#80 — The Unraveling
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
178.06499
Summary
David Frum walks us through current events once again, and explains why it's hard to keep up with the cascade of scandals that seems to be engulfing the Trump administration. He also offers some suggestions on how to deal with the idea that Trump is unfit for office, and why he should be replaced by someone who's better than Donald Trump. And he explains why the idea of impeachment is a bad one, and how we can all agree that he's not fit to be president, no matter what we think of him. The Atlantic's senior editor at The Atlantic Magazine, David Frum is a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, and he's someone who has been unusually clear-eyed about the problem of Trump in office. He's also a regular contributor to CNN and the New York Times, and a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard. He's a friend of mine, and I think you'll agree that it's a good idea to have him on the show to talk about it. If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a supporter of The Making Sense Podcast by becoming a patron. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our listeners, so if you enjoy what we're doing here, you'll be making possible entirely by becoming one. Become a patron of the podcast. You'll get access to all kinds of great shows, including the best ones, including The New York Magazine, NPR, and NPR, wherever you get your ad choices are available. You can become a patron, and get exclusive ad-free versions of the Making Sense podcast wherever you buy your ad is available, for as little as $1 dollar a month, starting from $1 or $2, $2 or $3, you get a maximum of $5 or $10, $10 or $6, and they get 20% off your first month, plus an additional $5, and you'll get an ad discount when you become a member of the MMS membership gets a complimentary rate of $4 or $7,99 or $8,000, they get two months, they'll get the ad is reviewed for two months for seven months, plus they get the same thing, they also get a discount on the ad-only policy plan, plus two months of the ad discount, and two weeks of VIP access gets two months get a complimentary ad-plan, they can get the best of that discount, they're also get full access to the whole service starts, plus a discount, for two weeks, they receive all that gets you access only $4,000 and they'll also get VIP access, plus the discount gets two weeks for VIP access.
Transcript
00:00:10.880
Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
00:00:14.680
feed and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation.
00:00:18.420
In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at
00:00:24.060
There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with
00:00:30.520
We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support
00:00:35.880
So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
00:00:46.580
Today I bring you a conversation with a person who agrees with me, and I with him on this
00:00:53.460
David Frum is going to walk us through current events once again.
00:00:57.200
There is just no way to keep up with the cascade of scandals.
00:01:04.580
We had this conversation a day before Trump announced that he would be pulling us out
00:01:11.540
I think I will reserve comment about that for a future podcast.
00:01:16.220
I'm sure I'll have a climate change expert on at some point to talk about this.
00:01:19.760
Let's just say it's another way in which Trump seems to be forcing our country into a kind
00:01:30.680
It's as though his only goal is to diminish our stature in the world.
00:01:39.120
David, as you recall, he's a senior editor at The Atlantic magazine.
00:01:42.540
He's a former speechwriter for George Bush, and he's someone who's been unusually clear-eyed
00:02:06.840
As I was saying to you offline, you are a true road warrior here.
00:02:12.100
You have found a reasonably quiet corner of a lounge.
00:02:15.520
So I apologize in advance for any imperfections in the sound we're going to be treating our
00:02:24.160
And we are jumping into another conversation about politics to the consternation of the,
00:02:31.920
I think, small percentage of my listeners who are diehard Trump supporters.
00:02:36.360
I want to start, as I attempted to start my last conversation with you, and I think
00:02:42.060
I do this really every time I touch the subject now, I want to attempt to anchor this to some
00:02:47.880
basic understanding that partisanship is not what is motivating this conversation.
00:02:55.560
You know, I think there are a few simple moves we can make to at least establish that to a
00:03:00.560
moral certainty for any reasonable person in the audience.
00:03:03.520
And one is to say that, you know, the implication of everything we're going to say that is probably
00:03:09.360
urging impeachment proceedings along is that we are eager to have a President Mike Pence,
00:03:16.240
So that this is not, we're not talking about a choice between Trump and Hillary now.
00:03:19.560
We're talking about everything we say that suggests he's unfit for office is ushering
00:03:24.680
in a Republican replacement and one who, you know, I'm really not at all sanguine about,
00:03:31.160
given my concerns about the influence of religion in politics.
00:03:35.460
And, you know, perhaps there are other ways to do it, but that is a fairly simple one.
00:03:40.680
Can you think of anything to say, apart from just referencing your obvious background as a
00:03:45.460
Republican, that can cut through this, this allegation of partisanship before we start?
00:03:51.760
The rule I try to follow, don't always live up to it by try, is no arguments about arguments.
00:03:59.420
A comedian should not make a sketch about the assassination of a president.
00:04:04.340
To which the response will be not to engage with that, but say, well, did you comment in a
00:04:08.600
similar way about a situation that I personally believe is to be analogous?
00:04:12.680
And you get this infinite regress where arguments turn into arguments about arguments.
00:04:16.920
So with the present president, your statements about him are either true or false, and you may
00:04:23.540
have good or bad motives, but they're either true or false.
00:04:26.300
So it's either true or false that he's behaving in a certain way, that he's a man of a certain
00:04:31.800
character, that he's doing certain things to our alliance structure, or it's not.
00:04:34.780
And these constant attempts to sort of go to the argument behind the argument, I think
00:04:39.600
in the case of Trump in particular, that they are desperation moves.
00:04:43.540
Trump is a very hard person to defend on the merits.
00:04:46.760
So it's hard to say that, it's hard to acquit him on the Russia matter.
00:04:54.060
It's hard to suggest that he is a person who lives up to the ethical and character standards
00:05:00.800
And so you get these moves where they say, well, let's not talk about him.
00:05:06.620
So I don't think anybody wants to talk about me.
00:05:08.940
We want to talk about Donald Trump, who's the most powerful man in the world, and probably
00:05:16.660
I went out on Twitter a couple hours ago asking for the hardest and most sane questions in defense
00:05:29.260
Many of them focus on the problem of information siloing and fake news.
00:05:36.580
And it is alleged that you and I are the victims of fake news and conspiracy theories.
00:05:42.980
The whole Russia conspiracy is a conspiracy theory.
00:05:45.980
I can come up with a much better argument in his defense.
00:05:50.780
Okay, well, this is not an argument actually exactly in defense of him, but it's an argument
00:05:55.680
that works to his defense, which is all the disturbing things we know, or many of the
00:06:01.240
disturbing things we know about him, we know because people entrusted with public secrets
00:06:05.900
have broken their oaths and released into the public domain information that is meant to
00:06:13.000
And this information often involves real compromising of really important secrets.
00:06:23.260
The Russians do not have their important conversations on open lines.
00:06:26.880
They have their conversations on lines or by modes that they believe to be secure.
00:06:31.840
So every time that somebody from the NSA or CIA or National Security Council releases
00:06:36.320
something about what the Russians are saying with Trump or about some conversation between
00:06:40.780
the Trump camp and the Russians, they reveal to the Russians that something the Russians
00:06:50.040
And what somebody might say to me is, you were very angry at Edward Snowden and Bradley slash
00:07:04.120
I view that as the way in which our political norms are eroding under the
00:07:10.780
what I'm increasingly viewing as a failed pressure testing of our system.
00:07:15.660
I mean, so the fact that you and I can be sanguine and even greedy with respect to leaks of classified
00:07:28.120
I mean, I think one of the tragedies of the Trump presidency, Trump's advent to the presidency
00:07:33.580
is itself a terrible blow to the institutions of the United States.
00:07:37.600
And the things the society is having to do in an effort to defend itself against him, which
00:07:44.840
I'm not saying when that Trump won't ultimately prevail over these institutions, but are themselves
00:07:53.360
No, I was I was definitely I was granting that.
00:07:54.980
I mean, I'm saying I want those leaks to continue because I think Trump is so bad.
00:08:01.300
I think it's fairly terrifying that we're in this position.
00:08:04.400
And look, look at what's happened with giving another example of the cost, the action of
00:08:10.040
the courts in striking down Trump's I don't know, are we allowed to call it a Muslim ban?
00:08:14.040
I mean, yes, you can read the fine print on that.
00:08:16.520
Yes, let's let's call it that Muslim ban is Muslim ban.
00:08:22.500
I mean, I think I basically agree with what they're trying to do that you can say this,
00:08:27.380
these actions by the president are obviously capricious.
00:08:35.840
However, the president's authority over immigration is plenary.
00:08:39.740
These are he is clearly acting within what would have been thought of as his rights until
00:08:46.780
Because he's so flagrantly using this power for ill and for malice and without a basis in
00:08:53.280
an indiscriminatory way, the courts are telling him he can't do it.
00:08:56.200
But, you know, that that's the courts are overstepping.
00:08:59.180
Let me give you one more example of a price of Trump.
00:09:04.440
Everyone's laughing over this funny fake tweet that he did last night.
00:09:08.680
You know, the mangled thing that then it was a typo and it stayed up for six hours.
00:09:14.980
OK, so what it looked a lot like happened like was the president was tweeting while falling
00:09:19.460
asleep, had some kind of spasm with his fingers, tweeted something nonsensical, passed out
00:09:24.240
so he didn't notice it, and nobody found him for six hours or noticed the tweet or did
00:09:34.160
This is a man who also has the power with his other fingers to launch a nuclear war.
00:09:38.120
But we all are wondering whether the people who execute his commands would take an order
00:09:45.540
from Donald Trump about a nuclear war in the same obedient way they would take an order
00:09:49.420
from a Barack Obama or George W. Bush or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan.
00:09:54.340
And I think we all kind of hope that they wouldn't.
00:09:57.680
But what do we call societies where military people don't defer to the civilian leadership?
00:10:06.640
The point is that we are not coming out of this hole.
00:10:12.020
However this story ends, we are going to have major losses for our institutions.
00:10:16.760
Yeah, well, so let's talk about how the story might end.
00:10:22.520
But first, let's talk about some of these losses we've already noticed.
00:10:30.160
He just got back from this trip, and I noticed that you reacted to the McMaster op-ed, which
00:10:37.280
seemed to rescind just what really has been a multi-generational vision of a world where
00:10:44.200
established democracies cooperate in ways that aren't guided by narrow self-interest.
00:10:53.040
In the world before World War II, countries behaved like selfish entities.
00:10:57.160
And they regarded the world as basically a competitive enterprise.
00:11:01.420
The United States, the other great powers, small powers too, it was a Hobbesian world
00:11:10.000
And after World War II, our parents and grandparents decided, we're not doing that anymore.
00:11:15.080
And what we're going to do, this can't apply to the whole planet.
00:11:17.960
Because there are a lot of authoritarian regimes, there are a lot of backward societies.
00:11:21.000
But among the advanced democracies, we're going to build new kinds of structures where
00:11:26.120
international politics begins to look a lot like domestic politics.
00:11:30.780
So if an American company and a German company have a dispute, that gets settled in more or
00:11:36.700
less the same way as if two American companies had a dispute.
00:11:40.160
If there's even a trade dispute between the German and American government, or between the
00:11:44.900
United States and the EU, that gets settled in a way that looks a lot like a domestic.
00:11:49.060
There's a set of rules that are agreed upon in advance by the two sovereigns.
00:11:53.400
The rules are then arbitrated by a neutral adjudicator.
00:11:59.640
And you can then enforce it inside the court system of either country.
00:12:04.000
From in this sort of zone of peace and cooperation, that's the NATO countries plus Japan, plus Australia,
00:12:09.680
New Zealand, plus a few others, international and domestic politics blur to a greater extent.
00:12:14.720
I regard that as one of the most signal political accomplishments of the human race.
00:12:20.440
So the Trump people went to Europe and they said, as far as we're concerned, that's over.
00:12:24.760
We regard the countries of Europe, and we don't, we, first, we don't even acknowledge there
00:12:29.360
And we regard the countries of Europe as power competitors in exactly the same way that we
00:12:34.120
would regard Russia or China or Uzbekistan or Congo.
00:12:39.080
And, you know, we call you our friends, but we think our relationship is regulated entirely
00:12:46.080
by interest, not by values, and interest in the most short-sighted way.
00:12:50.420
So when we have a trade dispute, we go to bat for the American company.
00:12:53.300
We don't ask the question, who's right, or how do we sustain a long-term regime?
00:12:57.120
We just say, our guys, our guys win, your guys lose.
00:13:00.520
Might makes right, the stronger imposes his will on the weaker.
00:13:03.560
And we're counting on ourselves to be the stronger for a long time to come.
00:13:06.240
Yeah, you have a great passage in this op-ed, quote,
00:13:10.660
perhaps the most terrifying thing about the Trump presidency is the way even its most worldly
00:13:15.320
figures, in words composed for them by its deepest thinkers, have reimagined the United
00:13:20.420
States in the image of their own chief, selfish, isolated, brutish, domineering, and driven
00:13:27.060
by immediate appetites rather than ideals or even long-term interests.
00:13:33.900
It really is, and this is the character of our country, too, which should be our greatest
00:13:38.620
concern, but the way in which defenders of Trump have to basically, you know, you put
00:13:45.680
it this way in a tweet, people who defend Trump become just like Trump.
00:13:51.160
And, you know, I said something similar a few days before, just watching how otherwise
00:13:56.280
serious people with, I mean, the most serious people in his administration, the people who we
00:14:02.000
were relieved to see appointed, because finally there are a few grown-ups at the table, you
00:14:07.180
have them just jettison their credibility and their ethical gravitas insofar as they could
00:14:15.460
maintain it for an hour in the current administration.
00:14:18.920
They just perform a kind of moral self-immolation trying to defend him.
00:14:24.260
They immediately start lying or speaking in Orwellian euphemisms.
00:14:30.380
It's very, I mean, that's one of the most worrying things about what's happening in Washington
00:14:35.320
I agree, and the tragedy of McMaster, this is happening with H.R. McMaster, I mean, in
00:14:40.720
his case, it really is, it's like an opera, because I'm sure he took the job with a view
00:14:45.480
to minimizing the harm that Donald Trump would do, and I'm sure in all kinds of ways that
00:14:51.220
we won't know for 20, 30 years, he is minimizing the harms that Donald Trump would do.
00:14:55.160
I'm sure he's playing a very public-spirited role and sacrificing his own reputation in the
00:15:02.420
But at the same time, he is called on to tell lies about petty things, and he's doing it.
00:15:08.640
So one more question on foreign policy here, because this genuinely surprised me, and I'm
00:15:14.900
sure there's some way of seeing it where it would just have been obvious he would behave
00:15:19.260
this way, but I was not expecting Trump to behave the way he did with the Saudis, where
00:15:24.720
he really just became like a lickspittle to the Saudi regime.
00:15:30.880
I mean, it was just, he talked tough during the campaign.
00:15:34.040
You can see tweets of his where he talks about their abuse of women and human rights and their
00:15:39.340
responsibility for terrorism and exporting the Wahhabi worldview to the ends of the earth.
00:15:46.260
I mean, he seemed to be aware of just how beyond the pale much of what they do is and has been
00:15:53.960
for a long time. And yet he didn't make a peep about this and then singled out Iran as though they were the
00:16:02.520
true engine of jihadist terror. Can you explain what happened there?
00:16:08.520
I can't, actually. I'm sure there is an explanation. I don't have the information to assess how much of this is
00:16:15.460
driven by crass business dealings, how much of this is driven by the ideology of the people
00:16:21.040
around him, how much of this is driven by certain kinds of domestic political considerations that
00:16:26.980
Trump balances a lot of the pretty obvious anti-Semitism in his entourage with kind of
00:16:34.800
championing of the foreign policy views of certain parts of the right wing of the Jewish community.
00:16:38.680
Some of that may be in play. There may just be, by the way, slovenliness and lack of attention where
00:16:44.480
because he was flattered that he got dragged into endorsing the Saudi side of an internal
00:16:49.840
sectarian war in the Islamic world. I can't assess all of those things. And look, there are also
00:16:57.560
serious reasons why the United States will go and has gone easy on Saudi Arabia and will continue to do
00:17:05.120
so, so long as oil remains an important fuel. One of the things I think is sort of exciting with
00:17:12.640
the time we live in, there are a lot of bad things, is within the life of the younger listeners to this
00:17:17.460
podcast, I think that day, they will see the end of that day. But I don't think I will.
00:17:24.180
That's something we should be going full speed ahead on, obviously.
00:17:27.860
Okay, so the Russia investigation, how is that going? I was going to have you on the episode
00:17:32.580
I did last week with Anne Applebaum and Juliette Kayyem. But then we had scheduling issues and
00:17:40.020
your interview got pushed like another 36 hours in the future. And the news was changing so fast
00:17:47.360
that I got the sense that if we just waited a few more days, all of a sudden, we would be in a
00:17:52.280
completely different news cycle with new facts to worry about. And indeed, that has happened. Since
00:17:58.020
I had that conversation with Anne and Juliette, we now have Kushner and his back channel, as well as
00:18:05.460
the ham-fisted response to that disclosure on part of the administration. So talk to me about how
00:18:15.080
Well, Anne, of course, has always been a great teacher of mine. So people who got to hear her,
00:18:18.800
I think really, I know how much I benefited from her wisdom on these issues over the years. And I
00:18:23.540
hope that your listeners would agree with me about that, because she really has been
00:18:29.200
at tremendous personal risk. Anne doesn't tend to talk about this, but she has herself
00:18:33.300
been a target and her family of Russian active messengers and disinformation. And it has taken
00:18:38.640
a terrible price from her. And she's not one to complain about it, but it's true and needs to be
00:18:44.140
On the Kushner matter, we still don't know exactly what happened. I think it's important in all of
00:18:50.460
these cases not to get ahead of the story, because you can see how rumor can easily overspread
00:18:57.040
and you can disillusion people that they expect bigger news than they get. And I think we all need
00:19:03.160
to be very cognizant of the terrible, terrible example of Louise Mensch, who is just, I don't know if
00:19:08.500
people listening to this podcast are aware of her, but Louise Mensch, she was a British Conservative
00:19:12.240
Member of Parliament. She's had a very exotic career in a lot of ways. And the latest, she's
00:19:18.780
no longer in Parliament. And the latest chapter of her career, she's become a disseminator of the
00:19:23.600
inverse of RT. It's like if there were an anti-RT that is very anti-Russian in its tone, but just like
00:19:30.960
RT in its method, in its total disregard for knowledge and fact and making up stories and circulating wild
00:19:37.000
rumors. In this struggle for the character of the country, being careful with what you know and being
00:19:43.700
careful about what you say is an important moral principle, not just a prudential principle. You don't
00:19:48.340
want to be like the people who abuse the credulity of their audience. So I'm waiting to see if, is the
00:19:55.740
story, what is the dimension of this story? We've heard many explanations of what could have happened. I have to tell you,
00:20:01.640
the answers that come from the Kushner's spinners don't sound very plausible. And the idea that
00:20:08.120
the president's son-in-law with no military experience proposed to go into a Russian compound,
00:20:14.880
have a secure conversation about military dispositions in Syria, that's just, we have an
00:20:21.040
entire Pentagon. If anyone is going to talk about, well, how do we make sure that we avoid plane crashes?
00:20:25.620
It's not going to be Jared Kushner. It's going to be the people in the Pentagon. And they have lots of
00:20:29.520
ways of communicating with their Russian counterparts, and in ways that are much more secure, both
00:20:33.500
technically and also making sure that you don't reveal more than you want to reveal. So that story
00:20:38.560
doesn't seem right. On the other hand, the darkest version of the story, which is that Kushner was
00:20:43.560
seeking some kind of personal financial advantage, which was suggested by a Bloomberg report, we don't
00:20:48.720
know that to be true either. There are some stray hints about that, but that shouldn't be taken as
00:20:54.400
written. All we know is this whole, the story is exceedingly strange, very difficult to justify,
00:21:02.280
and there's no, and there has been no credible effort to justify it. And it is behavior that if
00:21:07.180
not justified, should lead to the loss, at least of a security clearance and maybe outright resignation
00:21:13.040
and possibly even harsher sanctions. Yeah. And the effort to justify that I've seen
00:21:17.960
most commonly is that it relies on equivocating on this term back-channel, the claim that back-channels
00:21:25.520
are a kind of standard operating procedure, as though this sort of back-channel is equivalent to
00:21:31.480
the other kinds of back-channels people are talking about. That is a truly specious move, isn't it?
00:21:37.200
Yeah. Well, the people who make this point are, they throw out this word as if they know what it
00:21:42.220
needs and if they know what it hits. Look, what is a back-channel? That term gets applied to two
00:21:47.080
kinds of conversations. The first is a conversation where in an effort to explore with an adversary,
00:21:53.920
the government of the United States will send somebody who is connected to the adversary,
00:21:58.920
but deniable by the United States. A business person, a retired military person, somebody who,
00:22:06.300
if the conversation goes wrong, the United States can say, hey, he was just gassing. He wasn't talking
00:22:11.180
for mission impossible. If your mission fails, of course, the secretary will deny any knowledge.
00:22:17.040
So the first reason you have a back-channel is in order to have deniability. So Jared Kushner would
00:22:22.480
be the absolute last person in the world you would choose to set up a back-channel of that kind,
00:22:28.460
because he's obviously acting for the president, undeniably so. The second kind of back-channel that
00:22:33.740
you get is the kind of back-channel that the Obama administration had at the beginning of its
00:22:37.860
approach to Iran, which is in an effort, again, to explore what is possible. You set up a three-way
00:22:43.920
conversation. In that case, the intermediary was a man. The United States would talk to the government
00:22:48.020
of Oman. The government of Oman would talk to the government of Iran. And messages would be sent back
00:22:52.860
and forth that way. And only after a certain point would the conversation become more direct between
00:22:58.480
the United States and Iran. Some preconditions were dealt with first. I'm not endorsing, by the way,
00:23:02.800
the Obama-Iran policy, but this is how it worked. Now, it's not impossible that the Trump people
00:23:09.140
broke through those rules and norms and tried to do it a different way. But you just can't get past the
00:23:14.840
fact that he went to them. Let me give you one last example drawn from American history about how
00:23:20.100
these things work. Henry Kissinger, when he was national security advisor, had an informal set of
00:23:26.020
contacts with the then Russian ambassador to the United States, a guy named Dobrynin. Dobrynin would
00:23:31.300
come to Kissinger first at the NSC. First, they would meet in various neutral places. And then
00:23:37.080
ultimately, when Kissinger became Secretary of State, he would come to the State Department. In fact,
00:23:40.500
he even had a reserved parking space at the State Department, which is a big bone of contention.
00:23:44.160
But the point was, there was no question about the security of their conversation.
00:23:47.820
One of the big questions that we have about this is, did Kushner not understand that he was putting
00:23:54.240
himself in a position where the Russians could generate a transcript of his talk,
00:23:59.460
alter that transcript in various embarrassing ways, and release that or use that as a weapon
00:24:04.040
against him? He was putting his head inside their noose. Did he not understand it? Why was he doing
00:24:10.300
it? What motive could have been so strong or was he so stupid as to have taken such a terrible risk
00:24:15.420
for himself and his administration or his administration to be? They weren't yet in office.
00:24:19.100
So now, what do you expect of the coming Comey testimony?
00:24:24.320
I keep using a line to describe the Trump story.
00:24:28.320
If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at
00:24:35.660
samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense
00:24:40.320
podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations
00:24:47.060
I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on
00:24:52.600
listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.