Chapter 1: What is David Frum's perspective on Trump's reaction to the Supreme Court's tariff decision?
Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I'm David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Tim Miller, host of the Ball Works Daily podcast. My literary topic this week won't be a book. It will be a discussion of the ritual and performance of the State of the Union Address, and I will get to that after the interview with Tim Miller.
But first, some opening thoughts on the dramatic recent events. There are so many that one can hardly begin to tally them all. I record this podcast the day before the president is to deliver the State of the Union Address. You will see it or hear it at the earliest, the morning after the president gives the State of the Union Address. So you will know more than I do about what happens.
I have no idea, although I can make some guesses. I'm going to guess there's going to be a lot of ranting and raving in the State of the Union Address about the Supreme Court and the recent tariff decision. And one of the questions that should spring to mind is, why is the president so very, very upset that the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs he's been announcing over the past year?
I mean, I get it. No one likes to lose. This is an important issue for him. But it's not like he doesn't have recourse. He continues to hold a majority in both House and Senate. The Supreme Court has said your tariff measures would be fine if they came from Congress. You just can't do them alone. Why not announce in the State of the Union, I've drafted a tariff bill.
I'm sending it to Congress tomorrow. I look forward to you enacting it at your earliest convenience. There are enough Republicans, enough in this House and Senate, and there's some anti-trade Democrats. You might get a majority. Why not just pass the bill and do it the legal way that the Supreme Court pointed out to him?
Why is he falling back instead on all these convoluted other schemes for using imaginary balance of payments crises, which don't really exist anymore in a day of floating exchange rates, or false claims of unfair trade practices? Why not just write a tariff bill and send it to Congress and have them pass it? Well, once I say it that way, you know why he's so upset.
Because for Trump, the appeal of the tariffs was not just his primitive, mercantilist view of international economics.
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Chapter 2: What insights did Tim Miller gain from his recent trip to Minneapolis?
He loved the feeling of raw, arbitrary, discretionary power he got from a tariff mechanism that he insisted, and the Supreme Court just corrected him on, that he insisted he could apply to anyone at any time for any reason, without permission from anybody, Congress least of all. What he is mad about is not that he's lost his tariffs. He could enact them.
What he is mad about is that he has lost his power. And that, I think, will be a real theme of the State of the Union address. The president's desire to insert personal, arbitrary, whimsical, if need be, power, unlimited by anybody or anything. That power comes to its sharpest point when the issue is one of war and peace. Congress has not had a chance to debate, but we are very apparently
on the edge of a major war in the Middle East against Iran. The president has assembled an enormous amount of air and naval resources within striking range of Iran. He has made threats. People around him have made threats. They say they want a negotiation, but they point to the revolver on the table and warn that the revolver will go off. And war seems to be imminent.
And it may be even an unintended war. It may be a war that Trump thinks he can sort of bully the Iranians into exceeding to what he wants to do. They don't. And then he's trapped. He has to go to war, even though he thought he could intimidate them. And when and if that hope or expectation turns out wrong, he's back into a position where force is his only remaining recourse.
This, again, is arbitrary power. Congress is supposed to vote on these things. There's no figment or tissue of any kind of authority that the president has to initiate this kind of major regime change conflict that he has in mind with Iran. without the approval of Congress.
So what we're going to see is a drama of the tension between a president who wants personal power and a constitutional system that is designed to deny the president personal power. That is why I think these alternative tariff regimens that are being discussed by the administration are ultimately going to collapse and may well be rejected by the courts.
Because the alternative forms of presidential tariff power all require a lot of process, all require a lot of explanations, all have rules. They have preconditions that must be met, time limits that must be met.
There are opportunities to, they must be taken, some of them must go to court where there are opportunities for the tariffed party to make itself heard and to say, I did not engage in the unfair trade practice alleged by the president.
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Chapter 3: Why do younger Americans find 'Resist libs' cringe?
And under this trade power, Section 301 as it's known, you don't just take the president's word for it. There is a process and a hearing. And the accused party gets to make itself heard. So we are going to see a drama of the individual will meeting institutional limits. And that may be the theme of the rest of this political year and the rest of the Trump presidency.
The Trump drive to individual unchecked power has met some rebuffs. But with war on the offing, he may have his greatest opportunity yet to remake the United States as the kind of one-man system that he wants it to be. And now, my dialogue with Tim Miller. But first, a quick break. Tim Miller is known to all, or should by now be known to all, as the star host of the Bulwark's Daily Podcast.
He is also the author of the 2022 New York Times bestseller, Why We Did It, A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell. Tim is a veteran of Republican presidential campaigns, McCain 08, Huntsman 2012, Jeb Bush 2016. He built a consulting business before switching to full-time journalism for the Never Trump fight.
I've been privileged to be his guest on many, many occasions on The Bulwark, and it's a pleasure to be able to return the hospitality at last. Tim, thank you so much for joining me today.
Let's do this. My gold jacket guest, David Frum. It is my honor to be in the other seat.
I want to ask you just a brief question, because it's not impossible that there is someone who is unaware of The Bulwark. Can you take us through the rich and varied Bulwark cinematic universe? What is The Bulwark? Where did it come from? How did you join this group? Sure.
Yeah, it is the unofficial. Before you started your podcast, it was the unofficial podcast of The Atlantic. I had so many Atlantic guests, so I assume most people do know us. So I'll keep it brief. But the bulwark was the shorthand version of it starting was it was built out of the destruction of the weekly standard.
My old friend, Sarah Longwell, had a terrible idea, which was to start a Never Trump aggregator website.
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Chapter 4: How are Never Trump conservatives evolving in response to Trump?
I told her as much, but she just wanted to do something. She was so mad about Trump. She was... Alt Like Me had a past in conservative PR and communications work. And the site had been around for a couple of months or whatever when the owner of the Weekly Standard, the old neocon magazine, shut it down. And so a bunch of people were out in the wilderness.
And Sarah had met Bill Kristol in particular at a lot of meetings of sad Republicans in the basements, some of which you've attended. I've attended some of those sad meetings. One was called the Meeting of the Concerned. I love that name, the Meeting of the Concerned. We were all very concerned. And they were just talking. They're like, what can we do?
And it's like, hey, maybe this little aggregator thing I had, we can start something else and see how it goes. And that's how the bulwark was born. It was basically a side hustle for a you know, took over the editorship and it was a real hustle for him. But for a lot of folks, it was something that they were doing.
So it felt good to have a place for never Trump Republicans to gather and to write and to give their opinions and events and lament. And, um, I had been friends with Sarah. So she asked me to do it. As you mentioned, the intro, I was still doing PR work full time. And, um, You know, it took off beyond our wildest imaginations. Charlie Sykes at The Daily Show at that time.
And, you know, he brought over his audience from The Weekly Standard and JBL's newsletter writing, you know, enraptured a lot of people. And, you know, we brought in a lot of guests from the universe. And I just would hear from people. That the audience wasn't just never Trump Republicans. That was kind of the core base.
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Chapter 5: What historical context does David provide about the State of the Union address?
A lot of people that used to be Republicans were turned off by Trump. But it was also a lot of liberals. I'm sure you hear this, David, who were like, I have this uncle or best friend or son or mom or whatever who I used to argue with and I can't argue with them anymore because they've gone so insane.
And now you guys are like the, oh, this is what it would be like if my beloved family member who is a conservative had not totally lost their mind and we can have legitimate disagreements about this issue or that issue. And that was kind of the genesis of it. It went from being everybody's side hustle to a real deal.
Really, I think during that crazy summer, summer and a half ago where, you know, with the Biden debate and then Trump getting shot and, you know, we had got onto YouTube and, you know, kind of, It really just took off.
Can we sum up the politics of the bulwark as pro-market anti-polio?
Pro-market anti-polio? Yes. My favorite summation that anyone ever gave us was the capitalist wing of Antifa. Maybe not quite right, but I did like it. It has a nice ring to it. So, yeah, look, we're pro markets, anti-polio, anti-liberalism. And I think a lot of folks now come to us because we're no bullshit, honestly. And that was the point I was trying to make about YouTube.
There are a lot of people who don't know this backstory who just saw our material on social media now and were like, we like the cut of their jib. And they don't have to know about Hayek or Buckley or the history of conservatism to appreciate the content.
So you had a big outing last week. You took the much of the staff, maybe all of the staff of the bulwark to Minneapolis to do a live performance there, but also to do some on the ground observation of a situation you have spoken so much about. What did you see other than I see a lot of snow and ice?
Yeah, I did get a cold. I was not built for Minneapolis. And so it gave me even more respect for the
folks have been in the streets protesting exercising their rights yeah we ended up having to do two shows we planned to do one we wanted to do it in support of the people of minneapolis that sold out like two minutes and so we did a second one where we was more of an interview show we brought in tim walls and tina smith we appreciate them for coming and um and so look my main takeaway is that i just had to i was a little bit humbled about something i was wrong about something i sit here in my room
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Chapter 6: Why does David question the relevance of the State of the Union in the Trump era?
But just my analysis of it was very political. And the political analysis was that it was a win. that the people of Minneapolis won, they defeated Trump and they made him do something he doesn't like to do, which is back up, back down. And he does it a fair amount, but he doesn't like to do it.
And so I went there in this mindset that it was almost not celebratory, but almost, there was a little bit of a waving of the shirt, you know, it was like, you thank, yeah, congratulations to the people of Minneapolis. And when I went to the Whipple building and talked to people that showed up to the events and, and, you know, I had meals with activists, but I found out was, um,
that yeah they had had a political victory and that's not nothing it's meaningful But the occupation is ongoing. And the only difference is the tactics with which the government is using. And they've dispersed. And so I was talking to one woman, for example. She lives across the border in Wisconsin. She said about a 45-minute drive.
She drives to the Whipple building, which is the main headquarters where ICE has been staging. She protests every day for three hours. And I was talking to her. And she was like, look, my neighborhood in Wisconsin, we had seen, I think she said, four ICE or CBP agents. You know, in our little community text, we'd heard about four, you know, in the past, you know, a couple months.
In the past week, there'd been 10. You know, and this was just one anecdote, but there was more of that, like going out into North Minneapolis and even into South Dakota. And so, you know, where I think the government feels like the thing that has worked with the resistance, which is...
monitoring and videoing and documenting their actions that is easy to do in minneapolis where there's these built-in networks it's harder to monitor and document if they go out into other regions of the country other other areas are the tactics of the authorities less confrontational and one hopes less violent than we've seen in the recent past
Well, again, this is all anecdotal, but there's some elements of demonstrating that it's craftier. Like the ICE agents have been putting on their cars. It's like point counterpoint. It's like any sort of battle, right? The tactics shift. One thing that they've done is they start putting like gay pride stickers on the cars.
and other things to try to trick people into not seeing that it was a nice vehicle. Uh, and so, you know, I, I, I think that the violence towards the protesters, uh,
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Chapter 7: How does the conversation address the changing nature of political discourse?
has dissipated, but is that because their tactics have dissipated or because the manner in which they're doing this, you know, puts them, you know, means that they're encountering organized protests less. You know what I mean? I think that still remains to be seen. I think that we can say meaningfully, like Greg Bovino was, uh, was trying to instigate fights, right?
Like when he was walking around town, he was literally, he wanted violence. And so God loved the people of Minneapolis that this did not turn into anything that looks like, you know, 2020, that there was not really any of that. So I think in some ways the tactics have modified a little bit, but...
And the idea that people in Minneapolis and the surrounding areas are still having to deliver food to families under cover of darkness. And there's a network of doulas. Tim Walz was telling us about this network of doulas that is helping people give birth because they don't want to go to hospitals.
You described it as an occupation. Does Minneapolis still feel like a city under occupation? The hand of an unwanted police presence? Or does it feel like the hand is hidden and therefore it's not such an unwanted police presence?
I would not say that it felt like they were still under the hand as if things were everywhere. As if these secret police were everywhere. I will say this, though. Here's the way in which it still felt like an unwanted occupation. When you talk to people...
everyone had a story, you know, like everyone had an example of some, you know, someone they know at the school, you know, that their kids go to or, you know, at work or in the community. Right. So in that way, and I think that they were all still very conscious of the fact that this is ongoing, like business as usual is not like, it's not back to normal.
And in that sense, I think it's still ongoing.
This leads me to another, More challenging question that you and I have talked about in the past, and I want to hear your views, and I think many people want to hear your views on. Actually, I've got a couple of them that are a little more challenging. The first is I'm not at the cutting edge of the latest in Internet culture by any means.
So you don't know about bone smashing?
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of Trump's approach to power for American democracy?
Sometimes the internet culture gets to a point where I'm not even sure it exists. I think it mostly exists in order to upset and shock people like me, not because there's any actual consumer of it. Why? I'm reading here in the New York Times about this very distressing thing that the young folks are doing.
Right.
folding the sound of newsprint shuffling. Now, I wanted to ask you about something that, I don't know how real this is, but people keep up with this more than I do, tell me that there is a mood among the young, that there's something lame about the project that you're engaged in, and I guess I'm engaged in too, of standing up for what they would call resistance liberalism.
And this is somehow unfashionable, uncool. And is this like a perception of something that actually exists, or is this just chat?
and let me if it's to the extent it exists let me ask you about two different strains that i can see for what's motivating it one is and there's just nothing to be done about this is real leftists who say look you're standing up here for the constitution the rule of law for international free trade for You don't want to say open borders.
You just want to say orderly police procedures without abuses and without violence. So you're not a real leftist. You're not smashing the system. You're not overturning the hierarchy. You're not socializing the means of production. You're not globalizing the intifada. It's just lame. So, okay, real leftists, I get why they would have a beef.
But the other thing that it seems to be going on to the extent that this is a real phenomenon I'm describing is a feeling that simply having beliefs is in itself a sign of lameness and that the cool thing is not to have any. Am I talking about anything real? You're at the center of this business. Do you see this? Am I describing something you recognize?
You are describing something real, unfortunately, and this stuff's all evolving and changing. But I think that there is a sense among resist libs or a sense among some particularly younger folks in the public that resist libs are corny and cringe. And I think that what is underlying this, like you said, for some people, there's ideological elements to it.
But to me, what is underlying it is that the most visible elements of resist liberalism are... like people that seem like they are in the establishment or in positions of power, right? Like that they are protecting an existing order, right?
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