YouSaid · the spoken record

David Frum

lines on the record: 68
first: 2024-08-04
most recent: 2024-08-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And leaving it to me. And I would say, why does he bark like that? And she said, he's trying to warn us that we're surrounded by small flying dinosaurs. And I said, why does he have to bark? She said, why do you tweet, which is very powerful rebuke. So I try to give a sense of this just because look, loss is the great human equalizer. We will all sooner or later feel it. And if we don't ever, if we're spared and the only way we'll be spared is if we don't love enough, but if we are spared, then someday others will suffer it on our behalf because they will be deprived of us. It's coming for all of us. And just to give a glimpse of this human reality was what I tried to do.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quote like Ringo is a very difficult cavalier and he barks maniacally whenever there are birds. And I'd get angry, but she wouldn't, when she was alive, she wouldn't do enough to curve. Basically, I'd wake up early. Ringo would wake up early. He'd go crazy. I'd have to deal with him. She was asleep.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll just end up howling like wolves with anguish. You can't communicate that to anybody who is not, hasn't suffered this terrible blow. And I hope people are spared it. And I think a lot of the writing about it is difficult for people. It's too much. It's the open fire hydrant and the spray of high pressure pain hits them in the face and they don't know what to do with it. So I tried when writing the article to come at it very indirectly and to do things with shadow. And Miranda doesn't even make much of an appearance in the article until about two-thirds of the way through. And we don't even allude to the possibility that she's not here with us until quite a long way. And I talk about the bond I had with her dog because it's easier than talking about the bond I had with her. But you catch glimpses of her incredible, she had the sharpest wit of anyone any of her friends ever met. So I quote some of her, not just a few of her many, many sayings that we all”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm grateful for the question. And it is painful, but it's not too personal. So this coming from Friday would have been Miranda's 33rd birthday. My wife's and my eldest child. And she was an incredible free spirit, a very, very brave woman. And there's much to say. I'm going to be a little indirect and talk about maybe the writer process rather than the paternal process for a minute, that I think the reason that piece resonated with people. And if anyone wants to, if anyone's listening to the podcast and they don't subscribe to the Atlantic, just drop me a note at david.from at the Atlantic.com and I'm happy to send you a gift copy of the article. Many people try to write about grief. It's too big a subject. The pain is so enormous. My wife and I, we're in the country right now and sometimes we'll just be in the field walking.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is no free money anywhere in the world. All money, when you move it around, you move it from somebody to. So one of the things my rule is, as I remember recently doing some interviews on this question and talking to somebody who talked about the neoliberal market hegemony, and I said, I'm just a simple country magazine writer. Can you explain to me in words of single syllables why it's a good idea to pay more for cotton? And that's One of the greatest of writers, the subject of trade in the 19th century, Henry George, had some crackpot ideas, but it was very good on free trade. One said that the doctrine of protection teaches us to do to ourselves in peacetime what our enemies seek to do to us in wartime. So how can that be smart? And it hasn't gotten any smarter since Henry George made fun of it 150 years ago.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you think, look, these are not assumptions that the massive body of proof about what happens when you protect domestic industries. These are not theories. These are, to some extent, they're theory, but based on powerful mathematical support. In other cases, they are real experiences. We know you protect your economy, your industries are going to be less competitive. Your consumers are going to pay more. Your exporters will suffer. Every barrier to imports is an equal and opposite tax on exports. That's an accounting reality that can't be evaded. What tariff barriers do is they enrich the owners of and to some lesser degree the workers in the protected industries by impoverishing consumers generally and the owners of and workers in exporting industries.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a terrible plane crash. Many people hurt and killed. And at that point, somebody pipes up. I see the liberal consensus on flying has been challenged and we all need to go back to moving by donkey cart.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This conflict in the Middle East, I blame fundamentally on the unwillingness of Israel's enemies to make the best peace they can. They would have gotten a better peace in 1937 from their point of view. In 1937, from the peace they got in 1949, a better peace in 1949 from the peace they would have gotten in 1967 or 68, and so on. And dude, just stop fighting and start talking and make the best piece you can. And the Hamas vision that they're going to achieve some kind of repeat of the Algerian war with the Israelis and the caste as the French who had a France to go back to when they don't is a delusion. It breaks my heart. It's horrible. It's stupid. It's unnecessary. I don't know what different thing the Israelis could have done from what they were compelled to do by this heinous attack and kidnapping.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I feel the tragedy of what is happening in the Middle East. I felt it on the day of October 7th when the terrible news of this heinous, heinous. Invasion, murder, rape, outburst hit the world. I thought, what did they think they were doing? I mean, this is going to end this war will and must end with everyone in Gaza living in tents. Why did Hamas do this? It can't accomplish anything. It's just pure human waste killing 1,200 Israelis today at the price of who knows how much suffering in the Palestinian territories tomorrow. Why are they bringing this on themselves? And I think there is a real duty to make the best peace you can.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or not so mysterious improper ties to Russia, you get a sense of one of the things that's going on here is that the American domestic political system is being penetrated by Russian influences of many improper kinds. And they have reached the very top of the political system in the Trump years. And that's really alarming. And with Trump advance, they want to come back. And in Vance's case, he's on the ticket, it looks like, not because Trump read his book, which he obviously didn't, but because a small group of very powerful and wealthy people who for some reason are very hostile to Ukraine and very sympathetic to the dictatorships in Russia and China wanted him there and put up a lot of resources to get him there.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I paid a couple of visits to Ukraine at the beginning of the democratic movement in 2014 and 2016 and saw the emergence of a new kind of national consciousness. But like a lot of people from Western countries, I was skeptical about the strength and stability of this new consciousness. And I understand why the Biden administration was at first so worried about getting more deeply involved in Ukraine. But I think When people put their own lives on the line in the astonishingly heroic way that the Ukrainians have done to defend their country against an aggressive dictator, that summons the world to their help as best we can. Now, I understand there are a lot of debates, and Rory points out the importance of local knowledge and a lot of debates, but when you see that the people on the other side of this debate in the United States so often have mysterious”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of opinion favorable to you, they become less favorable when you kill their relatives with China. Again, I don't pretend to be any kind of expertise, but what I can say is that the general policy of when dealing with a great power rival, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst, is the right attitude regardless of how, because however good your information is, it's always going to be radically imperfect anyway. So hope for the best, be ready for the best, but prepare for the worst. And those are based not on ideas about the place, but about the realities of international politics through the ages.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very few people can possibly have the detailed travel knowledge that you have. You're one of the world's great travelers, and you know a lot of places better than most people do. And the nature of the way the decision-making process works is that we hope that the decision makers get lots of information from you and people like you, but they can't be that because they have other jobs. That said, I don't think these questions, the kind of questions that you face at the center of decision in Washington are not really about granular knowledge. And the granular knowledge that is required is that war is a very, very last resort. And you don't have to know a lot about any particular place to know that you should really be extremely cautious about military activity. So the reason that, I mean, I've always been very dubious about military action against Iran. And that reflects not great knowledge of Iran, but a lot of knowledge about war and that it doesn't yield the results that you want it to. And even countries that you think or hope that there's a big body”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I made two visits during the period of the war and after. So I don't have much confidence in my opinions about it. And as I said, I would not have supported a war for the betterment of Iraq. And I just generally think the wars don't do that.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intelligence turned out to be ahead of the facts. I was, of course, disappointed and a little embarrassed and said, okay, well, in that case, I wouldn't have, I mean, I make no excuses for Saddam Hussein, and I'm glad he's gone. But I would not have supported a war purely for making Iraq a better place. And so I supported war for very particular reasons. Those reasons turned out not to be true. And so, you know, I'm in the wrong there. That said, I don't join the concurrence. A lot of what the critics say is they blame the British and the Americans for things that the Iraqis did when they say, you know, there are all these casualties in the Civil War. Well, the Iraqis had agency too. They didn't have to have that. They got a chance.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to overstate this because one of the things that I have always been really resistant to is a lot of people who were supporters turn into very fierce critics after the war became more difficult than it was thought to be at the beginning. I said, well, you know, that just strikes me as a little cowardly, frankly. If you were there at the takeoff, you need to take the bumps on the landing too. And I won't name names here, but I didn't become one of those who said, yes, I was all for it. Now I feel betrayed. My thinking on it was the thing that I would never have supported an American war to make Iraq more democratic. I would have supported a lot of measures to make Iraq more democratic, but outright war you resort to for self-defense. So I didn't have a very high level security clearance. I was a speechwriter. So I believe those who thought that there were really dangerous weapons either in presence or in imminent development in Iraq. And when that...”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But JD Vance offered a politics of social reaction, joined economic protectionism, joined to defeatism at best about America's role in the world. And I think that responded much more to a small intellectual clique than to the actual concerns of those areas. Probably the single most urgent problem of those areas is opioid addiction. And you need a real program. And by the way, a problem that got worse during the pandemic but has become a little less worse since the pandemic.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Protectionist president since the war, Joe Biden was the second, and he was so protectionist, partly because there are people in his party believed in state-led economic development and other things that I disapprove of, but also because they were frozen, they thought the map in 2024 must look like the map of 2016 and 2020. And they're not paying attention to, well, Georgia's in play, Arizona's in play, Nevada's in play, much more future-oriented economies. And by the way, the economy of Pennsylvania and Michigan are changing.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First data point when he ran for Senate in 2022, he ran, I believe, 20 points behind the incumbent governor of Ohio. So he's not, this idea that he's a tribune of the people of those areas is false. One of his biggest causes as senator were opposing aid to Ukraine and helping support the cryptocurrency industry, neither of which seemed like big causes of the people of Ohio. I would also say, I think there's a real hazard, and I think this is one of the things that Biden was guilty of, of succumbing to fossilized thinking about the map. I'm not sure that those are the only swing states in America. Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, those are also swing states, and they are swing states more connected to the American future. And one of the things I think the Biden administration got wrong, both from a political and a policy point of view, is they, if Donald Trump was the most”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to go to work for Donald Trump, you need to be very clear in your mind about where you will say no, about how and when you are summoned by the presence of the president, that awe-inspiring presence, no matter how big a dufus the president actually is, and in this case he's a pretty big doofus, no matter how much of a dufus, no matter how wicked he is, the presence is awe-inspiring and is meant to be awe-inspiring. And when you're summoned and you're asked to do something improper or wrong, will you say no? And then you need to bear in mind that if this guy thought there was any chance you would say no, you wouldn't be there in the first place.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I wrote a piece early in 2017 for a friend. It was published in the Atlantic. It was a public piece, but it was inspired by a question I'd got from a friend, not one of the people at this meeting we had in early 2017, but about, we're talking about whether or not this particular person should take a national security job in the Trump administration. And while my advice to him was yes, you owe that to your country. You're working for the country, not for Donald Trump, by then, my answer seemed to me insufficient. So I thought about it some more and I wrote a piece. And it ended with this observation.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He showed so much character getting from point A to where I knew him that you thought that it never occurred to me that character would be the defect, actually, that that was the deficit quality”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which I thank him. When he wrote his famous book, I wrote back that I had just won criticism of it, which is he said in the introduction of the book, he says that the story I tell here I tell not because I'm an extraordinary person, but because I'm an ordinary person enabled by the promise of America. And I wrote back and said, no, that's not true. You are an extraordinary person. And I understand why you said the contrary, but it's important that you, in your private thinking, understand that what you did is not available to everybody because of your extraordinary drive. But I said this as compliments, your extraordinary drive and gifts and energy and ability. They are beyond the ordinary. And I think we tend to believe that when the good fairies give you some gifts, they give you all of them. And so you think with those gifts would also come integrity and character.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, wait a minute. Why punch a baby in the face? Well, if I just said the first three things, your mom said the first three things, they don't get interesting unless I add the punch the baby in the face. But he was in those days much more about items one, two, and three. And it's only in his latter career post his traumatic health events that he decided I'm leading with the punch the baby in the face idea.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 20 he's, but he's look, we all are in motion. So in 2018, he was much less so. So his thing that he became famous as a cultural warrior, but the reason he became important. Because he had a message that appealed to lost and depressive young men and gave them ways of organizing. That's what his books were mostly about. And so a lot of the advice he gave to the lost and disoriented who came to his talks was, I think, helpful. They found it helpful. And one of the tragedies is somebody who is really a self-help guru. There's always a little something a little trashy and false about self-help because the truths are pretty obvious. I mean, my joke about him at the time was that Jordan Peterson's advice was should always wear a seatbelt, get plenty of exercise, tidy up your room, and every once in a while punch a baby in the face.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things truly become urgent, then I have more conservative views on some of those questions. Second, I am, like all of us, somewhat tribal. I have a lot of inherited friends on the right. And third, I give a lot of dinners.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, I'm not so socially liberal. I'm pretty social on questions of do criminals belong in jail. Should the border be enforced? Is marriage the best institution for human happiness? I'm pretty conservative on those kinds of issues. Is abortion to be avoided, if at all possible? I'm pretty conservative on those issues. How should universities be organized? Boy, am I conservative. The professor talks, the student takes notes. So partly is the issues that seem to me the most important now are not the issues on which I am most conservative. And if the kaleidoscope of politics shifts and those issues do come more, if we get past the threat that we're going to have the overthrow of democracy in the United States and trade wars between allies and surrender Ukraine to the Russians then if other”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where you can see his mind had begun to shift gears, and the theme of the meeting was could anything good come out of cooperating with the Trump presidency? And there are about a dozen people involved in the conservative world, and I was one of them. And my argument at the meeting was, I don't want to say that nothing good can come of this, and I don't want to say that nobody of conscience should participate in this administration, but you need to be very careful. It's going to be very, very dangerous and probably nothing good will come. But of course, it's worth a try. That was my view. But I could see that was not the answer I gave. I saw him as expected. I saw him a few more times in 2017. I saw him for the last time in person. This is an odd story, in 2018. I gave Jordan, the Canadian pop philosopher Jordan Peterson came to Washington. I gave a dinner for him, and J.D. Vance, who's one of the attendees, and I think that was the last time I saw him in person.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. So look, lots of people, you met JD Vance. You said, this is a man who obviously is ambitious, who is looking for a career in public life, is going to go places. And as the whole world now sees, and this is the part I didn't get, he was a very good mimic and mirror. So he had a way of refracting back to you what you were saying to him in a way that was a little better than the way you had said it to him in the first place. And so this was the story of his, so he ended up my website closed in 2012. I ended up later at the Atlantic. He wrote a number of articles for the Atlantic again expressing the modern, moderate Republican anti-Trump view. And we were in pretty close contact in those days. And I remember a meeting that he organized just after the 2016 election. This would have been late 2016, early 2017, between the election and the inaugural.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Post Iraq experience like when he first came back from Iraq he defended the American intervention in Iraq. Only later did he say no, that was the crucial turning point in my life.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot, but some thousands of younger people read, participated in, and we had many, many contributors. And so this young Yale Law student wrote to me. I met him at a lunch in Washington, I must have been in the summer of 2008, 2009, because, of course, the defeat would have been behind us. 2009 probably. He was incredibly impressive, so smart, so driven, so ambitious. I liked him and admired him. And then we began. He wrote a number of pieces. He wrote under a pseudonym because he was at Yale Law School. And the reason he gave was he was worried about how his classmates would react to the things he was saying because he was saying some pretty conservative things, including, ironically enough, given what he later claimed was his origin story, the defense of the good conduct of American troops in Iraq. There's an old Hollywood joke, do you know Doris Day? No Doris Day. I knew her before she was a virgin. So I knew JD Vance before he was radicalized by his”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I realize we probably first met about the year 2008 when he would have been, having finished a service in the Marine Corps, having completed his education at Ohio State. But I think he was maybe a first year student at Yale Law School when I met him. And he wrote to me, I was running a website, didn't have a big readership, but that was sort of influential within the conservative part of the conservative world that was looking for a way forward after the terrible defeat of 2008. And I was arguing, you know, we needed to hold on to our core beliefs in market economics and private enterprise, but we needed to, and the formula that was on the masthead was find new conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible. And everyone who came into my orbit knew that that's what I was promulgating, that's what I was looking for, that's what I was trying to promote in advance, and not”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Become very reluctant to acknowledge things that are said by our opponents. So one of the big points made by Republican critics of Biden was they threw these attacks at him for being decrepit. Many of them exaggerated, many of them based on deceptively edited videos. And so it's a natural instinct that partisans will rally and defend. And what you're attacked for, you want to deny. And then there's a lack of mechanism that in the end you can't We have a process for removing presidents and it's defeat at the ballot box. There isn't otherwise even the famous 25th Amendment doesn't remove the president. It only suspends his holding of the office for a finite period of time which must be repeatedly renewed. So it depended on his agreement.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say very important because of the deep, because he will tell you a story about Gold of My Year in 1974. And if you're the typical 30-something staffer that just seems like a source of wisdom and knowledge that you will never have. So I don't know. So I think one is it was a moving target. The second is...”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will trust Alistair's instincts on this more than my own, having been so close to the center on these things. But my observation is this. First, it was a moving target. If you watch clips of Biden from 2020, he's obviously getting on, but he's still quite an effective platform performer. And in 2024, he's not. And if you work with him every day, you probably don't notice the point of no return. It's a little worse in the beginning of 2021 than it is later in 2021, a little worse and so on. But when is exactly the moment of no return if you work with him every day? And my sense from just what I read is that he can be quite effective if you get him in the right way. I'm sure at a national security council meeting at 10 in the morning, he's very impressive.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In his State of the Union address early in 1996, he began with good economic news within the first 60 seconds of his State of the Union address. You lose audience with every passing minute. Biden in 2024 didn't get to good economic news until past the 15-minute mark. Which meant that many people never heard it, and he's not an effective communicator even at his best. And it was a good night for him, but this is not his best year. You start with that by saying more Americans are working than ever before. The unemployment rate is lower than it's been at any time since the 1960s. We're doing better than any economy in the world. The inflation is subsiding. Deaths from drug abuse are declining. The crime rate is dropping, just pound that point into people's head. They only know their own personal experience. They don't think much of what was happening to other people. How could they know? You have to tell them.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being liberal or progressive, being progressive are often reluctant to say that because not everyone is benefiting. And so they get bashful. Basically, if anyone's having a bad time, we can't talk to the people who are having a good time. But in a democracy, you just need more of the vote. And if most people are having a good time, you should tell them, remind them. I pointed out in a recent column that when Bill Clinton was running for re-election in 1996, The economy began to really turn in 1995.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've been wearing pants for a comparatively short time of our existence as a species. We are animalistic. So one, recognize that Trump is talking to the lizard brain. First, know it. Second, don't scold people for it because that won't work. Third, fight it. Fourth, do a little jiu-jitsu with it that make her femininity, make her physical appeal, make that Hillary Clinton would often try to waller off and say, I'm just, I'm not a woman at all. Don't think of me that way. People are going to think of you that way. So you have to play with it, as Margaret Thatcher did. But the last is, and this is slightly contradictory, is do trust that reality does matter, that the present incumbent administration has a great story to tell about what has happened in the United States since the end of the pandemic. The United States has had more success adjusting to the post-pandemic world than any pure democracy.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In it. But what he understands is none of that is going to matter because he's playing on the human lizard brain. And you cannot deny it. And there is a tendency, again, on the American progressive side to scold people for having lizard brains and to say, well, are you saying that women? I'm not saying it. I'm not even thinking it. But I can't help feeling it, or many people can't help feeling it.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More honest than men. And so when women politicians behave in gender conforming ways, they get a bump. But when they seek the very top job, which is always to some degree a military job, and in the United States it's very much a military job, then they're behaving in non-gender conforming ways, and then they face certain challenges. And a lot of Donald Trump's attack on Kamala Harris has been to imply that her sexual behavior is deviant or debauched. And she's basically too slutty to be president. And this seems to be at first a total figment of his imagination. Second, even if it weren't a total figment of his imagination, none of his damn business. Third, are you joking? We're talking about Donald Trump, who's the most sexually debauched person ever to hold the presidency, and there is no runner-up. If sexual propriety were a valid criterion for getting that job, Donald Trump would not be.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about those pieces of advice are slightly contradictory to one another, but here's how I unite them First, I believe the big chronic weakness of parties of the left They tend to exaggerate the role of rational calculation in voter behavior. They think if we deliver certain promises of services and goods and benefits, that those material inducements will matter more than tribe and affinity. And look, that's a gamble in a way that parties of the left have to make. But I think they can often be blind to how much of voter behavior is driven by deeply irrational, antirational forces. And for women in politics, this is a special danger, but also opportunities. There's a lot of political science says that women have an advantage when they run for local races, especially school boards, because people, voters credit them often irrationally with caring more about children than men do, and so voters credit them often irrationally.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to cut off Ukraine. And they can destroy NATO without formally withdrawing. All the president has to do is give an interview to Breitbart.com in which he says, I'm angry at Germany and won't defend them. That's it. NATO's gone. I mean, NATO is an elaborate set of treaties and accommodations. They all rest on the American security guarantee, which in turn rests on the president's personal willingness to use nuclear weapons if he or she must to defend NATO allies. If the president says, I won't do that, then NATO is kaput, whatever happens to the treaty structure. And he will try to start a massive round of trade wars, not only against China, which is a special case, but against all our friends. Remember, Donald Trump imposed his tariffs not only on China, but on Mexico and the European Union and Vietnam and India and other partners we should be working with. For me, the outlook is just mayhem, chaos, the collapse of American alliances, the collapse of American leadership.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prompts first and highest priority should he return to the presidency will be to shut down all the legal proceedings against him. There isn't an obvious legal way to do that. There are a lot of instruments of power, but it's not clear that any of them are legal. So we will very rapidly be plunged into a huge crisis of legality and constitutionality about the powers of the president. Can the president fire prosecutors who have already initiated cases against him? Can he shut down state criminal cases against him? Donald Trump will find partners and enablers who will say yes, but he will also meet a lot of resistance. So the outlook is not Some of the people who fear Donald Trump fear that he will rapidly consolidate power in his hands. That might happen, but as likely, more likely, is we have a complete crisis of authority with the president trying to do things that the system can't accept, massive resistance to that, especially if he doesn't control both houses of Congress, possibly rapidly on our way to an early impeachment crisis. And meanwhile, no policy of any kind on any other subject and no foreign policy. The Trump people will”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I always said when people said my friend, my cousin, my dad is a big Trump supporter, what can we say to reason with them? And my stock response is tell them to believe more in their children because a lot of, I think, what goes on, and this is very true, I think, of what is going on in British conservatism, is this kind of hostility of the old toward the young. Lack of confidence and trust of the old toward the young. I always say, you know, the reason you should listen to your children, you know more than your children, but your children are ambassadors from the future. They tell you what's going to be. And if you care about them and if you care about the future, you need to listen.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it works to the extent it works. Because for most of us as individuals, once we reach a certain point in our lives, the future holds decline leading to extinction. And it's very natural to project our individual dwindling hold on life onto the others. I mean, who wants to hear that we're going to discover a cure for Alzheimer's 10 years after we die from it? There are a lot of voters who are older to whom the message of pessimism is”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it got him within 7 million votes of the frontrunner in the 2020 election. And it lost him the House of Representatives in 2018, and it lost his party to the Senate in 2021, and it delivered them the worst down-the-ballot performance of an out-party and a non-presidential year in 2022. And it cost them a bunch of judgeships and county commissionerships in 2023. And it's going to cost them the election in 2024. So no, I don't think it works. I mean, it works for him. He's been able to steal a lot of taxpayer money and he's enjoyed being hobnobbing with his admired dictators all over the world.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's behaving as if America is not a success. That has been the key to it. Make America great again. And it's all about his famous line in his first inaugural address was the American dream is dead. It was pessimism. It was despair sold in America? You're going to sell pessimism and despair in America? That's not going to work.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you need someone to blame, and it can't be the Hungarian. So maybe it's the Jews, many of whom used to be Hungarians. Maybe it's somebody else. And this culture of grievance, you then say, okay, by hiring Tucker Carlson's father, we're going to put it into Tucker Carlson's brain. And he is going to solve this vision of grievance to the most dynamic, most exciting, most vibrant, fastest growing, most successful major society in the world. We're supposed to get mad because some of the Hungarians live in Romania. The whole point of the United States is we back the European Union. So the way we solved the Hungarians and Romania problem is by having visa-free borderless travel between Hungary and Romania so you can live wherever you want.”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you're Hungarian, you've had a bad couple of hundred years. It's just, you're on the losing side. You mentioned you're on the losing side of both the first and the Second World Wars, your vision of a great Hungarian Empire is carved up by peace treaties. You're this little state with many of your people who speak the same language outside your borders because of your own bad decisions to back the wrong horse in World War I and World War II You think you are you know you've produced so much science and culture and music you think you're the center of a great cultural sphere but no one pays any attention to you in the 21st century I mean it's just endless disappointment and humiliations and regrets and then the polls who are so much poorer than you their economy is soaring they're going to overtake Japan and GDP per capita by the end of the decade at the current rate and Hungary is just shriveling and sinking and you're mad at the world”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And new coalitions are going to come into being. And if he is beaten in November, as I have been confident all along, he would be. And now even more confident than ever that he will be. But if he has beaten it, then we're going to open into a new world and there'll be a huge question for Republicans. Is the future this kind of bleak organism based on this reactionary authoritarianism that originates in small central European republics and has no relevance to American life? Or are we going to find some way to build new kinds of coalitions around ideals of markets and trade and collective security?”
2024-08-04 · The Rest Is Politics: Leading · 88. Bush and Iraq, being J.D. Vance’s boss, and why Trump loses (David Frum) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source