Lawfare Archive: David Frum on 'Trumpocalypse'

I have heard you will have a mobile phone call, but so simply let you not come from here. Who is with your ex ex-girls dreaming? My second baby? No, I'm not going to let you in. No, I'm just a dream.

“With mobile phone in real life, Frank, from the beginning of the 'Owner Mindest' contract,”

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The 'Anpassbarkeit', or 'Rinsatz Bereitschaft'. Or, we use 'Ki' from 'AVS'. With '100' from 'Modellen'. 'Ainsatz Bereiten' agents, 'Oer-geschwindigkeit' and 'Intiqueter Sicherheit', or 'Missioned Signs' agents, or 'Nomodel B'.

'Wivet Ka' and 'E' agents, or 'Rivolationer' agents, or 'Ki' agents, or 'VS'. I'm Sarah Wildrich, internat law fair with an episode from the law fair archive for September 13, 2026.

On September 9, President Trump spoke at the GOP's first ever convention ahead of a midterm

election. In his remarks, Trump explicitly asked the voters to quote 'Protendive on Ballet' on quote. In the midterms, and said he would give every American $5,000, if their publicans maintain control of both chambers of Congress.

For today's archive, I chose an episode from June 10, 2020, in which Benjamin Woodest spoke with David from, a former speech writer for George W. Bush and a prominent conservative critic of Trump. They discussed Trump's book, 'Trump Hawkelips', 'Trump's Lasting Impact on Politics', had won a game for put demands of Trump supporters, and what comes next from GOP and American

democracy. I'm Benjamin Woodest, and this is the law fair podcast, June 10, 2020. David from is one of the most prominent and eloquent conservative critics of the president. The former George W. Bush, speech writer and current writer for The Atlantic, has written

a second book about the Trump presidency, and in this case what comes after it, the book

is 'Trump Hawkelips', and it is out now. David from joined me in the Jungle Studio for a wide-ranging conversation of the ground he covers in the book, 'How You Rebuild After Trump'. How you satisfy elements of Trumpism without letting them descend back into authoritarian populism, what policies and approaches should a new administration take, and how should we

“treat the Trumpists and their most die-hard supporters?”

It's the law fair podcast, June 10, David from on Trump Hawkelips. David, let's start with the fact that this is your second Trump book. In fact, it's the second book with a title based on Trump owes something, and I want to ask about the relationship between the two books and to what extent they really should be read as a pair.

Thank you. They weren't intended as a cycle, but they became one. The first book 'Trump Hawkelips' was written in the summer of 2017, but drawing on work I'd done for The Magazine, for The Atlantic Magazine, since 2014, and from other things I'd written about Tea Party Republicanism even before that.

Trump Hawkelips was written over a longer period of time, and one was written early, and acknowledged at the beginning there was a great danger in writing early because you could

“make mistakes, but I felt it was more important to give warnings of things I saw coming”

even at the risk of mistake, and the second is written partly as an assessment, and partly as a way forward, after an election I'm even when I wrote the book, I was hopeful Trump would lose and now I'm quite confident he will lose. You were confident, you say you're confident he will lose, how confident were you that he was going to lose the first time around, and is your confidence something that people

should take cheer from? Well, Stuart Stevens, who we both know, who is Governor Romney, as he then was, is his

message guy in 2012, said, "The host is not always win when you enter the casino, but

that's the way to bet," and by how he just meant the conference of actors. So yeah, I thought Donald Trump would lose in 2016, as indeed he did lose the popular

of lucky events that came his way. This time he's an even more trouble than he was in 2016, that this time what I thought

“going into the intellectual, I was writing the book was just important sectors of the”

Trump coalition had drifted away, and he had just failed to deliver on aspect after aspect of his promises, the number of Americans without health insurance, said increased even as the economy had prospered during the Trump years. But now, I mean, we are living truly through a Trump apocalypse. It truly is.

I mean, 110,000 Americans dead of pandemic disease, 40 million people unemployed, American

cities on fire, Trump driving, driving the country toward greater disorder, pushing us toward violence, because it's only hope of reelection. All right, let's take as a assumption that this prediction is correct, and since that is the working presumption of the book, that we are dealing with the aftermath of a Trump presidency rather than a second term of a Trump presidency, in which case I suppose you'll

have to write a third book in the cycle, you know, Trump a demo wrong or something. But this book is an attempt to imagine a kind of political reconstruction. And I want you to start by walking through what the elements of that are, not the specific policy elements, but how you think about that problem, if you're trying to imagine an American political culture after Trump, even before you get to the components of the

agenda, what are the components of the problem and the challenge that we face in thinking that problem through? In the United States, in the 2020s, for the first time since the civil rights era, we have important parts, important people and politics who are explicitly anti-democratic. You and I are talking on the day that the New York Times published Tom Cotton's very

important op-ed, calling for sending the US military, the regular military into American cities over the objection of those, of the governors of those cities and the mayors of those cities.

Exactly the kind of thing that second amendment people always claim to be afraid of, and

now one of America's leading second amendment people is wanting to do that to override protests by people's music as a proofs of people on the left, ungrateful minorities that

“he wants to crush and wants to use violence, no quarter is the phrase I think he used in one”

of his speeches and on Twitter, no quarter, no surrender, no prisoners kill people when they try to surrender. That's maybe a little out there, but he is part of an important coalition, faction within the Republican Party that is very frank that if it has no hope of winning at the federal state level, if people are generally allowed to vote the way theoretically since the 15th

amendment people have generally been allowed to vote, and that the Republican Party should make a conscious part of its program to make it difficult for the wrong kind of people to vote.

This is a way I'm sure that many people have thought and politicians are, you know, always

want to shape the electorate, but since 1964, '65, it's not a way American politicians have tended to speak', and there's a good chunk of the country, not anything like a majority, and maybe not even a major minority, but a third of the country that's prepared to go along with this program. So we have an explicit anti-democratic political culture backed by an important anti-democratic

political minority, and the question that we are going to face is we try to re-stabilize

“democracy after the Trump presidency is how do you deal with that?”

How do you first try to reconcile them, and second, if they can't be reconciled, how do you build around them so they can't do again the kind of damage they tried to do during the four Trump years? And what is the core philosophical strategy that you're deploying to do that here? You mean on my side?

Yeah, I mean, so there's a hundred ideas that you can propose by way of doing these things, but they've got to be unified or conceptually related in some way by a big idea, right? Otherwise, it's just a laundry list of policy suggestions. So what's the philosophical strategy you're deploying? Here's my big idea.

I'm a person naturally of the center, right? I'm a conservative minded person, I'm a person who's sympathetic to business enterprise and wants to see taxes as low as feasible and have a dynamic competitive economy. So that's where I belong, and I want to see that kind of party fit for decent political

What the Republican strategy has been since the Tea Party years and has become more and

more explicit is we don't have to become a modern center right party if we can shrink the electorate enough that we can prevail as a reactionary, plutocratic, showvenist, xenophobic party. And my thought is if we can take that option away, the shrink the electorate option away and say, you know what?

Just about everyone who wants to vote is going to vote and we're going to make sure that those votes count more like equal than they do today, maybe a lot more like equal than they do today. Now compete.

Then what you get, whereas right now we have a very destructive form of political competition

where Republicans compete by preventing people from voting or trying to or by as Tom Cotton did, threatening military force. And instead they compete by trying to reach into the Democratic coalition and pick up the

“disinfected parts there and play for the center that that's how politics worked in the”

most stable years after World War II, your two coalitions voting was becoming more and more widespread, especially after 1965. And they competed by reaching by looking for disinfected parts on the other side and trying to broaden their appeal, instead of trying to narrow the electorate and narrowing the electorate as when the Republican plans since 2010.

All right, so let's talk about how to prevent on a long-term electoral success by narrowing the electorate-oriented reactionary party, the traditional Democratic answer to this, is well an act popular left-of-center programs combined with voting rights legislation that will keep the electorate large and also to maybe increase in other representational fashions, for example, statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia change the demographics

of the Senate a little bit, and along the way you become more popular with a bigger alternative. You embrace some but not all of that. So what separates your vision of this from the sort of traditional center-left Democratic vision? Well, I go along with some of the central-left ideas about political reform, because

the Democrats want to have these ideas because they think they will benefit by them. And in the short term, I'm sure that's true. I am in favor of them because I think it's just dangerous to have either party have a political plan that rests on disenfranchisement and the threat of potential violence. So I'm in favor of statehood for the District of Columbia, or the residential parts,

and I think we've seen with the extraordinary use of federal force inside the District unnecessarily and excessively in the past few days, why that's important for other reasons. I'm less sure about Puerto Rico because there's an important separatist movement there,

“and I don't think you should become a state unless you have an 80% majority in favor of it,”

not a 55% majority in favor of it, but that's just too dangerous. I don't need a Catalonia or Quebec problem inside the United States. But D.C. for sure, and that will add two senators who will probably be, who will certainly be urban, probably democratic and very likely non-white, so that would be progress of a kind. And I think we need a new voting rights act to replace the parts that the Supreme Court

struck down in 2013. I think that decision in 2013, by the way, was not crazy. They made some good points that it is strange that you scrutinize states in the 21st century

according to how well or badly those states behaved in the first half of the 20th century,

and with no regard to what they're doing now. But you need the Supreme Court open the way for some new sections of the voting rights act I'm in favor of that, but my goal here with this is not just to accelerate a democratic agenda.

“I think Democrats will be surprised by what the country will look like once both parties”

are committed to public participation. They're going to discover that a lot of the traditional parts as we become a more unified country, a lot of the people who are in the democratic party for cultural reasons, may discover that for economic reasons they don't belong there. And I look to a world in which the families who are of different backgrounds, maybe African-American,

maybe immigrant, and the members of the family who are more committed to the private sector about one way and the members of the family who are more committed to the public sector about another way, and they both can do it because neither feels insulted or threatened by either party. I want to turn to an area where you really break some new ground, I think.

that you develop in this book, which is of course an issue near and dear to my heart.

But one that I really hadn't seen written about this way is just how outlined the United States is in its attitude among Western democracies towards civil service. I'm interested for you to kind of lay that out and also lay out what you propose to do about it. Yeah, well this is an issue that I have talked a lot about offline, but I'm brought to this

“because I'm Canadian by origin and I spend a lot of time there and so I see I think a lot”

about how other systems work. So in Germany, the equivalent of the assistant attorney general for the criminal division is appointed by the president of the German state on the advice of the justice minister. Chancellor of the German state has nothing to do with it and very typically the chancellor

and the justice minister are from different parties in coalition together.

And then that person gets that job by rising through the ranks of professional prosecutors where that person has spent a career and that person is appointed to a fixed term, I think it's five years and can't be fired except for the kind of cause you get fired for in the civil service. I mean, real, provable wrongdoing.

And if the chancellor were to suggest to that person to the head of the prosecutions that that prosecutor prosecutes somebody or not prosecutes somebody else, the chancellor would be in handcuffs before the meeting whatsoever, the chancellor doesn't have a rule in criminal prosecution at all. Now, in the American system, it can't quite work that way, but I don't think Americans appreciate

because of the age and continuity of the American government, how much of the things it does it does because they're left over from the 19th century when political parties did a lot of the things that government did. The United States was quite late to get to the idea that the government should print ballots for elections deep into the 19th century in most states.

The ballots were printed by political parties, and you got your ballot from either the Republican or the Democratic party, that's hence the origin of the phrase, "the straight ticket voting." You got a ticket from one party or the other, and you dropped that and you had to bring your own, dropped that in the ballot box.

Even now, we let politicians draw districts. No one on earth does that.

“In fact, when you explain it to people from other, I think it's not that politicians draw”

their own districts. Well, they favor themselves, yes, isn't that wrong? You don't think so, or we don't seem to, or we don't do anything about it. So, that's a view that I've had for a long time, but it's become very important during this pandemic.

Why is the American response to the pandemic been so uniquely bad? And I think the answer to that is, the lack of professionals at the very top of the American government. It's an amateur government by design, and maybe there's a case for that in the area of foreign policy, new presidents, get to bring in new ideas.

But in the realm of public health, it means you have people at the top who are picked for reasons entirely apart from their expertise in public health. And boy, are we paying a price for that? So, let's talk about that.

“We can talk about it with reference to public health in a moment, but I want to start with”

prosecution, because the obvious response to your point is, wait a minute, you're proposing to take the political leadership cadre out of, and therefore, political accountability out of the task of law enforcement entirely or mostly. And, of course, there's only in the law enforcement apparatus, the one example of an agency that functions the way you're describing, or the major example.

There are some others, is the FBI, right, where the director is a political appointee. And that's kind of the only political appointee in the bureau. The justice department is kind of a disaster in this regard, because each U.S. attorney is separately politically appointed and Senate confirmed. And there are dozens of political appointees in main justice.

So my, I guess my first question about this is, how do you imagine this working in the

national security apparatus? Do you imagine? And let's just focus on the justice department. Like, if Donald Trump loses and Joe Biden becomes president, how much of a house cleaning is legit, well, we know the answer under the current rules, but in your world, how much of

the justice department would change hands? Look, there's, because the grammar of the American political system, because of the process of Senate confirmation, the attorney general is going to be a political person.

around that.

And as you'd say, the president needs some way to be able to enforce the president's priorities

on the bureau, obviously. Otherwise, you get Frankenstein monsters of bureau, you get the J. Edgar Hoover problem, be yourocracy with his mind, with a mind of its own that isn't accountable to anybody.

“And I think there's a good, and the deputy attorney general, obviously, the same.”

I think the way, this historically worked in the United States, is from the 1830s until the 1880s. The rule was everybody was politically appointed for everything. The messengers and the house of representatives and messengers in the state house, they changed with the election.

And then, beginning in the 1880s, the federal level, and a little later at the state

level, that the government would pass lists and say, these jobs are listed as career jobs,

and these jobs are listed as jobs can change. And we know those, you know, schedule C, that is literally those are the list of jobs where people do not have civil service protection. But over the decades, those lists have changed all the time. So it wouldn't be a revolution to say, you know what, the U.S. attorneys, we are moving

them off the political list. And they're just not going to be appointed by the president, but from where they're going to be appointed from within, and they're going to be appointed on the civil service system. And they're going to have civil service job protection. I mean, it is crazy.

I mean, imagine this, that you are being prosecuted for some federal crime, and you're sitting there across the U.S. the desk from the U.S. prosecutor, and you know that when that person was hired, the first question they were asked was, what did you do to help elect president so-and-so, and they needed to have an answer to that question. And if they hadn't done anything to help elect president so-and-so, they probably didn't get

the job.

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And so what you're basically doing is you're locking in the power of the career bureaucracy

to prevent conservatism from ever-winning. And I guess I want to ask you, is that right? And is that actually part of the point that you're trying to make it impossible for the sort of populists to actually run the henhouse? So in this argument, the person on the hypothetical percent side of table saying, "There are

a bunch of things I want to do." And I can't actually pass laws to get them done. And I probably can't convince people with the relevant expertise that they should be done. And they may not meet the test of bureaucratic rationality where an apolitical civil service

will see them and saying, "Oh, OK, that makes sense because if you do this, it doesn't

contradict three other things you also want to do." I'm not confident of that. I want to do something where I need to use administrative power in ways that are not supported by legislature and that the relevant experts don't think makes sense.

“And I think, well, that's something that shouldn't be done.”

And what we have seen in the case-- the fact that we put it in bars, both, is an example of this. I mean, the major changes in law enforcement-- there are have been major changes in law enforcement policies that have come about by winning arguments.

And probably the most dramatic example of those is the change in the way the United States

does antitrust law. That over the span of a generation, that a lot of people made the case that merely being big was not a problem. The problem was anti-competitive behavior. And made the case the point of anti-trust is to protect consumers, not to protect small

businesses that compete with a bigger entity. And that argument was won, and it was won by some changes in the law, but it was won above all by a change in bureaucratic rationality. What we have seen in bars cases is that the power he really wants is not a power so much to change policy, but a power to favor certain individuals and groups.

And if my scheme makes it more difficult for him to do that, that may be a merit of my scheme, not a demerit. So I was actually using bar as my mouthpiece there because he actually made this argument in a somewhat different form in his Miller Center interview a number of years ago. And he kind of argued the point that people shouldn't be afraid of political leadership

because that's the mechanism.

“Sometimes you have to go in there and beat the career heads together.”

I'm an impariting him, but that was the gist of the argument. And so I'm using bar as my cut out here because he's actually kind of made this argument and he certainly does behave this way. But I guess you see the same frustration with among certain conservatives with career foreign service officers, right, that they're just, they kind of reflect a certain status

quo thinking and if you're disruptive with respect to that status quo, it's a very hardship to turn, I mean, Larry Silberman wrote a famous article about in the late 70s about why presidents can't control the state department. And you know, I do think this is a broader concern among conservatives than it is among liberals.

And I wonder if one of the reasons for that is that, you know, conservatives aren't wrong that there is a sort of greater cultural and additutinal set of common grounds between political liberal leadership and the bureaucracy and conservative leadership and the bureaucracy. And I'm not sure that that is exactly true, but also to the extent it's true, the extent it's true.

And we've tested that over the past four years, the argument may, maybe your inability to convince career people sworn to uphold the interest of the United States to do things your way, maybe that doesn't reflect on them, maybe that reflects on you to say and in particular in the state department, we all know foreign service officers.

to be superware of the interest of the United States, they tend to come from more traditional

kinds of backgrounds. I mean, they're much more likely to be religious. I've noticed then, you know, people of similar backgrounds in the United States are. And of course, they are people who've given their life to public service in the service of the nation and they also, you know, spend a lot of time dealing with the military counterparts.

But they aren't different from, say, to use the name, the Richard Gennels of this world, because the thing the foreign service teaches you is to think of the United States as embedded

“in a world of relationships and that those relationships are really important.”

And it's important to avoid being gratuitously offensive. And there's a famous story of Trout told about many of the Secretary of State that the new ambassador is called into the Secretary of State's office, and Secretary of State has the giant globe, and the Secretary of State spins the globe, stops the globe, and says to the new ambassador, show me your country on the map, and the ambassador points to Finland

or Newsparkistan or whatever it is, and the Secretary of State in the anecdote turns the pivots the globe, moves the ambassador's finger, puts it on the United States, and says, "No, this is your country, because the premise of the joke is that the ambassador will sell out the United States to appease the world, will be taken over by the Finns or the Uzbex." Well, maybe, but maybe also what happens is that there's a real tendency in the United

States to, in an expression in Washington, to forget about the Finns and the Uzbex. And not to take their concerns seriously, and in fact to be kind of dismissively rude about them.

“And what the Foreign Service in Coulsert can't say people say, "I, of course, I know the United”

States is my country." But you know what? One of America's interests here in Finland or Uzbexstan is a solid long-term relationship with Finland or Uzbexstan, and sometimes I have to tell you, this, this brainwave they've had back in Washington is going to cause long-term incalculable damage.

I mean, we've just -- and I mentioned Richard Greenell, so he was President Trump's appointee as ambassador to Germany, and he seems to have been given one mission mission, which is "Be as rude as you can to as many people as possible in Germany."

And every day we're going to check how many people this week have vowed never to have

another meeting again with the American ambassador, have you added anybody to that list. And he got to the point where, by the end of his tenure, I mean, he just couldn't -- there was no one in Berlin who had talked to him because he had behaved so badly to so many people. And he saw that as a mark of his success, that he had successfully upheld the interest of the United States by telling -- giving the Germans a piece of his mind.

And so did the Trump administration, which is now loose him on the intelligence community. Right. And the result is that Germany has declined to attend the next G7 meeting because it's being held in the United States because everybody thinks, you know, we behave so badly. And you know what?

They're right. We have behave badly.

“So before we wrap up, I want to turn to an area -- I think the area of the book that is”

likely to be the most controversial, which is immigration, which is an area where your views are politically disruptive. I think irrespective of what political camp will be reading the book.

So walk us through first of all how immigration relates to the overall thesis of the book.

And secondly, what you're proposing in that area and how that fits into this larger thesis. Yeah. So this is, as you said, this is probably the most disruptive section. So my overarching concern through all the Trump books has been the way the American political system is incentivizing people to pull the country apart.

And Donald Trump has mastered this, but others have seen the same thing because of other changes in American society, culture, and media that you can get a lot of political power by appealing to narrower and narrower slices of the country and pitting them against each other. So I'm above all concerned to reunite the bonds of nationhood, not because I'm a selfish nationalist.

I mean, as we've just said, I'm very concerned about maintaining America's integration into world system. But national cohesion is to be preferred over tribal, racial, local cohesion, that spirit of nationhood is such a resource that we are in danger of losing it. And so I'm fascinated by ideas how do you create a greater sense of national belonging.

And my basic way of thinking is you need, it's like a billionity community. You need both thicker ties within the community and clear separation between the community and not the community. Higher walls, denser connections. And so I talk in the book both about healthcare and immigration is two sides of the same

point. A healthcare system that makes Americans feel like they have something more in common with one another. Something you get, not because you're a good person, not because you're over 65 or have

And that's not a judgment on other people, but they who are not American, they don't get this. And again, not to be hostile, but this is part of the price of belonging, but this is the benefit of belonging.

“But if you're increasing the benefits to belonging, you have to be clearer about who”

belonged and who does not, and we have since, maybe the Middle Ages, maybe longer, because of our lacks attitude toward the immigration system, our effective tolerance of very large degrees of illegality and great permission to enter, that the United States has sort of blurred the boundary between the United States and the rest of the world, and because that it is blurred the connections between Americans.

So what does that practically mean? So I have a number of suggestions, first, it practically means that we need to be serious about enforcing the rules against illegal immigration, and that's not that difficult to think to do.

The reason it's happened is not because the problem is so objectively hard, but because

there's such powerful interest groups that forbid it. So you need real meaningful enforcement, and that the place where that occurs is not at the border, but at the workplace, that it has to be feasible for employers to know who's legal to work and who isn't, and there have to be sanctions on employers who are higher people who are not legal to work.

After the crackdown on illegality, you need some real thought about who should come to the country and in what numbers, and currently the United States takes about 1.2 million people a year, almost four-fifths of them, because they were related to somebody who got here earlier, who in turn was related to some here, got here earlier, who in turn was originally related to someone who probably came illegally in God's status.

So you have an original act of illegal immigration followed by regularization that begots generation after generation of newcomers, and that's just no way to run a country. So I argue for both reducing the total number of immigrants, I don't have a ready answer

to what the right number is, but reducing from the present 1.2 million, and very much shrinking

the family reunification part by, for example, saying siblings are no longer eligible. You come to the United States, you can sponsor your parents, you can sponsor your children, you can sponsor your spouse, but you cannot sponsor a sibling, you cannot sponsor the siblings children.

“And then I think above all, not above all, but finally we need to address the asylum system,”

which has become a de facto sec, this thing which was supposed to be a way of dealing with the Anne Frank family has become, in effect, a whole secondary immigration system of the United States, in which hundreds of thousands of people a year arrive at American borders say, I've got a persecution, a fear of persecution at home. I know it's going to take me five years to win that case in an American court, and I know

I probably will ultimately lose, but in the meantime, I have worked permits in a driver's

license in housing and food benefits, and they get all of those things. And then at the end of the five years, when they finally lose their case, they're so rooted in the United States, it seems unbelievably cruel to send them home, assuming they haven't married in American and they mean while anyway. So those are the elements of it, but I want to join it, and this is, I want to join

it to a thicker system of social provision, where those people who are recognized as Americans, who do have the rights of citizens and permanent residents.

“So without diving deeply into the merits of the specific proposals, I think it's fair to”

say, each of them is independently controversial, and I think one overarching problem that the idea runs into is that in the name of sort of sucking oxygen out from the populist political agenda, right, this is an issue that is central to the sort of right-wing populism of Donald Trump, you end up giving that movement a fair bit of what it's asking for. And so I'll be at in very different rhetorical terms, and so I guess my question is, what

do you say to the left-of-center person who responds to that by saying, that is, it sounds like warmed over Donald Trump, in very polite and respectable language? In the middle part of the century, democracies everywhere faced a threat and a challenge from communist parties who wanted to create totalitarian political systems. And those communist parties got strong because they batted on concerns like unemployment,

on the lack of medical coverage, on the lack of provision for people in their old age. How did we beat the communists? They didn't beat them by McCarthyism, that probably wasn't helpful at all. We beat them by saying, you know, these communists, they're talking about things that people care about.

And they're wicked, and they have sinister ends, but they found something. So prudent moderates, including prudent conservatives like Dwight Eisenhower said, let's take away the resource from them, not because we want to be soft on communism, but because

And there were people in those days who much more reactionary conservative who said, "If you yield anything to the communists, you're yielding everything," you know, that you

have a social, an old-page pension, and that's the first step on the slippery slope toward

the total abolition of freedom. That's the argument of Friedrich Hayek's road to serve them. You give the communists anything, and the next thing, you know, it's Stalin. Well, that turned out to be not true that, as Teddy Roosevelt said, at the very beginning of this period of the beginning of the 20th century, that reform is not the path to socialism,

reform is the antidote to socialism, reform is how you protect existing institutions. And we can all say, yeah, that he's making a good point with the threat to liberal democracy came from communism. Well, today, the threat to liberal democracy comes overwhelmingly from these authoritarian nationalist, showvenist movements, and their topish is the immigration issue, which

is stressful. There are many benefits to immigration. I don't want to be a known thing about it, but there are also many costs. And so, let's take that issue away by fighting away to capture as many of the benefits as we can by mitigating the costs.

I want to talk about one final subject, which is an uncomfortable one, and it's actually one that you don't treat in depth in the book, but I know it's one you've thought about a lot, and it seems to me important.

“And that is, in a post-Trump world, what do you do with the Trumpists?”

I mean, this is not so much a policy question, as it is a social question, but, you know, what is your attitude toward the Richard Grenell's of the world, toward the bill bars? You know, if Trump loses, and these are all private citizens, one of the features of Washington over the, in the post-war era, is that we kind of all socialize together, you know, and that does seem to be breaking down.

And there are a lot of people who have a vocabulary that approaches a kind of illustration. And there are others who talk and Joe Biden certainly, one of them talk about, like, once we get rid of Trump, it can all return to normal. And so my question is, what's the social aspect? And I don't mean social in the cocktail parties in kind of way, but in the deeper sense,

how do we live together as a community and as a country in a world in which, you know, you started this conversation by saying we have a problem that one of our political parties is explicitly anti-democratic or one of our major political movements.

“How do you deal with that as a kind of social matter?”

Well, I end the book with this discussion, and I think you know my thoughts on it,

which is the bias always has to be toward finding ways to bring people back into the political

process, to integrate them, to forget the past, and to not re-billate them. That's not the right word to reconcile with them. That doesn't apply to, of course, the immediate family of the president, they broken many laws and they're going to face legal consequences of a kind that are just going to go forward.

And there are people around the president who also have done outright criminal things. And there are people like Bill Barr, who I think really will be permanently disgraced in American government, because they've been so important and so central. I don't think there's any coming back for him. But for many other people, and certainly for the Trump voters, I think we have to, we do

have to do our utmost to find a way back. Now, in some cases, it won't be feasible, because one of the reasons that people often were attracted to Trump was he was a personally obnoxious person, and they were personally obnoxious. And so he immancipated them.

So I don't think I have to worry about, like, to talk about Richard Grinnell. I mean, Richard Grinnell is a professionally unpleasant person. So he's going to make his own future. But we really need to be thinking, not, I mean, it was the legal government of the United States, people participated for a mix of right reasons, good and bad.

Many of the people who did it, did it for reasons that were fairly corrupt.

That's not the first time it's happened, and all of this has been the most corrupted

administration certainly in modern history, and maybe ever. If you're not caught for breaking the law, we have to find a way to reintegrate this. We have to become, we have to find a way to be a country again. I'll let me end with one of the things I went on a huge reading campaign about at the beginning of the Trump era was the history of West Germany, not Nazi Germany, but West

Germany at the 15 years after World War II. I mean, how do you build a democracy when you've had, when you've got people walking

“the streets who have committed terrible, terrible crimes, how do you think about that?”

And one of the best books, I read on this, I've made this point, that Conrad Ad now

Germany.

“Of justice, or you could have democracy, but not both.”

If you did justice, you would destroy the bases of the state, and make it impossible to

rule democratically, and if you're going to preserve the state and put yourself on the way to democracy, you're going to accept that a lot of people are going to get away with bad things. He chose democracy over justice, and that judgment was rewarded because what he found was that the society as it became more democratic, it also became more just, and that the verdict

on the people who did wrong was done, not by their contemporaries, but by their children.

They were judged in time, but the time, the first priority, is to put the democracy back

on this beat again. I'll just point out along the same lines that you mentioned, Hayek and his analytic error, the analytic error, ultimately led him to support the coup that brought Pinochet to power.

“And so the flip side is all of the point that you're making is also really important”

that once you decide that anything but purity leads you on a road that takes you someplace terrible, you actually end up being on that road yourself. Yes, very well said. Yes, agree. The book is Trump Hockelips, the author is David From David, thanks so much for joining

us. Thank you for the hospitality. The law fair podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. Our audio engineer this episode was Zachary Frank of the firm of goat rodeo.

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