Forget the Epstein files hullabaloo. Members of the Trump administration, perhaps at the urging of Barron Trump, seem to have directly intervened to get the travel ban lifted on the Tate brothers, who are charged with rape and sex trafficking in Europe. Meanwhile, a "Keep Christ in Christmas" extravaganza is being planned at the Kennedy Center, where Trump is now chair. Plus, the con behind crypto is going to run out of fools, CEOs are regretting their bet on Trump, Kash wants to run the FBI part-time from Vegas—and the Dems need to try on a little shamelessness and make Trump own the spiraling price of eggs. David Frum joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod. show notes David's new piece on the Tate brothers (gifted) David's "Cautionary Tale for Trump Appointees" (gifted) Nevada Independent story on Kash and the Vegas timeshare megadonor WSJ on Kash's whirlwind start at the FBI Tim's playlist
Chapter 1: Who is David Frum and what is his latest work about?
Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. He's back. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic, author of 10 books, most recently, Trumpocalypse. It's David Frum. What's happening, Frum?
Hey there. I'm just back from almost a month in Austria, so now catching up with the world.
How are the folks in Austria thinking about what's happening here stateside? Well, I have to confess, I was mostly talking about ski snow quality.
Good. How was the ski snow quality? We were very lucky with the ski snow quality. But we were escaping the month of February and on a ski hill, my wife and I and two little dogs.
Well, that sounds lovely. Well, on the topic of Trumpocalypse, I was perusing your social media feeds, and I saw this nice summation of where things stand. Egg shortages, fatal measles outbreaks, airplane crashes, crypto scams, tariffs, betrayal of allies, pardons and special favors for insurrectionists, crooked mayors, and online pimps. The American people have voted for change.
I guess we'll get to all of those topics. Which one?
I guess dealer's choice on which one you want to start with. Let's talk about eggs, because I have a serious point to make about that. It goes to a big structural problem in American politics. The price of eggs has almost quadrupled since fall. If you're in the restaurant industry and you're buying high-end eggs, you're looking at $8 a dozen.
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Chapter 2: Why are egg prices rising and how is it affecting politics?
If you go to Walmart in the DC area, it's about $6 a dozen. There are some at $5.97, but a few at higher than $6. Now, Everybody listening to this podcast, every Democratic politician in Congress knows this isn't exactly Trump's fault. There's an avian flu. The herd of egg laying chickens has been culled and there's a genuine economic shortage.
So Democrats are hesitant to blame the president for something that's obviously not his fault. In 2022, the price of beef ran up. And it ran up for because during COVID, there had been people in the beef processing plants that had to sit farther apart from one another, reducing the efficiency of the plants. There was a drought. And so beef cattle were arriving at slaughter less heavy than usual.
It wasn't Biden's fault. Did that stop the Trump people? It did not. There is a great novel about the rise of the Nazi, published in 1934, very prophetically, called The Operments. And I recommend it to you. And at one point, one of the characters says, our opponents have a great advantage over us, and that is their absolute lack of any sense of fairness.
And I think you see in the beef versus the eggs, that dynamic at work. The Trump people knew it wasn't Biden's fault. It was, you know, there was a pandemic. The people in the processing plants had to sit farther apart. A lot of the processing workers got sick and there was a drought. So the beef cattle were less heavy. It wasn't the president's fault that the price of beef went up.
That didn't stop them. Democrats know it's not the president's fault. The price of eggs is up, but it does stop them. I don't know how you do politics in a country where people respond to price cues so intensely. And one party says, we're going to be responsible about economic causation. And the other party says, the hell with that. No, we're not.
That's a fair point. And I think I've been thinking about this on the eggs thing, because you do see pundits like liberal pundits talking about it a lot or anti-Trump pundits more than politicians. So you see it some from politicians. I think Ruben Gallego mentioned it on the pod on Wednesday. One thing I notice is the other side also has the benefit is of they're so shameless about
In the argumentation, Trump is so shameless that it's almost easy for him to say, this is Sleepy Joe's fault. He's asleep at the switch. It's Joe Biden's fault. And sometimes even when the Democrats, I notice, do try to pin this on Trump, it's like in an ironic way where I almost feel like they're criticizing the voters, not Trump themselves. The voters were too dumb. Yeah.
to know that the egg prices, you know, he wasn't going to fix. And so sometimes I feel like the egg prices commentary is an attack on the voters. And if you're really going to play their game, it's got to be what you're saying, which is the shameless attack on Trump and the politicians.
Years ago, an acquaintance of mine who is a literary person, hard up for money, as a gag, wrote a kind of romance novel under pseudonym and sent it to one of these generic pulp Boone and Mills kind of things. And he was hoping to pick up $1,200. And he sent it to the company. And he got back a rejection letter that said, if you want to write this stuff, you have to believe in it. Right.
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Chapter 3: What is the controversy surrounding the Tate brothers?
And then for people who didn't follow this, using them in pornography, I think the seven women that are at the center of the Romanian case, they put in a house in Bucharest, they turned into a porn den, and they, you know, against their will, showed, you know, allegedly, showed pornographic videos of them.
And like that is, you know, it is on the nose of what they, you know, had accused the left of. As you say, on the same day that they released the Epstein files. Nobody cares about hypocrisy, though. I do wonder, is there... Like to me, the more interesting thing is The evangelical side of the party, like the Christian, the social conservative side of the party, there's nothing.
How can Mike Johnson, who monitors his own son's porn use, also live coherently in a party that celebrates these two men?
And step back to something you said a minute ago. You're right, no one cares any about hypocrisy. You just have to do it. So in this vast country, parties need complicated, they don't need complicated messages, but they need complicated message groupings. Look, I confess, I'm an out-of-touch East Coast elitist. I know the price of eggs because I looked it up on the Walmart site.
I don't even like eggs that much. So that's not a message that's actually going to change my vote. I'm about democracy. I'm about Kash Patel and anger management problem, Don Bongino running the FBI. I'm about the predicates being put in place for what looks like some kind of military backing of the president if he defies a court order. That's my issue. And me and my neighbors here in
Ward 3 of the District of Columbia. We're going to be motivated by that. And we're going to get to the polls at 5 a.m. and stand in the queue. And we're going to vote for school board, too, while we're there. You talked to us one way. The people who decide this election care about the price of eggs. And you have to talk to them.
And this is a thing that the Trump people did with a lot of people for whom English was not their first language. New to the country. They did actually kind of politics in some ways the right way, which is, you know, we're going to go into this neighborhood.
People weren't born here, may not have English as their first language and want to talk to them about what they care about because their votes count, too. That's like democracy done right if it weren't done for such evil ends, ultimately. But the process is done right. And that's something that those who want to save democracy have to do, which is, you know what?
Yeah, there are people in Ward 3 in D.C. who know that it's not literally the president's fault the price of eggs is up, but the people who feel the price of eggs don't know that and don't care. So you just go there every day and you say, when will Trump eggs reach a dollar an egg? Because right now they're 50 cents an egg. They're on their way to a dollar an egg.
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Chapter 4: How do tariffs and immigration policies affect the US economy?
So there's extensive growth. In a country that would otherwise have a shrinking population, it has a growing population because of immigration above all. And whatever the merits of that from a social policy point of view, if you start not only stop the immigration, but send it into reverse, yeah, that's going to have an effect both on costs and consumption.
It's going to have an effect on cost because you're taking people who were doing work taking them away. The MAGA people are very clear. They want price of landscaping services to go up. They want the price of construction to go up. But half the people in the construction industry in the fastest growing states are immigrants.
And I assume a lot of them, especially in the most dangerous work like roofing, are illegal immigrants. So again, I'm not endorsing any of this. I'm an immigration enforcer. But understand, it makes costs go up. And also, every immigrant is a buyer. They buy houses and shoes and cars. And all of that is being subtracted for the economy. And yeah, it's a shock.
Well, David- We are going to add some to the economy, though. We like to be fair-minded here at the Bulldog Podcast. They do have a plan for bringing some people in. It's called the new gold card. It's going to solve the debt and bring new fresh blood into the economy. I want to listen to Donald Trump talking about this plan the other day.
If we sell 10 million, which is possible, 10 million highly productive people coming in or people that we're going to make productive, they'll be young, but they're talented, like a talented athlete. That's $50 trillion. That means our debt is totally paid off.
We're going to sell 10 million gold cards at 5 million a pop. What do you think about that?
Well, every country, including the United States, has programs where they do sell visas in exchange for a certain amount of investment. You don't pay it directly to the government because this is or was a free market country. Is that a golf club with dues where you pay to Bedminster?
The old idea was that if you made a $5 million investment in something that wasn't personal real estate, this is not a new thing. And many, Singapore has it, Canada has it, the United States has it too. So it's not a completely outrageous idea, but the Trump gold card comes, CNBC reported this, with a special loophole.
The United States has a regime of taxation where if you are a high net worth individual, a high income individual, and you come to the United States, you are taxed on your global income. So you don't just get taxed on what you make in the United States, you get taxed worldwide.
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Chapter 5: What is the Trump administration's 'gold card' immigration plan?
The British general asked the French, how many British soldiers do you need to defend northern France? And the answer was, just one. We'll get them killed in the first five minutes. the same way. That was how many Americans did it take to defend Germany from the Soviets? Just one. Just one. But we need to know you're there.
So whatever the guarantee is, this idea of British and French troops in Ukraine, that is the test of success. And backed by
some American presence to say, you know, the Russians aren't there for territory, but whatever the ceasefire line is, whatever the line of control, whatever is free Ukraine, that part of Ukraine needs to be a place where investors can invest hundreds of billions of dollars in security.
And that means they need to know there is a tripwire there, backed by Britain, backed by France, backed by the United States. If the Russians ever try this stunt again, They're going to feel the wrath of the world, not indirectly, but directly. Yeah, I'm sorry. You said the Russians aren't there for territory. The Russian attack on Ukraine is not the Trump fantasy that they want.
This is about taking control of some one fifth of Ukraine. That's nonsense. They were there just to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign entity. So if Ukraine keeps sovereignty over 80% of its territory, that's a win for the West.
If Russia can find ways to sabotage and corrupt Ukrainian sovereignty by, for example, saying that Russia insists that Ukraine have an election, that is not a Russian decision to make when the Ukrainian, if they are able to write that into the schedule and they have corrupted and weakened Ukrainian sovereignty. And that that's, that's a loss when you say, can I be optimistic?
I think there are things you can say about the Trump administration that are going to be positive. I've always believed that there are gifts of Trump, that he forces, he's forcing a deepening commitment to democracy in the United States. He's, you know, we are having to think about institutions in a way we never did. Why did Congress give all that power over trade to the president?
People have been warning that that was a danger for a long time. Now we can see. Maybe we'll fix it. Should Europe have a more serious approach to its own security? Yes. Yes. And they're going to be forced to do that. Those are inadvertent gifts of Trump. But it can't be at the expense of the brave people of Ukraine who have sacrificed so much for their freedom and who are winning this war.
Last thing, you wrote a cautionary tale for the Trump appointees was related to these negotiations and how Marco Rubio and Mike Waltz might learn something from the past. I'd love for you to just share a little bit of that cautionary tale with people.
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