Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

David Frum:

Donald Trump, if returned to office will be almost 80. He’s not a man in great health. And JD Vance will be one cheeseburger away from the presidency should they win. And so it matters what kind of person he is, what kind of vice president he’d be, what kind of president he’d be.

Preet Bharara:

That’s David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, and a staff writer at The Atlantic. Frum joined me today to break down what happened at last night’s much anticipated vice presidential debate. Will the candidate’s performances move the needle in what’s shaping up to be a neck-and-neck election? That’s all coming up. Stay tuned.

Great news, folks. Stay Tuned is going live. On October 15th at 5:00 PM Eastern Time, I’ll be speaking with Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in a live remote taping. We’ll be discussing the upcoming presidential election, the importance of battleground states and how the presidential candidates are trying to win over voters in Wisconsin. To learn more and to RSVP, head to cafe.com/live. I hope you’ll join us for this important conversation on October 15th.

Some are suggesting that last night’s debate might be the most important vice presidential debate in U.S. history. Atlantic columnist, David Frum, joins me to discuss the debate and whether it will impact the election. David Frum, welcome back to the show.

David Frum:

Thank you for having me return.

Preet Bharara:

So we have a lot to talk about, the race, politics, substantive issues. But, of course, we are recording this on the morning of Wednesday, October 2nd, just hours after the debate, the one and only debate between the vice presidential nominees took place. So why don’t we begin there? And before we talk about the particulars of the debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, I’m going to ask you the question that everyone has been talking about and asking about before the debate. And some people will like to talk about after the debate, depending on which side they’re on. Do vice presidential debates matter? And historically, have they mattered? And in this case, does it matter?

David Frum:

Well, there was a saying during the 2016 election, “LOL nothing matters.” I take the opposite you. I believe that everything matters. There’s just a lot of everything. And you never know in advance what will be the thing that matters and the thing that doesn’t matter. But Donald Trump, if returned to office, will be almost 80. He’s not a man in great health. And JD Vance will be one cheeseburger away from the presidency should they win. And so it matters what kind of person he is, what kind of vice president he’d be, what kind of president he’d be.

Preet Bharara:

Historically, can you point to any particular vice presidential debates that matter? Look, some people think that vice presidential picks don’t matter a lot. It probably mattered a lot for Kennedy when he chose Johnson. Could have mattered, I guess, when the first Bush chose Dan Quayle, but he overcame that. Historically, do you have a view on the significance and importance of vice presidents for purposes of the election of the president that year, not for purposes of catapulting that person into the public square for the future? And we’ll talk about that with JD Vance in a moment too.

David Frum:

Okay. Well, political scientists propose various measures to argue that vice presidential picks don’t matter. And if I believed in political science, I would repeat that those claims as if true.

Preet Bharara:

David Frum, I just want to state for the record, David Frum does not believe in political science.

David Frum:

Yeah. Well, let me make a little-

Preet Bharara:

… which by the way, on Fox, we’d say, “You’re anti-science.”

David Frum:

So I was trained as a historian and one of the things that historians believe is facts matter. And one of the things that political science believe is that facts can be massaged into models. How do you do a model when they’re like three examples? So I’ve never believed in the whole enterprise of trying to build abstract rules based on how many elections under contemporary conditions have there been? And what counts as contemporary conditions?

I think the whole exercise is I think we need history, not political science. Okay. So some history, in 1940, when Franklin Roosevelt was getting ready to run for his third term, he tried to reinvent his government. He tried to bring in more Republicans. He made a Republican Secretary of War. He made a Republican Secretary of the Navy, and he invited Henry Wallace Jr., son of Henry Wallace Sr., who had served in the Coolidge and Harding cabinets to be his vice president in 1940. This is a bit of a story, but it’s going to be worth it, I promise.

Wallace quickly proves not only a crackpot and a spiritualist, just a weirdo, but also a complete believer in Soviet propaganda. And as Roosevelt gets ready to run for his fourth term in 1944, the Democratic Party rebels and says, “We cannot have Henry Wallace be your running mate.” And they force Harry Truman on Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Did that make any difference to the outcome of the 1944 election? No. Did it make a difference to the history of the world? Huge difference. Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Totally correct.

David Frum:

And it was six people, six men, in the room who said, “No to Wallace, yes to Truman.” And because of that, we got the Berlin Airlift. We got the Marshall plan. We got NATO. We got the invention of the Western world, and we would’ve had a Soviet apologist in the White House otherwise. So, yeah, it matters.

Preet Bharara:

In the more immediate sense, I take your point, I want to go back to it that everything matters in particular when races are so close and are won by a handful of votes in a handful of states. So one could argue that a particular rally or set of ads that Hillary Clinton did or did not run, could have mattered and made the definitive difference in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or some other state.

And if that’s so, then a particularly good performance or a bad performance could make the difference. I guess the only question I have is if you’re trying to measure what difference a debate has, by definition, you’re talking about that subset of humans in our country that are undecided as to Trump versus Kamala Harris. And in the old days, you kind of thought those might be sort of independent-minded, open-minded moderates. Who the hell are those people at this moment who are undecided? And what might a vice presidential debate or presidential debate, for that matter, tell them about which way they should go if they’re undecided at this late date on October 2nd, 2024?

David Frum:

Well, the way I think about the people who are really making difficult choices in this election, it’s like a revolving door in a big office building. As the door moves there, it’s sections, so the different sections of the door that are moving and are going to end up on different sides of the wall.

So what you have, on the one hand, are young non-white men without college degrees who are on their way out from the Democratic coalition into the Republican coalition. So I think that would probably happen with or without Trump. Might even happen faster without Trump, but I think it’s going to be a real change in our politics. One of my big theories about American politics is that race is becoming less important. Sex is becoming more important as a dividing between blocks of voters. So non-white young men without college, they’re moving out.

Meanwhile, moving into the Democratic coalition, grudgingly kicking and screaming every which way, are a lot of historic Republican voters, people who voted for McCain, a younger Bush, McCain, Romney, people who have a little bit more security in life and who don’t like a lot of the democratic agenda, but are terrified by this instability and threat to democracy and threat to alliances from Donald Trump.

So Liz Cheney is the brand name version of that person, but there are a lot. I had dinner just the other night with a friend of mine who served at a sub-cabinet level in the Bush administration who’s now knocking on doors with his wife for Kamala Harris. And he doesn’t agree with her about very, very much, but he agrees with her about not overthrowing the Constitution and supporting NATO and protecting Israel and Ukraine and Taiwan.

So you have those two great movements. One pushed out of the Democratic coalition by just disaffection and alienation, and the other attracted to the Democratic coalition based on these mega issues, even if they don’t like some of the economic program.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s get to the debate. We’ll do both style and substance. But first, let’s talk about expectations. What was your expectation for this debate, and what do you think the general public’s expectation was? And in your answer, describe your prior relationship with JD Vance.

David Frum:

Yeah. So I had an expectation and a hope, and the expectation is based on my assessment of the two man, which is I think of, I know JD Vance is a man of very powerful intellect and very poor character. And Tim Walz is a man of good character, but not a first-class intellect.

And what I hoped was that Walz would be able to use his strength of character to drive home the bad character of JD Vance. There were some moments in the debate where that did happen, and those moments will be the viral clips that are already being aired, one that showed JD Vance refusing to acknowledge what happened in 2020 that Donald Trump lost, and then tried to make a coup to overcome his loss.

Tim Walz:

Did he lose the 2020 election?

J.D. Vance:

Tim, I’m focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?

Tim Walz:

That is a damning non-answer.

David Frum:

But if you watch the debate in real time, that’s not what happened. Walz was just not equal to the occasion in real time. Although there’s that, he was able to generate some good clips.

Preet Bharara:

Why do you think in the polls that I saw, and I don’t know how scientific they were, but they’re more scientific than a Donald Trump true social poll that both JD Vance and Tim Walz increased their likability, in fact, Tim Walz by quite a bit, JD Vance also, and that the polls I’ve seen so far talk about Vance winning the debate, whatever that means, and however important that is or is not very narrowly.

CNN Poll had him winning by two points, a couple other polls had it very narrow. Is that just because people see what they see and they already have a dog in the fight?

David Frum:

I think, to a great extent, that’s right. People decide what they wish happened. They believe that’s what happened. I think Walz benefited by human beings have over the centuries, over the millennia, evolved good ways to detect who’s a trustworthy person and who’s not perfect. That’s why there are con artists, but con artists simulate certain kinds of behaviors that are trust-inspiring.

And I think people looked at Walz and saw a good man who means well maybe in a little over his head, but a good man. And they saw in JD Vance a much more formidable brain. But if you were alert to that, you saw there were warnings there that this is someone you should not trust. And I think people did pick up on that, and I think we’re attuned to it, and it’s reinforced by all of our prejudices. But the reason it helped them both was because, and I think this is the central mistake that Walz made, Walz kept giving JD Vance these compliments. I’m sure you’re just as upset about school shootings as-

Preet Bharara:

I saw your Twitter feed. You didn’t like that. You wanted more hardball. David Frum wanted more hardball, anti-science David Frum.

David Frum:

I wouldn’t say more hardball. But look, obvious, it cannot be true that JD Vance is as upset about school shootings as you are because if he were, he would want to do something about them, and he doesn’t. So he’s not. So that doesn’t mean you say you’re not upset about school shootings, but you don’t give him these unearned compliments. And in fact, what Walz ended up being party to was a game of courtesies from which JD Vance had much more to gain than Walz had to gain.

He didn’t have to be rude. He didn’t have to be unpleasant. He didn’t have to name-call. At first, he couldn’t. That’s not his nature, and he shouldn’t because that degrades the whole process. But here’s the thing that really, I think, is the sort problem. And so long as these Trump characters are on the stage, it’ll remain the problem.

So this whole event is happening on CBS, the most famous name in television broadcast news, in American history, still a network with a strong sense of itself as a prestige network. And they want to talk, and they’ve got their two very smart women career reporters, incisive interviewers. They want to ask about the issues. They want to ask about healthcare. They want to ask about federal lands. They’re not going to take time to ask about George Soros’ plot to eliminate the white race.

That’s for the Steve Bannon show. But you know what? JD Vance goes on the Steve Bannon show and talks about the George Soros plan to eliminate the white race. And that’s part of who he is. And if you are the rules of your network, don’t allow you to talk about the things that actually are the reason this person is on the Republican ticket in the first place, you’re missing something because JD Vance is not there because of his views on federal lands. He is there because there are a lot of people who think that George Soros has applied to eliminate the white race, and JD Vance was their guy.

Preet Bharara:

Here’s the tweet you sent at 10:19 PM last night. Further to what you said a moment ago about the debate quote, “Vance is going home tonight with Walz’s wallet. Vance didn’t even have to snatch it. Walz just handed it over along with a bunch of unearned compliments to Vance’s fine character,” end quote, obviously, written with some sarcasm. And so my mild pushback is isn’t there some value, even if the character compliments are unearned, in coming across in this modern day and age, given all the vitriol of the past to come across as gracious and nice, Minnesota nice, to coin a phrase or not. Is that naive?

David Frum:

No. But it’s a closer line that you have to walk. And that’s where Walz’s limits became important, is he could have been gracious. He could have shake hands. Vice President Harris shook Donald Trump’s hand. And that must’ve been a pretty gross experience.

Preet Bharara:

Well, she didn’t pay him any unearned compliments.

David Frum:

But she didn’t pay him the unearned compliments, and she was not rude to him.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

David Frum:

And she wasn’t un-nice. But I don’t think you need to go that last extra mile. And I think it also means that when on the occasions when you do, it loses its value. That was an old Obama method, that he would talk, he would pay tribute to the personalities of the people who were around him.

And I think when Obama’s talking to Paul Ryan, it’s perfectly appropriate. As vigorously as those two agree or disagree that you could see that, well, they’re both idealists. They both had a vision for America and they both were in politics for belief and the right kind of reasons. Both of them postponed their money-making activities until after they had left the political arena.

Both of them lived on their salaries while they were in politics and ways that they probably recognize, and they’re both kind of intellectuals, egghead types and probably more comfortable with numbers sometimes than with people, more comfortable with print than with in-person meetings. They recognized each other and they could have a kind of mutual respect. So there are occasions for it, but I think when the occasion is not there, you can end up validating what you need to warn people about.

Preet Bharara:

I want to go back to this question of the importance of debates and what they tell us about someone either in the vice presidency or the presidency. There are these other areas in life, and you and I have shared some experiences including law school, where the tests for advancement or for placement at an institution or in a job or in a clerkship, are these tests that you take that as I’ve grown older and met a lot of people who are actually successful in life, in leadership and in the practice of law, for example, that those tests are kind of bullshit.

You’re testing a particular kind of test-taking skill that I’m not sure ultimately correlates to being good at the practice. And I think about these debates sort of that way as well, not just in terms of governing, but also in terms of just engaging in campaign activity.

So you made the observation. Others have shared it, that Tim Walz did not have the same dexterity as JD Vance. But then, you see another aspect of campaigning that happens more often than a single debate retail campaigning. One guy goes into a store, tries to meet ordinary people. Tim Walz is normal, knows how to speak to people, knows how to identify with people, knows how to relate to people. JD Vance looks like a bot giving a speech from a podium. JD Vance’s speech, I think, a majority of regional people, I think, would say the Tim Walz’s convention speech was much more formidable and well-received than JD Vance’s.

So those are two examples of other things that happen more often in a campaign than a single debate.

David Frum:

Yeah. That’s all true.

Preet Bharara:

How do you compare all those things in terms of what they tell you about, about leadership?

David Frum:

Legal education, it seems to me, is about two fundamental things. The first is there is actually a body of content and information that you have to master to be a lawyer, and it’s specialized. So what a great constitutional lawyer needs to know is very different from what a great tax lawyer needs to know, obviously. But in both cases, there’s a body of content. There are a set of rules and subrules and exceptions to the rules that you need to master to be at the top of the field and whatever technical area of law you are involved in.

The second thing that lawyers learn is how to separate their own ego from the facts of the case. I don’t know if your spouse is a lawyer, but for people who are non-lawyers married to lawyers, this can be extremely-

Preet Bharara:

Mine is.

David Frum:

Okay. Well then she’s inoculated, but mine is not, and it’s extremely exasperating. Well, one could argue that, but one could also argue this. It’s very exasperating. But the benefit of it is that you get very good at weighing the strength of arguments independent of how you feel about the arguments.

And that is a really important skill for lawyers. It’s not an un-useful skill in life. There’s something that can be deforming about legal education, but there’s also something that can be emancipatory because it teaches you how to weigh. You can say, “Look, I actually wish this argument were the correct one, but unfortunately, that argument is the stronger case.”

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know that the logic game section on the LSAT test for who was able to take both sides of a matter.

David Frum:

And it’s not take both sides because that sounds amoral. I mean to weigh both sides because that’s the real thing. Now, you end up maybe being if you’re in that kind of work commissioned, but one of the things that a lawyer does advise the client is when to fight and when to settle.

Preet Bharara:

I took you on a rabbit hole. Want to apologize to the listeners. But on this issue in politics, what’s the relative importance of being able to meet with a crowd and relate to them or give a speech from a podium versus perform well in one debate?

David Frum:

They all matter, but the performance in the debate, look, I mentioned earlier that Vance is a man of strong intellect and bad character. And we saw that displayed in the debate, and there were some revelations there if you were paying attention. So, for example, when Vance has a very strong anti-abortion position that is rejected by probably close to two-thirds of American voters,

Preet Bharara:

You wouldn’t know that from the debate really?

David Frum:

So how does he cope with that? Well, his answer is, “I’m going to lie my way out of it.” And the way he lied his way out of it was by presenting himself as an advocate of maternal health and child welfare. And you think, “Okay. Well, where is that in your record? Have you been an advocate for higher mother’s allowances? Have you been an advocate for expanded access to free clinics for uninsured children?” No, you haven’t done any of those things.

And in other cases, you could learn a lot from his silence. His most famous answer in the debate is the answer about the 2020 election where he declined to say what was true, that the election was-

Preet Bharara:

And Trump lost.

David Frum:

… Trump had lost, lost not in a close level. He lost by seven million popular votes. Again, speaking of weird rules, we have these rules that say, “Yeah, you can lose by seven million votes,” but it’s still quote, unquote, “close” because it only matters what people in Pennsylvania think. But he wasn’t able to say that. But I was listening at the beginning of the debate where the very first question referenced the Iranian missile barrage directed to Israel just a few hours before the debate began. And both were asked about the advice they would give the president if they were the second to last person in the situation room. And Vance had nothing to say, really nothing to say.

Preet Bharara:

Well, he did his bio in answer to that question.

David Frum:

Here’s why that is telling, because Vance is the leading critic of the US-led alliance structure in the world. He’s the leading force against helping Ukraine. He’s been leading force against helping Taiwan. He is scathing about the NATO allies. He is scathing about the Pacific allies, but because the Republican Party is a pro-Israel party, he’s always indicated to important Republican subgroups that Israel, for him, will be a special caravan. His animosity to Ukraine, his animosity to Taiwan, his animosity to Germany and South Korea, notwithstanding, he will be a friend to Israel.

And I’ve always thought, “That doesn’t make a lot of sense.” I don’t find that credible, partly because what Israel needs from the United States is not just the United States for the whole alliance structure, which the United States is the center. Israel’s most important trading partner is the EU. It needs the EU to be safe. And what I think he revealed to me there was my intuition is right. Hours after this missile barrage, he doesn’t have one warm word for the people who spent the night sheltering in bomb shelters. And that tells me who he’s not and who he’s not tells me something but who he is.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with more of my conversation with David Frum. Going back to this abortion issue and how JD Vance talked about it and dissembled about it, he said, at some point, some version of, “Well, the Republican Party needs to do a better job in talking about abortion.” What the hell does that mean exactly as opposed to the substance of his party’s position?

By the way, we should point out, I believe it’s the case that Donald Trump, the head of the ticket, tweeted out or posted on some social media site during the debate, did he not, that he would veto a national abortion ban. What do you make of all of that?

David Frum:

Well, when you say we need to do a better job-

Preet Bharara:

I love when politicians do that. Why are your polls in the toilet? I need to do a better job of communicating why they shouldn’t be in the toilet.

David Frum:

Well, I spent a long time in Republican politics. And a lot of people, I have intermediate and probably muddled any logical views on the abortion question. And the thing I have been saying in my writing about this question now for close to 20 years is that Republicans are giving are answering the wrong question.

And that the way you answer the abortion question, if you’re someone with the intermediate and muddled views that I think maybe a lot of us have is that there used to be 1.2 million abortions a year in this country. Now, they’re about 800,000. They are never going to be zero. If you are someone who views abortion with unhappiness, maybe, you should figure how do you get the number from 800,000 down to 600,000? What would be involved in that? Well, let’s study the women who have abortions that we discover that the typical woman seeking an abortion is in her 20s, she’s not a teenager. She already has one child.

And usually, she reports having had some economically traumatic event in her life in the previous 12 months. You think, “Okay, she’s had a baby. She loves a child. She knows what’s at stake here.” But she’s also in this state of shock. She’s lost a job or a relationship has ended, or she’s lost a house or been foreclosed on or something. Maybe, if she had $500 a month more like cash on the first of the month, maybe that would influence her decision. If you want to reduce the abortions from 800,000, why do you think about 500 a month cash per child? Why don’t you think about instead of have opening clinics where the mother goes to the clinic, what if you put the clinic in a van and post it in a neighborhood and open it at seven in the morning, and have it there on Saturdays?

I don’t know whether any of these particular things would make a difference. But what if you stop thinking about what do we ban and start thinking about what do we give to change people’s behavior? And then you’d be answering the right question. I think that’s the kind of person he was trying to be. But the problem is he has a long record of being a banner, and he has a long record of voicing this strange attitude, hostility. He’s a devoted son. He’s a devoted husband. He’s got close relationships with women. And yet the abstract impersonal woman is to him a creature whom he views with great suspicion and wants to control.

Preet Bharara:

Especially the ones who don’t have children.

David Frum:

And I listened to that, some iterations of that point, which he’s made many times. And, look, I share some of his views that we do have across the developed world, a birth rate crisis. We’re below replacement level in just what every country and in some places like the Pacific Rim countries catastrophically below replacement.

So there’s a way of talking. If you were to go on a podcast, okay, we’re on a podcast, and I say, “We got a lot of survey data that shows that Americans under 40 are having fewer children, many fewer children than they say they want.” When you ask them how many children they say, they wanted averages out year three, they’re having barely a little over one. There’s a gap there. Why? How do we help them? How do we help people? Children are this powerful source of meaning and love in life. They’re the most important thing for most people that we will ever do. How do we help them?

Preet Bharara:

Well, one way of going about it is to attack the moral character of the people who aren’t having children,

David Frum:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

That would be one way.

David Frum:

You can talk about this in a way that doesn’t make you sound like a sociopath. So when you choose the way that does make you sound like a sociopath over and over and over again, that’s a question about even if… When he says, “We need to do a better job,” I think he’s right. He’s talking about something real. But it’s strange that the person who is the problem is talking about we need to do a better job of solving the problem.

Preet Bharara:

My favorite line from JD Vance, because I looked through my notes as you were talking,, was when Margaret Brennan said something about the Springfield situation that the migrants there were in the country legally. And I wonder if this was planned or this was an insight in a window into Vance in some way or his character. He says, “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check,” which the hell did you make of that comment?

David Frum:

Well, look, I get what he was driving at there which is-

Preet Bharara:

It’s a very odd thing to object to a fact check even if that was the rule. Do you think that was intended, or do you think that was a gaffe?

David Frum:

No. I think that was a moment of exasperation.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

David Frum:

But here’s what he was trying to communicate back of the quibbling about the fact checking. We’ve had this complete breakdown of the asylum system in the United States. The people who are entering the United States in such large numbers today are not the illegal immigrants of the 1990s who had no status, who were crossing the border surreptitiously and seeking to avoid any contact with the authorities.

The modern influx is driven by people dealing with this crisis and abuse of the asylum system. They are coming in with legal color, and they’re seeking to make contact with the authorities to get temporary permission to stay in the United States with temporary permission that turns into years and decades.

So the Haitian population in Springfield, they’re under something called Temporary Protected Status, which is a legal status, for sure. But is a legal status that you get if you enter the country illegally in the first place?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Yeah.

David Frum:

And that’s the point he was trying…. Because prestige media are very unwilling to talk about the immigration problem as it is, there’s this haste to say, “Well, they have a legal status. Therefore, they’re legal immigrants.” And those of us who are on the more skeptical of immigration side, as I am, say, “Yeah. But they entered illegally in the first place.” And the status that is keeping them in the country is an abuse of what was supposed to be a rare and exceptional situation that has become a blanket norm that benefits hundreds of thousands of people who entered illegally and are clearly never returning home.

Preet Bharara:

Well, what did you make of how Governor Walz handled the border and migration issue? I thought that was pretty good.

David Frum:

Yeah. I’m going to succumb to the Washington disease of quoting oneself. But the first article I wrote, and I’ve been banging on about the Trump Drumpf since 2015. But the first article I wrote after Joe Biden was at last safely in the presidency. We had restored the principle of constitutional government, peaceful, well, not the peaceful alternation of power, but the legal alternation of power. It wasn’t peaceful.

There was a violent riot that was incited by the former President. Biden began canceling many of the Trump era controls on the border. And this is the first and biggest mistake of the Biden presidency. And I think the core problem here is the very liberal people on immigration and Biden was taking advice from them, imagine that the reason we’re having tens of millions of people on the move through the planet is because we live in a world of misery, and they’re being pushed by misery from their homes.

And therefore, what is the decent thing? The developed world must take the most miserable people, and eventually the world will run out of miserable people and the problem will adjust. But my view of it has always been that these are people who are paying 10, 20, $30,000 to a trafficker to bring them to the United States or to Europe.

This is driven not by the world’s misery, but by the world’s rising prosperity. And when you study the problem and when you interview the people and go to the, whether it’s Serbia or the border in this country, in the EU, what you see are people who are more prosperous than the typical person from the place they’ve come from who have made a rational investment in trying to better themselves even further.

And these are the most ambitious, the most capable, and some of the most well-resourced people in their original place. And there is no limit because as the world gets more prosperous, there’ll be more and more people on the move. So when you dismantle the controls that Trump imposed not at the beginning of his presidency in the last months, you are going to have an endless problem of unregulated self-selected migration with no limit to it. And the Biden people did not understand that. And the whole-

Preet Bharara:

But they understand, I mean, notwithstanding, people might have some quarrels with some of the things that you’re saying, but don’t you think that the Biden administration and Kamala Harris who will potentially inherit it, understand that now in how they talk about the border?

David Frum:

They do understand it now, and they have begun in the past few months to do some necessary things. But they bought themselves a lot of trouble. And look, if we ultimately lose America, if the man who made a coup in 2021 is restored in 2024 and this time in a legal way, it will be because of this one mistake. And the United States will pay very dearly for it. I hope that doesn’t happen. I think they have learned from experience, and they have some better approaches now. But immigration, there is no limit to how much immigration there would be in a world without rules.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to go back to JD Vance for a moment, and you have now on a number of occasions said he has bad character. And I put this question to other people, and I’ve gotten different answers. So JD Vance, very famously, we all know was deeply critical of Donald Trump, used really pointed language to criticize him, his character, what he means for the country. Drew very nasty comparisons between Donald Trump and some other people, but managed to at least present himself as a convert. Is he just a cynical opportunist or has he been converted? Ezra Klein, who had on the podcast some weeks ago, believes that he’s actually a convert. What do you think?

David Frum:

I think consistent hypocrisy is a very difficult thing to sustain.

Preet Bharara:

So he’s a convert, says David Frum.

David Frum:

Yeah. I think, look, the hypocrite is someone who thinks one thing and says another. I just don’t think there are very many people who can carry that off. What we think and what we say come into alignment one way or the other. Either, we change our thoughts to our words or our words to our thoughts. And the honest person changes thinks first, speaks second, and brings the words into alignment with the thoughts.

But there are a lot of people who do it the other way around. So you say something often enough, you say something to meet certain needs. Yeah. I don’t think he would be the first person to have come to believe what it’s in his interest to say. That’s not integrity, however, because the change of view was not driven by new information or some kind of religious conversion experience. It was driven by necessity and opportunity. But at this point, yeah, I think you could give him a lie detector test, then ,he’d pass it.

Preet Bharara:

Well, is he the platonic ideal of the lawyer that you were talking about who is capable of taking either side?

David Frum:

No, because I kept stressing, it isn’t the lawyer. The lawyer is capable of taking other side, but the platonic ideal of the lawyer knows which is the better side, or the stronger side.

Preet Bharara:

But in the civil system and in the criminal system, lawyers do not go into court other than prosecutors, if I dare say that. You may know your client is guilty. You may know your client has the weaker argument, but you make as powerful as you can, the weak argument because that’s your job.

David Frum:

Right. But then you outside the courtroom, you say to the client, you have the weaker side here. You should settle. You should settle. The most [inaudible].

Preet Bharara:

I’m practicing law again. A lot of lawyers don’t say that. A lot of lawyers, to maintain their position with the client, do in fact often the opposite and tell their client the government is full of crap.

David Frum:

Yeah. I think in the civil case, a good lawyer tells you, “Look, just find out what they need, what they want really. And let’s pay them, and let’s settle this matter because let’s not go to court.” And that’s the advice by the way that Fox News’s lawyer should have been giving them all along, and maybe, they were. But, yeah, they got you. They just got you. The text are all there. Let’s find what is the cheapest price we can pay to make this go away. So a lawyer who fights no matter what is not a good lawyer.

Preet Bharara:

Can I tell you what I thought was, and I don’t mean this as a compliment, except as a matter of cynical strategy. I thought the most clever way that Vance talked about his conversion, I was just dumbstruck by the strategy of this. And maybe, I’m overreacting to it, but I wonder what you think. Vance said at one point when he was asked about his prior statements, he said, quote, “I was wrong about Donald Trump.”

And then he goes on to say, “I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record.” So if you’re a skeptical Trump MAGA voter and you’re like, “Who’s this new guy,” he insinuates himself in that comment by saying, “Yeah, I was duped by the other people that you despise and hate and who you think are the enemy of the people,” the mainstream media. And so I was a victim of the mainstream media. What level of cynical brilliance is that in explaining to the Trump base why he came along late?

David Frum:

Yeah. That is pretty good. I agree with you. That does make an impact. It would raise the question in an attentive listener. What have you done to address your gullibility problem?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. No, Yale long grads are very gullible.

David Frum:

Because when you are back in government, if you do become vice president, it will not be a once a year thing. It’ll be a once an hour thing that somebody comes up and tells you things that aren’t true. So if you’re not good at discerning what you should rely on, maybe, you should be in some other line of work.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think if Trump’s demeanor and attitude was as genial, and I think he was genial, and cordial as JD Vance was in the debate? And that was his posture, especially post-assassination attempt, and it’s all the Trump stuff, and it’s all the same policies, and it’s all the same ideas, and it’s all the same attacks, but delivered in a more refined and polished packaged form. Would Trump support go up or go down?

David Frum:

This is like when a young couple fall in love.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know where you’re going with this.

David Frum:

There’s a moment they’ll stand over the waterfall or in the moonlight, and they’ll say, “Would you love me if?” And that question means-

Preet Bharara:

The answer is always yes.

David Frum:

Yeah. Well, of course, the correct answer is yes. But the actual factual answer is, would things be the same if things were different?

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

David Frum:

And the answer to things are different. Things would be different. If Donald Trump weren’t a monster, he’d be a very different person.

Preet Bharara:

But is it the fact of his monsterness, to use your word, not my word, is that what attracts his base? And if he became more genteel, would they go away?

David Frum:

I do think the Romans put bums in the seats of the Colosseum for 500 years on the theory that people enjoyed watching human beings ripped apart by wild beasts or hacked pieces by swords. And we don’t have viewership statistics for the Colosseum, but it seems to have done a brisk business. So, yeah, I think there is a part of the human spirit.

There are magnificent parts of the human spirit that are horrified by cruelty and will risk our lives and give our lives to stop it. But there are other parts of our spirit which are excited by cruelty and find it fun and thrilling.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with David Frum after this. I guess when I asked the earlier question, what I was really getting at is the next question after what we began this conversation with the import of the selection, not just the import of the performance of the debate, Donald Trump goes away at some point, whether he’s re-elected or not, right? It’s not going to live forever. Does JD Vance become the embodiment of whatever Trumpism is? Is he trying to turn it into a rational or rationalized legal philosophy, or is that an impossibility because there is no such thing as a coherent strategy for government and leadership that is Donald Trump?

David Frum:

Well, we will find out the answer to that question. Assuming Donald Trump loses the 2024 election and assuming he agrees to go off the stage one way or the other, and he may not, he may still be around in 2028, but assuming he does or he is compelled to go off the stage or the party turns on him, people will have different ideas about what comes next.

So there’ll be Republicans to say, “You know what? This whole thing has been a disaster.” Actually, look back, we’ve lost every election since 2016. 2016 looks like a fluke. 2018, we lost the house. 2020, we lost the presidency by seven million popular votes. 2021, we lose the Senate. We have a bad year in ’22. We lose again in ’24. Maybe, we lost the House in ’24. This whole thing was a mistake, and we need to get Glenn Youngkin or Brian Kemp, or some normal person to bring back the parties it was.

So that’ll be one set of answers. There’ll be people like Ron DeSantis, maybe not literally him, but you’ll say, “You know what? Yes, Brian Kemp, Glenn Youngkin, you’re right.” But we need to take a little of the Trump meanness and mix it into the old message, but with a little bit of snarl.

And then there’ll be people like JD Vance who will say, “No. What we need to do is to treat Trumpism like a series of ideas, and put a smile on it, and make it a little bit more rational and coherent just the way you said and try that.” And then there’ll be people, I don’t know, Bobby, Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard will say, “The essence of Trumpism is being crazy. And what this electorate wants is an authentic, crazy person, not a pretend crazy person like JD Vance.”

And I think those four approaches will be tested, and we’ll see what the right answer is. And I’m going to be a little careful about guessing, which is going to get the upper hand. But my own intuition, for what it’s worth, is the Vance answer will not be the right answer, that trying to trick make Trumpism a series, the people who say old policy with a snarl and the people who say authentic, crazy are more likely to be right. But I don’t know. We’ll see.

Preet Bharara:

My increasing view of Trump is that it is much more politics of attitude than anything else. And obviously, there are policy prescriptions within that attitude. And one of the reason I think that is every once in a while, people will ask me on social media, on Twitter, “Why do you follow this or that person?” I follow a lot of conservatives. I follow number of Trump supporters because I want to know how they’re thinking about things because I want to know what they’re saying.

I didn’t watch the debate yesterday and mute it when JD Vance was talking. I didn’t mute it when Donald Trump was talking. I don’t mute all these people because it’s sometimes very instructive to understand what the other side thinks and why they think that way. And there’s this universally condemned series of statements that Donald Trump made in the last number of days where he calls Kamala Harris stupid.

So she has mental issues and problems. Joe Biden does also, but Joe Biden developed those later. But Kamala Harris was born in mental decline. I forget the exact words that are used, which even for Trump is a little bit beyond what normal political discourse is about. And you would think that everybody would hate that, and it’s nasty, and it’s terrible and doesn’t belong in our politics, and it’s further polarizing and all of those things.

And then I see the reaction from people in the MAGA universe and someone said, I don’t know your reaction to this, “This is why people love Trump, because like what he says or not, he says what he thinks.” And the very fact that he says this stuff that is considered taboo and impolite and political circles and for generations, much more of what we see is the kind of cordiality we saw in the vice presidential debate. The very fact that he says stuff, even if it’s nasty, is seen as a virtue. What do you make of that?

David Frum:

That’s interesting. We’re talking about old clips. We talked about Reagan. You can see it on YouTube. And I direct people if they haven’t toward it, if they haven’t watched it before. All of many have. Is the clip of Richard Nixon presiding over the electoral college count in 1961.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Oh wow. Yeah.

David Frum:

You may have seen this. So he’s, of course, vice president, Eisenhower’s vice president. He runs for president in 1960. He loses to John F. Kennedy, and he finds himself in the situation that Al Gore would later find himself in, of having to preside over his own defeat, and to read the count. So many vote for John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas, so many for Richard Nixon of California. And he performs a ceremonial duty. And then he says, because there’s no script for what you’re supposed to say, he asks the room, “This is such an unusual situation. may I have three minutes of your time?”

And everyone claps. And he says, “I hope the men in the Kremlin just witnessed the scene that we have shown here to the world today.” And he talked about the majesty of this transition of power where he delivered the presidency to John F. Kennedy through World War II and the Cold War. We had a series of imperatives on the American government, which is we had to preserve a lot of unity at home because the dangers around the unity at home were so intimate, so overwhelming, nuclear Holocaust, that everyone involved in politics understood the system is bigger than any one of us.

And when the Cold War ended, I think a lot of that feeling faded. And Donald Trump certainly doesn’t think the system is bigger than him. And I think one of the questions for us as we enter the post-Trump era is can we get that feeling back that the system is more important, the game is more important than the winner, the rules of the thing that matters. And we all benefit so much from these rules that we all have a stake, even if the rules pronounce us that turns loser. Maybe, there’ll be another turn. Can we get back to that?

Preet Bharara:

What about this question of whether or not there is one lesson to be learned by all politicians, and that is to speak less robotically and to be more honest, even if it’s sort of not polite and formerly political taboo. It seems to me the one thing that frustrates people, and it’s not necessarily partisan, is that at least when I was growing up, politicians are very robotic. Some people will say, and this is not true of everyone, that the least interesting guest you can have on a podcast is an elected official because you don’t say anything, or everything they say is utterly predictable.

And sometimes, interviewers try to engage in a game of gotcha. And it’s ultimately fake, and it’s ultimately boring, and it’s ultimately not true and not real. I don’t think the solution answer is Donald Trump certainly, but I think there is some force to that critique.

Now, on the other side, as I’ve thought about it over the years, a politician is somebody who’s trying to gain a consensus and a majority of people who will support him or her. So you can’t just cavalierly before Trump came along, disparage even if you think it’s right to do so and you feel this way, elements of your constituency because you’re trying to get as many votes as possible. So one of the reasons that you’re anodyne and one of the reasons that you’re uninteresting is that put negatively, you’re trying to be all things to all people, put positively you’re trying to be a uniter, not a divider. But that leaves a lot of people feeling that it’s all fakery. Is there any truth to that?

David Frum:

I think with the less good politicians, it’s true. And first is how do you have a good conversation with a politician? And that is you don’t try the gotcha questions because there’s this game where a politician goes on the air and says, “There’s one thing I can’t say.” There are a lot of things I can say, but ask me about one of those. And the interviewer says, “No, no, no. I’m going to give you the hardball question, which is the thing we both know you can’t say.” He says, “What’s the point of this exercise? You both know I can’t say that.” That’s bad interviewing because there are a lot of things that would be worth asking about.

But Brian Lamb, the former host of C-SPAN, always understood, “Ask the right question.” And you do get interesting answers from the people with the heaviest responsibilities. I don’t think the politicians of the past were always so robotic. Bill Clinton wasn’t robotic. George W. Bush wasn’t robotic. They were careful they could be sometimes invasive.

Preet Bharara:

I guess that’s what I mean. Yeah. Look, Donald Trump, I always talk about this as being a seminal moment in 2016. And you had the 16 Republicans lined up in front of Air Force One at the Reagan Library. I think this is where it was.

And Jeb Bush is saying, “Republicans are better on national security and on safety, and my brother kept us safe.” And Donald Trump is basically like, “What the f*** are you talking about?” 9/11 happened on your brother’s watch and not another person. And again, I’m not praising Trump. I’m just trying to diagnose something. None of the other 15 people or 14 people would’ve dared to say that. They would’ve been very careful about that. And at that moment, when I didn’t think Trump had any shot of winning, but it was more entertainment value in 2016, that was something different.

David Frum:

Yeah. But that’s a very specific Jeb Bush problem, which is if you’re going to run as the brother of George W. Bush, you’d better have a very clear answer on to what extent do you accept and to what extent do you reject your brother’s presidency? And if you can’t work that out, maybe you need to reconsider having a third Bush presidency.

Preet Bharara:

Right. My point was not about Jeb. The point was about Trump, that he busts out of the straitjacket of Orthodox politics. And I can understand why that hasn’t appealed. He goes too far, and he has no character and all those other things. But to the extent he breaks out of that straitjacket, isn’t that a lesson to other politicians too?

David Frum:

Up to a point. Just remember, Donald Trump got 46% of the vote in 2016, a little higher in the 46s in 2020. He never had majority approval of his presidency on any single day of his presidency according to any reputable poll. Rasmussen doesn’t count. That day in day out, this is why I think he’s going to lose the election in 2024. A majority of the American people have rejected him on every single day since he became a candidate and then a president.

And the American political system is not perfectly representative. So even though a majority rejects you, it’s still theoretically possible to become president, and did happen in 2016. But it’s not a lesson to emulate. And anyway, yes, of course, politicians want to win, but most people undertake the enormous risks of starting before… In the last round of the game, it’s you or one other person. So you have a 50/50 chance of winning or thereabouts.

But when you start, you don’t. You’re doing it for some reason that’s bigger than yourself when you start, and saying, “Well, maybe, if I’m a monster, I can gain a little competitive advantage,” but well, what’s the point of this? We all know why Donald Trump entered politics because he had these psychic needs and, of course, to steal. But most people enter politics under the extremely long odds enter for better reasons than that.

And this kind of self-indulgence is not the course to recommend, and it mostly doesn’t work. And even now, Donald Trump, today, Donald Trump in 2016 was interesting because shocking. He’s not a shock. He’s boring. That’s the most devastating point that Kamala Harris made against him in their debate was people are leaving because they’re tired of the show. Reality shows don’t last usually 10 seasons.

Preet Bharara:

Can we talk about Kamala Harris’s coalition such as it is? They will say it’s very impressive that we have people like Dick Cheney AOC and Taylor Swift. Now, I don’t remember ever seeing anything like that before. I don’t think even the Reagan Coalition was quite like that. Is that a lasting thing or is this just a feature of anti-Trumpism at this moment?

David Frum:

Can I say both?

Preet Bharara:

Sure.

David Frum:

That sound like one of those Weasley politicians you like you hate having on your podcast.

Preet Bharara:

No. You’re the platonic ideal of a lawyer, sir.

David Frum:

Ouch, ouch. Smile when you say that. Okay. So it’s both because, first, Dick Cheney being in the coalition is a very specific response to the threat of Donald Trump. And Cheney is doing what a lot of my friends are doing, what I’m doing saying, “You know what? We are not going to like 80% of the domestic agenda of the Harris administration.” We’re going to swallow that with our eyes open, that we’re not going to like a lot of it because it’s more important to preserve the Constitution and because we trust her to do a better job of maintaining American leadership in the world, which is for us, issue number one.

I think that’s the Cheney man. Just, yeah, the spending’s going to be crazy. And there are going to be all these regulations and all kinds of irritating little things, social issues we’re not going to like. But you know what? We’ll have a chance. All of that can be fixed later. You can always balance the budget later. But the things that can’t be postponed, she’s better on. And so in that sense, it is an aberration. We’re not going to see a Sanders AOC, Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney coalition again.

Preet Bharara:

Fair.

David Frum:

But the part of it that is enduring is I do think we’re living through a moment like 1968, ’74, when the parties change who their voters are. And as I said to you, we discussed at the beginning of this podcast, we are seeing a certain kind of voter with a lot to lose migrating into the Democratic coalition because it offers stability and a certain kind of voter with less to lose and more alienation migrating out of the Democratic coalition because they don’t feel attached enough to the society and are excited by the Republican promise to take more risks with America.

Preet Bharara:

So David, there’s a lot going on. We talked about some of this before we began recording, and it is a little perilous to talk about the Middle East because events are changing so rapidly. So as I mentioned, we’re recording this on the morning of Wednesday, October 2nd. This podcast won’t be out for a number of hours. And who knows what other things will have happened in that time. But we have seen Israel take very serious and aggressive concerted action against Hezbollah, a targeted ground war beginning, whatever targeted means. Iran has retaliated with a series of missiles in the last day. Do you dare to say anything about how you think this is going to go with respect to Lebanon, Iran and Hamas, or is it too fraught and difficult?

David Frum:

I’m not going to make military predictions because I don’t have the expertise, and I don’t have the prophetic gift, but I think there are two lessons I would invite people to take away from all the shocking events since October 7th of last year. The first is how much the world needs American leadership. That’s one of the questions on the ballot in 2024. Can the United States abdicate? Can it auction off its foreign policy to the highest bidder?

We will support Ukraine if they fabricate dirt against a political opponent. We won’t support Ukraine if they don’t fabricate dirt against a political opponent, or does the world need America to be there? And they’re in all kinds of, not just the headline places like the Middle East, but in the places of tragedy on page [inaudible] what is going on in Sudan where the scale of human suffering is enormous and where American leadership is, there’s a special representative to the Sudan, and aid is being delivered, and negotiations are being done, and American power is a shaping fact that is the only hope anybody in that terrible situation has got for a better outcome, that American leadership has to be president.

When you have a candidate for president says, “My idea is we leave the world to run itself,” your idea is to leave the world to catch on fire that will scorch America too. That’s the first thing I hope people take away from these events.

And the second thing I hope they’ll take away is authoritarian societies boast a lot about their strength. The Iranians just did ring of fire, line of death. We’ll fire all our missiles at you, but democratic systems don’t like to talk that way.

Problem is we’d always rather spend the money at home if we could. As President Eisenhower said when he said goodbye, every dollar spent on instruments of war stolen from health and education and transportation and better needs at home. So we don’t like to do it. But the capabilities of democratic societies are very great, and that is something we all ought to keep in mind when we hear these people from far left and far right talking about the doom and decline of our way of life and all these, the wave of the future is somewhere else. The wave of the future is liberal democratic capitalism right here at home. It doesn’t talk a big game, but it is capable of defending itself when it has to.

Preet Bharara:

How do you think these issues will be playing out in the election? Could we be sitting here in mid-November saying that, as you said earlier, everything matters, and you don’t know what small thing or medium-sized thing or large thing will affect the election? Could we be sitting here seeing in November that Kamala Harris lost Michigan because a particular block of voters was disenchanted with the Kamala Harris and Joe Biden policy in the Middle East or in some other state that needs to be won?

David Frum:

That’s not impossible. It’s also very possible that Kamala Harris wins Pennsylvania because the Philadelphia suburbs are filled with hundreds of thousands of people, not a small block of voters who understand that the world needs America and understands that what she and her ticket stand for is American leadership in defense of embattled democracies.

And during the Cold War, the reason Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush were such powerful figures and one such vast majority was they were able to give voice to American leadership at its most inspiring in the more peaceful world that followed the Cold War, we needed to talk about that less. And since 9/11 and America frustration with the way that the 9/11 wars played out, we don’t like to talk about. It’s we’re all embarrassed and chagrined, and we’ve lost a lot of self-belief.

But one of the things that… there are some gifts of Donald Trump. And one of the gifts he’s given is he’s reminded the liberal half of America that it does believe in the country, and it hates dictators and wants to stand up to them, and does believe that the world needs American, does believe in international markets and does believe in all of that.

They may not like the Reagan domestic agenda, but when Kamala Harris puts Reagan’s face in ads, she is saying he voiced something that is truly universal, that is shared by all Americans of Democratic belief, democratic faith with a small D. And Donald Trump rejects that. So I think her best argument for being present is that she is the heir to that mighty tradition. And if she loses, people may say what you just said.

If she wins, people say, “You know what? If you are as liberal a Democrat as Kamala Harris and can say something that touches the court, and Dick Cheney, you found the magic key of American politics.”

Preet Bharara:

Last question, you mentioned Donald Trump gifts. So my last question is, do they pay you enough at the Atlantic that you can buy one of the $100,000 Trump watches?

David Frum:

I know you want one.

Preet Bharara:

David Frum.

David Frum:

I would say don’t think of it as a watch. Think of it as a way that a non-citizen who’s not allowed to make a campaign contribution can deliver cash directly to Donald Trump’s wallet. And maybe, the watch arrives someday. And maybe, it doesn’t.

Preet Bharara:

Are you making an allegation, sir?

David Frum:

I’m making a suggestion that I think, to me, it looks like a scheme for organized bribery and intentional circumvention of the campaign finance laws. And I don’t know that anyone will give $100,000. But I think if anyone does, that person will not be shocked if the watch never arrives and will not be shocked of the watch turns out to be made of plastic instead of gold. They won’t care. That person already has a good watch.

Preet Bharara:

Words to the wise. I don’t think we have a lot of listeners who are in the market for that.

David Frum:

Yeah. They own a nice watch. They don’t own a president, but that $100,000 allows you to own a little piece of an American president.

Preet Bharara:

They probably also own a bridge somewhere on paper, at least. In any event, David Frum, thanks for spending time with us. It’s always great.

David Frum:

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with David Frum continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for Insiders, we discuss the difference between today’s Republican ticket and Ronald Reagan.

David Frum:

However much I disagree with this person, I’ve done foreign policy and domestic policy, there is a human being here who has something in him that I can respond to.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to.cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s.cafe.com/insider. I want to end the show this week by offering my best wishes to two great and consequential men on milestone birthdays. And they both also happen to be fellow Libras.

First, I want to join the whole world in celebrating the 100th birthday of Former President Jimmy Carter. As long as he’s lived, his legacy of decency and integrity and service will last forever. So happy birthday, Jimmy Carter on your 100th.

The second birthday boy is another great man who was not president but was much more consequential to me all my life. And that’s my dad. He turns 85 this week. He came to this country some 55 years ago with just dollars in his pocket and a hope in his heart that I might amount to something in America. He has very often told me and my brother how proud he is of us. But given the life he has led and the sacrifices he has made, he will never be prouder of us than we are of him. Here’s to 100 years for you too, dad. Happy birthday. I love you.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, David Frum. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @Preet Bharara with the #Askpreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.