David Frum: This Is Shame-Faced Trump

Transcript

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Speaker 21 Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Delighted to welcome back Gold Jacket guests, staff writer at The Atlantic and host of the David Frum Show. It's David Frum.

Speaker 21 How are you doing, sir?

Speaker 22 Good.

Speaker 25 When you say gold, I'm conjuring up one of those WrestleMania jackets, those really shiny ones.

Speaker 21 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 21 Sure. I kind of am thinking about like the Masters winner or at a Saturday Night Live.
Like if you've been the host, I think five or ten times, you get a jacket.

Speaker 21 That's what I had in mind, but we'll give you a shiny one.

Speaker 27 All right. Thank you.

Speaker 21 I don't know. What should we talk about at the start of the podcast? Who's to say? Lots out there in the news.
What won't we talk about that? Maybe Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 28 What do you think? All right.

Speaker 29 All right.

Speaker 23 Bad for the Jews.

Speaker 21 Not a great representative. I want to talk about, you know,

Speaker 21 there's some angst.

Speaker 21 It's a lot of negative discussion about the Jews out there in the public space. I want to talk about that at the end.

Speaker 21 But yeah, Jeffrey Epstein cover-up is in full bloom right now. We've seen a bunch of emails talked about that the last two shows.
This morning, Trump is out with a bleat about this. He says this.

Speaker 21 The Democrats are doing everything in their withering power to push the Epstein hoax again. Some weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they're soft and foolish.

Speaker 21 Epstein was a Democrat. Not our problem.
Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers about Epstein. They know all about him.
Don't waste your time with Trump. I have a country to run.

Speaker 21 How does he sound on that?

Speaker 22 Well, when you say the cover-up is in full bloom, I think it's sort of past the bloom.

Speaker 34 Look, if you want to do a cover-up, you don't keep obsessively talking about the thing you yourself are covering up.

Speaker 24 You introduce the country to the seven brave astronauts who are about to embark for Mars.

Speaker 38 And you announce your new Trump candy bar.

Speaker 41 And you say tariff holiday for Republicans in red states and more tariffs on blue states.

Speaker 43 You do something else.

Speaker 26 But Trump, in a way, I forget whose point this was.

Speaker 46 This is not original to me.

Speaker 43 I'm going to be repeating somebody else.

Speaker 47 Maybe it was Charlie Sykes who said this, that normally Trump doesn't cover up.

Speaker 24 He just says, yeah, I did it.

Speaker 50 I punched that baby.

Speaker 24 And in fact, after years of our country being led by weak presidents who wouldn't punch a baby, I punched the baby in the face.

Speaker 54 I did it.

Speaker 55 And people say yay.

Speaker 47 And some people are upset, but others say yay.

Speaker 23 But there's no cover-up.

Speaker 24 And Epstein is distinct because he's actually, for once, acting guilty and shamefaced.

Speaker 51 And that has led, I think, a lot of people to think, this must be really horrible.

Speaker 37 If all the other things he did, he doesn't cover up.

Speaker 22 What happened here?

Speaker 21 He also is very good in those cases when, you know, he says, like, oh, you know, whatever it was, but I didn't pay any taxes.

Speaker 21 You know, imagine like the example, the prime example of this is, you know, could have Mitt Romney and, you know, how apologetic he was and all this for the well and not paying the taxes and trying to figure out how to spin it.

Speaker 21 And Trump was always like, yeah, I didn't pay taxes, right? Like only a sucker would pay taxes. Right.

Speaker 21 That was his normal move here. But then the other move is that, as you say, he would do a distraction, right? Like we'd be troops into the cities or I don't know,

Speaker 21 maybe we'll get to Venezuela later. Maybe a Venezuela will be the answer on this front.

Speaker 21 But this is an issue that he has just been unable to do that with, in part because at least some element of his own media ecosystem won't go along with it. Like Fox is pretty much going along with it,

Speaker 21 but the outer reaches of the MAGA ecosystem won't go along with his efforts to try to talk about other random shit.

Speaker 26 Yeah, I want to introduce a theory here that maybe helps us understand this, which is there is MAGA and there is maybe para-mAGA.

Speaker 42 And the MAGA universe is all about Trump and his ambitions and his greed and his very specific degrees of hatefulness.

Speaker 40 That Trump hates people who in any way cross him, but if you don't cross him, he doesn't have kind of ideological hatreds.

Speaker 24 He's too selfish to have ideological hatred. Why would I hate people just because other people hate me?

Speaker 21 Like if a cat-eating Haitian migrant came into the country, like put on a red MAGA hat, they would be be invited to the Oval Office. Right, exactly.
Exactly.

Speaker 63 And he could eat the cat.

Speaker 51 Trump would serve him the cat.

Speaker 40 They could eat the cat together.

Speaker 33 There is this Paramaga universe that, for whom Trump was a vehicle for their general craziness and insanity and paranoia and hatefulness.

Speaker 25 And Paramagga decided that Epstein a while ago would be the biggest scandal ever.

Speaker 62 Pizzagate was false.

Speaker 25 The idea that Hillary Clinton was having bathing in donkey blood, that was false.

Speaker 22 Epstein was true.

Speaker 65 I mean, not every aspect of it, but there was an Epstein.

Speaker 41 He did abuse underage girls.

Speaker 31 That was true. And

Speaker 24 now they built a construct about it with a lot of anti-Semitic overtones.

Speaker 28 If Jeffrey Epstein had been Godfrey Epworth, this story wouldn't resonate in the same way.

Speaker 31 But it was true.

Speaker 41 And he was Jewish, and many of the people around him were Jewish.

Speaker 24 So it was perfect.

Speaker 63 And Trump went along for the ride.

Speaker 23 arrogantly, shamefacedly, not giving early signals that, you know what, let's find another scandal here, people.

Speaker 37 This one cuts close to home.

Speaker 34 So, Paramaga spent years convincing the really hardcore or the outer fringe, not the opportunistically crazy people, as Marjorie Taylor Greene is turning out to be, but the sincerely crazy people, as Lauren Bobbard is turning out to be, that this is the key to all mysteries.

Speaker 72 This is the master story of American life.

Speaker 60 This will unravel everything.

Speaker 35 And they built it out, and they built it out.

Speaker 71 And then his own vice presidential nominee, and then his own vice president, went along for the ride, too,

Speaker 27 for reasons that may have been very cynical this well if we magnify the scandal and it turns out there's something to it maybe trump will have to resign maybe and who would benefit from that they got everyone ready for this thing so they built the spotlight the bank of spotlights that are now turning on one by one and now trump is trying to run around the amphitheater turning the spotlights off yeah

Speaker 21 and it's not working you mentioned uh you know some titillating thoughts there about i i don't think Trump is ever going to resign, but

Speaker 21 just kind of an adjacent thought to that that almost never crosses my mind because this is the place that you come for rain cloud assessment of our politics.

Speaker 21 There are other places on YouTube that you go to for, you know, the walls are closing in on Trump, plenty of options for that. But I don't know, man.

Speaker 21 This week, the thought has crossed my mind a couple of times the last two days that

Speaker 21 between the

Speaker 21 potentially losing hold of the paramagus, as you call them, on Epstein, between just the economic problems that are happening in the country that they don't seem to have any plan for reversing.

Speaker 21 If anything, they seem to be making it worse.

Speaker 21 The fact that people after the election last week can kind of smell, within the own coalition, can sort of smell lame duckedness on him in a way that they couldn't before.

Speaker 21 It does feel like it's at least possible that this week could be a week we look back on and say, you know, the wheels did finally come off this fucking thing. He was around for way too long, but

Speaker 21 that was the point where it started. Is that too optimistic? Is this too Friday, Pollyanna, for you?

Speaker 38 I basically agree, but I don't don't want to point to a specific time.

Speaker 35 So do you remember when Trump was running for the first time, there was this internet tag, LOL, nothing matters.

Speaker 43 And my response to always was, was, actually, everything matters.

Speaker 27 It's just there's a lot of everything.

Speaker 56 So things

Speaker 22 accumulate.

Speaker 57 The economic difficulties, I mean,

Speaker 32 in a country where elections are decided.

Speaker 51 by people who know the price of every can of beans on the shelf and how much that can of beans cost in their grocery basket and how much it costs this time last month and this time last year.

Speaker 22 You can't tell those people that grocery prices don't matter.

Speaker 52 I mean, you can tell fancy people who shop on Instacart what the grocery prices are down.

Speaker 24 They may not know, but the people who are going to decide

Speaker 71 this and other elections, this coming election, other elections, they know.

Speaker 24 So if that's your plan, lie to them about the price of beans.

Speaker 35 It's not going to work. And there's a very specific problem, which is when Trump says, I'm going to go around the country and tell people how great the economy is.

Speaker 51 All of the problems of the economy in 2025, or virtually all, are directly caused by things he did, intentionally did, did solo, did in defiance actually of much of the rest of his own party, and did for really no reason except malice and ignorance.

Speaker 42 I mean, if people are concerned about the price of macaroni and cheese, well, the reason the price of macaroni and cheese is up is because Trump tariffed the macaroni.

Speaker 21 Yeah, speaking of that,

Speaker 21 there's an interesting tariff announcement yesterday.

Speaker 21 I have one more Epstein thing, but since you led me there on the tariffs, this is from the New York Times.

Speaker 21 The Trump administration is preparing preparing tariff rollbacks on goods from countries beyond those that have reached trade agreements with the U.S. in an effort to lower prices.

Speaker 21 They specifically mentioned also the coffee tariffs they're rolling back in an effort to lower prices. That's intriguing.
So they're going to roll back tariffs in the hopes that that lowers prices.

Speaker 21 Huh?

Speaker 23 They're connecting the dots, aren't they?

Speaker 30 Wait a minute.

Speaker 21 Scott Besant and Howard Nutlick told me that this wasn't true. The tariffs were increasing prices.
But it's interesting then that to roll them back would, in theory, lower prices.

Speaker 39 You mean if I drop the egg from a two-story window, that's why the egg carton smashed.

Speaker 23 That's fascinating.

Speaker 41 Yeah, so that would do it.

Speaker 68 But the problem is, of course, you've introduced so many dislocations into the economy that, yes, cutting tariffs will bring prices down.

Speaker 24 Negotiating new free trade agreements would... bring prices down, but it won't do it overnight.

Speaker 25 It will work with a lag, and you'll have to iron out a lot of dislocations.

Speaker 71 And the point is, you can't just selectively This takes us back to the politics of 19th-century tariff policy, which I'm interested in, and nobody else is.

Speaker 21 I don't know. You did a one-was it the first, very first David Frum podcast, or the second? Was it a two-hour deep dive on

Speaker 21 early 20th century tariff policy? And I was eating it up by the pool. I got to tell you.

Speaker 40 I'm sure you were.

Speaker 24 With Doug Irwin, who wrote that, who wrote Doug Irwin, who's the greatest expert on the history of American tariffs.

Speaker 36 And yes, we spent two hours talking about it.

Speaker 24 He said to me that he wrote this thousand-page book on it, and he said he wasn't sure that his own wife had read it, but he was grateful that

Speaker 34 I love the subject.

Speaker 21 Can't get into it. I listened to the part.
I did doze off a little bit, as I recall. I was pulled, but then woke back up.
And the parts I heard were really, really cool.

Speaker 66 Yeah, we got to the parts about pig iron.

Speaker 47 But look, what would happen in the night is you'd have these things where the coats would be too expensive.

Speaker 33 And so they would cut the tariff on wool cloth.

Speaker 31 Well, wait a minute, what about the tariff on thread and the tariff on needles?

Speaker 22 Like, you have to do the whole package.

Speaker 46 It's not going to work.

Speaker 55 You just create selective windfalls.

Speaker 81 So Trump's got this problem and it's entirely of his own making.

Speaker 25 And it's, by the way, it's a very Trump-specific problem because there are a lot of things that are happening under Trump that might have happened had Ted Cruz become president.

Speaker 24 But then there are things that only happen because of Trump.

Speaker 66 And the tariff mania is something that only no one else in the Republican Party thought it was a good idea before Trump started selling it.

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Speaker 21 I got to go back to Epicenter on one item because we can't move off without talking about our friend Megan Kelly. She was on yesterday.
I don't really understand exactly.

Speaker 21 I mean, I understand that Megan Kelly is interested in attention for herself. And so, at some level, we're giving her what she wants here.
But it's kind of at the outer edges of,

Speaker 21 I think, what is advantaging her at this point.

Speaker 21 You know, getting a siding at some level with Candace against Ben Shapiro when it comes to the question of whether the Jews were involved in Charlie Kirk's murder.

Speaker 21 And now, yesterday, spinning for Trump on Epstein, she was going to the old Roy Moore defense about, well, you know, he's really hanging around with ephoeophiles, not pedophiles.

Speaker 21 So Let's just listen to a little bit of it.

Speaker 82 But that he was into the barely legal type.

Speaker 83 Like he liked 15-year-old girls.

Speaker 82 And I realize this is disgusting. I'm definitely not trying to make an excuse for this.
I'm just giving you facts.

Speaker 82 That he wasn't into like eight-year-olds, but he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.

Speaker 21 So Epstein was into the barely legal 15-year-olds. That seems to be a contradiction in terms.

Speaker 21 And so it's not a big deal because that, so he was just in a few file, and then Trump was around once they became 18, I guess was the spin now.

Speaker 24 There may be something about the pressure of that size podcast aimed at that size audience that drives people quite literally crazy.

Speaker 21 So you're saying I'm lucky that she's fourth and I'm 11th in the rankings. You know, it's like, it's like if you get above seventh, it starts, you start to

Speaker 78 that audience because what you know, as Megan Kelly looks at the universe, she knows that there's up above her, the places she's going, are Candace Owens and Joe Rogan and Modern Medicine is a lie, and Hillary Clinton conducted human sacrifice and

Speaker 71 real mania in that audience and the algorithms that serve that audience reward real mania.

Speaker 23 But she is herself still someone who's very much a part of the real world, at least so far.

Speaker 24 So she can't say that Donald Trump is a heroic fighter against child sex trafficking.

Speaker 62 I mean, which there are people who will say that.

Speaker 42 I mean, she's enough on earth to know, well, that's, I mean, yes, he's deeply interested in child sex trafficking, but no, he was not.

Speaker 65 Not as a fighter.

Speaker 28 Like as a fly on the wall.

Speaker 41 So she's looking for a kind of reality-based defense of Trump.

Speaker 32 And this was the best she could do on the spur of the moment.

Speaker 36 But her world is close enough to the real world that the reality-based defense runs into the reality-based reaction, which is, what do you mean, the two-term president of the United States, who many of his supporters said he's coming to office to do justice on child sex traffickers, was himself intimate friends with America's most notorious child sex trafficker, and himself waited until these victimized, traumatized girls had grown up a little bit, at which time he would victimize them himself on sort of the rebound.

Speaker 58 That's the defense.

Speaker 24 And that's not going to impress anyone who's not already.

Speaker 21 Pepstein would groom teenagers, you know, and traffic them. And then when they became of age,

Speaker 21 he would take the people that he'd take the young girls that he'd groomed and trafficked and then pass them around like party favors to the creepy old friends of his.

Speaker 21 That's not the best defense. I mean, it might keep you from being behind bars if you're one of the creepy old people, but it's not exactly moral comportment.

Speaker 27 It may be the best defense that doesn't rely on utter delusion and denial of reality.

Speaker 24 I think that's what's going on in her head in that case, is she doesn't want to quite say, I live in, you know,

Speaker 35 fantasy land with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.

Speaker 24 I do live on Earth.

Speaker 21 Well, Google searches and ChatGPT searches for ephebophilia are skyrocketing. A lot of water is being used right now on AI searches for the definition.

Speaker 23 When politics was a very male-dominated activity, there was a rule among politicians that what you did with women was a completely separate part of your moral life.

Speaker 40 I mean, look, if you cheated at cards, unacceptable.

Speaker 48 If you embezzled from the bank, unacceptable.

Speaker 76 But maltreating women was an entirely separate moral category that in no way way reflected on who you were as a man.

Speaker 60 As politics becomes less, and I think this raises a lot of very profound questions.

Speaker 75 Are women people?

Speaker 23 Is your treatment of women a reflection of the kind of person you are?

Speaker 40 And if women are people and the way you treat them is part of the person you are, the way cheating at cards would be, the way embezzling from your employer would be, then it's just not enough to say, well, I waited until the moment.

Speaker 24 that the girl celebrate, blew out the candles on her 18th birthday cake before I molested her.

Speaker 59 The question, well, how you treated her is an important part of the story of your life.

Speaker 38 And that is true whether she's 18 or 23.

Speaker 62 The question is, who are you?

Speaker 60 And even if you avoided criminal liability,

Speaker 27 who are you?

Speaker 42 Because part of who you are is the way you treat your intimates.

Speaker 21 This goes back to the Bill Quinn question.

Speaker 21 I mean, Bill is maybe the only person who had good news in the Epstein file leaks recently because there was some email where Epstein said that he'd never been to the island.

Speaker 21 Again, who the hell knows if Epstein's ever telling the truth in his emails or not, but that was noteworthy. But I felt that way when I got older.

Speaker 21 And like when I became Monica Lewinsky's age, I felt that way about that question, about his treatment of her. It's like there's nothing, nothing was illegal here.

Speaker 21 Like that was not, it was not, not equivalent to a 15-year-old girl, of course, different than 22 or 23, however old she was. But like.

Speaker 21 what is appropriate comportment and treatment of somebody, you know, and when there's that kind of dynamic is obviously like something worth contemplating.

Speaker 21 And I do think that if you go back and look from a bipartisan level at basically, you know, the period before up through Bill Clinton, it was, as you're saying, it kind of was just like accepted that you can do whatever you want with women.

Speaker 21 That's a side deal.

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Speaker 6 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houghton.

Speaker 19 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 21 I want to talk about

Speaker 21 a couple other items in the news. Are these settlements now? I'm was bundling a couple of things together, but obviously, Trump, there's some rumors that Trump was talking with the DOJ about

Speaker 21 having the taxpayers pay him directly for the ill-treatment that the government made against him in this shutdown deal.

Speaker 21 The worst part of the shutdown deal, I think we can just be honest about that, is that it allows senators to bring lawsuits if federal law enforcement seizes or subpoenas their data without notifying them with potential damages of about a half million each.

Speaker 21 This

Speaker 21 apparently was about the fact that Jack Smith's investigation into January 6th included looking into some of the phone records of people that the coup plotters' conversations with GOP senators.

Speaker 21 And then out this morning from Bloomberg, the DOJ is in settlement talks with Michael Flynn, Trump's first national security advisor, who's seeking 50 million over what he says is a wrongful prosecution by Robert Mueller.

Speaker 21 And there's another Trump lackey that is also in negotiations for similar. This is, I think, unprecedented and insane, right?

Speaker 21 The Trump wants the taxpayers to pay off his cronies, basically, is what's happening.

Speaker 60 Well, the reason it's unprecedented is because in the past, people who had done bad things, who had been convicted, and who then later either got a pardon or had some other change in their legal status, would know, well, if I now sue, I reopen.

Speaker 24 the case that originally led to my conviction.

Speaker 40 And the Department of Justice will vigorously contest.

Speaker 23 And since they won the last time, the odds are pretty good they will win the next time.

Speaker 35 So Mark Rich didn't, after Bill Clinton pardoned him for all of his many financial crimes, did not say, okay, now I'm going to demand that I be compensated for the, because they won the last time, they will probably win the next time.

Speaker 81 So

Speaker 36 the predicate for all of this is that Trump will instruct his Department of Justice to take the fall.

Speaker 66 and not to defend the interests of the taxpayer in protecting the public purse against these claims by wrongdoers, convicted wrongdoers.

Speaker 55 Now, in the case of the senators, they weren't convicted of anything.

Speaker 51 They weren't accused of anything.

Speaker 72 And their phone records that were obtained were not any content of their phone calls, but simply numbers in, numbers out, time of the call, the famous metadata.

Speaker 31 But this is a little bit, the analogy I've used, it's a little bit like Confederate cabinet officers suing for reparations after the end of the Civil War.

Speaker 23 You tried to bring down the government.

Speaker 24 And the government, in its mercy, did not bring cases against you in particular. There's a limited universe of people who will face legal consequences.

Speaker 26 There are many more people who are involved in this conspiracy, like the Confederate cabinet officer.

Speaker 66 So we're letting you go. We're just letting you off the hook.

Speaker 71 It's bygones be bygones.

Speaker 2 Actually, it's not a very vindictive political system,

Speaker 39 which we used to think was good and may still be good, although I'm beginning to change my mind about that.

Speaker 26 The prosecutions are as selective as possible.

Speaker 51 Actually, only the people who went into the building and did crimes inside the building, everyone else more or less left alone.

Speaker 63 But you're not getting a payoff.

Speaker 23 You're not a hero for having been a Confederate Confederate cabinet officer.

Speaker 65 You're not a victim.

Speaker 79 You tried to bring down the government or people around you did and you knew them and you helped them.

Speaker 21 Yeah, and the Flynn case, I mean, it's even more stark.

Speaker 21 I mean, he was like, he was a Turkish intelligent asset and he takes the job to be national security advisor and he's being investigated for like back channel conversations he's having with the Russians and he lies to the government.

Speaker 21 He was caught so red-handed that even Donald Trump got rid of him.

Speaker 21 Donald Trump, the same guy that just, he just gave a raise, he just gave a promotion to this guy that, you know, that had the leaked texts that said he thought that all men aren't created equal, actually, and we should take out calipers and be a white nationalist country.

Speaker 21 That guy just got a promotion from Donald Trump. Trump looked at what Flynn's behavior was early and was like, ugh, okay, I can't do this.

Speaker 21 And so that's how outlandish and outrageous Flynn's behavior was. The idea that now we should pay him back

Speaker 21 is crazy.

Speaker 35 Does the name Valerie Plain ring a bell?

Speaker 29 Of course, yeah. Okay.

Speaker 35 So this is a big case in the Bush era where Valerie Plame was a former CIA covert operative, and there was a complicated story.

Speaker 24 She helped her husband get a very important role that he probably wasn't otherwise qualified for, and the role was then very embarrassing to the Bush administration.

Speaker 72 And in the blowback, Plame's name was divulged in a way that it should not have been.

Speaker 21 She was an agent.

Speaker 31 She was an undergrad.

Speaker 40 Yeah, she was a covert or had been.

Speaker 24 So one of the people who was implicated in the Plame case was Carl Rove. who was never charged.

Speaker 35 And the reason he was never charged was when the FBI came to talk to him, he said, yeah, I did it.

Speaker 60 I did it. I don't think I broke the law.

Speaker 31 I did it.

Speaker 35 And it turned out the only way you got in trouble in that case was if you lied.

Speaker 56 That was how you got in trouble.

Speaker 69 If Flynn had told the truth, there probably would not have been much of a case against him.

Speaker 35 Yes, he was operating as an agent for the Turkish government and he hadn't told anybody about it, but that happens.

Speaker 31 And

Speaker 38 prosecutions are kind of unusual.

Speaker 24 You just tell the FBI the truth and then there's nothing they can do.

Speaker 47 But he, as a senior official of the U.S.

Speaker 24 government, chose to lie to the FBI.

Speaker 75 That's a big deal.

Speaker 21 It is. But he might get, and he's asking for 50 million on the back end.

Speaker 43 That's too, you know, he's also a mistake.

Speaker 34 He should ask for half a million.

Speaker 21 He could get it.

Speaker 35 He'd probably get it. Trump would give it to him.
Yeah.

Speaker 34 Trump is also kind of cheap.

Speaker 21 It's crazy. Trump, the other is this interesting thing about this.
Not interesting. The other like...

Speaker 21 The unique, the uniquely depraved Trumpian element of this is, I just don't know that any other president in modern times, I mean, maybe I'm watching the great, this, this James Garfield series right now, which is so good.

Speaker 21 So maybe, maybe, you know, back in the 1880s, one of the presidents thought about this.

Speaker 21 But in modern times, I don't think any of the, it even occurred to any of the presidents that, like, hey, I could have my own attorney general do settlements with my pals and pay them cash.

Speaker 44 Yes.

Speaker 42 The 19th century political system was very corrupt in a lot of ways.

Speaker 26 But the presidents tended not to be.

Speaker 23 I mean, Garfield

Speaker 32 was implicated in some things, but what they would do is they would take the money for the party.

Speaker 35 And a lot of the things they did were kind of shocking to modern sensibilities until you realized that's how parties were financed.

Speaker 25 And they drew a kind of distinction between what they did for the party and what they did for themselves.

Speaker 55 And some presidents went farther.

Speaker 25 Ulysses Grant appointed some three dozen of his relatives and his wife's relatives to government jobs.

Speaker 53 That's probably, you know, that was untoward even at the time.

Speaker 21 Arthur.

Speaker 34 Yeah, Chester Arthur,

Speaker 51 who had had the highest, who had collector of the port of New York, the highest, and, you know, run the Republican machine in the state of New York with the proceeds.

Speaker 23 But the idea of this kind of

Speaker 26 this, it's a difference in scale, it's a difference in brazenness, and it's also the question of, I mean, political morality changes.

Speaker 57 And the question is, how far away are you from the political morality of your own time?

Speaker 27 You know,

Speaker 38 there are things that, you know, happened at other times that would have shocked the people of the 19th century. In our time, it's just not done.

Speaker 42 The presidents are supposed to use the office to enrich anybody.

Speaker 38 And the scale of it and the billion-dollar extent of it,

Speaker 71 and the awarding of largesse to people who had been implicated in a conspiracy against the United States government,

Speaker 66 that's incredible.

Speaker 21 Kudos to him, I guess, because to be the most brazenly corrupt member of the Trump administration is a challenge.

Speaker 21 You really do have to go above and beyond. And it might go to Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
He's a classic example. I was just doing a little backstory on him.

Speaker 21 He's like one of these 37-year-olds who looks like he's 50. So he's carrying a lot of weight, I think, on his soul.

Speaker 21 Just in the last week, Pulte floats the 50-year mortgage idea that's been going around to help people get

Speaker 21 lower monthly mortgage payments. So that's going to be the big solution for

Speaker 21 affordability from this administration. You just pay way more interest.
Then yesterday, he sent a criminal referral to the Justice Department against California Representative Eric Swalwell.

Speaker 21 He's thinking about running for governor.

Speaker 21 Again, making this same accusation he's made against Tish James and others that there were misleading claims on mortgage documents. Swallow says that's not true.

Speaker 21 And then the other story that did did not get as much attention that caught my eye was

Speaker 21 as Pulte was gathering all this information, there was, I guess, a marketing official inside Fannie Mae that was sharing sensitive information with him.

Speaker 21 Senior Fannie Mae officials called her conduct into question, and an internal ethics watchdog was brought in to look into it.

Speaker 21 The officials that called her behavior into question and the ethics watchdogs have been fired. Pulte and the marketing woman who was giving him the information are obviously still in the government.

Speaker 21 It's hard to kind of think of a parallel for this character.

Speaker 44 You can't.

Speaker 23 Let's divide, leaving Trump himself aside, Trump officialdom.

Speaker 40 As I'm sitting here thinking about it, I see four broad categories of Trump badness.

Speaker 41 So first are those who are wasting taxpayer resources on their own vanity and fun.

Speaker 66 Cash Patel, Christina.

Speaker 63 They're not actually pocketing the proceeds.

Speaker 24 They're squandering the proceeds to have a big time and at other people's offense.

Speaker 21 And taking the jet to their girlfriend's

Speaker 21 country music show.

Speaker 51 Kell seems to live for fun, know them for Instagram likes.

Speaker 24 So squanderers, category one.

Speaker 35 Category two are the people who are enriching themselves in one way or another.

Speaker 79 And that's true of many of the people in and around the financial area.

Speaker 24 This is more litigious, so I won't use names here.

Speaker 21 But I mean, I will just say, I will say it. I mean, the Wycoff and Lutnick families seem to be doing pretty well.
I will see exactly what all that

Speaker 21 shakes out, but the children are both in business with the Trump families in ways that are insanely inappropriate.

Speaker 33 So category one, they're squanderers.

Speaker 23 Category two are using public position to enrich themselves privately.

Speaker 24 Category three are people who seem to be on, but are just sort of generally evil in ways that you don't, the Stephen Millers, the Paul and Grassias, they're not enriching themselves in government so far as anyone can tell.

Speaker 42 And they don't seem to be wasting public resources.

Speaker 35 They're just doing things that in a free and democratic government, you didn't think anybody would ever do.

Speaker 35 But then category four, and this is where Pulte comes in, are people who are using the power of the state for political retribution.

Speaker 55 This is the Watergate type of crime.

Speaker 75 So Pultey doesn't seem, he's not crooked exactly.

Speaker 69 I don't think, I mean, he's plenty rich.

Speaker 41 He doesn't need to be more rich.

Speaker 21 He might have been crooked in enriching himself back then in order to get the wealth to be this sort of influence.

Speaker 31 But I think his parents made the money.

Speaker 71 I think he's an heir.

Speaker 21 Yeah, but then he was also involved in some of the GameStop stuff. And, you know, I don't know exactly all the details, but it wasn't like he invented a widget and sold it.

Speaker 62 But saying, I'm going to go into the bill and use files that were obtained by the government for one purpose and obtain them without process, without warrants or anything like that, for a purpose of legal criminal retribution.

Speaker 40 That is the Watergate category of offense.

Speaker 63 And

Speaker 68 that's not corrupt.

Speaker 38 It's not corrupt in self-enrichment sense, but it's a huge abuse of power.

Speaker 51 And maybe of all the four kinds, maybe the most dangerous.

Speaker 64 Yeah.

Speaker 21 On top of that, he is also,

Speaker 21 you know, the retribution is happening both externally against the political foes, right? The Comeys, the Jameses, and the Swallows. But to me, the most

Speaker 21 malicious rather is the retribution against people that are just trying to do their job inside the government. And you have seen a little bit of this.

Speaker 21 This is where Cash Patel kind of goes from category one into four as well, right?

Speaker 21 Like people who are working at the FBI, working at DOJ, working at Fannie Mae, just trying to do their jobs, making sure they're following the rules, making sure the government's following the rules, doing what they're told.

Speaker 21 And next thing you know, they're getting pushed out of their jobs, punished, and who knows, maybe even targeted and looked into

Speaker 21 because they were part of the January 6th investigation or because they're an ethics watchdog looking

Speaker 21 at Trump officials.

Speaker 25 Aaron Powell, Jr.: This brings to a question I alluded to before that I'm thinking about a lot, and I don't have an answer to it.

Speaker 24 So I'm just laying it out there for other people to think about.

Speaker 35 One of the great things about the American political system has been its non-vindictiveness.

Speaker 35 I mean, it's a striking thing that of the makers of the American Revolution, every one of them except poor Alexander Hamilton died in bed.

Speaker 40 There's not another revolution in the history of the world where that can be said.

Speaker 23 And generally, however hot an administration is, there's just kind of a bygones be bygones aspect to it afterwards.

Speaker 35 And, you know, people who in their active days, you know, they end up on going to the Miller Center and yucking it up,

Speaker 37 telling

Speaker 24 old war stories.

Speaker 81 And there's something very, the best of America about that.

Speaker 31 And after the first Trump administration, it wasn't completely, there had been so many outrageous crimes culminating with January 6th.

Speaker 72 It wasn't completely possible to do that and Trump stealing all those documents on the way out the door.

Speaker 32 But generally, I think the instinct of the Biden administration was just push them to the side, let history judge.

Speaker 24 If there's a federal district court judge who wants to take forever

Speaker 47 to decide a case, that's good.

Speaker 42 Let her be as slow as she likes.

Speaker 75 And Julie Brown of Miami Herald, who has done so much good work on the Epstein case, made the point on a tweet today that the Biden people made a very conscious choice when they were prosecuting the Epstein.

Speaker 38 They made it a higher priority to send Maxwell to jail.

Speaker 24 and to protect the privacy of the victims than to use the files to embarrass Trump.

Speaker 38 And again, that was in the best American tradition.

Speaker 23 But my question to myself, and again, I don't have an answer, is that attitude obsolete?

Speaker 33 If we somehow get to the other side of this second Trump administration, and if there is a return to normal government, a peaceful transition, to the resumption of lawful government,

Speaker 23 should bygones be bygones?

Speaker 38 Or do people like Pulte and like the second and third level down, rather than load everything onto Trump's shoulders and send him off into history, should there be some kind of deeper set of cleaning up the government?

Speaker 35 You know, there are no major institutional reforms passed by Biden after the first Trump administration.

Speaker 24 No changes to the pardon process, no changes to the declassification process.

Speaker 21 Electoral account act.

Speaker 21 That's right.

Speaker 66 That's right.

Speaker 38 And again, can we do that a second time?

Speaker 57 Get away.

Speaker 24 I mean, one of my pet legal reforms is that anyone who accepts secret service protection from the government, any presidential relative who accepts secret service, should publish their tax returns.

Speaker 71 That Eric and Don Trump Jr., they're getting protection, publish their returns.

Speaker 71 Because if they're using, if they're official enough to be worthy of protection, they're official enough that we need to see their tax returns.

Speaker 21 Yeah, I mean a lot there. And probably maybe in 2027, we'll do a full podcast on this because I'm with you.
And in some ways, it won't be possible.

Speaker 21 Like there's a question about what is judicious and what is right, you know, what would be best for the Republic going forward.

Speaker 21 But then there's an element of it that will be, it'll be more impractical this time than it was last time.

Speaker 21 Even if even if we had decided that some reformer comes into government and they come in in on the whole, and that is their MO and they win an election mandate based on that, it's like, well, now still, you've got, like, what do you do with the marketing woman that was working with Bill Pulte on this?

Speaker 21 Can she, do you fire her? Like, can you lose her? Like, again, like in past administrations, you probably would just let that person go and ignore that and move on.

Speaker 21 But now it's like these people are all around the government now, inside DHS, inside FBI, inside DOJ, inside Fanny, you know, that are doing acting with retribution.

Speaker 21 And how would the next president deal with them?

Speaker 55 Yeah, Yeah, or people have authorized the use of serious force in immigration enforcement where it's completely not necessary.

Speaker 36 I think we have probably slightly different views on the immigration question between us, but I mean, I think every previous advocate of stricter enforcement has always regarded it as fundamentally a matter of non-criminal law

Speaker 54 and the penalties.

Speaker 24 Like sandwich man, if the sandwich man had received a thousand dollar fine for throwing a sandwich at a federal officer, I think most of them said, yeah, you shouldn't throw a sandwich.

Speaker 24 That should be, you should get a paper in the mail that says

Speaker 21 yeah, or you should have to pick up dog poop on the side of the road, you know, 10 hours community service or something, either one. You can pick.

Speaker 61 Yeah, we don't send 20 armed men to your house and we don't, we don't charge you with assault.

Speaker 42 The people who were party to those abuses of police power, what do we do with them?

Speaker 60 Yeah.

Speaker 31 They shouldn't be police anymore.

Speaker 51 That's at a bare minimum.

Speaker 40 There's someone who's authorized you to send, use pepper spray against three-year-olds, that person shouldn't be doing police work.

Speaker 21 This isn't on my list, but just really quick, because you've titillated me about our differences on the immigration thing, because

Speaker 21 I'm such a squish in immigration. But I wonder, I get this question a lot when I go into right-wing circles now, which is, don't you give them credit for the border at least?

Speaker 21 And my response to that has been. Actually, no, because we don't want zero immigration.
At some level, sure, it's better.

Speaker 21 We also don't want the situation that we had in the second year of Biden. But we don't want zero immigration at the border.

Speaker 21 That is the sign that the country is like Venezuela, Venezuela, that we have net negative migration, not a healthy country.

Speaker 21 Where are you on that?

Speaker 21 Do you feel differently about the border?

Speaker 40 Well, first, I always think that when I hear a person who claims to be an immigration hawk talk about the border, I know they're faking it.

Speaker 24 Because the locus of enforcement is not the border, it's the workplace.

Speaker 62 And border enforcement is like blowing up drug boats.

Speaker 24 If you want to stop the flow of drugs, you are never going to succeed by blowing up drug boats.

Speaker 35 There is not literally, but practically an infinite number of drug boats carrying an infinite amount of drugs.

Speaker 61 If you want to do drug enforcement, you have to do it on the interior of the country.

Speaker 25 And if you want to reduce the flow of illegal immigration, that means going into places where you know there are a lot of illegal immigrants, checking the books of the employer, and writing them a big fine if it turns out that their workers are not legal.

Speaker 35 And then they will stop employing illegal workers and then illegal workers will come in smaller numbers in the future.

Speaker 43 In the Biden case, the problem was an abuse of the asylum process, that the United States took a view in those years that basically anyone who can't cross the border who claimed to be an asylum seeker was entitled to release inside the country until seven or 10 years later when their case was heard, by which time it would be impossible and inhumane to eject them.

Speaker 69 So

Speaker 51 the answer was to meet them quickly and to expedite their hearings and to do this in sufficient numbers, massively enough, early enough that the world got the message.

Speaker 24 But you also needed to understand that a lot of the asylum process of the Biden years was driven by a very specific foreign policy crisis in Venezuela, which is not to be met by blowing up boats or invading Venezuela, but a quarter of the population of Venezuela left the country to escape poverty and oppression.

Speaker 71 That's not an immigration problem exactly.

Speaker 41 That is a Venezuela problem, and you needed a policy about Venezuela.

Speaker 38 And the Biden people met it by saying, okay,

Speaker 22 welcome all to the United States for as many as can walk their way to the border.

Speaker 24 There are more, by the way, it should be stressed, more Venezuelan refugees in next door Colombia than there are in the United States.

Speaker 53 And I believe there are more in Mexico than there are in the United States.

Speaker 21 So to that Venezuelan question, you alluded there that you're not for, despite being neocon David Fromm, you're not for us just kind of yeeding boats out of the Caribbean and planning a regime change war against Maduro, it sounds like.

Speaker 21 But

Speaker 21 your last podcast was about this. I should shout out.
People can listen to that. But what's the short version of your view?

Speaker 71 I'm for sure not for blowing up the boats.

Speaker 24 I'm neocon enough to contemplate military action against Maduro.

Speaker 26 Sure.

Speaker 36 With congressional approval, as Bush got before the Iraq war, and working in cooperation with regional allies.

Speaker 24 The idea that you're having this battle with Colombia has been a longtime friend of the United States on many important issues, including a terribly dangerous and deadly drug war that it's fought on its own soil, with tens of thousands of Colombians dying in the fight to protect Americans from Colombian drugs.

Speaker 32 The present president of Colombia is a little wacky, but I think leaves early next year.

Speaker 35 There'll be a new one and one friendlier to the United States.

Speaker 24 It's the single largest place where Venezuelan refugees go.

Speaker 27 They've been astonishingly compassionate and helpful to their Venezuelan neighbors.

Speaker 44 They have to be a partner.

Speaker 81 And Mexico has to be a partner. And Brazil has to be a partner.

Speaker 56 You have to work with partners, partly for practical reasons, partly for reasons of legitimacy.

Speaker 70 And then you have to have a clear idea of the future you contemplate for Venezuela.

Speaker 42 And the idea that you would use force to replace Maduro with the next-in-line thug, because the next-in-line thug has assured you that he will be more cooperative on a very narrow range of issues.

Speaker 71 What Venezuelan needs from the United States is help finding its way back on the path of development.

Speaker 72 That was the main theme of that podcast we did, is that this used to be one of the most prosperous countries in Latin America.

Speaker 70 This used to be a country that received refugees from war-torn Europe and gave them opportunities to be a new life.

Speaker 81 It could be that country again.

Speaker 63 And so I'm not against an American intervention, but it can't be this kind of solitary action with sinister goals in mind.

Speaker 70 And it can't be done without Congress.

Speaker 21 And in addition to that, like, I mean, just the human rights violations in the Caribbean, like they're not even telling us what they're doing.

Speaker 21 Like, the idea that our government can say, okay, we're just going to take out these boats.

Speaker 21 You've got to trust us that they're drug boats because, like, summary execution at sea is now the punishment for selling drugs in this country when Venezuela is not even a source of drugs.

Speaker 21 And then simultaneously, like, oh, yeah, also we've got this potential regime change war that the Secretary of State is interested in planned. And like, the whole thing is just a colossal.

Speaker 35 Even if they really are drug boats, and even if everybody involved is guilty, and even if none of them are people who paid for smuggling traffic.

Speaker 21 Or people being human trafficked. Yeah.
Or anything. Who the hell knows? I mean,

Speaker 21 at least half the people we sent to El Salvador prison weren't even gang members. So you can't exactly trust that they're telling the truth.

Speaker 38 As you say, summary execution at sea is not a punishment for drug smuggling.

Speaker 26 But the last thing is the whole thing is stupid and futile.

Speaker 24 We don't know how much this operation costs.

Speaker 72 There are no estimates provided. The United States now has the largest concentration of force in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Speaker 42 It's pulling assets away from all sorts of other regions of the world to deploy them in the Caribbean.

Speaker 72 It must cost hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.

Speaker 47 How much cocaine is being intercepted?

Speaker 67 And it's, by the way, it's cocaine, not fentanyl.

Speaker 47 How much cocaine is being intercepted?

Speaker 24 There's an anecdote from both Daniel Patrick Moynihan and George Schultz telling themselves.

Speaker 49 I repeat it a lot because I think it's the beginning of wisdom.

Speaker 35 Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the first drug czar in the Nixon White House.

Speaker 55 That is not a cabinet officer, but he had all government responsibility for the drug war.

Speaker 32 And in 1971 or thereabouts, he achieves a huge drug bust, tens of millions of dollars worth of heroin, and is very excited.

Speaker 36 And he books a helicopter to fly to Camp David to tell President Nixon about this tremendous victory in the war on drugs.

Speaker 77 And as he gets on the helicopter, there is Secretary of Labor George Schultz reading the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 61 And Moynihan, and they both tell this in their memoirs,

Speaker 24 Moynihan is just burbling with excitement over the little headphones.

Speaker 81 And Schultz could not be less interested, and just barely folds down his newspaper.

Speaker 22 And finally, Moynihan remembers that before Schultz was Secretary of Labor, he was a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, famous free market school, and says, George, I suppose you think that so long as there is demand for drugs in the United States, there will be a supply of drugs from somewhere.

Speaker 68 And that's the point.

Speaker 69 How many of these boats do you plan on blowing up?

Speaker 54 You know, I looked this up.

Speaker 38 Year over year, the price of cocaine at retail in the United States is down 25%.

Speaker 37 That's the one price that Trump has brought down.

Speaker 28 Yeah.

Speaker 21 And quality is up because there are fewer fentanyl deaths, you know,

Speaker 21 also than there were during the Biden years.

Speaker 46 So intercepting the cocaine boats is even if every person were completely guilty as charged, even if they were all like senior members of the cartel and they were deserving of some terrible punishment, it still would be a stupid and expensive, you'd be spending billions to save millions.

Speaker 30 Ah,

Speaker 86 greetings from my bath, festive friends.

Speaker 93 N1231, see PayPal.com/slash promo terms points give your renee for cash and more paying for subject to terms and approval.

Speaker 50 PayPal Inc. and MLS 910-457.

Speaker 19 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 21 I want to close by kind of talking about the anti-Semitism discourse it's having on the right and left. First, I want to just talk about what we're seeing on the right.

Speaker 21 This was a tweet from Candace yesterday about the Epstein stuff. She writes, they are blackmailing President Donald Trump in broad daylight.
The slow release of the emails is intentional.

Speaker 21 Now he will give them whatever they want. For those who struggle with context clues, they equals Israel, who Jeffrey Epstein worked for.

Speaker 39 So what's the point of using all these?

Speaker 65 Oh, by the way,

Speaker 38 in case you're too dense to get it.

Speaker 84 I was talking about the Jews.

Speaker 21 This, Candace's explicit anti-Semitism and explicit conspiracy mongering. She proffered a theory about how I think the Mossad came from underground in Utah to kill Charlie Kirk.

Speaker 21 That was a possibility. There are more examples of this.

Speaker 21 That and Tucker, you know, having Nick Flintis, an unapologetic anti-Semite, not not an anti-Zionist, like, like, no, like, Jewry is bad, anti-Semite, having him on his podcast, Megan Kelly doing apologia for Tucker on that, that has created this big feud on the right with kind of Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin and some on one side and the podcasters on the other.

Speaker 21 I'm wondering what you make of that, and then we'll talk about the way that it's horseshoeing over to the left.

Speaker 35 Look, anti-Semitism is different from other forms of hatred.

Speaker 71 And this is not my original point.

Speaker 72 Others have made it.

Speaker 79 Because most hatred, most bigotry is based on contempt, misogyny, homophobia, racism, based on I'm better, you're less, and I use my position of cultural or financial or whatever kind of power to make, to diminish and demean you, to make myself feel better.

Speaker 35 Anti-Semitism is different because it is not based on contempt. It is based on paranoia.

Speaker 63 And one of the dangers of being a paranoid person is it's very, because anti-Semitism is the fundamental myth of Western culture that God sent his son to reprove humanity and embedded them, and the Jews were able to combine and kill the Son of God, which is a man who split the Red Sea and made the planets.

Speaker 24 They were able to kill his son.

Speaker 76 That's pretty big.

Speaker 61 Once you start delving into paranoia, if you believe that they are responsible, sooner or later, you need to, as Candace discovered, you need to know, who's they?

Speaker 24 Who's this they? And who's behind the they?

Speaker 41 And who's the mastermind behind the ultimate?

Speaker 26 Who's the ultimate boss in this video game of conspiracy upon conspiracy?

Speaker 69 So because so much of modern right-wing thought is a form of paranoia, it's just this powerful myth that is waiting for you at the end of the paranoia gravity.

Speaker 26 But this is where it leads into left-wing anti-Semitism.

Speaker 27 So anti-Semitism itself is a word coined in the late 19th century in German, because the anti-Jews of the late 19th century did not want to look old-fashioned.

Speaker 56 They didn't want us,

Speaker 43 we're not religious bigots.

Speaker 71 We're not like Martin Luther or the medieval papacy.

Speaker 79 You know, we are modern and scientific.

Speaker 43 We have nothing against Judaism as a religion.

Speaker 95 We have a much more up-to-date and modern problem, which is that Jews are biologically Semites.

Speaker 41 And as such, so anti-Semitism began its life as a euphemism to create a new kind of anti-Jewish hate.

Speaker 75 And it functioned at its time in exactly the same way as anti-Zionism does.

Speaker 42 It's a way of retaining the old hate while distancing yourself from the old justification.

Speaker 42 And I think the proof of the similarity is medieval anti-Judaism, believed that Jews killed innocent Christians to get blood for matzah, and modern anti-Zionists.

Speaker 42 There was a case just at University College London just the other day where where somebody, a lecturer was brought to campus to teach the students that the Jews had done this as recently as 1840 in the city of Damascus.

Speaker 75 The content remains the same, but the justifications for promoting the content.

Speaker 75 And so I believe it is certainly theoretically possible in a lab to imagine a form of anti-Zionism that has no element of anti-Jewish hate.

Speaker 23 I don't think country should exist, says the...

Speaker 33 this non-anti-Zionist. And I object to Israel existing.

Speaker 38 I object to Pakistan existing.

Speaker 24 I object to, I think there should be, like John Lennon, no borders.

Speaker 21 I tried to make this very point to Hassan Apaika when we were on this podcast last weekend.

Speaker 26 It's theoretically, it's theoretically possible.

Speaker 54 And I even know one or two people who are like this.

Speaker 56 But it's extremely difficult, and it doesn't exist much in the real world.

Speaker 54 And it's not a lot of fun.

Speaker 57 The oomph and excitement of anti-Zionism is precisely that it draws from anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism, your belief that there is this conspiracy of these uniquely powerful, uniquely malevolent people who are congregated in the land of Israel, where their normal, imperfect government becomes your summary of all the evil in the world.

Speaker 86 Ah, greetings from my bath, festive friends.

Speaker 93 N1231, see paypal.com slash promo terms, terms points give your renee for cash and more paying for subject to terms and approval.

Speaker 50 PayPal link and MLS 910457.

Speaker 18 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 21 So you wrote a provocative tweet about this.

Speaker 21 It's kind of a loose what you're saying, but puts it succinctly, which is Republicans are having a big public argument about anti-Semitism that has contaminated their party. Democrats aren't.

Speaker 21 Their anti-Semites are violent neo-Nazis. Our anti-Semites bring new exciting energy to our party.
There is something to that, I think. And you see some examples of this.

Speaker 21 Like I'm thinking of Richie Torres and Adam Friedland did a podcast a couple weeks ago where Adam Friedland, who is an anti-Zionist Jewish comedian slash political podcaster, was pressing Richie about this and was talking about, I'm Jewish, and so I, you know, I'm an anti-Zionist, so it can't be anti-Semitism.

Speaker 21 So you see a little bit of it.

Speaker 38 One of the most important biological anti-Semitic tracks of the early 20th 20th century was written by a Jew, Otto Wenninger.

Speaker 71 It is not unheard of. And

Speaker 25 I've always had a theory that most of the members of the American Nazi Party are Jews under different names who are in some way crazy or estranged from their families.

Speaker 25 I mean, this is an old tradition in the Jewish world that people exit either for ideological reasons, because they find in communism a substitute faith for Judaism, or just because they're alienated and estranged, that they become very effective.

Speaker 24 And then they, as a Jew, I therefore endorse all of these myths.

Speaker 59 But look, half the Jews in the world live in Israel.

Speaker 49 It's pretty hard to have a sustained critique of the Jewish state that doesn't put those half the Jewish population of the world at risk.

Speaker 21 So here's the thing that I struggle with, and maybe might be the area that we have slight disagreement on that I want to hear your pushback to, because I don't.

Speaker 21 I think it's actually really important that the left figure out how to talk about this and discuss it, which is there, and I talked about this a little bit with Chris Hayes on Tuesday, which is there are a lot of people on the left, particularly younger people, who are passionately opposed to the way that Israel conducted the response to October 7th.

Speaker 21 And they've seen the videos and their TikTok feeds of innocent Palestinians getting killed and maimed and children and

Speaker 21 horrible. They've seen horrible stuff.
They don't like the B.B. Netanyahu government.
Many good reasons for that. And they're upset.
at Israel.

Speaker 21 And then they're on the internet and they're consuming information.

Speaker 21 And the people that seem to have the most moral clarity about that question of how the Palestinians were treated are also the people we were just talking about, the Candace Owens of the world and Tucker Carlson's.

Speaker 21 I say seem to have the most moral clear ideas. I just want to say like this is from their perspective.

Speaker 21 And then there's some people on the who are left pod influencers who make their whole brand, oh, the Democratic Party is in league with APEC and the Jews and Israel and the tech.

Speaker 21 And so the only information they're getting are from these far-right podcasters who are anti-Israel and these left-wing podcasters who are attacking the Democratic establishment.

Speaker 21 Again, in some ways, potentially legitimately for their policy views.

Speaker 21 And so how do you break through that?

Speaker 21 And I think the only way to possibly break through that is to be able to have a clear denunciation of the things that you don't like about the policies put forth by the Bibi Netanyahu government, with also,

Speaker 21 and does so in a way that doesn't lead people down

Speaker 21 a slide towards, oh, I'm concerned about Jewry worldwide. And I think that's very challenging.

Speaker 56 Well, let me...

Speaker 71 come up with a comparison that might be helpful here.

Speaker 43 Urban crime, genuine, serious problem.

Speaker 51 Many of of the perpetrators of urban crime are black, and a disproportionate number of them are black.

Speaker 38 So supposing you are talking, you want to talk about urban crime, and you're aware of this fact.

Speaker 26 How do you deal with it?

Speaker 42 Do you see this as a secret source of political power?

Speaker 24 And do you look for code to say, you know, you don't like black people to begin with, let me give you a whole other reason not to like them?

Speaker 51 Or do you understand that you've got a genuine problem here that can draw power? from some of the worst things in American history.

Speaker 46 And you have to learn how to talk about this in ways that don't use that resource, even though it's beckoning, and also signal to the

Speaker 70 people you're talking about, I'm not driven here by animus.

Speaker 24 And indeed, since the victims are also disproportionately black, that you have an interest in solving this problem as much as anybody else.

Speaker 57 And we can have a kind of solidarity.

Speaker 24 I think this is one of the reasons that the Momdani case resonates so differently with supporters of Israel, Jewish supporters of Israel, non-Jews.

Speaker 56 We just don't think he's a good faith actor.

Speaker 78 He's not interested in the Syrian civil war, which had anybody bothered to share the pictures on TikTok, was in fact, it's so upsetting that many of the pictures that you think are from Gaza are actually from Syria, because those are the really most terrible ones.

Speaker 69 What is the resource?

Speaker 57 And who do you make league with?

Speaker 33 And if you celebrate the financiers of Hamas terrorism in your own personal rap video, it's hard for me to believe that you have no view on Hamas terrorism.

Speaker 21 You don't give him points for trying? He seems to have tried.

Speaker 21 He seems to be trying, which would be what I would defend Zoran on, which I think is a category difference from some on the Republican side side who revel in the wink and the nod comment, whereas Zoron seems to be trying to win people back over.

Speaker 51 What does trying mean?

Speaker 32 When George Wallace reinvented himself after he was assassinated, he sat down, or he's in a wheelchair, he had to sit down, but his near assassination, he.

Speaker 21 This is a little different. George Wallace

Speaker 21 instituted racist policies and then is an old man. Zoron's 34.

Speaker 26 The point is

Speaker 36 when you have done things, and in this case, not a decade before, half a decade before, but a few weeks ago, the question is, who is this for?

Speaker 42 Who is this for?

Speaker 40 Is this for the people who feel that you are hostile to them?

Speaker 35 Or is it for an audience?

Speaker 81 If it's for the people who feel you're hostile to them, then you meet with them privately, you listen to them, and you try to find a way.

Speaker 46 This is, I think, a little bit the trajectory of Al Sharpton, who was involved in anti-Semitic incidents in the 1990s, and then made a serious effort to reinvent himself and to say, there's still things I care, I'm not going to reject that I believed in 1991, but there are things I did, or whatever year it was, that I am ashamed of.

Speaker 33 And I want to show that in a good faith way.

Speaker 24 And that's not what anyone is seeing.

Speaker 69 What Zoran is saying, it is still in his case, it's the single thing he's most sincere about.

Speaker 71 All this housing stuff,

Speaker 28 that's all affect.

Speaker 42 The pollsters told him it would work.

Speaker 72 The thing that has motivated him through almost all of his career, he's not such a young man, he's been an active in public life for 15 years, social media and other places, has been this issue.

Speaker 38 And if you want to convince the people

Speaker 23 on the other side of the issue that you're not driven by animus against them, there are things you do and there are things you don't do.

Speaker 42 So as I said, he comes on your show and he speaks to an audience, but he's speaking about.

Speaker 2 He's not speaking to.

Speaker 64 All right.

Speaker 21 Well, I guess we did get to the answer of the question.

Speaker 21 We got waylaid a little with the Zoran, but the question of how to talk about concerns about Israel without doing so in a way that yields to the they, them accusations.

Speaker 21 And I guess you're the comparison to urban crime is the answer.

Speaker 41 I would say a way to do it, and there are many,

Speaker 72 is a little bit the Biden method, which is you go to Israel, you see the devastation that was done on October 7th, you express your solidarity with the victims, and then you turn to your friends and you say, let me tell you, I think your answer is wrong.

Speaker 25 By the way, I wouldn't even necessarily agree with that myself, but if you were in this position, I think your answer is wrong.

Speaker 23 And I'm going to say it on your own soil to your face.

Speaker 46 And not only is your answer wrong, but here's the thing I would have done instead.

Speaker 71 Because when defenders of Israel say, what were they supposed to do?

Speaker 70 The answer comes, not this.

Speaker 69 You know what?

Speaker 35 You don't value my life very much.

Speaker 21 I appreciate that. The thing I most appreciate that I just want to mention is that I do think

Speaker 21 back to your original point that the Democrats aren't grappling with this.

Speaker 21 I do think folks that are on the other side of you for their views of how Israel has handled the war in Gaza are at least open to hearing that

Speaker 21 there are manners in which those actions have been criticized that yield to these broader questions of anti-Semitism, racism, and stoke it. And are most dangerously, in my view,

Speaker 21 like when you said in the second part of your quote, their anti-Semites are vile neo-Nazis. Our anti-Semites bring new energy to the party.

Speaker 21 What a lot of, I think, the critics are doing is sending people down the radicalization pipeline to the neo-Nazis and

Speaker 21 basically delivering a new audience, a new young audience into the laps of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson to spread their vile hate. I think that that's really happening.

Speaker 2 And all of this in the context in which of algorithmic devices that are not neutral on the anti-Semitic equivalence.

Speaker 32 Like X is at Twitter is engineered to bring anti-Semites together.

Speaker 43 And so it looks like is TikTok.

Speaker 23 And that may change if TikTok comes into American hands.

Speaker 72 But it's not clear the Americans are going to get control of the algorithm.

Speaker 33 They'll just get the profits from it.

Speaker 21 All right. Final thing.
Do you have anything from Canada? Any report for Canada? How mad are the Canadians?

Speaker 21 How are things on the ground?

Speaker 35 It is not mad because Canadians understand that most Americans want no part of this. I spent a lot of time in Canada, of course.

Speaker 24 And they understand that most Americans are ashamed of it and not a part of it.

Speaker 35 But the injury to the Canadian economy from Trump is very real.

Speaker 80 Unemployment of the greater Toronto area is now nearly 10%.

Speaker 26 And it is having an impact on Canadian politics in a way that is especially, and that you see this throughout the English-speaking world, is especially damaging to those Canadians who have historically been most friendly to the United States, that they, we, look like fools.

Speaker 21 David Frum, I always appreciate your time, brother. Thank you so much for coming on.

Speaker 34 Always so good to be with me.

Speaker 21 We get some JD stuff.

Speaker 21 We're saving stuff for next time.

Speaker 21 What our vengeance looks like, JD 2028. It's a little teaser.
And we'll talk to you probably the new year. All right.

Speaker 60 Bye-bye. Thanks so much.

Speaker 21 Everybody else. We'll see you on Monday with Bill Crystal.
Peace.

Speaker 21 I

Speaker 21 must constantly.

Speaker 21 You can't break that which isn't yours.

Speaker 85 I

Speaker 85 must constantly.

Speaker 85 I'm not my own. It's not my choice.

Speaker 85 Be afraid of the lame

Speaker 7 Don't hurt your legs

Speaker 85 Be afraid of the home

Speaker 85 Don't hurt your soul

Speaker 85 Be afraid of the cold

Speaker 90 Don't hurt your blood

Speaker 85 A play moire de luge

Speaker 85 after me comes the flood

Speaker 85 I

Speaker 85 must go and standing.

Speaker 85 You can't break that which isn't yours, yours. I

Speaker 85 must go and standing.

Speaker 85 I'm not my own, it's not my choice.

Speaker 85 Be afraid of the lame,

Speaker 85 they won't hurt your legs.

Speaker 85 Be afraid of the old,

Speaker 85 they won't hurt your souls.

Speaker 85 Be afraid of the cold,

Speaker 85 they won't hurt your blood.

Speaker 85 I play muada de luish.

Speaker 85 After me comes the flood

Speaker 85 I

Speaker 85 must constantly

Speaker 85 standing

Speaker 85 I'm not mine,

Speaker 85 it's not my choice

Speaker 85 I

Speaker 85 must constantly standing tongue You can't can't break that that which isn't

Speaker 85 yours, yours Yours, I hope. Must constant stand ding dong.
I'm not

Speaker 85 my own phone is not

Speaker 85 much.

Speaker 21 The Bloor podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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Speaker 84 This is Matt Rogers from Los Culture Eastas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.
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David Frum: This Is Shame-Faced Trump

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Transcript

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