David Frum: Trump and Epstein Were Best Friends

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Speaker 6 Hello, and welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Delighted to welcome back. You don't need his full bio.
We've done it a million times now.

Speaker 6 He's the host of the David Frum show now, which I'm not considering a competitor. It's not hurting my feelings that there's a new competitor in the podcast space.
It's very good and very serious.

Speaker 6 You should go listen to that if you're not. It's David Fromm.

Speaker 4 How you doing, sir? I'm well. It's not a competitor because the guiding philosophy of the show is no concessions to listener taste.

Speaker 4 It's just like, it's just we are going there for, you know, monetary policy, trade policy. Yeah.
It's the eat your peas approach to podcasting.

Speaker 6 That is to certain listeners' taste, though. With the podcast numbers, it's like everything else.
It's revealed preference. Yeah.

Speaker 6 You know, I get many, I get emails from people saying, I wish you would do more David From style shows. And then I have a historian on or something.
And you see the numbers go down.

Speaker 6 And it's like, well, you know,

Speaker 6 I appreciate it, though. It's important to get some peas from time to time.

Speaker 6 You know, it can't be all fried chicken.

Speaker 4 It can't be all Epstein all the time.

Speaker 6 And let's start with Jeffrey Epstein. How about that? In this case, though, certainly deserved.
The files are allegedly to be released today.

Speaker 6 But just before we started taping, Todd Blanche told us that we're not going to see everything, which is not a surprise to me. He said this on Fox.

Speaker 6 I expect we're going to release several hundred thousand documents today, and those documents will come in all different forms.

Speaker 6 Kyle Cheney has been following this closely, writes, the bottom line is the Trump administration is missing today's legal deadline to release the files.

Speaker 6 Blanche says many will be released on a rolling basis over the next couple of weeks. Curious what percentage of the total files, hundreds of thousands, is.

Speaker 4 Look, my guiding rule for all of the Trump presidency has been a phrase I've used over and over again, and that is many secrets, no mysteries.

Speaker 4 There's a lot you don't know about Epstein and Trump, and there's really really nothing you don't know about Epstein-Trump. They were best friends.

Speaker 4 The only photos you ever see of Donald Trump where he is authentically smiling in the presence of another human being is Jeffrey Epstein. Putin he hero worship.

Speaker 4 With Putin, he's like the little kid, and Putin is

Speaker 4 the captain of the high school football team. He admires Putin.
He hopes to grow up to be Putin, but they're not friends because they're not equals. But Epstein, that was a friend.

Speaker 4 And they had all the same interests, stealing, sexual assault. And they may have, in the end, fallen out over a real estate deal, but they were so close so long, and they knew each other so well.

Speaker 4 And this whole idea that Donald Trump was the QAnon hero of rescuing victims of sex trafficking, I mean, how gullible did you ever have to be to believe that there were such people? There are fewer.

Speaker 4 You know, the Marjorie Taylor Greens of this world are dealing with the impact of realizing that the man who is the obvious fake Wizard of Oz is the obvious fake Wizard of Oz.

Speaker 6 Yeah, on that Many Secrets, No Mysteries point, the great New York Times story for folks who have the stomach for digging in by Nick Confessori, you know, in kind of the lead up to these files being released, they did a bunch of interviews with all the victims, just trying to figure out like what really was the Trump association with Epstein.

Speaker 6 And, you know, just a couple of things they discovered is, you know, in the late 80s, a bunch of people literally thought that they were best friends or not.

Speaker 6 You know, nobody can be sure whether Trump actually has any real friends.

Speaker 6 But the impression was Epstein or Maxwell introduced at least six women who have accused him of grooming or abuse to trump according to interviews none have accused him of inappropriate behavior none of those six one of the women though who has never before spoken publicly about the experience told the times that epstein coerced her into attending four parties at his home trump attended all four and at two of them epstein directed her of sex with other guests so that kind of tells you what you need to know basically the question is who who goes to prison and for how long obviously that has to be based on highly specific factual information you know even the worst person in the world you want to punish that person for the crimes they did commit and not for the crimes they didn't commit or not for crimes that they were in the vicinity of, but were not their personal responsibility.

Speaker 4 But with the President of the United States, there's just a threshold question.

Speaker 4 Is this a person who regards all Americans, including women, including young people, including kids who are adrift, as human beings worthy of respect?

Speaker 4 Or does he regard them as objects to be subject to his

Speaker 4 demands, pressures, lusts? The Epson story, whatever the exact details are, and we may never get all the way through it.

Speaker 4 It tells you who he is, but you already knew that, or you should have already known that.

Speaker 6 So, TBD, more on this will come out over the weekend. And if there are any

Speaker 6 particularly grotesque revelations from the files that we get today, you can check us out over on the Blork Takes feed. We'll be talking about that.

Speaker 6 It's just my suspicion we'll see, based on their behavior to date. I'd be surprised if the worst Trump material is in the first tranche.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Let's say that.
So

Speaker 6 we'll continue to wait.

Speaker 6 He gave a speech I wanted to talk to you about earlier this week, the kind of, you know, Maul Santa yelling at America speech that he did earlier this week about

Speaker 6 how he was given a bad deal with the economy.

Speaker 6 And some on the left, before the speech in the lead up, were talking about how this, whatever it was that he was going to say, was supposed to be this big distraction from the Epstein files that was coming.

Speaker 6 I was never sure if that was really the motivation. If it was the motivation, it seems to have been a total failure.
I was wondering what you made of his remarks earlier in the week.

Speaker 4 Two thoughts. The first is, you may remember from the first term, the C.
Bannon phrase, flood the zone with shit.

Speaker 4 This was an aggressive strategy where you created so many distractions that your opponents could never fixate on anything, could never hold you to account for any one horrible thing you did, any one abuse of power.

Speaker 4 Like so many things in politics, as you know well from your long experience, these strategies work until they stop.

Speaker 4 And the flood the zone with shit strategy worked so long as the American economy was was prosperous, as it was by good luck in the first three years of Donald Trump's first term.

Speaker 4 Most people don't pay that much attention to politics. Media elites can, sometimes, if they can all converge on one story in a time of prosperity, media elites can elevate that.

Speaker 4 But if there are too many stories, they can't. And since times are generally prosperous, people aren't that fixed on politics.

Speaker 4 When times are not prosperous, and they're not prosperous now, the flood the zone with shit goes into complete reverse.

Speaker 4 Because there's one story that the person who decides elections is thinking about, and that is

Speaker 4 they can't afford their groceries and their kids can't get a job. And meanwhile, the president is fixed on the White House ballroom and Epstein and Venezuela.

Speaker 4 It's his zone that is flooded with shit, and the shit prevents him from getting in the way of getting to the message that he ought to get to.

Speaker 4 And anyway, he doesn't have a message because the truthful economic message, the only thing Trump could do to make a difference to the problems that are afflicting most Americans, is to say,

Speaker 4 the central economic idea of my administration, the central economic idea of my life was stupid and wrong. I'm sorry I did it to you.
I'm going to do my best to undo it.

Speaker 4 You have to be patient as I undo this stupid thing I did to you. But it's all my fault.
And if someone else had been president, it wouldn't have happened.

Speaker 4 That's a tough message. And that's the message he had to sell in that speech.
And that's why I was struck. Donald Trump used to be a really smooth con artist.
He had a kind of chuckling manner.

Speaker 4 He didn't look desperate. He didn't look like he had to make the sale or he would end up like the guys in Glen Gary, Glenn Ross.

Speaker 4 This is a guy who had to make the sale and had lost the knack for making the sale. And I was struck by one more thing in it, which is he used a lot of statistics.

Speaker 4 And one of Donald Trump's secrets of power has always been he couldn't remember them and he knew that most people didn't care about them and didn't understand them.

Speaker 6 Yeah, Elizabeth Warren's got a white paper and, you know, he's selling you a monorail.

Speaker 4 This is going to be the greatest. It's going to be the best.
It's going to be the best ever, the best of all time. But he would never say 17%.

Speaker 4 And even though most of the statistics are made up or irrelevant, the very fact that he's using them was part of of the desperation of the con artist where the trick isn't working.

Speaker 6 It's interesting that you said that

Speaker 6 because it was one of my observations as well. Like, obviously he lies all the time.

Speaker 6 And obviously, you and I are going to disagree with the substance of whatever BS spin that he's trying to push, no matter what.

Speaker 6 But so just judging it, though, on a performance level, he was always really good at the flood the zone shit strategy at playing the tabloid game of like, hey, I'm going to get you to talk about this other thing.

Speaker 6 You know, maybe it's going to offend the sensibilities of some people, but I know my people will like it. And now we'll get, now we'll move the conversation.

Speaker 6 It failed completely on that score. It was not successful as a distraction or as a performance or as something to move people to a more comfortable turf for him.

Speaker 4 Because his people are all saying, I am paying more for my weekly grocery basket than I did in January. And you told me I was going to pay less.

Speaker 4 And maybe I discounted that and thought, okay, at least I pay no more, but I am paying more. And this time, unlike Biden, who was kind of the victim of a global inflation, you did it on purpose.

Speaker 6 You did it on purpose. And we kind of trusted that you'd be good at this.
We never really expected Biden to be good at it, frankly. That's what that voter would think, right? And you're failing.

Speaker 4 Right. So I've got a head of iceberg lettuce here that comes from Mexico, and it costs more because you made it cost more.

Speaker 6 Democracy depends on citizens who can listen, reason, and disagree without rancor. That's what we think of the Bulwark podcast, at least.
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Speaker 6 Underneath all of this, there's like a proxy war happening.

Speaker 6 You can kind of sense that it's not just you and me, David, who have had, you know, Trump during syndrome for over a decade now, who are noticing how he's lost his fastball and how he's adrift messaging wise.

Speaker 6 You can tell that the power brokers within MAGA can can sense it because there is a you know this sort of proxy war happening now about what to do next with MAGA.

Speaker 6 And a lot of that has been centered around

Speaker 6 conversation about Israel and also conversation about immigration, like how much of a national populist movement should we be? Should we be heritage Americans? What should our foreign policy be?

Speaker 6 And Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have been kind of at the forefront of the more nationalist conspiratorial side of this.

Speaker 6 Ben Shapiro gave a speech last night in Arizona pushing back on that that was pretty striking, the degree to which he went after them.

Speaker 6 And I just want to, if anyone could bear with us with the Ben Shapiro voice. If you're on 1.5 speed right now, you might want to move it back down so you can understand them.

Speaker 6 Let's listen to Ben Shapiro in Arizona.

Speaker 9 The conservative movement is also in danger. from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle, but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair.

Speaker 9 So, for example, if you host a Hitler-apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes.

Speaker 9 You know the Nick Fuentes who said that the Vice President of the United States is a, quote, fat, gay, race traitor married to a jeet.

Speaker 9 The person who said that Charlie Kirk was a, quote, retarded idiot.

Speaker 9 The person who said, and pardon my language here, it's his quote, that he, quote, took Turning Point USA and fucked it, and that's why it's filled with gripers.

Speaker 9 If you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.

Speaker 9 And when Megan said this week, quote, my goal and my job here is to try to understand, yes, where Candace is coming from on this, and says she sees no purpose in inserting herself, quote, into this on one side, that is a moral and logical absurdity.

Speaker 9 There is only one moral side here, Erica Kirk's side. And Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country.

Speaker 9 He's not actually making an argument-based in evidence. He's simply maligning people that he disagrees with, which is indeed par for the course from a man who was once a PR flak for Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 9 Check the record.

Speaker 6 David?

Speaker 4 Look, obviously he's right on every point. And I think what he's revealing here is

Speaker 4 Trump benefited in his first three years from a very strong economy that he did not create.

Speaker 4 And basically the story of Trump won is the United States came out of the Great Recession of 2008, 2009 slowly.

Speaker 4 And as of 2014, it had still not recovered to where it was before. But the federal monetary authorities got nervous in 2014 and began tightening the money supply some more, prematurely.

Speaker 4 And so the economy in 2016, all those years after the Great Recession, was still not performing the way Americans expected and wanted after so many years of first real hardship and then slow recovery.

Speaker 4 So Trump wins in 2016 because of the reaction to the Great Recession. And then the economy at last catches up, gets back on its growth path in their three good years before COVID.

Speaker 4 And he benefited from all that.

Speaker 4 And the people whom Ben Shapiro is referencing, that whole podcasting industry, well, Tucker Carlson was still on TV and Candace Owen was not yet a full-blown maniac in those days.

Speaker 4 They were a sideshow. Well, now all the people whom Ben Shapiro is talking about are much crazier than they were half a decade ago.
The economy is much worse. The Republican Party is in real trouble.

Speaker 4 There's some real issues. And the nature of the podcast economy is that everyone has to keep upping the ante.
My son, Nathaniel, who produces My Show, has a wonderful phrase.

Speaker 4 He said that in this environment, Charlie Kirk was the apex predator.

Speaker 4 And when Charlie Kirk was murdered and taken away from the scene, that left a lot of ecological spaces for like the smaller, meaner dinosaurs to roam the earth.

Speaker 4 And they're now all in competition with one another at a time when the Republican Party needs, has different needs.

Speaker 4 And Ben, who is, I think, much more about power and policy than about personality, is trying to summon them to.

Speaker 4 You guys, with your insane campaign that the wife of the president of France is an imposter, which even if true.

Speaker 4 would be not a subject of enormous interest from the American people.

Speaker 6 Well, unless she's also part of the plot to murder

Speaker 6 mid-level American political commentators, which is part of the theory as well.

Speaker 4 That's why you have to go there because it's like

Speaker 4 some kind of crazed junkie high.

Speaker 6 you need stronger and stronger doses of the same delusional medicine um but meanwhile the podcast movement is moving farther and farther away from anything that anyone else in the world would recognize as politics i agree with all that i guess my one note and i was i've faulted on social media now here i've praised everything that ben said no lies detected as they say about candace and tucker and steve bannon here's the problem with it though trump is the apex predator right like charlie was his minion not not to kill the metaphor here but and even ben in those remarks like no one benefits from and no one has yet had the gumption to just address the real issue, which is the biggest conspirator in the whole party is not Tucker Candice, but is the president of the United States.

Speaker 6 Person screwing the economy is the president of the United States.

Speaker 6 And the MAGA movement cannot possibly move back to you know, sanity and sobriety and anti-grifting when the leader of it is a grifter and a conspiracist.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, Trump is a crook way more than he is a conspiracist.

Speaker 6 He's both, though. You can be both.

Speaker 4 You can be both. You can be both.

Speaker 4 Look, through through this year, the MAGA movement has this desperate decision to make, which is if the 2026 elections are free and fair, if they're allowed to be free and fair, they're heading for a massive repudiation.

Speaker 4 And certainly in the House, not impossibly in the Senate, not impossibly in governor's races.

Speaker 4 And if there is a massive repudiation, a lot of things that today are happening because no one in Congress is saying, how did the president make a billion dollars from unknown sources in his first 12 months in office?

Speaker 4 It's very unlikely that he did that without tripping over some criminal statute somewhere along the way. Let's look into it.
All of those things become activated.

Speaker 4 So it is a matter of maybe survival to keep the House, and that means increasingly desperate measures. That's the great question.

Speaker 4 And so if you're trying to protect Donald Trump, and this getting distracted, this discussion about is the wife of the president of France secretly a man, secretly a Martian, secretly a mass murderer, is a big distraction from the thing you really have to do, which is find some way to stop Democratic votes from being tallied.

Speaker 6 I want to get into the Trump corruption, but you've piqued my interest there.

Speaker 6 How has your threat assessment evolved over the course of this year on that question about our democratic stability in this moment?

Speaker 4 My threat assessment has been pretty stable since 2016, which is

Speaker 4 a president, especially with a complicit Congress, can do some things.

Speaker 4 to shut down democratic competition, but he can't overthrow democratic competition entirely. So there's a disparity you can overcome through electoral manipulation, but it's finite.

Speaker 4 There comes a point where the wave gets too big, where even the things you can do without absolutely overthrowing the rule of law in a way that the judiciary won't accept, using the military in ways that the military won't accept.

Speaker 4 If the wave is that big, then you are out of resources.

Speaker 4 And I think we may be in 2026 heading toward a point where the economic discontent is so bad and on its way to getting worse that all the threats that they have in mind, when I hear hear the things they want to do, it's not going to be enough.

Speaker 4 And many of them, the courts have already said they can't do, like the president taking personal control of the election mechanics.

Speaker 4 Trump tried to issue an executive order to that effect and was told, no, you can't do that.

Speaker 6 I was always less worried in 2026 about

Speaker 6 kind of the voter suppression parts of their plan, because a lot of times voter suppression stuff backfires.

Speaker 6 I was more worried about a stop-the-steal thing, more akin to what they did last time, which is that the Democrats win the House by three seats, four seats, and that Republicans in random states decide not to seat those

Speaker 6 congressmen

Speaker 6 because they claim that the mail ballots are fraudulent. And to your point about size, that becomes a less doable effort if Democrats end up winning by 12, 14, 15 seats.

Speaker 4 Or 40. Or 40.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 So let me, here's the precedent that is really

Speaker 4 analogous.

Speaker 4 In 1984, there was a contested race in Indiana where the two candidates, Republican and Democrat, were dozens of points, votes apart. And it was pretty unclear who really had won.

Speaker 4 And it became a big, big controversy, Indiana 7th, I think it was. And eventually the House convened a special committee to look into it.

Speaker 4 But the committee had two Democrats and one Republican, and it found for the Democrat.

Speaker 4 And the Republicans were very upset. And in the end, the court said, we're out of this.
The Constitution says the House of Representatives is the judge of its own elections.

Speaker 4 We will not enter into who was right in the Indiana 7th. And effectively, the Speaker of the House said, I'm seating the Democrat.
And Republicans said, you will pay for this someday.

Speaker 4 And I think that has been sort of in their mind, Indiana 7th, 1984, as the precedent. But as you say, that would work with two seats or three, maybe four.

Speaker 4 The Mike Johnson thing of I'm just not swearing you in when there are 40 people who clearly want,

Speaker 4 I don't think it works. I don't think the other institutions of American life will abide it.

Speaker 6 I'm a little worried your house is being robbed, though.

Speaker 4 I heard that.

Speaker 4 We have a number of visiting house dogs.

Speaker 6 No, it's fine with me. I just want to make sure you just don't want to check to make sure you don't have an intruder.
Yeah. Your guard dog.

Speaker 4 There's a lot of wildlife in this house right now.

Speaker 6 That brings some people joy. I don't really get it, but I appreciate it.
You know, I don't like to yuck other people's yum.

Speaker 6 This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. The holidays are a time for tradition.
Some people have many in their family. We're updating ours.
We get to stay in New Orleans this year.

Speaker 6 And I'm trying to just jumpstart some new New Orleans holiday traditions.

Speaker 6 But whatever they are for you now, it's also a time to reflect on what your traditions mean and how you might rewrite them or make some new ones.

Speaker 6 One thing for some of us might be healthy over the holidays, given, you know, the emotional fervor and

Speaker 6 the memories of holidays past, is to think about whether therapy is something that could be useful for you. or a loved one.

Speaker 6 I was just talking yesterday with one of my friends who was in a group therapy session and you know going through some issues they were having we were bouncing it back and forth a bit and i you know i i do think that a lot of that stuff that that sometimes hangs over us uh you get a little extra time to think about it during the holidays you get more family time emotions are higher feelings are higher and and some of it starts to weigh on you a little bit more and so maybe if that's you this is a time to think about how therapy could help you with better help.

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Speaker 6 This December, Start a New Tradition by Taking Care of You. Our listeners get 10% off at betterhelp.com/slash the bulwark.
That's better H-E-L-P.com/slash the bulwark.

Speaker 6 I want to go back to the grift. On your show this week, you had Will Thomas on to talk about Trump's corruption and the dangers of politicians regulating industries they invest in.

Speaker 6 When you had done the show, the focus was naturally on crypto, which is where Trump has gained most of his wealth on paper at least so far during this first year.

Speaker 6 Obviously, that's an industry that should be regulated more. It's regulated kind of minimally.
I believe since you've taped, we had another news item that came out.

Speaker 6 Trump's business, the business that started as Truth Social, which is just basically his blog, and then expanded into crypto, and I think it also streams some like Don Jr.'s podcast or something, that business, the podcasting crypto blog business, has merged with a nuclear fusion company.

Speaker 6 It was a $6 billion merger. Nuclear Fusion feels like a highly regulated business, so I think that'd be relevant to your discussion.

Speaker 4 The discussion focused on two lines that are convergent. The first line is the way that the Supreme Court has over the past decade and a half dismantled American public integrity laws.

Speaker 4 It is now very, very difficult to convict a politician in the United States of bribery. The Supreme Court has said, they've got all these exceptions.

Speaker 4 If you give a politician money, like cash, and ask the politician, I need you to set up a meeting for me with a regulatory body.

Speaker 4 This is the actual facts of the most relevant case.

Speaker 4 I'm not telling you to tell the regulatory body what to say, but the fact that you've made the call gives the regulatory body a pretty clear idea of the answer you want.

Speaker 4 But if there's no actual order from you to tell those guys to give my donor this, then it's not bribery. So the Supreme Court has created this.

Speaker 4 If the governor is doing what is his ordinary line of business, setting up meetings, unless there is an explicit corrupt act for corrupt payment, no conviction. Wow.

Speaker 4 So that creates both a lot of loopholes in the law and also even when people do do things that are straightforwardly illegal, huge evidentiary problems.

Speaker 4 It very seldom happens that the politician is caught on some kind of record saying, you give me the $100,000 and I will give you the contract.

Speaker 4 And let me just make sure that that's in writing so that prosecutors can have it conveniently at hand. The Supreme Court has raised questions.

Speaker 4 If the gift comes after the act, there's a question mark about it. So public integrity is

Speaker 4 even before Trump, even before crypto, that was gutted. And

Speaker 4 a little cynically, I said on the show that the relevant decision here was a 9-0 unanimous Supreme Court decision because the liberals on the court want to make it harder to prove crimes generally, and the conservatives on the court want to make it harder to prove crimes against their friends.

Speaker 4 And so that produced the nine to zero majority.

Speaker 6 And to the extent that it was possible at all, they've dismantled the public corruption unit now. This administration has, which has just accelerated this pre-existing problem.

Speaker 4 Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: And now you throw crypto in, because one of the things the Supreme Court is very permissive of is if you're running a kind of business, the politician can run a kind of business.

Speaker 4 And the crypto industry, it's a number of different lines of business, but the meme coins in particular, which are, what, like trading cards, when Donald Trump put his meme coins on the market in January of 25 at $75 a coin, today they are trading at about $5.50.

Speaker 4 Now, some of the people who bought them, some of the people who bought one or two or three, are genuine dupes who've lost money, and they may even be irritated about it.

Speaker 4 But the people who bought millions of dollars worth of those coins were not dupes.

Speaker 4 They were looking for a way to give money to Donald Trump personally in a way that would pass scrutiny and maybe protect their privacy too. So the meme coins were intended to lose value.

Speaker 4 And it's not Donald Trump who's the only politician who can issue a meme coin.

Speaker 4 The next governor of California could create a meme coin and find a way to get money routed to anyone who's got an important, powerful job can say, yeah, I'm issuing a meme coin.

Speaker 4 And, you know, it's going to lose 90% of its value in the first six months. But, you know,

Speaker 4 we'll both remember that wonderful moment we had when you put all that money in my pocket and maybe I'll be grateful.

Speaker 6 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And on top of that, they released the stable coin,

Speaker 6 which is the deal that they're doing with with like where the UAE facilitated it and it's financed from a Chinese guy that's a criminal. It's like

Speaker 6 the notion there is that we're like pegging this fake coin to the dollar, to real currency.

Speaker 6 But like the idea that a foreign government would look at it and say, you know, I could take something that's actual currency or I could take the president of the United States meme coin that's pegged to currency.

Speaker 6 And it's preposterous to think that they're doing that for like legitimate investment reasons.

Speaker 4 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I wrote an article for the Atlantic about the stable coins because they're more complicated and actually much more dangerous than meme coins are simply a way to do corruption, but they don't pose any threat to the larger economy.

Speaker 4 Trump gets his corrupt swag. The donors get, some get duped, more get attention and favor.
But there's no systematic risk. But stable coins, these are seriously, seriously dangerous.

Speaker 4 Because what a stable coin is, is a bank deposit. You give the stablecoin issuer $100.
He gives you the coin. He gives you a promise that the $100 will be available when you want it.

Speaker 4 If you've seen It's a Wonderful Life, you know any institution that takes deposits is at potential risk because as George Bailey says, my $100, it's not here in the till, it's in Fred's house, it's in George's house.

Speaker 4 Well, the same thing happens with stable coins is the money is not actually at hand. Now, it's invested supposedly in treasury bills and other things, but they're not quite as liquid.

Speaker 4 And the thing that prevented the kind of bank run you saw in It's a Wonderful Life was the combination of strict regulation and deposit insurance.

Speaker 4 And deposit insurance is paid for, and not it's not a a trivial payment. Banks pay tens, hundreds of millions of dollars a year for their deposit insurance.

Speaker 4 A stablecoin is a bank deposit without proper regulation and without deposit insurance.

Speaker 4 So the reason that stable coins are a competitive business is you say, look, what if you were allowed to take other people's money and not pay the insurance premium? Wouldn't that be more profitable?

Speaker 4 I think it would be. I think it would, yeah.
You do you eliminate my most important cost?

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 4 But then there's a problem. What if they want the money back? And what if stable coins get big and

Speaker 4 they become like as happened in 2009 when this problem appeared in money market funds? People want their money back, the money's not there, and the government of the United States is on the hook.

Speaker 4 One of the things that the Trump people kept saying, they passed a law called the so-called Genius Act, very ironically named law, but they said there's no public money involved here.

Speaker 4 Don't worry, there's no deposit insurance. The government is not on the hook.
But if the failure is as big as it's likely going to be, of course the government is on the hook.

Speaker 4 Of course the government is on the hook because you you cannot have billions or trillions of dollars of deposits not be refunded. That would be the end of the world.

Speaker 6 The one caveat I guess I would give to that is that I don't know that the UAE is going to want their money back. I think that they're probably getting other stuff.
So

Speaker 6 some of the other purchasers of the Trump stablecoin might be a different deal.

Speaker 4 Well, the stablecoins are especially attractive to criminals and terrorists because,

Speaker 4 again, we don't want to go maybe too far down this rabbit hole, but it's actually, if you're a Hezbollah, if you're a Hezbollah, it's quite hard to get into the U.S. banking system.

Speaker 4 If you want to keep your money in U.S. dollars, that's difficult.
Banks are supposed to know their customer, they're supposed to file all kinds of reports.

Speaker 4 The stablecoin allows people who want to hold wealth in dollars, and there is trillions of dollars of dirty money around the world that wants to be in dollars, allows them to hold their money in dollars without going through all that scrutiny.

Speaker 4 And one more thing about the stablecoin companies: all the big stablecoin companies are domiciled outside the United States. They're in El Salvador.
I think Tether's in El Salvador.

Speaker 4 This is a whole arbitrage against U.S. regulation, against U.S.
know-your-customer laws with other people's money, all of it purporting to be a refundable deposit, but in fact at risk.

Speaker 4 And it's just a time bomb ticking waiting to blow up.

Speaker 6 Just one more thing on this. No thoughts on the President of the United States being the majority shareholder of a nuclear fusion business.

Speaker 6 Because that's true.

Speaker 6 That is a true sentence as of yesterday.

Speaker 4 Yes. Well, there are important regulatory concerns there.

Speaker 6 Like nuclear nuclear.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Nuclear energy, I'm I'm a big believer in it,

Speaker 4 but it's got obvious safety hazards. And there used to be an elaborate system of controls and inspections to make sure that nuclear power plants were run safely.

Speaker 4 And if the president has got his wealth tied up, I have no idea of the science of the risks of nuclear fusion as opposed to fission.

Speaker 4 I presume they're significant. And given what Doge has done to every other executive thinking part of the U.S.
government, what has happened to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? How intact is that?

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Speaker 6 I want to go into some foreign policy stuff. Well, I guess Dio's choice.
You had some thoughts about Japan. You mentioned them beforehand.
I also want to talk to you about the Venezuela potential war.

Speaker 6 Where do you want to start?

Speaker 4 Probably we should start with Venezuela because it's more urgent, although the Japan thing is one I'm more worried about.

Speaker 4 Through 23 and 24, a lot of Republicans, not just Trump, actually Trump was one of the more cautious, Vance, DeSantis, were calling for military action inside Mexico against the Mexican cartels.

Speaker 4 Rockets, SEAL Team 6s, naval blockades, Ron DeSantis' idea.

Speaker 4 The Mexicans fended that off by essentially appeasing Trump. They have opened their skies to American drones

Speaker 4 and they've let the United States conduct all kinds of operations, surveillance operations inside Mexico. We'll see whether they allow military operations.
But they've bought

Speaker 6 quiet.

Speaker 4 But the energy that makes the Trump people want to do something violent is still there. And so it's fixated itself on Venezuela.
And it's not quite clear what the goal here is, what the plan here is.

Speaker 4 There are no allies, but there's clearly a lot of aggression looking for an outlet. So far, it's found small boats, but it seems to be that they want even more.

Speaker 6 I don't know.

Speaker 6 Maybe Argentina or the new president of Chile. We've got a couple of right-wing governments now down there.
One of them will be for it.

Speaker 4 I'm just going to make a point.

Speaker 6 It's crazy. It remains unclear to me who, besides Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller, are actually for this.

Speaker 6 And even like our old friends in the neocon world, who maybe would have been for this in a a different thing, who are more amenable to Trump than we are, like National Review, Commentary, some of those folks, they're criticizing this.

Speaker 6 Like, who is for this?

Speaker 4 I remain that kind of interventionist.

Speaker 4 And the Maduro government is not only oppressive and cruel and dangerous, but it's also taken one of the most potentially prosperous countries in the world, certainly in South America, and reduced it to beggary and driven a quarter of the population into refugee status.

Speaker 4 So if you had a reasonably normal administration that would say, look, I'm standing here with the president of Mexico, with the president of Colombia, Venezuela's neighbor, and the largest receiver of Venezuelan refugees, the president of Brazil.

Speaker 4 And we're putting together a multilateral force that will not only remove Maduro from power, but that will oversee free and fair elections afterwards and make sure there's some kind of order.

Speaker 4 And the face of this occupation will be South American. So this is not American imperialism, of which so many have fresh memories.
I could be sold that project.

Speaker 6 Okay, all right. Now we're talking.
Now we're talking.

Speaker 4 You know, maybe there's a resolution by the Organization of American States.

Speaker 6 But not Gollum Stephen Miller deciding he wants to do it just so that he can do the Alien Enemies Act and deport as many Venezuelans as possible.

Speaker 6 Because that seems to be what's really happening, right?

Speaker 4 When the American troops went into Grenada in 1983 under Ronald Reagan, there were 1,900 Americans there. There were 300 from Jamaica, Barbados,

Speaker 4 and I think Trinidad. And the reason was not that the United States needed that extra increment of Jamaican firepower.

Speaker 4 It was to say to the Grenadians, your neighbors are here too, that we are showing a decent respect. And we know that every island in the Caribbean has unhappy memories of American action.

Speaker 4 So we want to reassure you that we are acting in conjunction with others who are in your situation and that you will retain your sovereignty and independence after this liberation action.

Speaker 6 This is one where I kind of don't know how this plays out. Do you have any thoughts on the next few weeks? I mean, I've been kind of surprised.

Speaker 6 At first, I thought this was a little bit of Marco's saber rattling and, again, some excuse making for Stephen Miller to do some deportations and that Trump would eventually taco like usual, but that feels not right anymore.

Speaker 4 Aaron Powell, Jr.: But what's weird about this is they have pulled together an enormous array of military force into the area.

Speaker 4 And you read these things like the largest deployment since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president is asking for options.

Speaker 4 And you say, wouldn't you have asked for options before moving all these ships and troops? The idea that they're sort of winging it even now, they don't seem to have a plan.

Speaker 4 Look, there's no staff process. There's no national security advisor of the United States.
Who's running the interagency process? Who's doing the diplomacy? There's no one.

Speaker 4 And it just seems to be a series of ad hoc actions by different parts of the federal government with no clear plan at enormous cost

Speaker 4 and at enormous hazard. And while Venezuela is probably not a very credible military opponent, I don't know that they would be able to resist.
There will be costs. There will be costs in life.

Speaker 4 There'll be costs in Venezuelan life for sure, American life possibly, huge costs in money.

Speaker 4 And there's no approval by Congress. There's no statement to the American people.
There's no buy-in, and there are no regional allies.

Speaker 6 Yeah. And unknown costs, unintended consequences.
JVL did a newsletter yesterday that folks should read if they want more on this, where he took your point about Maduro.

Speaker 6 And it's like Maduro is a bastard, but this is crazy.

Speaker 6 He wrote that Trump's bleed about this is the single stupidest and most irresponsible presidential statement in the history of foreign policy. I'd have you to find something dumber.

Speaker 6 Maybe somebody found something dumber. But just the notion that he's going to saber rattle and be like, hey, we got an armada.
We've surrounded you. Give us your oil with no plan.

Speaker 6 No, I mean, it is, it's, it's just, it's truly moronic.

Speaker 4 Colombia was a reasonably stable democracy from the 1950s until the 1990s. But it has not been a stable democracy now for close to 30 years.
So there's a lot of institutional damage.

Speaker 4 What's the plan to reconstitute a democracy?

Speaker 4 They're capable of it. They've done it before.
But they're damaged, and much of their population isn't.

Speaker 4 And Trump's idea seems to be: either Maduro coughs up the oil, or we get the next Maduro in line.

Speaker 4 And the United States would be committing military resources on a big scale to bring another another dictator to power in order to get oil.

Speaker 6 And then we're going to take their oil, so they're going to have no natural resources and money to try to rebuild their economy and the democracy. It's nonsensical.

Speaker 6 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, one more thing about that.

Speaker 4 So I'm a veteran of the W. Bush administration and all the commenters are aware.

Speaker 6 We still hear about it from time to time. Okay.

Speaker 4 So one of the big left-wing complaints about Bush was that he went to war in Iraq for oil.

Speaker 4 I remember having this discussion with so many people in those days, which is, nobody goes, if you want oil, you buy it. There's lots of of it.

Speaker 4 And if you conquer a country, you don't get the oil for free. You still have to pay for it because it's not just like lying there on the ground like pebbles.

Speaker 4 It's a product of enormous investment and

Speaker 4 the capital has to have a return and you have to pay the sovereign proceed. And I just had that argument so many times in 2003, 2000.
It would be crazy to go to war for oil.

Speaker 4 No one would do something that dumb. And now the president of the United States is saying, you know, we should go to war for oil.

Speaker 6 You want oil?

Speaker 4 There's a global glut. The United States is the world's largest producer of oil, oil and gas, and I think the world's largest exporter of gas.
And there's lots more. There's no shortage.

Speaker 4 So the idea you'd go to war to get, it's just, it's.

Speaker 6 I was going to say, as stupid as the idea was then, it's exponentially stupider now after the natural gas and shale revolution.

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Speaker 6 To Japan, I want to hear

Speaker 6 your concerns about Japan nuclearizing.

Speaker 4 Okay, so there was a little story. unsourced that an advisor to the Prime Minister of Japan, an unnamed advisor, had said that Japan should consider getting a a nuclear weapon.

Speaker 4 Now, Japan is eminently capable. They have a nuclear industry of their own.
They could have a weapon in a very few weeks or months if they wanted one. They have all the know-how.

Speaker 4 They have all the material. They forewent this because of their own history and because they relied on American protection, like so many people.

Speaker 4 The Japanese view was it's better to have a world with fewer nuclear weapons than more. Our trustworthy allies, the United States, have hoisted their nuclear umbrella over us.

Speaker 4 They are deterring the other nuclear powers in our region. We don't need the moral hazard of this.
We don't need the odium of of it. And we don't need the cost and trouble.

Speaker 4 But we could do it if we ever had to. But one of the costs of Trump making America so unreliable is that every country has to think, we can't trust the Americans anymore.

Speaker 4 And they did this not just once, but twice. So this is obviously a recurring risk that they will abandon the world or do something selfish and imperialistic.

Speaker 4 They're talking about waging war on NATO-allied Denmark. to seize Greenland.
Maybe that will never happen, but they're thinking about it. Someone is drawing up papers right now for a U.S.

Speaker 4 war on deadline.

Speaker 6 And what are the chances? Are you sure 82-year-old dementia-riddle Trump won't do that? Is that a 2% chance? Is it 8%? It's a lot higher than it was before. It's not zero.

Speaker 4 And we know that they're thinking about abandoning Ukraine.

Speaker 4 So if you're a European, if you're Japanese, if you're South Korean, if you're Taiwanese, you have to think all of these countries could have a bomb in a few months or years if they wanted one.

Speaker 4 I worry that one of the costs of the Trump presidency is it's going to be one of the greatest nuclear proliferation events in world history.

Speaker 4 And not with underdeveloped underdeveloped countries like India and Pakistan who had their own agendas, but with former U.S.

Speaker 4 allies who have said, we thought we could trust the Americans, and now we see we cannot.

Speaker 6 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: That's a dark irony because it was one of the things, when you said earlier, that the one unifying thing of Trump his whole life back to the 80s is his love of tariffs.

Speaker 6 He also was an anti-nuclear person back then, like in his pre-days. Like that was just one of the shticks he did to get attention.

Speaker 6 And so it would be a great irony for him to be the one that's the cause of that. The other thing is that in the way that Trump is erratic about all of this, and so that's concerning, right?

Speaker 6 It's like you can't, you know, you have to, you have to game out the options if 81-year-old Trump decides he wants to do something crazy to stand into power.

Speaker 6 The Vance element of it also is relevant because you look at his successors and you think, man, they might not be as crazy as him, but in order to appease his people, they might need to feel like they're more ideologically America first and that we might not be able to rely on them for

Speaker 6 kind of a related but different reason.

Speaker 4 Trevor Burrus: And Vance seems, who is obviously much more intelligent than Trump and much more consistent and hardworking and more ideological, has really talked himself into a position of America should not be keeping the peace for other countries.

Speaker 4 And America didn't do this as a favor to other people. America did it because after two world wars, the United States realized the world is not so big.
America is very big.

Speaker 4 If there are major wars in other places, America will be drawn in. And that will be really expensive.
So for an American point of view, you want to prevent war.

Speaker 4 And the way you prevent war is to make sure that all of the worlds, or almost all of the world's most advanced most sophisticated most militarily capable countries are allies of yours like the idea that germany doesn't have a big army and japan doesn't have a big navy was not some mistake made in 1945

Speaker 4 you guys you are so good at consumer electronics your cars are

Speaker 4 why don't you focus on that and leave the army

Speaker 4 leave the army and the navy to us we'll protect you you won't need one and and your french and korean neighbors will feel a lot better if you focus on what you do best and let us do what we do.

Speaker 6 I want to just really quick talk about immigration because you've talked about this quite eloquently in the past.

Speaker 6 I just want to hear your riff because I guess we were on with Nicole maybe a couple weeks ago.

Speaker 6 And you're talking about the economic side of the immigration choices that this administration has made this year.

Speaker 6 Catherine Rampell, my colleague, posted something, I guess it was last night, about just the crazy impact on the construction industry and how nobody's pushing back.

Speaker 6 She said that she called the National Association from Home Builders, which has been a source of her over years. So it's not like a cold call.
And they refused to give a comment to her about this.

Speaker 6 My buddy up in sent me a text that he had dinner with a guy that's a big home builder who had been a Trumper,

Speaker 6 who is like apoplectic about the state of affairs, who now has to buy Ubers for all his staff to get to their work sites because they're all afraid, even the ones who are illegal.

Speaker 6 Just wondering what you kind of make about the state of play there on the economic side.

Speaker 4 Well, if I remember these figures right, back when they were telling figures, it was estimated that about a fifth of the construction workforce nationwide was here without status.

Speaker 4 But in the really hot housing markets, California, Florida, it was more like 25% and sometimes 30%.

Speaker 4 And there are specialties, especially roofing and drywall, where it can be close to half the workforce in a state like California, a state like Florida.

Speaker 4 So these kinds of crackdowns really have an impact on the housing market.

Speaker 6 Now,

Speaker 4 because Trump is driving so much of the economy into recession,

Speaker 4 the shortage of housing is not as painful.

Speaker 4 It has been projected, I don't think we have the final figures on this yet, but on the present trajectory, 2025 will be the first year since the first census in 1790 when the population of the United States is smaller at the end of the year than it was at the beginning.

Speaker 4 Crazy. Look, I come at this as someone who's definitely more immigration restrictionist than many people were in the Biden years.

Speaker 4 But if you're an immigration restrictionist, you have to be very clear-to eyed. It's a cost.

Speaker 4 Immigration is a source of economic benefit. It has other costs associated with it.
And your mileage may vary.

Speaker 4 But the question is, do you want to capture all the economic benefits or do you want to, even at the risk of the social harms, or do you want to reduce some of the social harms by reducing some of the economic benefits?

Speaker 4 But this idea that J.D. Vance will say, well, we'll make housing cheaper by driving out all the immigrants.

Speaker 4 The United States needs to build, they're building the housing. They're not just buying the housing.
They're building the housing. And this is a single entry bookkeeping entry.

Speaker 4 And meanwhile, there are all kinds of industries where labor is going to be scarce. Again, the magnitude of the economic slowdown masks this to some degree.

Speaker 4 But the idea that you're doing both an immigration shock and a trade shock at the same time and trying to make up for it by cutting interest rates, that's a formula for recession plus inflation at the same time.

Speaker 6 I want to lump two things together that I would be remiss not to mention and in the Trump megalomania category before we end.

Speaker 6 The one substantive announcement from Trump's speech earlier this week, I should have mentioned this when we were talking about it, was the Trump Patriot dividend, which has turned out to be fake.

Speaker 6 The checks for $1,776 are actually reallocating things that Congress had allocated, which was subsidizing housing for service members.

Speaker 6 And then Trump has also officially renamed the Kennedy Center the Trump Kennedy Center. So thoughts on either or both?

Speaker 4 Well, he's replaying greatest hits.

Speaker 4 It was one of the things he did in the first Trump term that was disgusting and odious and unlowercase R Republican, but that worked, was that he put his own signature. on the COVID relief checks.

Speaker 4 That had never been done before. Every instinct of a Democratic Republic is, you know, these are not gifts to the people from the president.
He's not a Roman emperor distributing largesse.

Speaker 4 This is your money. And the reason it's signed by this obscure figure, the treasurer of the United States, is to depoliticize it.
But it paid off. It really did seem to do him a lot of political good.

Speaker 4 So he's got that same trick in mind. But because there is no congressional authorization, he either has to spend the money illegally.

Speaker 4 the way the farm money is being spent illegally without an appropriation or authorization, or he has to take it from some other fund that he's got, and that's what he's done.

Speaker 4 And then we'll have an interesting question.

Speaker 4 Are military people sophisticated enough to recognize that the reason they're not getting the bathroom in their military housing upgraded next year as they were supposed to is because Trump took the money to give it to them in the form of cash, which is taxable, unlike the bathroom, which was not taxable.

Speaker 6 On the Kennedy Center,

Speaker 6 this is happening right now.

Speaker 6 So it's Texas to be. His name is now going on the building.
I wonder if we can bulldoze it like the East Wing.

Speaker 6 Is that a wrong impulse that I'm looking at this picture of the Donald Trump Kennedy Center and I want to bulldoze it like the East Wing now?

Speaker 4 One of the things that people like you and me get often asked is, is there anything positive you can can say about President Trump? I realize after today, yes, there is.

Speaker 4 He really loves musical theater.

Speaker 6 He does. He is an old queen.
He is a Broadway queen at art.

Speaker 4 He really loves it, and he wants to be a piece of it. It's illegal, just as renaming the Department.
The Department of Defense was named by a congressional statute in 1949.

Speaker 4 The president cannot change it unilaterally. And the fact that so many people chose to go along with this absurd practice, you know, why not call it the Department of Booz?

Speaker 4 That might be even more accurate. Again, the Canary Center was a creation of Congress, named by act of Congress.
Trump can't change that.

Speaker 4 But we're so used to the law being violated in ways big and small. This one can be undone.

Speaker 6 It's going to feel petty. It's still like all of this stuff is like, you know, we'll could consume another president.
You know what I mean? He knows that, and I don't know.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Okay.
So here's the serious point. I think I've wrestled with this point with you before.

Speaker 4 Should the next president, assuming there is a more normal president at some point in the future, is the right attitude to move on or undo?

Speaker 4 And the Biden impulse was mostly move on, treat Trump as an aberration, where his crimes were undeniable, try to get some other part of the government to focus on it.

Speaker 4 Biden clearly preferred to keep the Department of Justice away from Trump prosecutions. They were not very upset that Judge Eileen Cannon kept delaying and delaying.
I think that suited Biden, too.

Speaker 4 Was that the right call? I think it was from the vantage point of 2021, it was defensible. From the vantage point of 2029, I think it will be harder to do.
And let me introduce the last thought.

Speaker 4 People who have a political science background may remember a problem called the prisoner's dilemma.

Speaker 4 So there are two prisoners, they're in separate cells, and they said, look, if you both keep silent, you get a light punishment.

Speaker 4 But if one of you defects, he gets away with it and the other is punished. And the result is that both of them squeal on each other and they both get punished.

Speaker 4 So what is the solution to the prisoner's dilemma?

Speaker 4 In the early days of the computer era, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto called for papers, and he said he was going to create a sort of mock computer universe, and he was going to play the prisoner's dilemma over and over and over again to find the most stable answer.

Speaker 4 And this is a long build-up, but the winning entry was a strategy called tit-for-tat, which was cooperate on the first move. On every subsequent move, do what the other guy did.

Speaker 4 If he cooperated, you keep cooperating. If he punished, even if it seems irrational, you punish.
Because over the long haul, if you have the reputation where if you cooperate, we'll cooperate.

Speaker 4 But if you defect, we'll punish you. It can't be the rule that

Speaker 4 Republicans get to break every norm and Democrats have to tidy the game, the room up afterwards.

Speaker 6 Bulldoze the Kennedy Center. Sounds like David Frum's on board with me.
I like that. Tid for Tech.

Speaker 6 Final topic.

Speaker 6 You worked with Rob Reiner on some political activism in 2017. Obviously, just a horrific tragedy.
And I was just wondering if you had any parting thoughts about it.

Speaker 4 I got to know him a little bit. And we became quite friendly.
close friends, but I gave a dinner party in D.C. for Rob Reiner in 2018.
I looked it up and among the guests was J.D.

Speaker 4 Vance and Usha Vance, who were then the bright hopes of reform Republicans. So I'm unearthing the records of that event to use in a future, this memoir I keep working on.

Speaker 4 But Rob Reiner was just such a kindly, generous

Speaker 4 gentleman. He had strong views, and

Speaker 4 those sometimes could get in the way of appreciating his artistry. But his artistry at its peak was incredible.
We watched Spinal Tap again, my wife and I, the other night.

Speaker 4 And I mean, it's as perfect as it was the day it was made.

Speaker 4 It's terrible. And

Speaker 4 there's an irreducible minimum of human tragedy. There will be people born with mental problems.
Some of them will be violent.

Speaker 4 With all these billions of people on the planet, there's an irreducible minimum. And all the rest of us can do is try to be decent.

Speaker 4 And the leaders of society are there to remind us, even if you're tempted not to be decent, that this is the way to behave.

Speaker 4 And when the utmost leader of the utmost society says, this is my moment to be a real dick,

Speaker 4 what hope is there for anyone else?

Speaker 6 It's sick. It's really sick stuff.
David From, appreciate your wisdom as always.

Speaker 6 Everybody else, I got a little Christmas present for you is for like 15 years, I've been toiling on what I believe is the best Christmas music playlist that exists in the world.

Speaker 6 And so we'll put that in the show notes here for everybody. And if you don't like it, that's okay.

Speaker 6 My taste isn't everybody's. You know, my father just wants Nat King Cole, and that's cool.
There's some Nat on there. I have a more diverse taste.
But everybody, hope you enjoy that.

Speaker 6 We'll have have a couple shows next week before the holiday. Stick around for that.
David Frum,

Speaker 6 appreciate you. Happy holidays to you.

Speaker 4 Merry Christmas to you.

Speaker 6 Bye-bye. Yeah, everybody else.
We'll see you on Monday with Bill Kristoff. Peace.

Speaker 6 Rudolph waking up in the road, dew dripping off his red nose.

Speaker 6 Blue and black tire track, torn through a beautiful dough.

Speaker 6 The leader scene of lightning McQueen

Speaker 6 black down

Speaker 6 at full speed.

Speaker 6 How many roads must a man walk down till he learns

Speaker 6 He's just a jerk who flirts with the clergy nurse till it burns

Speaker 6 I wouldn't be in the ceminary

Speaker 6 if I could

Speaker 6 be with

Speaker 6 you.

Speaker 6 If I could be with you.

Speaker 6 The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 10 Winter is the perfect time to explore California, and there's no better way to do it than in a brand new Toyota hybrid.

Speaker 10 With 19 fuel-efficient options like the All-Hybrid Camry, the RAV4 hybrid, or the Tacoma hybrid, every new Toyota comes with Toyota Care, a two-year complementary scheduled maintenance plan, an exclusive hybrid battery warranty, and of course, Toyota's legendary quality and reliability.

Speaker 10 Visit your local Toyota Toyota dealer and test drive one today, Toyota. Let's go places.
See your local Toyota dealer for hybrid battery warranty details.

Speaker 6 The first impression of your workplace shouldn't be a clipboard at reception. Sign In App turns check-ins into a moment of confidence for your team and your guests.

Speaker 6 Visitors, contractors, and staff can sign in by scanning a QR code, tapping a badge, or using an iPad in seconds.

Speaker 6 We handle the security, compliance, and record keeping behind the scenes so you can focus on people, not paperwork. Enhance security without compromising visitor experience.

Speaker 4 Find out more at signinapp.com.

Speaker 6 That's signinapp.com.

Speaker 8 60 years of Whistler Black Home, two legendary mountains, thousands of stories, ski and ride legendary terrain, and experience world-class snowsport events, concerts at the edge of the mountain, gravity-defying fire and ice shows, and more.

Speaker 8 This winter, go beyond. Plan your trip to Whistler Black Home.