I'm with people who are my new readers is I always have to caution them, you know, there's going to come a time when Donald Trump is gone, and I'm going to disappoint you because you're going to find out what I think about all the issues that are not Donald Trump.

Speaker 13 And that the future of conservatism is we're still, you know, we've been in this fight.

Speaker 13 And so, you know, the rain's coming from a certain direction, and that's the direction in which your umbrella is pointed. Do I believe the government is efficient at allocating resources? I do not.

Speaker 13 Do I believe that the government should be driving the direction of industrial policy? I do not. Do I sympathize with the criticisms of American history, even by acknowledging many of their truths?

Speaker 13 I do not. I think they are focusing on things that matter less and ignoring things that matter more.

Speaker 13 Do I think that anyone who works hard at it can make a sufficient success of their life in the United States? I do.

Speaker 13 Do I think the constitutional scheme basically is sound and should be protected rather than radically changed? I do.

Speaker 13 I mean, not that there are no reforms, I would imagine, but you go through these things, you know, and even if I'm wrong about any of those particular things, the system needs me.

Speaker 13 They need me and people like me to be saying those things.

Speaker 13 I mean, it can't always be true that anytime anyone has some, you know, brainwave, that we try it, that you need a lot of people to say, I don't know, the last 99 brainwaves, you know, proved kind of unreliable.

Speaker 13 Maybe we should road test this brainwave, try it in Delaware before we take it national. The debates that we used to have are debates that need to come back.

Speaker 13 And Donald Trump has been, because he believes in nothing except protecting himself from the consequences of his own criminality, he has stopped discussions that we need to have.

Speaker 13 I mean, there is inflation. How do you, what's the right way to deal with that? I mean, I do believe if you want to stop inflation, the Republicans of old were right, you need contractionary policy.

Speaker 13 You don't, as Biden thinks you do, have government investment to create new production to catch up to the money supply. You control the money supply.

Speaker 13 And these are conversations and debates and arguments and battles and votes that we all need to have. And I,

Speaker 13 I hope I'll live long enough to see them return. But in the meantime, we have this threat to all that we hold dear.
And you have to see that off before you can go back to politics as it should be.

Speaker 14 Right. Jonathan Rauch has explained this as the difference between a heart attack and cancer, that the attacks on liberalism from the left are serious and they're long-term.

Speaker 14 But we're dealing with the heart attack right now. And there are people who push back against that analogy.
And I think that that's going to be a fight that we're going to have as well.

Speaker 14 I mean, when Donald Trump leaves, obviously we don't snap back.

Speaker 14 But the arguments that you're describing are debates that we've had for hundreds of years in Western society, actually globally, you know, between how much creative destruction do you want?

Speaker 14 How much change? What is the pace of change? What is worth conserving? What is not worth conserving? There are a lot of things that are not worth conserving, as we've learned.

Speaker 14 On the other hand, there are institutions and there are habits and prejudices that should not be lightly thrown thrown away, that if you destroy these things because somebody in a seminar room has a quote-unquote better idea, well, maybe we ought to be skeptical about it.

Speaker 14 As you point out, maybe we ought to try it in one of the laboratories of democracy, say, in San Francisco or Burlington, Vermont, before we foist it on the rest of the country.

Speaker 14 And that is a back and forth,

Speaker 14 yin and yang. Yes, you want to increase opportunity.
On the other hand, do you want to destroy the expectations?

Speaker 14 I mean, you know, people live their lives with a certain expectation, a certain idea of fairness, a certain idea of what society is going to be.

Speaker 14 You can make it better, as liberals have been pointing out. On the other hand, you have to be careful what you burn down.
because there are things that exist for a reason.

Speaker 14 And I do think that conservative instinct is important. And also, I think there is that tension between individual freedom and the common good that is always going to be somewhat complex.

Speaker 14 And we need to have those debates.

Speaker 13 Somebody wants to walk down the street singing a song. Should that be legal? Yeah.

Speaker 13 Somebody wants to walk down the street shouting at the top of his lungs. Should that be okay?

Speaker 13 And you think, you know, okay, well, somewhere between the guy singing a song as he walks down the street, which, you know, maybe you don't like the tune, but you have live and let live.

Speaker 13 It's a complex society, versus maniacs wandering around the street shouting.

Speaker 13 So somewhere along that line, you need to do something about the maniac shouting and not do something about the the person singing a song. But we have to get from here to there.

Speaker 13 And we may need, and this is a thing that I specifically have to accept, and that's one of the things I talk about in the book, is sometimes generations go off the scene and say, you know what, your generational task is done.

Speaker 13 You know, as we, today, as you and I record, the country is marking the death of Dianne Feinstein. I'll say this with respect.
but because it is the day of her death, it is true.

Speaker 13 Also a warning, that there are times you have to accept that your time is up. And it's not literally on the day of your death that your time is up.
Your time is up before that.

Speaker 13 And you have to move on and allow new people, new generations, because many of the things I've been talking about, some of them will be intelligible to people in their 20s and some not.

Speaker 13 And more of the future belongs to them than belongs to me.

Speaker 13 And you may say, you know, we have to have these new debates and new ways for the people who will have 50 more years on this earth as opposed to those of us who have, you know, 10, 20, 30.

Speaker 14 I had a conversation with Will Salatin, I think, on the podcast earlier this week.

Speaker 14 And he was making this similar point that maybe at a certain point, you know, some of us get a little bit jaded, we get a little bit worn down, we become a little bit more pessimistic.

Speaker 14 And so when you see, you know, young people, you know, coming on board who have a more hopeful view, who are not willing to just give up, it is a reminder that these things do go in cycles.

Speaker 14 And another thing that I think that conservatism has understood in the past has been that, you know, there may be moments in which we run off the rails.

Speaker 14 There may be moments where you embrace fads or innovations or horrors, but they're not necessarily forever because human nature is what it is.

Speaker 14 And so I go back and forth between being a little bit horrified by the fragility

Speaker 14 of the world that we live in.

Speaker 14 On the other hand, you know, you're looking at dead histories behind you, and I'm thinking of all the periods where you had, you know, decades of just darkness that somehow we overcame.

Speaker 14 that somehow the power of these ideas were able to bring us out.

Speaker 13 This is a book written by Anne Moreau-Lindbergh, and she published it just after the fall of France in 1940.

Speaker 14 When things were dark.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And she was an authentic fascist, but she wrote as someone who was sad.
And she said, you know, democracy was good. No one loved it more than I did.

Speaker 13 But we just have to accept that it's over and that the wave of the future belongs to these new regimes, Nazism, fascism, even communism, even Soviet communism.

Speaker 13 We just, that's the future, and Americans have to adjust to it.

Speaker 13 And it's called The Wave of the Future, A Confession of Faith, and it's published in the summer or fall of 1940 and sold a lot of copies. And the Americans of 1940 said, screw off.
Absolutely not.

Speaker 13 Absolutely not. No.
Everything in there is wrong. We're going to leave that wave of the future 18 inches high.
And I keep it nearby, just to remind. This is the way I ended my talk at the festival.

Speaker 13 When you get to a certain point in your own life, the future holds decline leading to extinction. And it's very natural to project that, your personal fate, onto the society around you.

Speaker 13 And that's why old people are so pessimistic or tend to be so pessimistic. Because who wants to face the possibility that after you quit the scene, that's when things get really good.
It'll be cool.

Speaker 14 The sun's going to rise as soon as you leave. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 13 Maybe it'll be the problem. You're like the prophet Jonah.
We throw you overboard and the storm ends.

Speaker 13 So I keep this at hand to remind you that in 1940, liberal democracy was the wave of the future, not fascism. And so it is now.

Speaker 14 You know, maybe we ought to have an anthology of these prophecies of doom. I think it would probably make for some interesting reading.

Speaker 14 I was recently rereading Whitaker Chambers' Witness, and he was deeply pessimistic.

Speaker 14 You know, for people who are not familiar, he was a former Time magazine editor who had actually been a communist and then broke with the communists, and he was the one who exposed Alger Hiss.

Speaker 14 But he constantly, he did the deep pessimism that he had, that he was going from the winning side to the losing side, because he, like, and Morrow Limberg, really did think that, you know, Soviet communism was on the march and was probably going to be the future.

Speaker 14 And so when he left them, he had this very dark view that the West would not be able to survive. And clearly, he was also wrong, at least in the short term.

Speaker 13 I was rereading the other day again for this thing I'm working on. In the late 1950s, Hugh Trevor Roper, who was a liberal conservative, best known because he was the first scholar.

Speaker 13 He was a British intelligence officer during the war. And he was one of the very first scholars into the Hitler bunker.
in 1945.

Speaker 13 And he wrote a book called Hitler the Last 10 Days that was this, for a long time, the definitive study of the 10 Days Before Hitler's suicide.

Speaker 13 But he was a capital C conservative in British politics and was appointed to the House of Lords. The last years of his career, he had a bit of an academic scandal, so there's a blight on it.

Speaker 13 But he wrote this devastating review of Arnold Toynbee, who was a great pessimist of the 30s, 40s, 50s, and a great, you know, the jig was up. And he has a line in the essay.

Speaker 13 He said, when radicals of left or right say that the future belongs to them, it is only a very feeble conservative who says they are right and calls for the last sacraments.

Speaker 13 The conservative of character pops them on the nose and says you're absolutely wrong. It does not belong to you.
And I think we need some of that attitude.

Speaker 13 And that's why I keep Anne Morrow Lindbergh at hand.

Speaker 14 That is great. And what a great note to end on.
David Fromm, thank you so much for joining me on the weekend podcast. It is always great to talk with you.

Speaker 13 Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Speaker 14 And thank you all for listening to this weekend's Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes.
We will be back on Monday and we'll do this all over again.

Speaker 14 The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

Speaker 14 This is Matt Rogers from Los Cultureistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Los Culture Eastos with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.
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