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Podcast Summary: The Rest Is Politics - Episode 88
Episode Overview In this episode of *The Rest Is Politics*, hosts Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart interview David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a prominent political commentator. The discussion revolves around Frum's experiences, insights on contemporary politics, and reflections on significant events such as the Iraq War and the rise of Donald Trump.
Key Themes and Discussions
- David Frum's Background
- Upbringing: Born in Toronto to Jewish immigrants; Frum's childhood was marked by a mix of comfort and awareness of global oppression.
- Political Evolution: Initially gravitated towards conservatism due to a belief in the necessity of American power to maintain global security.
- Insights on George W. Bush
- Human Side: Frum describes Bush as likable and humane, sharing a humorous anecdote about Bush's candidness post-presidency.
- Critique of Policies: Frum's views evolved to include criticism of the Iraq War, stating he wouldn't have supported it if it were solely about democratization.
- Current Political Landscape
- Trump and Vance: Frum discusses Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as a running mate, labeling Vance as an embodiment of the moral flexibility of modern Republicanism.
- Concerns about Trump: Frum articulates fears about Trump's potential return to power, emphasizing the existential threat it poses to democracy.
- Perspectives on Political Strategy
- Democratic Party's Challenges: Frum suggests that Kamala Harris could win the election by resonating with younger voters and addressing issues with empathy.
- Importance of Realism: Advises that political narratives should reflect real achievements of the current administration, despite challenges.
- Views on International Relations
- Ukraine: Frum stresses the importance of supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression and warns against isolationist tendencies emerging from the right.
- Middle East: Reflects on the tragedy of the Israel-Palestine conflict, expressing a strong stance against violence and a belief in peace through dialogue.
Key Takeaways
- Crisis of Confidence: Frum identifies a crisis of confidence in American leadership and the implications of Trump's potential comeback.
- Coalition Politics: Acknowledges that new coalitions will form in response to evolving political landscapes, emphasizing the need for adapting conservatism to contemporary issues.
- Personal Reflections: Frum's reflections on grief following the loss of his daughter add a poignant layer to the conversation, emphasizing the universal nature of loss and the human experience.
Conclusion The episode offers an insightful exploration of political evolution, moral dilemmas in leadership, and the complexities of modern American conservatism through the lens of David Frum's experiences and observations. Through personal anecdotes and political analysis, Frum illustrates the challenges facing both parties in the current political climate.
--- *Note: For more content from *The Rest Is Politics*, including exclusive benefits, consider signing up for The Rest Is Politics Plus at therestispolitics.com.*
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
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1:07Welcome to The Restless Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And we're joined today by our third Canadian-born guest following Michael Ignatieff and Mark Carney. But this one became a naturalized American in order to work for former U.S. President George W. Bush. He is, like me, a journalist who crossed the fence into politics, and I first came across Mr. David Frum when he was writing speeches for George Bush around the time of 9-11. He has since become rather more critical than I am of some of the decisions made at that time and some of the events that followed, notably the Iraq War.
1:46Now, he's a lifelong supporter from Canada of the American Republican Party, but he's now very much a never-Trumper, and he sees the possible return of Donald Trump, a bit like Roy and I do, as a pretty existential threat to democracy. He's also somebody who knows Britain very well, having chaired the conservative UK think tank Policy Exchange. He's now back in journalism. And I must say, earlier this year, he wrote one of the most moving pieces on grief, in fact, on anything that I've ever read, which was an article he wrote in The Atlantic following the death of his daughter, Miranda. So we have an awful lot to talk about.
2:24And David, first of all, thank you for being there. And Rory, where would you like to start? David, thank you. Can we start with a little bit about you and your childhood? Give us a bit of a sense of who you are growing up, where your parents, grandparents came from, and what the origin story, the backstories, we'd say, in politics of David Frum is. Well, that's a great invitation because for the past four years, I've been wrestling with a failed memoir. And so, I have all the information at my fingertips, even though I haven't organized it to my liking yet. Three of my four grandparents were born subjects of the Russian czar.
2:57One was born in New York City. I was born in Toronto in 1960, Ashkenazi Jew from moderately observant background. And I grew up in a Toronto where almost every adult I knew was someone who had fled oppression of one kind or another. Refugees from and survivors of the Holocaust, people who had fled the communist bloc. There are a lot of Hungarians from 56 came to Canada, Czechs from 68. One of my homeroom teachers in middle school lived with a man who had been tortured under the Pinochet regime. We knew people who had fled Uganda. In fact, my father's chief bookkeeper was an Ismaili Muslim who had been expelled from Uganda.
3:40So, I grew up in a world in which dictatorship and oppression were very intimate realities. At the same time as I lived in this extraordinary cocoon of security and comfort. My parents were quite affluent. My mother, who died young in 54 in 1992, was one of the most prominent journalists in the country. My father had begun as a dentist and became a successful real estate developer. So, I had this contrast between my home life, which could not have been more comfortable, and the terrors of the world around me. And one of the ways in which I became political and began drifting away, because Canada is so comfortable and so safe.
4:21But the best and worst aspect of the Canadian character is a certain tendency toward complacency, of believing that all of this is something that happened because Canadians achieved it and Canadians deserved it. And the misfortunes of others are sort of their fault. Whereas I had an early intuition that all of this was an island that owed its existence to the protective embrace of first British and then American power. And so, where I became moved rightward when most of the people I knew were liberalish was my sense of a very dangerous world where the dangers were kept at bay by arm power, first British, then American.
4:58Do you think you had a bit of survivor guilt? Is there a part of you that wishes you were more like those people whence you come? God, I wouldn't want to be them, but I was intensely... Look, my father's parents came to Canada from Poland in 1930. They had suffered the ordinary insults of anti-Semitism, but they migrated for economic reasons, and they came to Canada because they had family there. My father was born in Toronto in 1931. Most of their family stayed behind in Poland, and they were almost all murdered. Had my father's parents stayed behind, my father would have been murdered sometime around his 10th or 11th birthday.
5:33And that was something I knew, as often happens in life, it was something that has become much more vivid to me in my later years, but it was something I knew from my early years. But did I wish that it had been me being on a forced march from, you know, one from Austro-Lenka to the Warsaw Ghetto? No, I was very happy to miss that. So, David, you set off on a journey which brought you more to the political right. You ended up with George W. Bush. Tell us a little bit about that journey and what took place in the interim from that childhood growing up in the comforts and wonders of Canada towards ending up with George W.
6:10Bush? Well, I didn't journey toward the right. I was sort of gravitated to the right as a teenager because of, I think, as I look back on this contrast between safety in my little island and the world I saw and how those terrors were kept at bay. I had a very realistic understanding of what it took to keep the terrors at bay. I went to a university in the United States. My My mother was dual Canadian US national and then was kind of floundered around through my 20s. And I often advise young people who are interested in journalism. You can't start in journalism. You have to fail at other things first before you're qualified for the occupation.
6:49So I floundered around through my 20s. I went to law school and finished that, then fell in love and got married and still am married. I got a job at the Wall Street Journal on the editorial page. And I just sort of bumped along and drifted from journalistic events. But I was very committed to the Republican and conservative project of the 1980s and 1990s, which I saw as first and foremost, a defense of human freedom against foreign authoritarian violence, and then unthinking interference with private markets at home. So, when I look back on it from this vantage point, I say, you know, people like me who supported Bush and then moved away from the Republican parties, we're often accused of mending our views to ingratiate ourselves with some imaginary Georgetown cocktail party set that hasn't really existed for probably 40 years.
7:44But I look back and say, what I have believed from the beginning to the end is collective security, democratic government at home, markets, free trade, and the necessity of all of this world system being guaranteed by some powerful external force, which was first Britain and then now is the United States. David, I get into quite a lot of trouble with my left-leaning, and I'm left-leaning, as you know, but some of my friends, because whenever the subject of George W. Bush comes up, I instinctively am quite supportive of him as a human being. And I've always tried to sort of look at people as not merely through the political lens.
8:25I always found him, you know, a really quite charming and likable and very humane human being. What are your memories of working for George W.? Well, let me tell you a story about him that will warm, I think, every skeptic, although it takes place after he left office. Can I use a little off-color language on this podcast? Will that offend anybody? You may. You may. Go for it, David. So the year is 2017. George Bush has organized a giant fundraiser for a hospital on the west side of Los Angeles. Millions of dollars are being raised, thousands of dollars a plate. They need a big name headliner and they get George W.
8:59Bush, which causes some controversy in the very liberal crowd that writes big checks in West Los Angeles. But things look up because at the inaugural for Donald Trump in January of 2017, George Bush is caught on camera mouthing. These words are not heard, but everyone can read them. After Trump's inaugural speech, that was some weird shit. Yeah. And he said, he whispers that to, I think, Hillary Clinton. And anyway, so everyone, all the people in the West side of Los Angeles are charmed by the some weird shit. And when it's time to introduce George W. Bush, that the introducer says to this room full of big donors, and I know many of the people in this room were skeptical of you and voted against you in two elections, but we are all amused when you are delighted when you are caught on video saying that was some weird shit about Donald Trump's inaugural.
9:48And everyone claps. George Bush comes to the microphone and they're still clapping as he comes to the microphone. He leans into the microphone and he says, so you like me now, you motherfuckers. And the room convulses. So one of the things as a writer for Bush, keeping the Bush sense of humor under control was like owning a 200 pound dog and trying to keep it under control with a thin leather leash because he was so dangerously funny so much of the time. And most of the humor could not be said, could not be shared by president or even maybe by an ex-president. But when it came out, you saw who the man was.
10:32Alistair, I'm very interested in this question of your relationship with David and George W. Bush and everybody, because during the time that I've got to know you, you are honestly quite tribal. You're very much a man of the left. You are instinctively pretty antagonistic towards British conservatives. And yet you somehow had to reconcile yourself towards American Republicans who are, for my money, even more right-wing than British conservatives. So can you just give us a bit of a glimpse of what happened in 2001 and whether you felt any, this is really a question to Alistair, any strange discomfort or dissonance about suddenly having to find yourself surrounded by people who really you'd been campaigning against for most of your life?
11:17Well, yes, I did, but much more with Rumsfeld and Cheney and the people who define themselves as the pretty extreme neocons. Because I felt George Bush had an understanding of the particular difficulties that Tony Blair was facing politically at home. And that's what I mean about him being humane. I felt that, and I completely get where David's coming from. He could be very reverent. He was very self-deprecating. He used to make jokes about he could never understand the intelligence because he wasn't intelligent enough. He used to constantly sort of belittle his own experience, his own wisdom.
11:54And yet I found him somebody that was really easy to relate to. So I guess, and also the fact is we were in a very, very difficult situation. where politically, I guess, you were looking to build alliances rather than break them down. But I don't know whether you agree with that, Tate, David, that he was a very different sort of human being to some of the others around that I found very, very difficult to deal with. Yes. I know. I think that's very perceptive. And of course, your angle of observation was very, very intimate. I actually did not work that much when I was there on foreign policy issues.
12:28I worked mostly on domestic issues. My big foreign policy brief was Mexico, not anything transatlantic. And one of the things I remember most intently was preparing for the state visit of Mexican President Vicente Fox, the first Mexican president ever elected in a competitive multi-party election, who arrived at the White House on, I believe, September 10th, 2001. And that was, I mean, for me, that was one of the most moving moments of my life. It's now obscured by other incidents in history. But I want to say something about Alistair's tribalism. If I can tell a tale out of school, I visited Alistair at his home in North London just on the eve of the – was it just before or just after the Brexit referendum?
13:07Just after, I think, yeah. Yeah. And what we talked about then, if I can tell a tale out of school, is how because human beings live longer than they used to do, we often have the experience of growing old in a world that's very different from the world in which we were young. And so, when you're young, you have an illusion that the arrangement of political forces is not only natural, but unchangeable because it hasn't changed for you. But over time, these things begin to drift and shake. So, during the Brexit time, I was like, well, I wrote a little short play. I was doing a blog. I wrote a blog somewhere.
13:44I wrote a short play about the American. I was asked by my British friends, many of whom were pro-Brexit, why I was so horrified by it. I said, I can only look at this like a North American. I understand there are deep issues of British patriotism here, English patriotism, but I wrote the short play that went something like the American to the British, I need you to watch your brother. Again, again, you're always asking me to do this. Yes, I am always asking you to do this. It's not fair. Life isn't fair. You like him better than you like me. You notice I never ask him to watch you. So we live in a world in which things change.
14:21And so I have this, I've believed in collective security, free trade, the alliance of the democracies under the protective cover of the world's leading liberal power, first Britain, then America. And I believed that all my life. And in 1980, that made you a Reaganite. And in 2020, it makes you an anti-Trumpite. And David, where did this put you in relation to these Brits? So you got involved in British Policy Exchange, right? Yeah. And so I guess you knew Michael Gove. You knew Liz Truss. You may have come across Priti Patel. I mean, what do you think of that group of people? What was their conservatism?
14:59What was their vision of the country? Was it something that resonated with you? Did it feel like American republicanism? Look, at its best, and I know people in Britain are so sick of talking about Brexit, I sense the little sound volumes being shifted to mute. But I understood the appeal of sovereign island independence. I really did. And so long as people made clear that this was going to be very expensive, but was worth it. I couldn't argue with anyone who said that, that this is a self-governing island. It's always been self-governing. You're good at it. You don't want to take orders from foreign courts and bureaucracies, and we're prepared to pay the enormous price of putting up all these barriers to trades in services and goods in the movement of people.
15:46But the problem was that no one said that. A few men and women of iron conscience said it, but most people pretended that there was going to be – that Brexit meant more, not less. And so, I had a lot of arguments over that. But I do think one of my observations, and it's a little uncomfortable, is that the conservatism I grew up in was an accumulation of solutions to problems in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. And some of those solutions worked brilliantly. Others of those solutions failed dismally. And some of them might have worked but were politically unacceptable. But the problems changed. And so you shouldn't be surprised when you see, as I and Alistair observed together after Brexit, that you get new kinds of coalitions.
16:28So questions about what should the world look like after the Cold War, after 9-11, is going to group people in different ways. And the question of what should the world look like before 9-11 and before the end of the Cold War? Is there a sense of nostalgia with which you're looking at this conservatism that you believed in because you just do not recognize it in the current Republican Party leadership? I have no nostalgia for anything. I'm a pretty intense student of history. And one of the lessons of history is do not wish to be born even five minutes before you were born. Just think of the dental care, among other things.
17:05The world is a better and safer place in almost every way, certainly for citizens of the developed countries and for most of the rest of the world as well in 2024 than it was in 1984 and 1964. We're free from the terror of a US-Soviet nuclear exchange, which would not just be a mass death event, but probably the extinction of human civilization. So, that's gone and that's a tremendous mercy. So, I have no nostalgia for it. What is challenging as we get older is to remain open to new possibilities. And you were kind enough to refer to the article I wrote about my daughter. I had three children.
17:42I have two. I'm very close to them. And I try to see a lot of the world through their eyes. And the pain of the loss we've suffered means that in a way, the future my eldest daughter is not going to see becomes more precious to me. And it can't be subject to the dictatorship of the aging. So, yes, there are new problems. Climate change was not understood well in the 1980s. The mass migration on the scale of tens of millions of people was not anticipated when travel was more expensive in the 1970s and 1980s. These are just two of the many kinds of new problems that are different. And to quote the greatest of American presidents, Abraham Lincoln, as our situation is new, so we must think anew.
18:26And intelligent conservatism is based not on pretending the world isn't changing, because of course the world is. But I guess what I'm getting at is that there was a time in your life when you probably thought that a more conservative Republican party view of the world would be better for addressing these problems, where now you seem to be in a place where Trump in particular, you look at with a certain form of, I guess, contempt and maybe a sense of loss that that is what is now leading Republicanism, the Republican Party in the US. Look, I believe that Mitt Romney obviously would have been a much better president.
19:00I think he would have been one of the best presidents we ever had. I think he's demonstrated both his extraordinary technical competence and his moral integrity. I was very proud to have cast, as my last Republican vote, was my vote for Mitt Romney. And I'm very proud of that vote. But I think the question of is Donald Trump a conservative or not is to me actually a very tertiary question. What he is is unacceptable. And new coalitions are going to come into being. And if he is beaten in November, as I have been confident all along he would be, and I'm now even more confident than ever that he will be.
19:37But if he is beaten, then we're going to open into a new world and there'll be a huge question for Republicans. Is the future this kind of bleak Orbanism, you know, based on this reactionary authoritarianism that originates in small Central European republics and has no relevance to American life? Or are we going to find some way to build new kinds of coalitions around ideals of markets and trade and collective security? David, expand on this idea that it's the politics of Viktor Orban, that it's the politics of a small Central European country. not relevant to the United States. And explain that firstly for us, and then work out how on earth you frame that for American voters.
20:19So, if you're Hungarian, you've had a bad couple of hundred years. It's just you're on the losing side of both the First and the Second World Wars. Your vision of a great Hungarian empire is carved up by peace treaties. You're this little state with many of your people who speak the same language outside your borders because of your own bad decisions to back the wrong horse in World War I and World War II. You think you are, you know, you've produced so much science and culture and music. You think you're the center of a great cultural atmosphere, but no one pays any attention to you in the 21st century.
20:56I mean, it's just endless disappointment and humiliations and regrets. And then the Poles, who are so much poorer than you, their economy is soaring. They're going to overtake Japan and GDP per capita by the end of the decade at the current rate. And Hungary is just shriveling and sinking. And you're mad at the world and you need someone to blame and it can't be the Hungarian. So maybe it's the Jews, many of whom used to be Hungarians. Maybe it's somebody else. And this culture of grievance, you then say, okay, by hiring Tucker Carlson's father, we're going to put it into Tucker Carlson's brain.
21:29And he is going to sell this vision of grievance to the most dynamic, most exciting, most vibrant, fastest growing, most successful major society in the world. And like, what? We're supposed to get mad because some of the Hungarians live in Romania? The whole point of the United States is we back the European Union. So the way we solve the Hungarians and Romania problem is by having visa-free borderless travel between Hungary and Romania so you can live wherever you want. But what you're getting to is that you somehow think that weirdly Donald Trump is approaching the United States as though it were Hungary.
22:04He's behaving as though he's Viktor Orban. He's behaving as if America is not a success. That has been the key to make America great again. And it's all about his famous line in his first inaugural address was, the American dream is dead. It was pessimism. It was despair sold in America. You're going to sell pessimism and despair in America. That's not going to work. But it did work, right, David? Well, it got him to within 3 million votes of the front runner in the 2016 election. And it got him within 7 million votes of the front runner in the 2020 election. And it lost him the House of Representatives in 2018.
22:37And it lost his party to the Senate in 2021. And it delivered them the worst down the ballot performance of an out party in a non-presidential year in 2022. And it cost him a bunch of judgeships and county commissionerships in 2023. And it's going to cost him the election in 2024. So no, I don't think it works. I mean, it works for him. he's been able to steal a lot of taxpayer money. And he's enjoyed being, you know, hobnobbing with his admired dictators all over the world. So David, insofar as it works, and it works in the sense that it made him president, and it's working insofar as until about a week ago, he was well in the lead to become president again.
23:13Why was it working for him insofar as it worked, given all that you said, given that he's selling a Hungarian vision in the United States? I think it works to the extent it works. Because for most of us as individuals, once we reach a certain point in our lives, the future holds decline leading to extinction. And it's very natural to project our individual dwindling hold on life onto the others. I mean, who wants to hear that we're going to discover a cure for Alzheimer's 10 years after we die from it? There are a lot of voters who are older to whom the message of pessimism resonates because it feels true to them in their lives.
23:51And I always said when people said, my friend, my cousin, my dad is a big Trump supporter, what can we say to reason with them? And my stock response is tell them to believe more in their children. Because a lot of, I think, what goes on, and this is very true, I think, of what is going on in British conservatism, is this kind of hostility of the old toward the young, lack of confidence and trust of the old toward the young. And I always say, you know, the reason you should listen to your children, you know more than your children. But your children are ambassadors from the future. They tell you what's going to be.
24:26And if you care about them, and if you care about the future, you need to listen. I think that's one of the reasons why Kamala Harris has had such this amazing start, because I think she's giving that sense of respecting the young. Yes, I think that's true. David, in the event, which I know you think is very unlikely that Donald Trump becomes president and J.D. Vance becomes vice president, what will that mean for the United States and the world? Donald Trump's first and highest priority, should he return to the presidency, will be to shut down all the legal proceedings against him. There isn't an obvious legal way to do that.
25:02There are a lot of instruments of power, but it's not clear that any of them are legal. So we will very rapidly be plunged into a huge crisis of legality and constitutionality about the powers of the president? Can the president fire prosecutors who have already initiated cases against him? Can he shut down state criminal cases against him? Donald Trump will find partners and enablers who will say yes, but he will also meet a lot of resistance. So, the outlook is not, some of the people who fear Donald Trump fear that he will rapidly consolidate power in his hands. That might happen, but as likely, more likely, is we have a complete crisis of authority with the president trying to do things that the system can't accept.
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25:40Massive resistance to that, especially if he doesn't control both houses of Congress, possibly rapidly on our way to an early impeachment crisis. And meanwhile, no policy of any kind on any other subject and no foreign policy. The Trump people will try to cut off Ukraine and they can destroy NATO without formally withdrawing. All the president has to do is give an interview to Breitbart.com in which he says, I'm angry at Germany and won't defend them. That's it. NATO's gone. I mean, NATO is an elaborate set of treaties and accommodations. They all rest on the American security guarantee, which in turn rests on the president's personal willingness to use nuclear weapons if he or she must to defend NATO allies.
26:20If the president says, I won't do that, then NATO is kaput, whatever happens to the treaty structure. He will try to start a massive round of trade wars, not only against China, which is a special case, but against all our friends. Remember, Donald Trump imposes tariffs not only on China, but on Mexico and the European Union and Vietnam and India and other partners we should be working with. So for me, the outlook is just mayhem, chaos, the collapse of American alliances, the collapse of American leadership. Okay, David, thanks for this. And Rory, we'll take a quick break. Limu, Limu! And Doug.
26:56Limu and I always tell you to customize your car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. But now, we want you to feel it. Cue the emu music, Limu. Save yourself money today. Increase your wealth. Customize and save, we say. That may have been too much feeling. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.
27:27You gave a couple of really interesting pieces of advice in stuff that you were writing to Vice President Harris. You said two things which I'd like you to explain. Irrationality can be harnessed and redeployed. That's the first thing you said. And the other thing you said that caught my eye was trust that reality matters more than Trump wishes that it does. So just explain to me what you meant by that and why you think they are useful to Vice President Harris. If you think about it, those pieces of advice are slightly contradictory to one another, but here's how I unite them. The first, I believe, is the big chronic weakness of parties of the left is they tend to exaggerate the role of rational calculation in voter behavior.
28:12They think if we deliver certain promises of services and goods and benefits, that those material inducements will matter more than tribe and affinity. And that's a gamble in a way that parties of the left have to make. But I think they can often be blind to how much of voter behavior is driven by deeply irrational, anti-rational forces. And for women in politics, this is a special danger, but also opportunities. There's a lot of political science says that women have an advantage when they run for local races, especially school boards, because voters credit them often irrationally with caring more about children than men do.
29:00And so voters credit them often irrationally with being more honest than men. And so, when women politicians behave in gender-conforming ways, they get a bump. But when they seek the very top job, which is always to some degree a military job, and in the United States is very much a military job, then they're behaving in non-gender-conforming ways and then they face certain challenges. And a lot of Donald Trump's attack on Kamala Harris has been to imply that her sexual behavior is deviant or debauched. And she's basically too slutty to be president. And this seems to be, first, a total figment of his imagination.
29:38Second, even if it weren't a total figment of his imagination, none of his damn business. Third, are you joking? We're talking about Donald Trump, who's the most sexually debauched person ever to hold the presidency, and there is no runner up. If sexual propriety were a valid criterion for getting that job, Donald Trump would not be in it. But what he understands is none of that is going to matter because he's playing on the human lizard brain. And you cannot deny it. And there is a tendency, again, on the American progressive side to scold people for having lizard brains and to say, well, are you saying that women or – well, I'm not saying it.
30:18I'm not even thinking it. But I can't help feeling it or many people can't help feeling it. That's just, you know, we've been wearing pants for a comparatively short time of our existence as a species. We are animalistic. So, one, recognize that Trump is talking to the lizard brain. First, know it. Second, don't scold people for it because that won't work. Third, fight it. Fourth, do a little jujitsu with it that make her femininity, make her physical appeal. Make that, don't deny it. Hillary Clinton would often try to wall her off and say, I'm not a woman at all. Don't think of me that way. People are going to think of you that way.
30:58So, you have to play with it as Margaret Thatcher did. But the last is, and this is slightly contradictory, is do trust that reality does matter. The present incumbent administration has a great story to tell about what has happened in the United States since the end of the pandemic. The United States has had more success adjusting to the post-pandemic world than any pure democracy. Now, liberals being liberal, progressives being progressive are often reluctant to say that because not everyone is benefiting. And so, they get bashful that basically, if anyone's having a bad time, we can't talk to the people who are having a good time.
31:32But in a democracy, you just need more of the vote. And if most people are having a good time, you should tell them, remind them. I pointed out in a recent column that when Bill Clinton was running for re-election in 1996, the economy began to really turn in 1995. 1996 was the first good year, really good year of the expansion that began in 1993. In his State of the Union address early in 1996, he began with good economic news within the first 60 seconds of his State of the Union address. You lose audience with every passing minute. Biden in 2024 didn't get to good economic news until past the 15-minute mark, which meant that many people never heard it, and he's not an effective communicator even at his best.
32:12And it was a good night for him, but this is not his best year. You start with that by saying more Americans are working than ever before. The unemployment rate is lower than it's been at any time since the 1960s. We're doing better than any economy in the world. The inflation is subsiding. Deaths from drug abuse are declining. The crime rate is dropping. Just pound that point into people's head. They only know their own personal experience. They don't think much of what was happening to other people. How could they know? You have to tell them. David, why did the Democratic Party spend so long before we got to a situation where Joe Biden stepped down?
32:51Why is that not something that happened in 2022, 2023? I mean, what on earth was going on? Why did Joe Biden run it so close to the wire? Well, I will trust Alistair's instincts on this more than my own, having been so close to the center of these things. But my observation is this. First, it was a moving target. If you watch clips of Biden from 2020, he's obviously getting on, but he's still quite an effective platform performer. And in 2024, he's not. And if you work with him every day, you probably don't notice the point of no return. It's a little worse in the beginning of 2021 than it is later in 2021, a little worse and so on.
33:29But when is exactly the moment of no return if you work with him every day? And my sense from just what I read, is that he can be quite effective if you get him in the right way. I'm sure at a National Security Council meeting at 10 in the morning, he's very impressive. Very impressive or able to conduct a competent conversation? I would say very impressive because he will tell you a story about Golda Meir in 1974. And if you're the typical 30-something staffer, that just seems like a source of wisdom and knowledge that you will never have. So, I don't know. So, I think one is it was a moving target.
34:04The second is we become very reluctant to acknowledge things that are said by our opponents. So one of the big points made by Republican critics of Biden was they threw these attacks at him for being decrepit, many of them exaggerated, many of them based on deceptively edited videos. And so it's a natural instinct that partisans will rally and defend. And what you're attacked for, you want to deny. And then there's a lack of mechanism that in the end, we have a process for removing presidents and it's defeat at the ballot box. There isn't otherwise. Even the famous 25th Amendment doesn't remove the president.
34:44It only suspends his holding of the office for a finite period of time, which must be repeatedly renewed. So it depended on his agreement. David, just sticking with the current contest, you have this extraordinary relationship with J.D. Vance, who was essentially working for you, writing for you under a pseudonym. Just first of all, what was that arrangement? Why was he writing under a pseudonym? And secondly, what's your take on it as a human being and as a politician? Yeah. So, I realized we probably first met about the year 2008 when he would have been, having finished a service in the Marine Corps, having completed his education at Ohio State, but I think he was maybe a first year student at Yale Law School when I met him.
35:28And he wrote to me. I was running a website, didn't have a big readership, but that was sort of influential within the conservative, part of the conservative world that was looking for a way forward after the terrible defeat of 2008. And I was arguing, you know, we needed to hold onto our core beliefs in market economics and private enterprise, but we needed to, and the formula that was on the masthead was find a new conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible. And everyone who came into my orbit knew that that's what I was promulgating. That's what I was looking for.
36:02That's what I was trying to promote in advance. And not a lot, but some thousands of younger people read, participated in, and we had many, many contributors. And so, this young Yale law student wrote to me. I met him at a lunch in Washington during the summer of 2008 and 2009, because of course, the defeat would have been behind us. 2009, probably. He was incredibly impressive. So smart, so driven, so ambitious. I liked him and admired him. And then we began He wrote a number of pieces. He wrote under a pseudonym because he was at Yale Law School. And the reason he gave was he was worried about how his classmates would react to the things he was saying because he was saying some pretty conservative things, including ironically enough, given what he later claimed was his origin story, the defense of the good conduct of American troops in Iraq.
36:52There's an old Hollywood joke, do you know Doris Day? No, Doris Day. I knew her Vance before he was radicalized by his post-Iraq experience. Like when he first came back from Iraq, he defended the American intervention in Iraq. Only later did he say, no, that was the crucial turning point in my life. What was it about him that you found impressive? He clearly made a big mark on you. Yes. So look, lots of people, you met J.D. Vance, you said, this is a man who obviously is ambitious, who is looking for a career in public life, is going to go places. And as the whole world now sees, and this is the part I didn't get, he was a very good mimic and mirror.
37:34So, he had a way of refracting back to you what you were saying to him in a way that was a little better than the way you had said it to him in the first place. And this was the story of his career. So, he ended up, my website closed in 2012. I ended up later at the Atlantic. He wrote a number of articles for the Atlantic again, expressing the modern, moderate Republican, anti-Trump view. And we were in pretty close contact in those days. And I remember a meeting that he organized just after the 2016 election. This would have been late 2016, early 2017, between the election and the inaugural, where you could see his mind had begun to shift gears.
38:12And the theme of the meeting was, could anything good come out of cooperating with the Trump presidency? And there are about a dozen people involved in the conservative world, and I was one of them. and my argument at the meeting was, I don't want to say that nothing good can come of this. And I don't want to say that nobody of conscience should participate in this administration, but you need to be very careful. It's going to be very, very dangerous. And probably nothing good will come, but of course it's worth a try. That was my view. But I could see that was not the answer I gave. I saw him a few, I was expected.
38:45I saw him a few more times in 2017. I saw him for the last time in person. This is an odd story. In 2018, I gave a Jordan, the Canadian pop philosopher Jordan Peterson came to Washington. I gave a dinner for him and J.D. Vance was one of the attendees. And I think that was the last time I saw him in person. David, can we lean into this for a bit? Because there's a dissonance going on, which is difficult for me to get my head around. And you can help me with this a little bit. On the one hand, you sound like what I guess we'd call a kind of socially liberal, fiscally conservative centrist, kind of David Cameron, Keir Starmer, you know, environmentally responsible, culturally modern.
39:27And on the other hand, you're giving a dinner for Jordan Peterson. And what's going on here? Well, first, I'm not socially, I'm not so socially liberal. I'm pretty social. I have questions of do criminals belong in jail? Should the border be enforced? Is marriage the best institution for human happiness? I'm pretty conservative on those kinds of issues. Is abortion to be avoided if at all possible? I'm pretty conservative on those issues. How should universities be organized? Boy, am I conservative. The professor talks, the student takes notes. So, I'm pretty – I mean, the world – partly is the issues that seem to me the most important now are not the issues on which I am most conservative.
40:14And if the kaleidoscope of politics shifts and those issues do come more – if we get past the threat that we're going to have the overthrow of democracy in the United States and trade wars between allies and surrender Ukraine to the Russians then, and if other things truly become urgent, then I have more conservative views on some of those questions. Second, I am, like all of us, somewhat tribal. I have a lot of inherited friends on the right. And third, I give a lot of dinners. And Jordan Peterson is a cultural warrior, though, isn't he? I mean, you've talked in a pretty modest way about your conservatism, but that guy is well out there in the J.D.
40:50Vance culture wars. Well, in 20, he's, but he's, look, we all are in motion. So in 2018, he was much less so. So, the thing that he became famous as a culture warrior, but the reason he became important was because he had a message that appealed to lost and depressive young men and gave them ways of organizing. That's what his books were mostly about. And so, a lot of the advice he gave to the lost and disoriented who came to his talks was, I think, helpful. They found it helpful. And one of the tragedies is somebody who was really a self-help guru. And there's always a little something a little trashy and false about self-help because the truths are pretty obvious.
41:39I mean, my joke about him at the time was that Jordan Peterson's advice was, should always wear a seatbelt, get plenty of exercise, tidy up your room, and every once in a while, punch a baby in the face. Well, wait a minute. Why punch a baby in the face? Well, if I just said the first three things, your mom said the first three things. They don't get interesting unless I add the punch the baby in the face. But he was in those days much more about items one, two, and three. And it's only in his latter career, post his traumatic health events, that he's decided I'm going, I'm leading with the punch the baby in the face idea.
42:14Okay. Well, let's park him. On J.D. Vance, you used this phrase about him, moral flexibility. Were you aware of that early on in your relationship with him, that his ambition was such that he would, unlike you, he would move from being a kind of Reaganite conservative to somebody who will do whatever Donald Trump says. No, not at all. Not at all. Quite the contrary. So what do you think of him now? When he wrote his famous book, in which he has some nice things to say about me. He does, yeah. For which I thank him. When he wrote his famous book, I wrote back that I had just won criticism of it, which is he said in the introduction of the book, he says that the story I tell here, I tell not because I'm an extraordinary person, but because I'm an ordinary person enabled by the promise of America.
43:00And I wrote back and said, no, that's not true. You are an extraordinary person. And I understand why you said the contrary, but it's important that you, in your private thinking, understand that what you did is not available to everybody because of your extraordinary drive. But I said this as compliments, your extraordinary drive and gifts and energy and ability, they are beyond the ordinary. And I think we tend to believe that when the good fairies give you some gifts, they give you all of them. And so you think with those gifts would also come integrity and character. I mean, he showed so much character getting from point A to where I knew him that you thought that it never occurred to me that character would be the defect, actually, that that was the deficit quality.
43:39But I suppose you have to have a character defect to even to imagine that you could be the person that could be Donald Trump's number two, especially when you see what happened to the last guy. Yeah. Well, I wrote a piece early in 2017 for a friend. It was published in The Atlantic. It was a public piece, but it was inspired by a question I'd got from a friend, not one of the people at this meeting we had in early 2017, but about we're talking about whether or not this particular person should take a national security job in the Trump administration. And while my advice to him was, yes, you owe that to your country, you're working for the country, not for Donald Trump, by then my answer had seemed to me insufficient.
44:15So, I thought about it some more and I wrote a piece and it ended with this observation that if you're going to go to work for Donald Trump, you need to be very clear in your mind about where you will say no, about how and when, when you are summoned by the presence of the president, that awe-inspiring presence, no matter how big a doofus the president actually is, and in this case, he's a pretty big doofus, no matter how much of a doofus, no matter how wicked he is, the presence is awe-inspiring and is meant to be awe-inspiring and when you're summoned and you're asked to do something improper or wrong will you say no and then i said and then you need to bear in mind that if the if this guy thought there was any chance you would say no you wouldn't be there in the first place david help us understand through jd vance the swing voters or maybe voters in general in pennsylvania wisconsin michigan i guess he comes story here, because we're focusing now on election, which looks like it's going to be determined in three key states.
45:17And J.D. Vance sometimes seems to claim to be speaking for some of the people in those states. Talk us through that story and what that means for the election. Well, first data point, when he ran for Senate in 2022, he ran, I believe, 20 points behind the incumbent governor of Ohio. So, this idea that he's a tribune of the people of those areas is false. One of his biggest, his big causes as Senator were opposing aid to Ukraine and helping support the cryptocurrency industry, neither of which seem like big causes of the people of Ohio. I would also say, I think there's a real hazard. And I think this is one of the things that Biden was guilty of, of succumbing to fossilized thinking about the map.
46:02I'm not sure that those are the only swing states in America. Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, those are also swing states, and they are swing states more connected to the American future. And one of the things I think the Biden administration got wrong, both from a political and a policy point of view, is if Donald Trump was the most protectionist president since the war, Joe Biden was the second. And he was so protectionist, partly because there are people in his party believed in state-led economic development and other things that I disapprove But also because they were frozen, they thought the map in 2024 must look like the map of 2016 and 2020.
46:38And they're not paying attention to, well, Georgia's in play, Arizona's in play, Nevada's in play, much more future-oriented economies. And by the way, the economy of Pennsylvania and Michigan are changing. The economies of those states are changing. And it's not just about the industries of the 19th century anymore. But J.D. Vance offered a politics of social reaction joined to economic protectionism, joined to defeatism at best about America's role in the world. And I think that responded much more to a small intellectual clique than to the actual concerns of those areas. You know, probably the single most urgent problem of those areas is opioid addiction.
47:16And you need a real program. And by the way, a problem that got worse during the pandemic, but has become a little less worse since the pandemic. David, can I just ask you about Iraq? So you went from a position of broadly supporting George Bush on Iraq to a place of pretty severe criticism. What was it that made you support him? And what was it that turned you into a critic? I don't want to overstate this because one of the things that I have always been really resistant to is a lot of people who were supporters turned into very fierce critics after the war became more difficult than it was thought to be at the beginning.
47:57So, well, you know, that just strikes me as a little cowardly, frankly. If you were there at the takeoff, you need to, you know, take the bumps on the landing too. And I won't name names here, but I didn't become one of those who said, yes, I was all for it. Now I feel betrayed. it. My thinking on it was the thing that I would never have supported an American war to make Iraq more democratic. I would have supported a lot of measures to make Iraq more democratic, but outright war is you resort to for self-defense. So, I didn't have a very high level security clearance. I was a speech writer. So, I believe those who thought that there were really dangerous weapons either in presence or in imminent development in Iraq.
48:37And when that intelligence turned out to be ahead of the facts, I was, of course, disappointed and a little embarrassed and said, okay, well, in that case, I wouldn't have, I mean, I make no excuses for Saddam Hussein and I'm glad he's gone. But I would not have supported a war purely for making Iraq a better place. And so, I supported a war for very particular reasons. Those reasons turned out not to be true. And so, you know, I'm in the wrong there. That said, I don't join the King of Arabism. I think a lot of what the critics say is they blame the British and the Americans for things that the Iraqis did.
49:13When they say, you know, there are all these casualties in the civil war. Well, the Iraqis had agency too. They didn't have to have that. They got a chance. David, I served in Iraq and I find these conversations very interesting because you speak with such confidence and authority, maybe because you were a speechwriter or journalist, but how much time have you spent in Iraq? How much do you actually know about this country you're speaking with such confidence about? I've made two visits during the period of the war and after. So, I don't have much confidence in my opinions about it. And as I said, I would not have supported a war for the betterment of Iraq.
49:57And I just generally think the wars don't do that. And I guess, David, I'm being a bit unfair to you here because I guess I'm putting you in the firing line for a sort of general anxiety I have about the United States. But I've just come back from the States. And as you can imagine, I've been in big meetings with grand people talking about what we should do about Iran, what we should do about China. And I remember meetings about what we should do about Iraq, what we should do about Afghanistan. done. I've never met such an extraordinary group of Ivy League, hyper articulate, confident people, most of whom I think don't speak a word of any of the local languages those countries, have barely visited the rural areas, probably can't even get a visa to Iran, have probably spent two or three days in China, and yet they have the clearest views in the world on what the obligations the United States are and where the real threats lie and what needs to be done.
50:47It always makes me very, very uneasy, the gap between what seems to me a lack of real granular knowledge of these countries and the confidence of the US establishment. Well, very few people can possibly have the detailed travel knowledge that you have. You're one of the world's great travelers, and you know a lot of places better than most people do. The nature of the way the decision-making process works is that we hope that the decision-makers get lots of information from you and people like you, but they can't be that because they have other jobs. That said, I don't think these questions, the kind of questions that you face at the center of decision in Washington are not really about granular knowledge.
51:27And the granular knowledge that is required is that war is a very, very last resort. And you don't have to know a lot about any particular place to know that you should really be extremely cautious about military activity. So, the reason that, I mean, I've always been very dubious about military action against Iran. And that reflects not great knowledge of Iran, but a lot of knowledge about war and that it doesn't yield the results that you want it to. And even countries that you think or hope that there's a big body of opinion favorable to you, they become less favorable when you kill their relatives.
51:59With China, again, I don't pretend to be any kind of expertise, but what I can say is that the general policy of when dealing with a great power rival, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst is the right attitude, regardless of how, because however good your information is, it's always going to be radically imperfect anyway. So hope for the best, be ready for the best, but prepare for the worst. And those are based not on ideas about the place, but about the realities of international politics through the ages. David, sticking with war, it strikes me that of the many reasons why you're worried about the return of Trump Vance is Ukraine.
52:38What is your fear there? So, I paid a couple of visits to Ukraine at the beginning of the democratic movement in 2014 and 2016, and saw the emergence of a new kind of national consciousness. But like a lot of people from Western countries, I was skeptical about the strength and stability of this new consciousness. And I understand why the Biden administration was at first so worried about getting more deeply involved in Ukraine. But I think when people put their own lives on the line in the astonishingly heroic way that the Ukrainians have done to defend their country against an aggressive dictator, that summons the world to their help as best we can.
53:24Now, I understand there are a lot of debates, and Rory points out the importance of local knowledge and a lot of debates. But when you see that the people on the other side of this debate in the United States so often have mysterious or not so mysterious improper ties to Russia, you get a sense of one of the things that's going on here is that the American domestic political system is being penetrated by Russian influences of many improper kinds. And they have reached the very top of the political system in the Trump years. And that's really alarming. And with Trump and Vance, they want to come back.
53:57And in Vance's case, he's on the ticket, it looks like, not because Trump read his book, which he obviously didn't, but because a small group of very powerful and wealthy people who, for some reason, are very hostile to Ukraine and very sympathetic to the dictatorships in Russia and China, wanted him there and put up a lot of resources to get him there. David, you've always been a pretty firm supporter of Israel's right to exist, obviously, and also politically a supporter of Israel. But I just wondered if that support is at any point being challenged in recent months.
54:34No. I mean, I feel the tragedy of what is happening in the Middle East. I felt it on the day of October 7th when the terrible news of this heinous, heinous invasion, murder, rape, outburst hit the world. I thought, what did they think they were doing? I mean, this war will and It must end with everyone in Gaza living in tents. Why did Hamas do this? It can't accomplish anything. It's just pure human waste, killing 1 ,200 Israelis today at the price of who knows how much suffering in the Palestinian territories tomorrow. Why are they bringing this on themselves? And I think there is a real duty to make the best peace you can.
55:21and this conflict in the Middle East, I blame fundamentally on the unwillingness of Israel's enemies to make the best peace they can. They would have gotten a better peace in 1937 from their point of view, in 1937 from the peace they got in 1949, a better peace in 1949 from the peace they would have gotten in 1967 or 68 and so on. And that's something you have to do to stop fighting and start talking and make the best peace you can. And the Hamas vision that they're going to achieve some kind of repeat of the Algerian war with the Israelis and the cast as the French who had a France to go back to when they don't is a delusion.
55:59And so it breaks my heart. It's horrible. It's stupid. It's unnecessary. I don't know what different thing the Israelis could have done from what they were compelled to do by this heinous attack and kidnapping. Dave, one of the things I'm very sympathetic and agree with you strongly as a conservative on is I'm like you, I think like you, quite anxious about the move towards protectionism, the move away from free trade, the move towards these very centralized industrial policies. And this is happening not just in the US, but really across the world. The kind of assumptions we had about liberal markets are now being challenged everywhere.
56:41People are saying that the reason for votes for populism is because the liberal consensus on markets failed. And we're now going back to what feels to me like a return to the 1970s. But maybe I'm mischaracterizing your position. I'd love to hear what you think about those things. There's a terrible plane crash. Many people are hurt and killed. And at that point, somebody pipes up, I see the liberal consensus on flying has been challenged, and we all need to go back to moving by donkey cart. You think, look, these are not assumptions, the massive body of proof about what happens when you protect domestic industries.
57:19These are not theories. These are, to some extent, they're theory, but based on powerful mathematical support. In other cases, they are real experiences. We know you protect your economy, your industries are going to be less competitive. Your consumers are going to pay more. Your exporters will suffer. Every barrier to imports is an equal and opposite tax on exports. That's an accounting reality that can't be evaded. And what tariff barriers do is they enrich the owners of, and to some lesser degree, the workers in the protected industries by impoverishing consumers generally and the owners of and workers in exporting industries because there is no free money anywhere in the world.
58:06All money, when you move it around, you move it from somebody too. So, one of the things my rule is, as I remember recently doing some interviews on this question and talking to somebody who talked about the neoliberal market hegemony. And I said, I'm just a simple country magazine writer. Can you explain to me in words of single syllables, why it's a good idea to pay more for cotton. And that's one of the greatest of writers on the subject of trade in the 19th century, Henry George, had some crackpot ideas, but he was very good on free trade, once said that the doctrine of protection teaches us to do to ourselves in peacetime what our enemies seek to do to us in wartime.
58:45So how can that be smart? And it hasn't gotten any smarter since Henry George made fun of it 150 years ago. David, thanks for so much of your time. I hope it's not too painful or too personal if I can maybe close off by asking you about Miranda. I think the piece that you wrote was incredibly helpful to a lot of people because of what you said about her life and her death and how you dealt with it. And I speak to you as the father of a 30-year-old daughter with a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel like you're Ringo. So just tell me how you're assessing it, how you're coping with it, and what effect it's had on your life.
59:27I'm grateful for the question. It is painful, but it's not too personal. So this coming Friday would have been Miranda's 33rd birthday. She was my wife's and my eldest child. And she was an incredible free spirit, a very, very brave woman. And there's much to say, I'm going to be a little indirect and talk about maybe the writer process rather than the paternal process for a minute. I think the reason that piece resonated with people, and if anyone's listening to the podcast and they don't subscribe to The Atlantic, just drop me a note at david.from at theatlantic.com and I'm happy to send you a gift copy of the article.
1:00:09Many people try to write about grief. It's too big a subject. The pain is so enormous. My wife and I, we're in the country right now and sometimes we'll just be in the field walking and we'll just end up howling like wolves with anguish. You can't communicate that to anybody who hasn't suffered this terrible blow and I hope people are spared it. I think a lot of the writing about it is difficult for people is it's just too much. They open the fire hydrant and the spray of high pressure pain hits them in the face and they don't know what to do with it. So, I tried when writing the article to come at it very indirectly and to do things with shadow.
1:00:51Miranda doesn't make much of an appearance in the article until about two-thirds of the way through. We don't even allude to the possibility that she's not here with us until quite a long way. I talk about the bond I had with her dog because it's easier than talking about the bond I had with her. But you catch glimpses of her incredible, she had the sharpest wit of anyone, any of her friends I've ever met. So, I quote some of her, and not just a few of her many, many sayings that we always quote. Like, Ringo is a very difficult cavalier and he barks maniacally whenever there are birds. I'd get angry, but she wouldn't, when she was alive, she wouldn't do enough to curse.
1:01:27Basically, I'd wake up early. Ringo would wake up early. He'd go crazy. I'd have to deal with him. She was asleep. and leaving it to me. And I would say to her, why does he bark like that? And she said, he's trying to warn us that we're surrounded by small flying dinosaurs. And I said, why does he have to bark? She said, why do you tweet? Which is a very powerful, powerful rebuke. So, I try to give a sense of this just because, look, loss is the great human equalizer. We will all sooner or later feel it. And if we don't ever, if we're spared, and the only way we will be spared is if we don't love enough, but if we are spared, then someday others will suffer it on our behalf because they will be deprived of us.
1:02:10It's coming for all of us. And just to give a glimpse of this human reality was what I tried to do. Well, you succeeded in that. David, thank you. This was a wonderful interview and we're very grateful. Thank you. A pleasure to be on with you. Okay, Roy. David Frum. Very moving, I thought, about his daughter. Incredibly moving. Incredibly moving. And in fact, after that, it's quite difficult sort of reaching back into the interview itself. I mean, I'm very pleased that we had him on. For international listeners, I think he's a really interesting example of a kind of American phenomenon. That world of people who work in the White House, but are also journalists and also think tank people who are also shaping policy.
1:02:57It's a sort of culture in the US. We didn't make much of this, but he was somebody who, despite being Canadian, he was educated at Yale and Harvard Law School. He's very much part of that American machine. One thing, Alistair, which we didn't fully get into is, of course, he is, and he's pretty unashamedly about this, he's pretty Republican. I mean, he's a guy who embraced Reagan in the 80s, was fiercely critical of Bill Clinton, strongly supportive of George W. Bush. Did you never at any point feel a kind of weird dissonance being with Republicans who are much further right wing than the conservatives who you normally find uncomfortable in Britain?
1:03:34I did. And I remember once, I think it was in Prague, and I was out with some of the Bush team. And they were talking about the kind of neoconservatism. And I said, excuse me, what is this neoconservatism compared with conservatism? And one of them, I think it was Doug Bartlett, he said, well, it's conservatism with a much more moral dimension. And I remember saying, well, are you saying that anybody to the left of you doesn't have a moral dimension? And, of course, when you think of that in the context of, you know, the current Republican Party under Trump, and I did quite enjoy David's assessment of who would win the most sexually depraved presidential league table.
1:04:19I'm sure there's some stiff contenders, but I'm sure he's right that Trump is right up there. No, so look, I did feel uncomfortable. And I suppose at the time though, because I was, you know, if you think what my job was, it was to be alongside Tony Blair, who was trying to, you know, shape this policy and the key to that was the alliance that he had with George Bush. And, you know, people can criticize him for it, But that was how he saw his job at the time. So we had some difficult conversations, for sure, but never with David. I always thought David was a really quite interesting thinker. And the point you're making about this kind of strange network, of course, the other thing is that they're – I remember Bill Clinton always used to say about this, the thing about the right is they're so much better organized than we are.
1:05:05You know, the links between the politicians and the media and the think tanks. And it's, you know, that's been cemented in Britain, the whole Tufton Street. We didn't really get him going on his policy exchange years. But that was a very much, it's a right wing thing. And, you know, I think they do do better than the left, I'm afraid, because the left tend to, you know, anything less than perfection. This is another point he made. Anything less than perfection gives you a reason to criticize the other person on the left. Yes, we didn't get into that a lot. And I think, you know, there's so many interesting things that we could have done.
1:05:36I mean, we could have, and it's such a learning thing with a one hour interview, because there will be many of our listeners who would have wanted us to challenge him more about his links to British conservatism, who would have wanted to challenge his statements about Israel, Hamas and Palestine, who would have wanted us to get into the Iraq war more. but I guess I felt we gave a maybe maybe I'm patting us on the back too much but I think we gave a decent flavor of a very particular type of Republican who's turned against Donald Trump big time and what an interesting phenomenon that is and probably the thing that I could congratulate you most on is the J.D.
1:06:16Vance insight I mean to get someone who knows J.D. Vance that well and is able to talk through his intellectual journey that well I thought was fascinating Yeah, and also it's such an interesting thing about J.D. Vance that on the one hand at that time, he's this young, ambitious, thrusting buck who wants to get himself known. And on the other hand, he's a little bit worried about what his new friends at Yale are going to think. So he wants to write under his pseudonym. No, I thought his take on Vance was really, really interesting. But I know quite a lot of these people who, I mean, for example, the first time I came across Anthony Scaramucci was when he reached out to me because he decided, you know, he'd heard that I was sort of quite a good messaging person and a campaigner.
1:06:58And he said, I've basically decided whatever, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to do everything I can to stop Trump being president again. And I want your help. And likewise, you meet a lot of people like David Frum, who, you know, would, and still is basically a Republican. I mean, when you heard him talking about free trade, about NATO, he kept repeating this thing about collective security and, you know, free trade and so forth. He's basically a kind of Reaganite Republican. And yet we didn't even get into who he's going to vote for because we just, you know, he's going to vote for Kamala Harris because he has become a never Trumper.
1:07:33There's a lot of them. Well, Alistair, thank you. I think it's and I think we should do more on this. And I think I'm going to try to bring in, if it's OK with you, more voices from the American left. You seem to have developed a particular penchant for repentant American conservatives who've turned against Trump. But there are some wonderful voices to the American left who I think we should start bringing to this conversation. But thank you. I thought it was very interesting and worthwhile. Good. See you soon.
From the publisher
What was George W Bush like behind closed doors? Why did Trump really choose ‘never-Trump guy’ JD Vance as his running mate? How can Kamala Harris win the election?
Rory and Alastair are joined by George W Bush's former speech writer and political commentator David Frum to discuss all this and more.
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