David Frum: Losing the Dominance Primary

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. It is Tuesday, May twenty fourth two thousand twenty three, and we are fortunate enough to be joined by our good friend David from staff writer at the Atlantic. Welcome back, David.

Thank you so much.

David, I felt that we needed to have a soundtrack for today’s show. A special soundtrack before we get into the news of the day. Go for it. Here it is.

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy caught in a landslide? No escape from re added.

There’s no escape from this reality. I mean, where do we start, David? Donald Trump gets his felony court date. The country is inching toward default. And Rhonda Santos, the governor of the state of Florida has chosen to launch his candidacy for president — Yeah.

— with Elon Musk on Twitter. Can we start there? That Ron DeSantis is going to launch with Elon Musk.

I’ve had an observation about the way DeSantis communicates. And it struck me when he did an earlier pre launch online ad. I watched realize it was three minutes long. Mhmm. Every encounter between DeSantis and a voter in the SAD was mediated through a screen.

The the voter would see the SANDus on a telephone. They would watch him on a TV screen even when the voter they photoshopped DeSantis in apparent conversation with actual voters. But when you look more closely, you realize that the voters were looking at each other, not at him. And in fact, they were holding screens in front of their faces as they talked him. In this new ad that is, I guess, twenty four hours before launch, Ron DeSantis is walking toward a stage and we hear a speech by a voice over.

In a British accent.

In a British accent. Action is something that really happened. This was at some rally.

Okay.

In each case, there’s there’s an immediate motive. And the latest ad, the motive is to conceal that Sanders has an uncompelling voice In the previous ad, it was to conceal the fact that DeSantis’s actual real life encounters with voters are are few and look awkward. But the ad then sends a subliminal message, which is that desantis is someone you do not encounter directly. You encounter them through the prism of media and launching a campaign not in front of a cheering throng, but in a Twitter spaces where I don’t think there’s video in a Twitter spaces. It’s a very disassociated kind of event.

You’re not going to watch this on your television at home. There’s no one there. It’s not for people in in Iowa or New Hampshire. It is something to appreciate at two or three removed from the actual person.

Well, and it has the obvious advantage for Rhonda Sanders. I mean, there’s a Trump adviser who told NBC News. Announcing on Twitter is perfect for Ron DeSantis. This way, he doesn’t have to interact with people and the media can’t ask him any questions. So I suppose that’s right.

It also gives you deniability if the numbers are lower. Right. So when Donald Trump did his town hall on CNN, for all the criticism that format got and much of the criticism was deserved, something like three and a quarter million people watch that. That’s not a colossal audience, but it’s quite a big one. It’s about five times what CNN normally gets.

Donald Trump can truthfully say that because of him, CNN went from its usual six hundred seven hundred, maybe eight hundred thousand people in prime time to three and a quarter million. So if forty eight thousand people listen to the Twitter spaces. DeSantis can say, look, we’re not doing like with like here. It’s not that we’re on TV. Anyway, it’s at six o’clock eastern time during the working day everywhere else in the country.

So, of course, no one watched. But what you’re hearing more and more from Ron DeSantis campaign is they have a series of often reasonable explanations of why they’re not succeeding. Some of you say, okay. Those are all good explanations for why you’re not succeeding, but at some point you have to start succeeding.

Yeah. That would be a good idea. So, David, in my newsletter this morning, I I started off by saying, can we just leave aside the rank of punditry just for a second and just ponder this bizarre twist that the show runners have thrown at us here that we have a major candidate for president of the United States. Who is paying court to this petulant man child who spent the last few months posting poop emojis taking advice from somebody called Cat Turd and destroying a social media platform. And he is now a kingmaker and politicians indulge his fantasy.

So we’re going to see this man who wants to be present in the United States. Either here here at Mercium saying, Good to be here with you, Elon. We can get to the rank punditry if you like, why he thinks this is a good idea. I wanna jump

ahead to something that you and I just thought, well, that we would just thought today, perhaps. And that is Trump doubling down on his abuse of Eugene Carroll. So Eugene Carroll is the

—

Mhmm. — New York writer who brought his lawsuit against defamation for Donald Trump, one, a a substantial verdict, and Trump is now defaming her again. So let’s compare and contrast these two things. What is the message you’re constantly getting from Donald Trump? Which is I may be stupid.

I may be incompetent. I may be lazy. I may be crooked. But I am the most aggressive person in American politics. And even when I lose a defamation suit, I repeat the defamation because there is nothing you can do

A redefine.

And what is DeSantis DeSantis’s message is I won’t back down. I am so tough. But every time we encounter him in the presidential campaign context, We see him flinching and cowering a little bit. Turning to Elon Musk for protection, refusing to engage with Donald Trump. If you premise that the Republican electorate of twenty twenty above all things rewards dominance.

At every turn, Donald Trump is displaying dominance. And Ron DeSantis is displaying dominance the version. And so are the others? There’s been this pundit argument, is it better to sort of deflect Trump and ignore him or to fight him? And there are a lot of smart people who make the point.

Well, why don’t you let him burn himself out and let him throw his punches? But once you understand you’re in a dominance contest. Good luck. You can’t do that. There is just one question.

Who is mean enough and tough enough to deal with Trump? And that doesn’t mean responding to every provocation because there isn’t world enough in time to do that. But at some point, you have to stand up and say no more and hit back and hit back so hard that you establish your credit with Republicans as someone who can’t be pushed around. Guys this theory that every campaign has a secret slogan and defines what it’s really about. And the standout secret slogan was weak on dictators tough on mickey mouse.

But it’s also weak on Trump up on Mickey Mouse.

Well, this is a great point about the fight for dominance because if there’s one moment in the presidential campaign where you want to project power and dominance. It is that moment you announced that you want to be the president of the United States. And what is Ron DeSantis doing? He is diminishing himself, first of all, by going to a shrinking somewhat obscure website, and I mean, not just Twitter, but Twitter spaces. And then he’s going to be in the shadow of Elon Musk.

So he is diminished. I think I can understand the the logic. I mean, he knows that he needs a reset. He really needs to do something dramatic. He needs to create a lot of buzz.

He needs to reinforce, you know, his status with the, you know, the online far right. And this is consistent with this pattern and practice of, you know, co opting the base wing of the party. And he knows that embracing Elon Musk is gonna create rifts within the manga verse and it’s gonna trigger Trump down in Mar a Lago. What puzzles me about this is first, your point, which I think is is number one is that it certainly does not project dominance. The second, the risks that come with the possible rewards I mean, at minimum, he’s gonna be tied to and he’s gonna be asked about, you know, Musk’s latest crazy thing that he says.

You know, it’s a moral to work from home or his conspiracy theories or his anti somatic memes. But I also think he is now at the mercy of Elon Musk’s whims. I mean, he was two days ago that Elon Musk is emoting over how great Tim Scott was. Tomorrow, he could decide that he’s done with Ron DeSantis. I mean, he could throw him under the bus, he could cut him off at the knees.

And DeSantis would be well and truly screwed if a week from now, Elon Musk says, yeah, I gave the guy a shot and, yeah, he’s just he’s just not all that. He is now a hostage of Elon Musk, this erratic man child.

Those are all great points. And just to amplify something you said at the very beginning of that important presentation, the DeSantis campaign offers reasons. For what it does. But they’re never reasons. They’re rationalizations.

Mhmm. What it does at every point is take the coward’s way out. And then afterwards it explains what that was actually the smart thing to do. And sometimes it is the smart thing to do. So you don’t have to fight every fight.

But in the end, we say, you know what, with all of these things add up to what you are displaying is you are one of nature’s followers. At some level, Stephen Crouder and Ben Shapiro are the campaign managers for the DeSantis campaign. At any stupid petty thing that arises on the Internet. I remain to this day reasonably socially conservative person. Some of these things are things I even kind of agree with.

But in the scheme of things, how important are they? These are just internet flotsam and jetsam. The country is days away from a potential default on its debt, just to send us of anything to say to that. Tens of millions of Americans are going to pay less for insulin, which is I think they will like because of a massive government intervention in the pharmaceutical industry. Is that good or is that bad?

The warrant in Ukraine looks like it’s entering a new phase. There’s ever increasing Chinese aggression toward its neighbors. Where is the big Ron DeSantis foreign policy speech. Where is the one moment where he shows? If you don’t watch all these weirdos on the too spicy for YouTube video channels.

The people who watch baseball and not hate video, does he got for them? He doesn’t talk to us us at all. Most of American life is a completely alien space to this campaign. And, yeah, they’ve got explanations. But their rationalization is not reasons.

It seems deeply unserious, except if you live in this world of the flotsam and jetsam of the internet, and Maybe the calculation he’s made is that that’s where the influencers are. That is where the republican base is. The republican base is frankly not interested it in the very serious issues, the real serious threats. I mean, they’re willing to throw a rhetorical bomb once in a while, but what they are most interested in are. These petty trivial culture war fights.

So, I mean, maybe that is the id of the Republican voters who will decide who gets the nomination.

But there’s another rationalization. We’re testing that right now. And what we’re discovering is not true.

Mhmm.

Not true. The the guy who bet everything on the audience for too spicy for YouTube. It’s discovering he’s got about eighteen percent of the Republican primary vote and and dwindling. And the man who is beating his chest and taking random positions on issues. Donald Trump is dominant because he looks like the clan leader.

And so these issues are all stand ins for what this contest is really about. And at every turn, DeSantis has failed. And we can enter the space of how do you stand up to Trump within the context of Republican primary. There are a lot of things that you would do in a general election that wouldn’t work in a primary, but there are things that would work in primary. Or that any rate you have to try because you’re certain to lose.

I mean, one of the things that is strange is as obnoxious and provocative as the DeSantis campaign has been. It’s actually been kind of a risk averse campaign because they’ve never been once that I look. We either beat Trump or we lose to Trump. And if we’re gonna be Trump, we have to beat him. And if you’re going to beat him, you have to go to his area of strength, which is he’s the biggest He’s Leroy Brown.

He’s the nearest guy in town. And you have to do to Leroy Brown, what was done to Leroy Brown? Jim croatchase song, which is even looking like a jigsaw puzzle a couple of pieces gone. And if you can’t do that, then we way down is going to do it to you, and you will look like the jigsaw puzzle with a lot of pieces gone.

I think DeSantis needs to have that as his theme song. That would be good at his rallies. So another weird element of this announcement is, you know, DeSantis is sitting down and he’s chatting with Elon Musk, but it’s going to be moderated by a guy named David Sachs, who you are familiar with, but most of our listeners aren’t What’s interesting about this choice is I think one of the less successful moments of the DeSantis pre campaign was when he blundered on Ukraine and seemed to suggest that he was gonna bail on Ukraine. You tried to walk that back a little bit. But David Sachs is an open anti Ukraine social activist bundler troll.

So I mean, that that’s an interesting choice that he would launch his campaign with two guys who I would say are pretty clearly pro Russia when it comes to this particular war.

Well, it also tells me that Elon Musk dominated the discussion about the launch campaign. Because, I mean, supposing you’re the the Sanders campaign manager said, look, we’re going to announce that the governor of one of our great states is running for president. Now normally, that’s done in front of a cheering crowd. We’re gonna do it in front of an interviewer. Okay.

He’s the richest man in the United States, and he owns owns an important media platform. Different, but maybe futuristic, possibly, connect with space. Okay. Oh, and he wants to bring along his sidekick also that’s

I have a friend. Can I bring my friend over? No.

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Carson okay, Ed McMan. No. And And what happened there Ron DeSantis.

Oh, okay, mister Musk. You bring whoever you want.

That’s exactly right. There’s there’s no there’s no alternative scenario here. That musk basically dictated it.

President of the United States, you have to be the man in charge. And and Ron DeSantis has shown us at every turn. Yeah. He is a weakling. You can push him.

You can’t push him if you’re a gay school teacher. But if if you’ve got a couple hundred million dollars and got a mildly corrupt floor at a real estate deal that you’re trying to advance or some other scheme, you can push them. And he will take the pushing and stay pushed. And I’ve often thought that one of the most profound moments I’ve ever seen in American politics occurred in the nineteen ninety two presidential race. This is the three way race between the Elder Bush, Bill Clinton, and Rossborough.

And the last of their debates was a town hall moderated by Carol Simpson of ABC. And they took questions. And one of the questions came from a woman, an older woman who’s obviously if you watch the clip terribly nervous. At being on TV for the one and only time in her life. Mhmm.

Her question was, I would like to ask each of the candidates how they personally have been affected by the deficit. So total panic. Definite is very abstract. Of course, it’s we’re supposed to believe it’s important. It’s Rossboro’s big issue, but none of us are personally exactly affected by it.

It’s not in a way that it’s easy to communicate. Anyway, so to cut the short story short, Bush and Perot both flub the question. And then it’s Clinton’s turn. And Clinton says, takes one of, you know, that giant step toward her. Oh, yeah.

And projecting sort of emotional reactions to this frightened person as a nervous person. Yeah. I’ll answer your question, but first, I need to ask you how have you personally been affected by the deficit. And as the woman spoke more and more fluently as she overcame her in nervousness, became clear. She didn’t mean the deficit.

She meant the recession. Mhmm. And either she didn’t know the difference, which is possible, because these are technical terms or just because she flubbed it because she’s scared to be on TV in front of eighty million people. She made a mistake. And the lesson of that is the question you hear from the voter, when the voter enters the realm of politics, they’re often speaking the foreign language, deficit, recession, things they don’t know the meaning of.

They mean my neighbor lost his job or my husband lost his job. So you have to help them to translate from their language into the language of politics and then do the translation back. And you have to hear the question behind the question. And DeSantis keeps thinking that the question is what are we gonna do about

—

Mhmm. — this or that piece of Internet flotsam. And he’s never understood. The question is, are you big enough to take on Donald Trump? Are you brave enough?

We don’t want you to take them on like some maniac you may wanna maniacal get Trump, but you have the kind of cold, steely authority that allows you to deal with this guy. And at every Ron DeSantis’ messages, no, I don’t. I don’t. And I can’t deal with you on Musk. And I can’t even say no to David Sachs.

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So let’s talk about Donald Trump and what he is doing these days, the lack of impulse control now that he is in in a different world, you know, I think it’s worth pointing out for everybody who says, well, you know, nothing ever touches Donald Trump. Okay. That that is true. That conventional wisdom is probably correct. However, He’s not in Twitter anymore.

He’s facing potential federal indictment. He’s been indicted in New York. He has to give depositions in in civil cases. And so over the last twenty four hours, you get a trial date set in his criminal case in New York or the hush money case. The judge issues a contempt warning.

Mark this on your calendar. March twenty fifth twenty twenty four on your calendar right in the middle of the republican primary. He’s gonna go on trial. Thirty four counts of felonies. Wall Street Journal reporting, the special counsel is wrapping up the Trump Mar a Lago probe, Eugene Carroll.

We talked about this briefly. Is seeking very substantial new damages after Trump again defamed her, called her a whack job in CNN town hall, And Michael Cohen, his former lawyer is commenting on all this and said he has zero confidence the Trump’s gonna obey the judge’s order. Here he says, I have less than zero confidence. He gets blinded by anger. Cohen said Monday.

Rational thought flies out the window when Trump gets angry. He’s no different than a petulant child. And and so he’s basically saying, look, whatever the judge says, Donald Trump is not going to follow this. He doesn’t think that these rules apply to him. So give me your sense of of where Donald Trump is because I think there is that default setting that nothing’s gonna matter, that he keeps getting stronger.

However, He is in a world in which his lies actually have consequences, and there’s no indication that he fully has taken that on board.

Right? Well, we have a habit of talking with Donald Trump purely in the context of his relationship to his base or to the republican primary electorate, which is a little bigger than the base. And all the things we’ve just been saying about how this is a dominance, not just that applies to a certain subset of America. Mhmm. That’s the immediately politically relevant subset because it’s the first contest.

But after that subset, after he prevails or loses in that contest, he then has to face a different election in which the questions are and that’s in front of the big general election audience. And there is not a dominance contest. There are other things state. Their questions of empathy and compassion and responsibility and reassuringness matter. Because it’s so outrageous that Donald Trump any kind of figure in national politics at all because it’s so embarrassing to all of us that he did serve as as president.

That we lose sight of the fact of just what an unpopular president he was and how he has always been a minority figure. From two thousand to two thousand and twenty, six presidential elections, twelve major party nominees, After John McCain in the catastrophe of two thousand and eight, we’re having both the great depression and the Vietnam War at the same time. McCain is the party of the president. The second and third worst performing candidates for president were both Donald Trump. In his first outing in two thousand sixteen, he got, like, half a point of the vote more than Michael McCockus did in nineteen eighty eight.

And we do not sort of spend lots of time pondering the mystic connection within Michael Ducakas and and his base, although he had one I’m sure. So what we’re heading toward is this person who’s always been a candidate of a minority of the country, now tangled in these additional legal problems. And they rally alienated Republicans to him because they think that the system’s unfair and stacked against them and they should be in charge and they’re not. And so Every attack on him is an attack on them. But most people in this country respect the laws.

Most people respect the operations of the criminal justice system. And if he ends up with indictments and convictions, this ex president who’s already weighted down by his popularity because of the many reasons he deserves to be unpopular, is now going to have a whole bunch of new weights attached to him and will sink even lower.

That’s a great segue to two recent pieces that you wrote. So last month, you wrote a very sort of upbeat piece predicting a Biden blowout and you argued, you know, the strong political fundamentals pointed to Biden’s reelection, growing economy, rising employment, Republican culture war gambits that are alienating crucial groups of the voters. But you wrote a more recent piece just a couple of weeks ago, identifying the x factors, the things that could maybe turn Biden’s reelection up side down. So let’s just walk through that because, I mean, I think that all the fundamentals do point to a Biden reelection. However, You know, life is full of contingencies, and politics can take strange turns.

So what are the unexpected events that might bump history off its predicted core?

Also to give you a glimpse of the writing process. Yeah. The way that one too what’s happened is typically, my wife will read my pieces before they go online and give me comments, but she doesn’t always have time. And in this case, I wrote this piece about why I expected a Biden blowout, and she didn’t read it before it was published. And then over dinner said, okay.

Well, if you’re wrong, why this is the sort of thing she would say. If if you are wrong, why would you be wrong? And Well, there were two things that could complicate it. And she said, you should have put that in the article. I said, okay.

Well, I will I’ll I’ll write another article. And the two things are that could complicate things. Or one, Trump has these legal troubles. At that point, it was not impossible, although I think it is now very unlikely that they could have tripped him up on the way to the nomination. And scramble the field.

And then there’s the Biden health problem. If Trump had impulse control, the way for him to run the twenty twenty four election. Is to accept that Biden has a big advantage over him and he can’t do that. But if

he could,

and if you could remember that Biden, you know, one on one contest Biden did beat him and will beat him again, His message should be, I’m not running against Joe Biden. Joe, love Joe. Joe’s fine. Everyone likes Joe. Joe’s vanilla ice cream.

No one mines Joe. Joe’s fine. If Joe were to live for the next four years, we’d all be fine. But, and if you’re Donald Trump, so you can say things like this, we all know Joe’s dying. Yeah.

So I’m not running against Joe. I’m running against Kamala, and that you refuse to talk about Biden for the next and anytime they ask he’s I don’t not running against Joe. We all know. Joe’s not gonna be president. Tamela’s going to be president and go after her.

I think that’s exactly right. And I and I think you’re already seeing signs of

Yeah. And that’s the play. And I’m not gonna join in the piling on her because I’m sure she’s fine. But what Democrats will say is her numbers are bad. And they say, yeah, that’s only because Americans are skeptical of a minority woman, both of whose parents were foreign born.

I’m sorry. You can’t say the voters, you know, we’re scolding you. For your irrational attitudes. They’re voters. They’re full of irrational attitudes.

If you know that being a woman is discount and being a minority as a discount and having two foreign born parents is a discount. And you’ve got a candidate with all three of those discounts. That you just that’s the prop. And you should have thought of that in advance. And as vice president, she is hampered in what she can say to defend herself because she has to insist, you’re not running against me, you’re running against bite.

And so every time she defends herself, she turns the subject back to she will counter inflame the worries about Biden’s health because her message keeps in the spotlight that a denial is as dangerous as an accusation. It keeps in the spotlight the question of of is Biden really going to be the next president if the Democrats win

you cited examples of how they would go after, you know, Kamala, including over race sex and immigration, for example. The panel in California recommends reparations to black Americans, blame. Comala, you know, disorder in the New York City subway, you know, blame Harris, trans influencer on a Budlike hand. You blame Harris. So she can become kind of the magnet for all of these complaints.

And as you point out, this is only gonna increase as we get closer to election day. As you point out, you know, even a twisted ankle of respiratory infection is gonna bring doubts about Joe Biden’s fitness to the fore. I mean, there’s so many opportunities for this, the the focus to switch. And you already feel that the Republicans are gearing up to kind of not run yeah. They’ll run against Biden, but it’s really sort of Biden dead, Kamal alive.

As their hidden slogan go back to your hidden slogans before.

No. That’s going to be a a big problem. And the Democrats have no choice, but to say she’s not bug. She’s a feature, but they have one more problem with her, which is despite her biography, she was not a trusted favorite of the Democratic left. So she doesn’t have as much running room as one might think to put distance between herself and the Democratic left.

I mean, Barack Obama, who was creature of the Democratic left and had enormous credit with them. Could then send culturally conservative message when he headed the ticket in two thousand and eight. He could campaign in churches He could talk about the role of fathers. He he could sound these these within his own ideological and tradition. He could sound themes.

And it wouldn’t trigger a mutiny. Whereas she has this problem because there’s this feeling she was a a prosecutor. Can’t remember the line against her in twenty twenty. Kamela is a cop. Said the party left.

She actually spent a lot of her vice presidency building fences with party progressives and especially the cultural progressives.

Mhmm.

And so it’s gonna be hard for her in the campaign to say, yeah. How am I different from Joe? I am tougher on crime than Joe.

Okay. The other big factor are Trump’s legal problems, you know, and again and again so far, there’s, you know, they’ve generated a rally among supporters sort of so far. You raised a very provocative question though. It’s that, basically, now that we know that, you know, the criminal case is going in March and, you know, I whether you saw this, but, you know, Trump appeared via video, and he was on mute, but he throws up his hands in frustration at the scheduled date and, you know, glowered at the camera. But you raise the possibility, is it possible that when he comes here to Bulwark for the Republican National Convention that he’s wearing an ankle bracelet?

What?

I think it’s very possible. The DeSantis campaign has, I think, invested a lot of hope in the idea that the legal process will remove Trump on its own without DeSantis having to do anything. Indeed, allowing DeSantis to falsely pretend to be on Trump’s side even as the legal process does his work for him. That investment will not pay off. That investment of hope will not pay off.

But it’s going to be an issue. And I think one of its cultural legacies is going to be that we may see an intensifying alienation of Donald Trump’s core support is from American society and American law. They may react to his legal troubles by saying, well, we just reject the whole legal system. Yeah. And we’ve seen that pattern before.

White Southerners after the civil war or the way the in in the big cities of the North, the corrupt bosses could survive because they appealed to immigrant groups who felt equally alienated from legal system they interpret it as foreign to themselves. And as American society sort of Fishers, this is a potential for Trump. And it could signal an endearing problem that could be a problem long after Trump himself departs the scene.

You raise the the another x factor, is whether a convicted Donald Trump is still a viable candidate, you don’t think that he would be.

In a general election? Yes. No. I don’t think you you can be a convict. Especially if he remains a Florida resident, Donald Trump convicted felon cannot vote for himself in the state of Florida.

He has lost his voting rights. He wants you to vote for him, but he can’t vote for himself because he’s a fella.

This now seems like an an old story, but it’s not an old story on the right. You wrote extensively about the political fallout from the Durham report you described as a sinister flop. I agree with that. But in the right wing media ecosystem, it was a very, very big deal news, ran with it heavily. You know, Donald Trump obviously is going to pound it.

So give me your take on the Durham report and whether it’s gonna have any enduring political fallout.

Well, I wrote a short dialogue on Twitter. It sort of summed up my reaction to it, which was imagine the Trump person saying, and what, sir, do you say to the slamming the cards on the desk? Yeah. These are a pair of tubes. Oh, that’s a prompt arrangement speaking.

I win the ball. But but these are tubes. I win the pot. Trump arrangement system. But these are twos.

I think the the Durham report makes a showing. That the FBI may not have processed all the paperwork to open an investigation in exactly the optimum way. And that they may have transited too quickly from a preliminary to, you know there are three stages and there’s stage one, which I forget, preliminary stage two, and full investigation of stage three. And arguably, perhaps they transitioned a little too quickly from stage two to three. On the other hand, when they got to stage three, they saw a lot of people They caught a lot of crooks.

So the Republicans who like the Durham report are in a bit like a certain kind of defense attorney. Where he’s arguing it. When you caught my client for driving with a trunk full of cocaine and machine guns, That traffic stop began by pulling him over for a a busted taillight, and you had no right to do that. And maybe that busted taillight was an overreaction with the trumpets full of cocaine and machine guns.

Yeah. You you still have the machine guns and the cocaine. Okay. So let’s switch gears a little bit to latest developments in the war in in Ukraine. You tweeted a number of times about this report that some far right anti Putin Russian fighters were aligned with with Ukraine a couple of days ago, stormed a border region claiming that they had liberated a village what is going on here?

Yeah. I won’t pretend to understand that, except to say, one of the talking points from the pro Putin people is some of this group, whoever they are, turn out to have kind of unsavory histories.

Mhmm.

It is a remarkable thing that we are watching this horrific crime on the European continent, and the people who are apologizing for the horrific crime are constantly like checkboxing. Are the Ukrainians responding in every case with perfect propriety? Do their fighters all have unblemished civil rights records. I just keep thinking of, you know, the things that we did in World War two, which was by the way, World War two for the United States was a much much less existential fight than this war is for Ukraine. I mean, the United States was building a better world for everybody.

But the United States was never in except Pro Harbor, which was arrayed. It was never invaded and occupied the way the Ukraine was. You know, the British suspended elections for ten years from nineteen thirty five to nineteen forty five, in the darkest days of the war in the summer of nineteen forty, Churchill authorized campaigns of sabotage inside Nazi Europe. He famously sent out a memo saying he wanted forger’s bank workers and safe crackers for for the special operations executive. So, yeah, it may be that some of these Russian citizens who are leading these operations are going to be kinda unsavory types.

They may not have perfect civil rights records, but this is a real war. And Start of nuclear warfare, the Russians are observing no limits. They’re waging a war of atrocity. And we all want this war over, and the more pressure that can be put on Russia to end it. The faster the war ends and the better for everybody, including, by the way, the Russian population who have suffered horribly and will suffer more if this war continues any longer.

So I’m interested in your thoughts about the decision finally to give the Ukrainians f sixteens. Why now? Why not a year ago?

I can’t parse that. The Biden administration has been very cautious about a lot of these forms of aid. And some critics suggest that the Biden administration is ambivalent about the kind of outcome they want. Again, I can’t read that. But I’m glad they’re getting them.

And my view has always been the arsenal should be open and everything they need they should have. And this idea that that by showing the credibility of the Western alliance, we somehow make ourselves more vulnerable to China. I find absurd. The message that the Chinese authorities have to take from the Ukraine war is these democracies can really row together when they have to. And as disorganized and chaotic and unready as they seem in normal times, give them a crisis.

Mhmm. And they’re a little tougher than we think from reading our silence press and reading their open press.

Well and also, it it does appear that we are no longer engaging in the kind of self deterrence that I think slowed down the aid a year ago. And I think that that’s all positive. Okay. One last question because you’ve written very extensively about this. A lot of us had been bracing for a crisis at the border with the expiration of title forty two you’ve written extensively on all of this.

Give me your thoughts about where we’re at on the border because You very memorably wrote that, look, if Liberals do not secure the border, we will turn to fascists to secure the the border. I mean, this is one of those dilemmas you either get this right or people will turn to the most extreme folks out there who are promising to do the job for you.

I always believe that unlimited immigration leads to political instability, and you can have large immigration, but voters need to be assured that someone’s in control, and that their political choices matter and that they have a say in who’s in their country. And one of the reasons that illegal immigration and this kind of asylum wave, which is illegal immigration made legal through technicalities. Are so destabilizing as people feel, I’m an American. I get a vote in who joins I live in a condo. I should have some vote on who joins the condo board, and things feel out of control.

I have been focusing recently on not just on the border, but on what is beyond the border because the reason the end of title forty two did not lead to a deluge of new immigration. As the Biden people have been doing a deal with the Mexican government to act as America’s police force. And the Mexican authorities are keeping Central Americans and people from even farther field, there are many illegal immigrants China, from Africa, even from Russia showing up at this or that we’re showing up at the southern border, and the Mexican authorities are now doing the policing. And that’s helpful to the United States. But What this current Mexican government is asking in return is we want you, the United States, to look away as we destroy Mexican democracy.

So we have much less of a problem at the border, but a worsening problem beyond the border of a Mexican regime that is heading in some very sinister authoritarian directions. Mexican democracy is quite new. Mexico has had elected governments going back now more than a hundred years, but free and fair elections in Mexico start in the nineteen nineties. And the first peaceful transfer of power from a president of one party to a president of another party in the entire history of the Mexican state took place in the year two thousand. There’s a quarter of a century of peaceful transfers of power, thirty years of free and fair elections, And Mexico is suddenly going backward very fast under its current president who is working toward unfair elections in the summer of twenty twenty four that could spark a a true crisis of authority inside Mexico.

And the respite on border crisis that the Biden administration has got by cooperating with the president of Mexico Lopez Obrador may blow up into a bigger crisis in the summer of twenty four.

David Frim is a staff writer at the Atlantic. He is the author of ten books, most recently, Trumpocalypse and the Trumpocracy. David Frim. Thank you. So much for coming back on the podcast.

I always enjoy it.

Always such a pleasure to be with you.

And thank you all for listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow, and we’ll do this all over again. The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

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I really don’t like sharks, and I think we live in a very shark agandistic world. Quote, one thing to keep in mind is Shark we’re not out there trying to eat surfers and swimmers. They’d much rather eat fish, but in many cases they mistake us for their actual prey. When they do bite, they usually move on. That’s supposed to make us feel better?

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