Raging Moderates: Why Progressives Won’t WIN in the 2026 Midterms (ft. David Frum)

23:12It's on the high seas. It's not on Mexican territory. You know, these are controlled incidents. But it is, again, even though it's less dramatic and dangerous than what they wanted to do inside Mexico, it still has dangerous implications. And the story about Colombia is an example of this. So Trump can't even spell the country Colombia correctly. He spells it like the university. That is confusing, though, when you've gone after the university so much, right? Yeah. Maybe it's like spellcheck, but... I don't think Truth Social has spellcheck. Sorry. Now carry on with your very smart point. The United States has a very important relationship with Colombia dating back to the Clinton years.

23:46Colombia was a major source of cocaine to the United States. Crack cocaine was a big killer. And President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama had a series of programs to facilitate security cooperation with Colombia. They became a very, very important partner. And the Colombians paid a heavy blood price to clean up their act. And as part of the price, the United States helped Colombia to redirect its economy away from cocaine. If you go to the supermarket and buy cut flowers, those are probably from Colombia. And cut flowers need to move with incredible speed. They perish rapidly. Everyone knows that.

24:19And so Bush negotiated and President Obama signed a free trade agreement with Colombia. That's one of the last free trade agreements the United States entered into before the era of protectionism began. So this is an important relationship. Now, the current president of Colombia is kind of a loudmouth. And he's quite unpopular. He's at the end of his term. So he's someone, the relationship proceeds around him. he can be kind of an isolated figure. And he's very on the far left side of Colombian politics. And Colombia tends to tilt toward the more conservative side. He was the first, Petro was the first left-wing president in like 35 years.

24:49But when he says the Americans killed a fishing boat, if that's not true, that would be a very big lie for him to tell. Because the United States could easily refute it. And there are a lot of people inside the Colombian political system who would want to make him pay a price for making the relationship with the United States even worse than it is. So without having a lot of confidence in Petro, I'm going to guess that was not a lie. And if it's not a lie, then you really have to think, well, what about the next strike? This is not as hermetic. And although all the strikes are illegal, if you actually are killing narcos, probably the American political system won't give you too hard a time about it.

25:24It's illegal, but these are people who deserve something. But if you're actually killing fishermen, and it looks like the United States is, that's a moral reckoning. Yeah. Well, there's also the story, There's a name attached for the first time to a person who's from Trinidad and Tobago who has disappeared that his family is claiming was swept up in this, someone who is also not a drug trafficker. And then we have repatriated two Venezuelans that survived these attacks instead of trying them, which would indicate that we didn't have the goods to be doing this in the first place. And you already mentioned that this would be illegal.

25:59But if you get a narco trafficker, probably people will turn a blind eye to it. And I think Rand Paul has been doing a very good job out there advocating as much as he can for the fact that there are procedures you're supposed to go through when you do this, especially if it's not just a one off. Right. This has been 32 people dead, seven strikes thus far. And Trump has been asking for authorization if he wants to go into Venezuelan land, which obviously has big implications. And the Mexican connection is very interesting there. Do you think, you know, I guess looping back to what we were saying about the authoritarian tendencies of this administration, one of the biggest ways that they've been doing that is subverting the role of Congress.

26:40Right. I mean, we basically have a unitary state. Right. Is that what you would say? Where the executive is all that matters. And, you know, there are a lot of members of Congress that are hot and bothered about this. You know, Congressman Adam Smith, Jim Himes, etc. But so far on the Republican side, I've only really been hearing Rand Paul screaming about it because you're supposed to be able to get authorization, especially if you think that the administration has something like regime change on the mind. Do you think that they have that on the mind? And do you think there's any chance that there is some sort of discussion within Congress about what's going on?

27:15Well, I don't think President Trump tends to have plans the way other kind of people have plans. Concepts of plans. He has kind of instincts. Think of him as like an ooze that oozes wherever it is not met with a blockage. He's got various kinds of authoritarian and corrupt and sinister projects, sometimes just egos, sometimes making improper money. And he's just looking for where is a place where I'm not going to get a check. And killing drug dealers is a place where he won't receive too much of a check. But there are only so many things you can do in the realm of counter drug. You can control demand, and that means punishing Americans, which is always unpopular.

27:54You can control supply, and that means getting involved with foreign countries in various ways, and that's difficult. Or you can say, we'll control neither supply nor demand, and we'll have some kind of legalization, and then you get a lot of victims inside the United States. So it's a triangle. There are only three choices. Controlling supply, the United States has been working with that project since the 1970s. And the basic problem is violence doesn't work. If you want to control supply, you need a, as happened in Colombia, you need to create new opportunities for people who are involved in the drug trade, not all of whom want to be criminals, to grow cut flowers instead of growing coca.

28:27And it turns out cut flowers were more profitable. They were often like serfs to the drug lords. Cut flowers were a more profitable business. But you have to protect them because the former surf holders would say, well, we'll kill you if you grow the cut flowers. So you needed to protect them. But the idea that you're going to say, OK, the way we're going to stop drugs from flowing into the country is every time we see a$40 ,000 powerboat with crew who are making a couple of dollars a day, carrying a load of cocaine that cost dozens of dollars to manufacture, whatever its street value. And we're going to send naval vessels and jet fighters and we're going to blow them up with a missile that probably costs more than the entire project of the boat.

29:04just the missile. That's a losing project. I'm reminded very much of one of the great stories from the world of drug lore that Daniel Patrick Moynihan told in his memoirs. It's 1971, and the United States has just made the largest heroin bust in the history of the world to that point. This is the bust that was the origin of the movie The French Connection, if you've seen that. Oh, yeah. Okay. $5 million in 1907. Dr. Evil, 1970,$5 million. Inflation has been wild. So at the time that this happens, Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the drug czar, the man in the White House with drug control responsibility.

29:35He's enormously excited. And he's so excited that he summons up a helicopter to go to Camp David to meet President Nixon and tell him that they have intercepted$5 million to the fair one. And as he gets on the helicopter, who is also on the helicopter? George Shultz, who was then Secretary of Labor, one of the great, great figures in American government over the 70s and 80s. And Shultz has got that big helicopter headphones on. and he's reading the Wall Street Journal, and he greets Moynihan. Moynihan is burbling with incitement, and he says, George, I have to tell you what I'm going to tell the president about.

30:04We've just had the biggest drug bust in the history of the world,$5 million. Schultz looks up from the Wall Street Journal and says, good, congratulations. Not interested. Moynihan is a little hurt. George, you don't understand. This is the biggest drug bust in the history of the world,$5 million. Good, congratulations. And then Moynihan thinks, And then he remembered George Shultz used to teach economics at the University of Chicago. George, I imagine you think that so long as there's a demand for drugs inside the United States, there will be a supply. At which point George Shultz folds down the journal interested for the first time and says, Dan, there may be hope for you after all.

30:44That's a great story. So blow up the boats. It's going to accomplish nothing. You're serious about this. You have to rededucate yourself to plan Colombia. You have to give people opportunities in the producing countries that are better than drug making. You have to protect them. You have to work with local authorities. You have to do foreign policy. You can't just do Hegseth policy. Just let's blow up something and see what happens. Well, the administration is not big fans of doing foreign policy that way. And we saw that the head of Southern Command, General Alvin Holsey, resigned. He was only a year into the job.

31:18and there's reporting that he was pushing back against whatever this plan is and that Pete Hexert didn't like it very much. Do you think there will be more pushback from within the rank and file? And ultimately, does anything come of this back and forth with Colombia and whatever tariffs they're going to levy and the aid that they're going to cut off? Yeah, I think with Colombia, so Petro's out of office early next year. The right will return to power in Colombia. And I think probably the situation will get easier. I think a lot of people, there will be pressure in Congress against the Columbia tariffs because they will recall that the reason there's a free trade agreement with Columbia is to keep Columbia out of the cocaine business.

31:59And if you blow up the free trade agreement, you kill cut flowers. I forget how many minutes you've got to move them from place to place. Yeah. But you don't have much time. And if you put a lot of barriers on cut flowers, you can kill the cut flower industry as fast, almost as you kill the cut flowers themselves. And then what do the farmers grow? You know, there's a pretty obvious replacement crop. And there are people who are, and the remains of the drug industry and the left-wing insurgency inside Colombia are still there, ready to come back to life. My guess is they'll blow up some more boats.

32:28Eventually, there'll be an undeniably innocent person. It'll be a scandal. And then at that point, it will also be undeniable that this whole project is a failure because you cannot blow up your way to a drug introduction. It's not going, it's just not, as George Schultz would say, the problem is the demand inside the United States. It will summon forth supply from somewhere. And I think the thing will probably tend to fizzle out. I hope that you're right. That's less scary than, you know, that we're suddenly doing regime change. And God knows where. I can't even imagine what that looks like with our White House.

33:02Well, yeah, Colombia and Venezuela have been scenes of guerrilla war going back to the early 19th century. It's just, it's not a good place for, certainly not a foreign power, to try to impose control on the country by controlling the capital city. Yeah. Well, they also, at least in the case of Venezuela, are so natural resource rich that it's a very different estimation than it seems like based on the actions or what they're purporting the actions are about. And Petro said that as well, which I'm sure pissed the administration off too, that he just said this is about oil, right? This isn't, and gold, I think he mentioned.

33:36okay we're going to take a quick break stay with us

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34:38So, want to drive? CarMax. Pickup not available everywhere. Restrictions and fee may apply. Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. Expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you So update on Dave It's up to you We'll take the laundry Rinse, it's time to be great Welcome back and before we go We already talked about Graham Plattner a little But we're going to do more plaid and tattoos Maine Senate race just turned into a headache For Democrats Graham Plattner, the Bernie-backed oyster farmer once seen as the party's next working-class hope, is apologizing for years of offensive Reddit posts about race, police, sexual assault.

35:33Plattner blames the comments on post-war trauma and say that he's changed. She also did take responsibility, which I am always appreciative of and talked about as PTSD, too. But the scandal is dividing Democrats, progressives defending Ms. Authentic, party leaders backing Governor Janet Mills as the safer choice. I interviewed Janet Mills last week. She was definitely on message talking about, you know, I'm the tested candidate and the seat is winnable if you have someone opposing Susan Collins who actually has a record to run on. You know, you already previewed your thoughts, but what are you thinking about the race?

36:09So let me say something about people who take responsibility. I would have so much more respect for you if what happened is someone like this in their announcement speech said, now I have to tell my followers something, which is when I came back from war, I was very disturbed. And I put a lot of things on the record that I'm not proud of. And I'm sure my opponents will eventually find them. You know what? Here they are. Here they are. Let me disclose to you what I said. And let me tell you why I've changed my mind about this. If you take responsibility after someone else finds you out, I don't think you took responsibility.

36:39Accountability begins with you being the first to say, and by the way, you owe this to your backers to say to them, you know, here are my vulnerabilities. I'm not trying to steal a yard here. You know, one of the things that made Barack Obama so invulnerable as a new candidate with an exotic name was he'd written this big autobiography. You want to find a bad story about Obama, it's in the book he wrote. It's in the table of contents. You can look up like Drug use, anti-American sentiment. Yeah. All there. And he works it through. So it's lost its power. Because he said, this is who I was. This is not who I am.

37:12This is who I was. This is why I was. This is why I changed. Okay. And you told us. So I guess the change of heart is sincere. So that's my question. If you've got these things in the record and you want to be forgiven after they come out, you have to tell people. And you especially owe that to your supporters. Not just as an act of strategy, but as an act of moral offense. That's moral authenticity. If you're sorry after you're caught, you're not authentic. I mean, for some benefit of the doubt, I think, you know, Graham Plattner, I think we're the same age. So we're both 41. I am less terminally online than majority of my peers.

37:49But certainly, you know, I don't know. I doubt I could run for office based on whatever old tweets or something. Not like racist anti-police stuff. Actually, that's not true. I could run for office. Maybe I will. But you should, you know, there's this discussion now about what it means to be a millennial or a Gen Z candidate and that they are going to come with a lot more baggage than a Barack Obama who had even written a lot of this stuff in his book does. and that people are a lot more forgiving of things that they find offensive or that all of society finds offensive. I mean, we've elected Donald Trump twice, right?

38:30And his stuff is on tape. For someone who doesn't use a phone, or I guess he does now, but famously didn't used to ever email or text, he's on tape talking. We could still grab her by the you-know-what. And I think that young people are so desperate for something different than what the establishment has been feeding them for so long that they are willing to forgive these kinds of things. Now, Janet Mills' campaign feels differently about that, obviously. But what do you make of, you know, what the new era of candidacy looks like with people who have been online their entire lives? Look, I think there are people who forgive in a very selective way.

39:09So J.D. Vance forgives you if you say Nazi things. He doesn't forgive you if you say non-Nazi things. He's very harsh. If you say, I don't think Charlie Kirk was all that, then you have your visas yanked and be deported. But if you say, Hitler was right and put more people in gas chambers and you're 42, that that's a youthful indiscretion that is to be forgiven even if you did it 10 minutes ago. I think just generally, when George W. Bush, who had kind of a troubled past, alcohol and maybe other things too, when he ran for president, he talked about it. And in his acceptance speech, he talked about it in a very eloquent way.

39:41and I had nothing to do with this, so I'm not praising my own work. But he talked at one point about his life and he wasn't specific, but he said, I understand forgiveness because I have needed it. That once you say, I'm not going to go into every sordid detail, but I'm letting everyone know there are things I'm not proud of. I'm not going to be shy about them and I'm going to acknowledge my remorse. That's a different message than someone unearths it and holds you to account and then you have a story. Have the story first. And not just as a matter of strategy, because that's also how we genuinely know.

40:14That's how we know you're remorseful, is that you bring it to light yourself. Fair enough. I mean, he obviously not even told even his highest level advisors about that, because there were people who left the campaign once they saw this and found it obviously to be incredibly disappointing that he had spoken about that, even if he was in the throes of PTSD. You know, one more thing, the people leaving. So if you are someone who in your 20s had substance abuse problems, had rage problems, sexual misconduct, and you've talked to your staffers about it and you truly are a different person, they will die in the last ditch to defend you.

40:50They will not quit because they will say, yeah, that was the guy I wouldn't have voted for when we were all 20, but now we're all 40 and this is the guy or woman I would vote for. And they have taken, everyone's got something and this person has faced it and taken steps to correct it. I believe in him or her even more than I would have if they were someone who'd never known the temptation to do anything wrong. If people are leaving, it's because you haven't been straight with them. And if you're not straight with your staff, you're not straight with anybody. That makes a lot of sense. And it feels like there's definitely energy shifting away from Plattner.

41:22We'll see how the next few weeks shake out because he has been, you know, he's raised like$4 million already and has been a big source of excitement across the state. I wanted to get your thoughts on the gerontocracy problem writ large, because the Democrats in particular are obviously struggling with this. You know, Janet Mills is 77. Bernie, who's older than she is, is like, you know, it's time for a change. But this is happening all over the country. And we did have a few representatives who passed away in office just since Donald Trump came back in. And, you know, there were seats left open where we could have, you know, taken key votes and needed that.

41:58So what are your thoughts about when it's time to go? I have a rather dark joke about this, which I hesitate to say in a public place. No, go for it. This is a Scott Calloway podcast. You say all the dark things. If I were a Democratic senator quizzing a judge, or certainly a Supreme Court justice, my first question would be, Mr. Justice, Madam Justice, I have one question for you. Do you smoke? No? Forget it. like if if ruth batter ginsburg had smoked the whole history of this country would be different yeah she would have had a distinguished career and and been intensely mentally acute until age 68 69 70 and then to the great sadness of all who loved her and to herself but um she would have been taken she she would have gone to meet her maker and gone to a just reward and have but the seat would become vacant at an appropriate time so i think one of the things that has happened is We've had this extraordinary public health revolution that the baby boom generation and just before have benefited from, and people are not adapted to it.

42:55And what also happens, I think this is more true for men than for women. You can go off the cliff quite quickly. You can be a very vigorous and healthy 77, and then a very sickly and feeble 79. And so it surprises them. They go into that last race at age 77 feeling, I'm more or less the person I was at 67. Maybe I need a little bit more rest in the afternoon, but I'm basically the same. and then bang, two years later, it's gone. Again, I think this is more for men than for women. There's a lot of luck of the draw in how this goes. You know, John McCain savagely beaten, every bone in his body broken, it seems, and yet he was vigorous to the very, very end.

43:32Other people don't have that kind of good luck. In general, society is living longer, and so you should expect the politicians probably will age, and there's certain advantages to being there for a while. You build more networks. And, you know, something for voters to think about, but it's not the only factor. And I think some Democrats are overlearning the Biden lesson and not understanding that the reason Biden's age was such a problem was because Biden ran in 2020 as the last candidate of the Democratic Center. And he won as the last candidate of the Democratic Center. And then when he became president, his age caught up with him and he was too feeble to prevent, to resist the Democratic left.

44:09And so he ran a much more left-wing administration than he had promised both his party and the country that he would deliver in 2020. In 2020, he promised normal. And what you got in 2021 was basically a Warren Buttigieg administration. And that's not what Biden had promised. That's not what he thought he would deliver. And I think if Biden had been more vigorous, that's not what would have happened. Yeah, there certainly could have been more pushback, I think, against the more activist groups or consultants that were pushing things. But, you know, I think even purely on immigration, if he had sounded like the Biden of the election, we would not have had those first three years, which clearly could have been avoided with just the laws on the books because they were avoided in the last year of the Biden presidency as a source of great frustration.

44:54And one of the other things that was a big problem was, look, this is probably the single most consequential, most difficult decision Biden faced was whether to push for schools to reopen in the fall of 2021. And in retrospect, we can see that there's a balance of risk here because, I mean, there really were dangers associated with opening the schools early. Kids may not get sick, but teachers get sick and kids' parents get sick. You had to make a really tough moral choice. what is more important here, the future of the next generation, because we know these kids are suffering from not being in school, or genuine risks to older people?

45:27How do you balance that? And the Biden administration basically acquiesced as many of the blue states said, we're going to let the teachers unions make this call. And I think that is an underestimated fact in why Democrats lost in 2024. And it's an underrated fact in understanding what's happening to American society, because we think about little kids, but there are lots of people on the cusp of dropping out of high school or not in 2021, 2022. And the closure of the schools meant they dropped out of high school. And many of them got into trouble with the law. The spate of carjackings here in Washington, a lot of the people who did that, those were not people who had to be criminals.

46:02They were people who were marginal in school. The schools were closed. They went out. Their parents were working. They got into trouble. And they did terrible damage to others. And many of them will be in prison for a long time and never, ever get their foot back on the ladder that they would have kept their feet on. had the school stayed open and they've been able to finish their degree. Absolutely. I mean, the learning loss is astounding and smart Democrats and some Republicans, but pay more attention, I guess, to the advice the Dems are giving are, you know, working on programs like tutoring programs to make up for that.

46:34And I don't want to make this sound like it was an easy call. It definitely wasn't. And there were some Republicans who went along with this as well, but it is the dividing line in society. And I've noticed that, you know, when I'm talking about whatever authoritarian thing Donald Trump is doing that I get a lot of pushback. Like, well, you're the ones who shut down society. You're the ones who told us that your kids couldn't go to school. And New Jersey, the governor's race for Phil Murphy's second term being within three points or that we have a governor, Youngkin, in Virginia. I think you can draw a straight line between that and what happened with the management of our school systems.

47:07And you want to know that when the call was made, the president of the United States really thought hard about it and heard advice from all sides and balanced the decision. And of course, look, I have very little sympathy for COVID second guessing. People will say things like, well, the scientist said a different thing in September than they said in May. Yeah, called science. You have a completely new problem. You know what? Month by month, you know more about the problem. So of course your answers change. I mean, religion doesn't change, but science does. So I have tremendous, for the imperfect information, for the real-time pressures, for the balancing of interests because teachers and parents' lives, those matter too.

47:44But the president of the United States has to be the one to say, you know what, the next generation counts most. And if we're going to impose burdens, we want to have fewer burdens on the rising generation and more burdens on those who've already been able to enjoy more of their lives. Yeah. I think also, you know, as a nod to the importance of the transparency of everything. And, you know, I'm a New Yorker. We had the Andrew Cuomo daily press conferences. Having that kind of access or feeling like someone was actually puzzling it out in front of you would have made people feel a lot more secure in those decisions because there were, you know, huge balance of factors.

48:23And Randy Weingarten hasn't actually I haven't read her new book, but I have not heard that it was a massive mea culpa. So I doubt that that's the case. But she hasn't done that either, you know, come out and really said, I understand how disappointed parents were in these decisions. I think we could have done X, Y or Z things differently. We could have built, you know, outdoor tents or recruited a bunch of younger teachers to come in for a couple of years and put our older teachers on Zoom classes and made it more of a hybrid model. coulda, woulda, shoulda, I guess. I don't know if that's an uplifting note to end on, but it is the note that we are ending on.

49:01David Frum, thank you so much for joining me. Oh, thank you. And I want to, you dropped a hint that you were thinking about running for office. Does that sound? Oh, I don't know. Not really. No, maybe it is a sad reflection on the state of our politics, but I think that you can actually affect more change on the outside than you can on the inside, at least the way that our politics works today. Well, I hope there are people who are within reach of your voice, they will think about it. And understand that office doesn't mean, there's something weird about people saying, if I'm not a United States senator, I'm nothing.

49:33That state assembly, state senate, school board, city government, these are all intensely important callings. And I hope people who follow you will be inspired by your thoughts to take up that burden. Because every job matters. I love that. That is definitely an optimistic note to end on. I hope that you'll come back again. This was such a treat. Thank you. So kind of you. Thank you. Thank you.