Chapter 1: What insights does David Frum share about the friendship between Trump and Epstein?
President Trump made the right moves to get Puerto Rico out of a mess, putting private enterprise to work.
The electrical grid and other infrastructure were already in very, very poor shape. They were at their life's end prior to the hurricanes. And now virtually everything has been wiped out. We're literally starting from scratch.
But Governor Gonzales Colon thinks she knows better. Innovative companies ran to meet the challenge to rebuild Puerto Rico's grid. Now she's blowing up a valid contract to siphon money back to her closest political advisors. President Trump puts real businesses to work instead of fueling government waste. Don't let the governor send Puerto Rico back to square one. Support the rule of law.
Visit PuertoRicoInvestment.org. Paid for by the Committee for Puerto Rican Investment, Inc.
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Hello and welcome to the Bullard 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. 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. You should go listen to that if you're not.
It's David Frum. 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. 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.
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Chapter 2: How is the MAGA movement responding to economic challenges?
So TBD, more on this will come out over the weekend. And if there are any, you know, particularly grotesque revelations from the files that we get today, you can check us out over on the Borg Takes feed where we'll be talking about that. 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 trunch. Yeah, let's say that.
So we'll continue to wait. He gave a speech I want to talk to you about earlier this week, the kind of, you know, mall Santa yelling at America speech that he did earlier this week about about how he was given a bad deal with the economy and some on the left.
Before the speech, in the lead up, we're talking about how this, whatever it was that he was going to say was supposed to be this big distraction from the Epstein file, so it was coming. I was never sure if that was really the motivation. If it was, the motivation seems to have been a total failure. I was wondering what you made of his remarks earlier in the week.
Two thoughts. The first is, you may remember from the first term, the Steve Bannon phrase, flood the zone with shit. Yeah. And 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 situation. horrible thing you did, any one abuse of power.
Like so many things in politics, as you know well from your long experience, these strategies work until they stop. And the flood the zone with shit strategy worked so long as the American economy was prosperous, as it was by good luck in the first three years of Donald Trump's first term. 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. But if there are too many stories, they can't. And since times are generally prosperous, people aren't that fixed on politics. When times are not prosperous and they're not prosperous now, The flood of the zone was shit, goes into complete reverse.
Because there's one story that the person who decides elections is thinking about, and that is 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. 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.
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 – 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.
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. 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. in a kind of chuckling manner. He didn't look desperate.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of recent SCOTUS rulings on public corruption?
You can kind of sense that it's not just you and me, David, who have had Trump derangement syndrome for over a decade now, who are noticing how he's lost his fastball and how he's adrift messaging-wise. You can tell that the power brokers within MAGA can sense it because there is this sort of proxy war happening now about what to do next with MAGA. And a lot of that has been centered around
Conversation about Israel and also conversation about immigration, like how much of a national populist movement should we be? Should we be heritage Americans? You know, what should our foreign policy be? And Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have been kind of at the forefront of the more nationalist conspiratorial side of this. 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. And I just wanna, if anyone could bear with us with the Ben Shapiro voice. If you're on 1.5 speed right now, you might wanna move it back down so you can understand them. Let's listen to Ben Shapiro in Arizona.
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. So, for example, if you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes,
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. The person who said that Charlie Kirk was a, quote, retarded idiot. 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 groipers.
If you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it. And when Meghan 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. 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. 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 flack for Jeffrey Epstein. Check the record.
David? Look, obviously he's right on every point. And I think what he's revealing here is... Trump benefited in his first three years from a very strong economy that he did not create. Basically, the story of Trump won is the United States came out of the Great Recession of 2008, 2009, slowly. 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. 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. So Trump wins in 2016 because of the reaction to the Great Recession.
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Chapter 4: How are tariffs impacting the construction industry and housing market?
I was always less worried in 2026 about kind of the voter suppression parts of their plan because a lot of times voter suppression stuff backfires.
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 congressmen because they claim that the mail ballots were fraudulent. Yeah.
And to your point about like size, that becomes a less doable effort if Democrats end up winning by 12, 14, 15 seats.
Or 40. Or 40, yeah. So let me – here's the precedent that is really analogous. In 1984, there was a contested race in Indiana.
Yeah.
Where the two candidates, Republican and Democrat, were dozens of points of votes apart. And it was pretty unclear who really had won. 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. But the committee had two Democrats and one Republican. And it found for the Democrats. 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. We will not enter into who is 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.
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. The Mike Johnson thing of I'm just not swearing you in when there are 40 people who clearly want it. I don't think it works. I don't think the other institutions of American life will abide it.
I'm a little worried your house is being robbed, though. We have a number of visiting house dogs.
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Chapter 5: What are the potential consequences of Trump's foreign policy in Venezuela?
If the gift comes after the act, there's a question mark about it. So public integrity is – Even before Trump, even before crypto, that was gutted. And a little cynically, I said on the show that the relevant decision here was a nine to zero 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.
Yeah, right.
And so that produced the nine to zero majority.
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.
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. And the crypto industry has a number of different lines of business, but the meme coins in particular, which are 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. 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. But the people who bought millions of dollars worth of those coins were not dupes.
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. And it's not Donald Trump who's the only politician who can issue a meme coin. The next governor of California could create a meme coin and find a way to get money routed.
Anyone who's got an important, powerful job can say, yeah, I'm issuing a meme coin. And it's going to lose 90% of its value in the first six months. But we'll both remember that wonderful moment we had when you put all that money in my pocket. And maybe I'll be grateful.
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Chapter 6: How does the podcast discuss the role of cryptocurrency in public corruption?
know-your-customer laws with other people's money, all of it purporting to be a refundable deposit, but in fact at risk. And it's just a time bomb ticking, waiting to blow up.
Just one more thing on this. No thoughts on the President of the United States being the majority shareholder of a nuclear fusion business? Because that's true. That is a true sentence as of yesterday.
Yes. Well, there are important regulatory concerns here. I would think so. Yeah. Nuclear energy, I'm a big believer in it. Same. 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.
And if the president has got his well tied up, I have no idea of the science of the risks of nuclear fusion as opposed to fission. 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?
President Trump made the right moves to get Puerto Rico out of a mess, putting private enterprise to work.
The electrical grid and other infrastructure were already in very, very poor shape. They were at their life's end prior to the hurricanes. And now virtually everything has been wiped out. We're literally starting from scratch.
But Governor González-Colón thinks she knows better. Innovative companies ran to meet the challenge to rebuild Puerto Rico's grid. Now she's blowing up a valid contract to siphon money back to her closest political advisors. President Trump puts real businesses to work instead of fueling government waste. Don't let the governor send Puerto Rico back to square one. Support the rule of law.
Visit PuertoRicoInvestment.org. Paid for by the Committee for Puerto Rican Investment Incorporated.
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Chapter 7: What are the ethical concerns surrounding Trump's business dealings?
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.
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. At first, I thought this was a little bit of Marco Sabre 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.
But what's weird about this is they have pulled together an enormous array of military force into the area. And you read these things like, the largest deployment since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president is asking for options. 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. 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. 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.
And an 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. There will be costs in Venezuelan life, for sure. American life, possibly. Huge costs in money. 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.
And unknown cause, unintended consequences. JVL did a newsletter yesterday that folks should read if they want more on this, where he took your point about Maduro and it's like Maduro is a bastard, but this is crazy. He wrote that Trump's bleed about this is the single stupidest and most irresponsible presidential statement in the history of foreign policy. I defy you to find something dumber.
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, no, I mean, it's truly moronic.
Columbia 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. What's the plan to reconstitute a democracy in Venezuela? They're capable of it. They've done it before. But they're damaged and much of their population isn't.
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Chapter 8: How does the episode conclude on the topic of Trump's influence on democracy?
To Japan. I want to hear your concerns about Japan nuclearizing.
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 nuclear weapon. 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. They have all the material.
They forwent this because of their own history and because they relied on American protection, like so many people. 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. 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 it. And we don't need the cost and trouble. But we could do it if we ever had to. But what are the costs of Trump making America so unreliable? He said, every country has to think, we can't trust the Americans anymore. 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. They're talking about waging war on NATO ally Denmark to seize Greenland. Maybe that will never happen. But they're thinking about it. Someone is drawing up papers right now for a US war on Denmark.
And what are the chances? Are you sure 82-year-old dementia riddled Trump won't do that? Is it a 2% chance? Is it 8%? It's a lot higher than it was before. It's not zero.
And we know that they're thinking about abandoning Ukraine. 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. 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.
And not with underdeveloped countries like India and Pakistan who had their own agendas, but with former U.S. allies who have said, we thought we could trust the Americans and now we see we cannot.
That's a dark irony because it was one of the things when you said earlier that like the one unifying thing of Trump his whole life back to the 80s is his love of tariffs. 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. And so it would be a good irony for him to be the one that's the cause of that.
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