Preet Bharara:

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

David Frum:

The people who support him, they don’t even have the excuse that he concealed his real self from them. He made it clear who and what he was. If you supported Trump, you did it knowing all of those things. That was a tough thing for those who did not support Donald Trump to face about so many of their fellow countrymen and women.

Preet Bharara:

That’s David Frum. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic. Frum has been a prominent voice in conservative politics for years. He once served as a speech writer to President George W. Bush. Frum is the author of 10 books, most of which explore the evolution of the American conservative movement, his latest, called Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy, documents the evolution of the Republican Party during the Trump years.

Preet Bharara:

Frum returns to the show to discuss the war in Ukraine, the power of congressional internet celebrities like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and whether Trump can make a political comeback. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

Before I get to your questions, I want to mention something. The video of our full Stay Tuned live show that took place last week, featuring my conversation with Ben Stiller, Gary Kasparov, and Alexander Vindman, is now available at cafe.com for members of CAFE Insider. Folks who want to try the membership for just $1 for the first month can do so at cafe.com/insider. Now let’s get to your questions.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes from our old friend Walter Shaub, who once upon a time was the director of the Office of Government Ethics. Actually, it’s less of a question than a request. Walter writes, “Preet, Congress is holding a hearing on a congressional stock ban this Thursday. It would be great if you mentioned that for folks. It’s ridiculous this is even a debate.”

Preet Bharara:

Now Walter and I don’t agree on everything, but on this we are absolutely on the same page. This is an issue that I’ve written about, I’ve spoken about, and I’ve tweeted about on a number of occasions. I find it to be remarkable that there is no prohibition on individual members of Congress being able to hold and trade, buy and sell individual stocks, even though members of Congress, both in the House and the Senate, have broad ability to affect markets and learn inside information. I think it diminishes trust in the kinds of things that they vote on and the kinds of hearings that they have and the kinds of legislation that they propose and the kinds of influence that lobbying forces have if they’re allowed to trade in individual stocks.

Preet Bharara:

As I’ve mentioned many times before, such bans are normal and commonplace among financial analysts, financial reporters, law firms, trading firms. In fact, as I’ve mentioned also, I haven’t traded in any individual stock in many, many years, because even as a junior staffer in the United States Senate, on the judiciary committee, I felt uncomfortable owning and trading individual stocks given the portfolio of work that I had and the member that I worked for had.

Preet Bharara:

So I, along with the bipartisan majority of Americans, believed that some sort of stock ban for members of Congress is in order, and I think this hearing is long overdue. I’m happy that Representative Lofgren is holding this hearing Thursday, April 7th.

Preet Bharara:

As Representative Lofgren said in a statement, “The committee will hold a public hearing to examine proposed stock trading reforms for Congress, with a panel of stakeholders and experts to be announced in the coming weeks.”

Preet Bharara:

Now there happened to be a number of proposals on the table. They vary in popularity and a little bit in substance. One that I’ve written about before is proposed by Senators Jon Ossoff and Mark Kelly. It’s called the Ban Congressional Stock Trading Act. It would require all members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children to place their stock portfolios in a blind trust.

Preet Bharara:

There’s another competing proposal from Senators Elizabeth Warren and Steve Daines, who’s a Republican. They’ve introduced the Bipartisan Ban on Congressional Stock Ownership Act, which is a little bit more stringent than even the Ossoff-Kelly bill. The Warren-Daines bill would ban lawmakers and their spouses from owning or trading individual stocks. They would only be allowed to own stocks through broad exchange-traded funds or mutual funds.

Preet Bharara:

And so, whereas on the one hand, the Ossoff-Kelly bill would require lawmakers and their spouses to give up control of any stocks by putting them in a blind trust, the Warren-Daines bill would make lawmakers sell off their stocks altogether. Importantly, in my mind, both bills reach the issue of spousal ownership of stock. Now it’s an open question as to whether any of these bills will garner enough broad-based bipartisan support to get passed in the Senate and the House, but I hope they will.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes in a tweet from Marcus who asks, “Is there enough time to thoroughly investigate and prosecute all the participants in January 6th right up to the top before the next presidential election? #AskPreet.”

Preet Bharara:

Now, Marcus, you raise a very, very important issue that permeates all prosecutions and investigations. But the kind of prosecution investigation you’re talking about, it’s even a bigger issue, and that is the question of the clock.

Preet Bharara:

Now, ordinarily, in garden variety investigations and prosecutions, there’s always some focus on the clock. Often that’s true because of the statute of limitations. There’s only a prescribed period of time in which you can hold someone accountable for an act that violates a statute. The ticking clock is also relevant if there’s ongoing harm that’s happening, or there’s someone who’s a fugitive and you want to bring to justice and incapacitate before they do injustice and harm to other folks.

Preet Bharara:

The clock is also an important consideration because as time passes, witnesses’ memories fade, documents get lost, people get coached. All sorts of problematic things happen as the clock ticks. But in certain kinds of politically fraught investigations and attempts to hold folks accountable, the clock is of a slightly different nature.

Preet Bharara:

So one of the main issues relating to the clock has been the January 6th committee and whether or not it can get its work done, not by 2024 and the next presidential election but by the end of 2022, in the midterm elections. That’s why I think the committee has strategically decided to do certain things and not do certain things.

Preet Bharara:

For example, the committee has reportedly decided that it will not seek to issue subpoenas to fellow members of Congress, even if they were involved in the big lie and even if they were involved in some way in the activities of January 6th. That’s in part in my view, because it’s already April and those subpoenas will be fought tooth and nail, and it might be a distraction.

Preet Bharara:

At the end of the day, if the Republicans take over the House, that investigation will be brought to a close. So they’re focusing their energy and their time on the things that they can get done before the midterm election.

Preet Bharara:

Now you ask about investigating and prosecuting people before the presidential election of 2024. That’s still two and a half years away. There’s been some debate and question about what DOJ is doing, how much effort they’re bringing to bear on the immediate orbit around Donald Trump and upon Donald Trump himself.

Preet Bharara:

My view is if they act with alacrity and focus, and they use all the resources that they have brought to bear so far, that if there’s a case to be made against someone in connection with January 6th, that’s doable. Certainly the charges can be brought. It depends on how long a particular judge will decide a trial will take and when the trial can be set. But my view is if there’s going to be a case and if there’s going to be a trial against anybody up to and including the former president, that can be accomplished by the time the next president, whether it’s Joe Biden or someone else, takes office.

Preet Bharara:

I understand the reason for concern. If Donald Trump or another Republican takes office in 2025, and the Justice Department’s investigation is not complete, could it be derailed? We saw that kind of thing happen with respect to the Mueller investigation and former Attorney General Bill Barr interfered with, intervened in cases relating to cronies of the President. Could that happen again? I suppose so. So it’s a realistic concern that you raise, but I have optimism that there’s enough time to get it done. Stay tuned. There’s more coming up after this.

Preet Bharara:

As the US responds to the war in Ukraine, one thing is almost certain: the response would look a lot different if the former president were still in office. David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, joins me this week to discuss the impact of Russia’s invasion on US politics and how this political moment reflects where our country is headed. David Frum, welcome back to the show.

David Frum:

It’s such a pleasure to return.

Preet Bharara:

Good to talk to you. It’s been a little over a year. Just before we started taping, you and I were discussing what we might discuss on the show. Obviously, it continues to be major news in this country and around the world of what’s going on in Ukraine, which I think we should talk about a little bit. But then you said we should talk about that, but we should also return to these shores. Why’d you say that?

David Frum:

The drama in Ukraine, the horror, the sacrifice is so compelling that our attention is drawn and there’s a risk of … Especially for those of us who draw most of our knowledge in domestic politics, to play amateur expert in a way that can easily overstep the bounds of our expertise. So I want to focus on the things that I know the most about and that we together know the most about.

David Frum:

I also think it’s important that people understand that what is happening in Ukraine is the most grim and bloody part but of a global struggle, and that there is an American center to it, too. Obviously the contest here has not been as horrifying as it is over there, but, in some way, the contest here will determine the outcome over there. I mean if Donald Trump had somehow managed retain power after the election of 2020, this war Ukraine would look very different.

Preet Bharara:

Are you surprised at how much Americans are paying attention to what happens in Ukraine? I mean I think it’s a common understanding among folks here that Americans don’t care so much what goes on beyond our shores? Why is this different?

David Frum:

I’m not so sure that Americans really do. I mean I think people who listen to podcasts do. I think you and I do. I think the policy world is focused on it. But one of the real hazards ahead is that we may be reminded very bluntly in November of 2022 that Americans care about the price of gas. They care about the price of groceries, prices that are being inflated by the war in Ukraine. They pay attention.

David Frum:

I mean, obviously, Americans hate bullies. Americans stand up for the underdog. Americans admire courage and hate dictators, but they also care a lot about their own lives and the prices they face and the economic struggles they go through. It will be a big mistake if people think that Ukraine is going to be a ballot issue in 2022.

Preet Bharara:

So that’s interesting. You think if has no bearing on the fortunes of the Democrats or the Republicans?

David Frum:

I didn’t say no bearing. I think its political consequence over here is that it does alter a little bit the internal calculus inside the parties. Primary struggles are much more a game for activists than general elections. In those primaries, I think it’s going to matter.

David Frum:

I mean I think there are Republicans who’ve bet very heavily on Putin being a symbol and not a reality. They were important inside the Republican party. I think they’re going to discover that that’s an unpopular position and that if those Republicans who overinvested in Orban and Putin, because they thought of them as jokers, as symbols, as culture war counters, just as ways scoring points in domestic political debates without really thinking that these are real people with real agendas that were deeply sinister and violent.

David Frum:

So I think we’re going to see some consequences in places like the Ohio Senate Republican contest, where I think you’re going to find much more traditional Republican-born policy types getting the upper hand. You’re seeing that in Congress where Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy … And they can’t quite endorse what the president is doing, but they’re endorsing it without saying they’re endorsing it.

David Frum:

I think in the Democratic Party too, I think there’s been … Less dramatically, but there’s been a tilt. There’s a kind of left isolationism that sometimes gains strength in the Democratic world. I think it has less strength today. But when the two big parties meet for the voters who are less committed to paying all their attention to politics. Gas prices, inflation, crime, those are going to be the issues in ’22.

Preet Bharara:

We talked about what effect the war in Ukraine will have on domestic politics, how Americans feed the Democrats and Joe Biden or the Republicans and Donald Trump. We had a big issue some months ago that we talked about on this podcast and everywhere in the country, and that was the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. It seemed like a monumental issue then, even a political issue domestically. It seems to have faded from memory. Do you think that the fact that that doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the midterms mean something for whether or not Ukraine matters?

David Frum:

I think there’s a double conversation that tends to go on in forums like this and similar. We talk about the affairs of the world. Something will happen that seems like a really important thing and there’ll be a rejoinder. Well, the median voter in the median district doesn’t care about this issue, and that’s considered a sufficient answer.

David Frum:

I think it’s pretty evident, especially in midterm elections, that foreign policy issues don’t affect the median voter. But that doesn’t mean they’re not important. And so, when you’re in a discussion and people say, “Well, the voter in Paducah doesn’t care about it,” say, “Well, I don’t happen to be in Paducah. I don’t happen to be there, but I care.”

David Frum:

I think it’s important, and I think it’s going to be important to the United States. People want … I care about the consequences. I mean this war is driving food prices all over the planet. This war is driving fuel prices all over the planet. People care about the effects.

David Frum:

I think one of the things that we need to give some respect for politicians for is voters hire politicians to deliver results. We’ve all had the experience with the cars making a funny noise. You drive it to the shop. What you want is the car to come back without the funny noise. You don’t want a half an hour story about what the funny noise was and the various things that the mechanic tried to do to correct the funny noise. You want to drive the car in, fix the noise, reasonable bill, thank you very much. I have my own job to do.

David Frum:

So we look to political leaders to address these concerns, or most of us do. Then there are a few of us for whom this is a subject of attention in the way that other things are subjects for attention to other people. And so, we care and we focus. The point of these discussions is to help the politicians understand what to do, because politicians aren’t policy experts.

David Frum:

Politicians are specialists, very important in our … Politicians are specialists in the art of gaining public consent for public measures. They understand psychology. They understand people. They don’t understand every conceivable issue that could arise. And so, they need the guidance from people who do care about these specific issues.

Preet Bharara:

But is it also true … Relatedly, people might not be an expert in the Donbas region or in the history of Ukraine and it’s lineage as an independent country, and all sorts of other specific issues. But do the American people care that their president looks strong and does not look weak? Because that does seem to be a lot of the discussion between the folks on Trump’s side and the folks on Biden’s side. Does that matter to the American people in a general way?

David Frum:

I think one of the arguments for Donald Trump was always that he was really good at posing. He did things with his chin. He did things with his hands. He did things with his chest. But, of course, Donald Trump was not a strong president. He was vain. He was needy. He was impulsive. He was lazy. He was physically weak. He couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs. He couldn’t walk down a ramp. He was self-indulgent. He was greedy with food. He was [crosstalk 00:17:07].

Preet Bharara:

He got a hole in one. He got a hole in one recently. I don’t know if you saw that.

David Frum:

Congratulations. He legendarily cheats at golf. But he was a poser. I think one of the things that he admired so much with Vladimir Putin was that Vladimir Putin was also a poser. Also, he had a much more controlled media, of course. So they ramified it, and then Putin’s American admirers also then amplified this image.

David Frum:

I think for presidents, it’s important to deliver results. But sometimes presidents have to do very tough things. I mean we talked about Afghanistan. When President Biden took the hard decision that he did on Afghanistan … And there were a lot of micro criticisms about the exact timing, the exact way it was done. But it’s really important that people understand, if there were thousands or more than 10,000 Americans in Afghanistan right now, it would be very hard for the President of the United States to take a strong line on Russia, because the way the United States sustained that commitment in Afghanistan …

David Frum:

American troops is a very sophisticated army. There’s fuel, there’s ammunition. There’s tons of stuff that have to get into landlocked Afghanistan, and there are really only two main routes. One is by truck through Pakistan and the other is by rail through Russia. So long as the United States had such an enormous presence in Afghanistan, it was dependent either on Pakistan or on Russia, or on both.

David Frum:

When people wonder … The President and I wrote for George W. Bush. I mean there’s a lot derision of him for the way he flattered Putin back in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. But the reason he did that was because Putin’s cooperation was essential to getting supplies into Afghanistan. The same thing when Barack Obama went easy on Putin over a bunch of other quarrels in Syria and in Ukraine in 2014. He had American, in effect, hostages in Afghanistan who depended either on Pakistan or on Russia for road or for rail to bring supplies.

David Frum:

By taking that tough decision in the way that he did … And, again, there were micro criticisms, but President Biden regained a freedom of action for the United States and the world that it didn’t have before.

Preet Bharara:

What do you make of the things that Joe Biden says that people around him either walk back or think they need to walk back because they’re not strictly by-the-book diplomacy? So, for example, he said a few weeks ago that Vladimir Putin was a war criminal. He said more recently, and this sparked a lot of controversy …

Joe Biden:

For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.

Preet Bharara:

Then there was a whole debate about whether or not he was advocating for regime change. Then it was walked back. Depending on who you ask, they say it was weak of the people around him, the career diplomats, to walk that back. What do you think is going on there?

David Frum:

I think there are three layers with things, and I’m probably going to end up, by the end of these three layers, offending every listener to your podcast in one way or another.

Preet Bharara:

Just don’t offend me, sir.

David Frum:

Okay. So the base layer is Joe Biden has never been a verbally disciplined person. He says things. When he was younger especially, he would speak at great length. He would speak without always a lot of thought. That has historically been a problem for him. It got him into a lot of problems in the earlier part of his career.

David Frum:

There is also another layer, which is that Biden is a strategic blurter, that he takes advantage of his reputation, his earned reputation, as someone who talks without thinking to say things that move the discussion, most famously when he got up in front of President Obama on gay marriage.

David Frum:

That was obviously … That was not obviously. That, I believe, was deeply considered. What his plan was, “If I’m going to say this thing, and either I’m going to drive the administration to follow my agenda. But if the president gets really mad at me, I can say, “Well, you know, I’m always shooting my mouth off.”

Preet Bharara:

“That’s just me.” That’s just Joe.

David Frum:

“That’s just me.” “That’s just me.”

Preet Bharara:

That’s just Joe.

David Frum:

So he did a strategic blurt that actually changed the policy of the administration. It changed the country. Then the third layer is … And, again, I want to say this not in an exaggerated way, but there’s a lot of unfair criticism of him. But he is the oldest president ever and by a lot. He is perceptively losing some of his energy and some of his rigor. And so, I think those things are going on.

David Frum:

I think the, “My God, Putin has to go,” or whatever he said exactly, I think a lot of people want to believe it was a strategic blurt. It was such a step that I don’t think it was strategic. I think that was an expression of his feeling. I think that was just the shield between his inner self and his outer self being too thin because of the stress of age and office.

David Frum:

Depending on how this war goes, the western democracies can have bigger or smaller aims for the world afterward. But it’s really too early to begin talking about what those bigger and smaller aims might be.

Preet Bharara:

In hearing you talk and in thinking about the things that Biden says and whether they’re strategic blurts, I think we have a title for the episode, by the way, Strategic Blurter, which is hard to say.

Preet Bharara:

Donald Trump said a lot of things that were either stupid or offensive or accidental in contrary to the orthodoxy of Republicans and general diplomacy also, and we all on the sidelines criticized it and got into debates about it. But it seems to me that a lot of his base loved that about him. If you see these interviews of people at his rallies, they will still say that they love and adore Donald Trump in part because he called it as he saw it and he said what he thought, notwithstanding the niceties of constrained politics or constrained foreign relations and diplomacy.

Preet Bharara:

Does Joe Biden get the same kind of benefit as being authentic, whether these blurts are strategic or not?

David Frum:

Look, they’re different kinds of parties, they’re different kinds of voters, and they’re different kinds of politicians. I mean Donald Trump was a narrowcast politician. He had an intense base of support, and he leveraged that into control of the Republican Party. But he was never a broadly popular president. There was not a single day after he took the oath of office when he had an approval rating of even 50%, leaving aside the Rasmussen polls, in any reputable poll.

David Frum:

If you’re a Republican, given the Republican map, that’s fine. The Republican Party’s more homogenous within itself than the Democratic Party is. So it’s easier for one faction to gain control of the whole party. Then the Republican Party has a more favorable electoral map. So it can do more with a minority vote than Democrats can. Biden is a different kind of president running a different kind of party.

David Frum:

But Donald Trump’s blurts, they weren’t strategic, I think were often self-revealing. I mean one of the things Donald Trump had … Because he was such a profoundly amoral and indecent person, he had trouble remembering to do the decencies and conventional morality. It was just such a foreign language to him.

David Frum:

And so, he would often reveal what he was up to in ways that were, I think, nonstrategic, I think, that did him harm. I mean he would confess to things that everyone suspected he had in mind, because he could not remember that he was supposed to cover it up.

David Frum:

One of Donald Trump’s few … In the 2016 debates, Hillary Clinton was asked to say something nice about Donald Trump. She answered something about his family, which wasn’t even very convincing because actually he’s a terrible father on top of everything else. There’s nothing good. He’s a terrible family man.

David Frum:

But the one nice thing you can say about him, or the one positive thing you can say to him, is that actually, to a remarkable extent, Donald Trump was not a hypocrite. He did not pretend to be a good person. He didn’t pretend to care about people. He showed himself for who and what he was.

David Frum:

I think one of the reasons that so many of us found ourselves so lost and unhappy during the Trump years was that, you could say, the people who support him, they don’t even have the excuse that he concealed his real self from them. He made it clear who and what he was. If you supported Trump, you did it knowing all of those things. That was a tough thing for those who did not support Donald Trump to face about so many of their fellow countrymen and women.

Preet Bharara:

That’s because not everyone cares about those issues. They care about results and/or they hate the liberal elite that they believe run everything in America. And so, they don’t care about his personal morality. It also gave them something of a shield, which I guess is the corollary of what you’re saying, that when he did further bad things or showed himself to be indecent or offensive, it was not at odds with the person they perceived him to be.

Preet Bharara:

It’s interesting that you say he’s not a hypocrite, because, in many ways, Donald Trump, on particular policy issues and on particular loyalties, was an intense hypocrite, whether you’re talking about issues of choice or how he felt about certain people. He would say one thing one day and have a different feeling on another day. But what you’re saying is on a basic and fundamental level, he didn’t run as a boy scout and reveled a little bit and being the opposite of that. Fair?

David Frum:

Well, look, he was impulsive. So he’d have random walks. Look, you mentioned choice. I mean Donald Trump could be two-faced. But on many of those issues, I think he communicated very clearly. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about abortion. To the extent that he had an opinion about abortion, he would be for it, especially in his immediate circle. The people who had the right to complain that he was being hypocritical were the pro-life people, who would say … But he did deliver for them.

David Frum:

But, again, it was a pretty transparent transaction, which is Donald Trump doesn’t care about the abortion issue at all, but he delivered the result because he respected the power within the Republican Party, of the pro-life coalition. So he gave them what they wanted, even though he obviously didn’t care and obviously hated children.

Preet Bharara:

But it’s strange. Maybe different words need to be used. Not hypocrite or two-faced or contradictory, because look at religion. He presented himself as someone who is a friend of the evangelicals, and he couldn’t name a quote in the Bible, but he thought it was maybe, second to his own book The Art of the Deal, the best book. But I think maybe what you’re also saying is, at base, everyone knew he didn’t really care much about religion and didn’t really much about the Bible and didn’t really care much about church, and they forgave him for that.

David Frum:

Well, they made a transaction, and the transaction actually shows one of the … I mean this is, I think, one of the fundamental changes in the country that Donald Trump wrote and one of the reasons why, what happened on January 6th is so ominous for the future.

David Frum:

When I became involved with politics a long time ago, social conservatives believed they represented the majority of Americans, and that there were sinister elites that defeated the Moral Majority, the Moral Majority, that name which was Jerry Falwell’s first group back in the 1970s, that was also an assertion about how they thought the country was.

David Frum:

One of the things that the Moral Majority, by the way, was a breakthrough movement, is it tried to be a fusion of all forms … It was obviously an evangelical movement, but it tried to be more ecumenical, to work with Catholics, to work with Jews even, other religious groups, for a moral majority of people of faith, not just sectarian evangelical Protestants but all of them, but together represented the good sense of the country, or the moral sense of the country, so they promised.

David Frum:

Through the early part of the 21st century, I think that feeling was still there. That’s why when gay marriage became such an issue to the fore, that the method that was chosen by people on the other side was the referendum. Well, let’s take this out of the hands of the courts and let’s let the plain people vote on it in a free and fair contest. Let’s see where the country is. That happened a lot between 2002 and 2008.

David Frum:

The story of the Trump years has been that not only the leaders, but I think many people inside the social conservative movement have despaired of that. They understand now that that’s not where the country is, and that they cannot get what they want with democratic methods. Hence, the fascination with Victor Orban. Hence, the admiration for Vladimir Putin. Hence, the willingness to tolerate actions like that of January 6th, that …

David Frum:

And this is, I think, the real moment of danger that the country faces is you have social conservative and a culturally reactionary movement that is powerful enough to be looking for ways to impose its will on everybody. It’s not just looking for tolerance, it wants dominance. But it also understands that it is not so powerful anymore that it can hope to impose its will by free and fair elections. So they have to look to other techniques like January 6th.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with David Frum after this. I keep thinking about what the legacy of Trump and Trumpism is. Then we’ll also talk about whether or not it’s on the rise or it’s waning.

Preet Bharara:

But to me, you can make the argument that it’s about this centrality of untruth and making it so ordinary and every day and recruiting so many other people, not just Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert but many other people who see fit just to blatantly lie, whether it’s about the election of 2020 most famously or even other things, such that there are people who are willfully blind to the truth. I’ll give you one example that I saw a poll about.

Preet Bharara:

Unemployment is, I think, at 3.6%, one of the lowest rates of unemployment in modern times. A poll of Republicans showed that a majority of Republicans have the belief that unemployment is up under Biden as opposed to have gone down. That’s demonstrably false. You can Google it very easily. You can even use a lesser search engine like Bing and you’d find the same result. Isn’t that a problem for fair politics going forward?

David Frum:

I wonder. It’s interesting to describe that as untruth, because I don’t think people are … When they say unemployment is high when in fact it’s low, I don’t think they’re lying exactly.

Preet Bharara:

No, right.

David Frum:

I mean in a way [crosstalk 00:33:08]-

Preet Bharara:

But people’s perceptions on certain documentable things can be wrong.

David Frum:

Yes. But isn’t that part of all of our … I think there’s something about this in human nature. I mean the chronic belief, for example. In every way that you can measure things are getting better and better, and yet, as we get older, we are prone to say that things are getting worse and worse because-

Preet Bharara:

But that’s sort of a general perception, and it varies with age. I’ll give you another example. These things get called out, but I don’t think it matters. At a rally that Donald Trump was at recently, there’s representative … I don’t remember the person’s name; even if I did, I probably wouldn’t mention the name of the person … who just flatly said it was Donald Trump who found and got rid of Osama bin Laden, and the crowd cheered.

Speaker 4:

While President Trump was in office, we didn’t have a war. I think he made three peace treaties, caught Osama bin Laden and Soleimani, al-Baghdadi, and this president is weak.

Preet Bharara:

That’s just a wrong.

David Frum:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

You could Bing that also. Maybe that’s always been so, but it feels to me … My perception could be wrong, certainly. It feels to me that politicians, people who are actually elected to office, can just say whatever the hell they want now, and it doesn’t matter.

David Frum:

In fairness to that person, I think they had mixed up Osama bin Laden with the head of ISIS who was killed during the Trump presidency. And so, here’s an example that I think is actually … Because it happened in writing. Ex-President Trump gave a statement just this past week in which he said that he filled the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that had been left and that he had inherited empty. He had done it magically, he said.

David Frum:

Now that’s in writing. That’s premeditated. That’s something that you can look up on the information page of the Department of Energy, and you can see that it’s not true. It’s just not true. I tweeted the little chart showing the levels in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Basically it’s built up a lot when prices are low, and then depleted when prices are high, and that then President Trump drew down in the last year and a half to get gasoline prices down in time for the election of 2020, that he actually left the reserve lower than he inherited it from President Obama. So I mean that’s more a deliberate lie.

David Frum:

But I mean we do live in an ideologized and bipartisanized country, and that may be inescapable. This may be just something we’re all going to have to find a way to adjust. In the 19th century, if you wanted somebody’s vote, you delivered them an immediate personal material benefit, a turkey, a sack of coal, and the boss would get your vote.

David Frum:

Then in the 20th century, Americans became better educated and more affluent. If you wanted their vote, you had to deliver them not an immediate personal benefit, but some kind of larger collective benefit, a new bridge, a new high school, a factory in the district. That’s how you got their vote.

David Frum:

Well, the country may be now educated and affluent enough that we turned to politics for self-actualization. Why are people listening to this podcast? It doesn’t confer a direct material benefit on them. We’re not telling them about betting tips or stock tips or health tips. We’re discussing affairs of state, and people find it meaningful and want to participate. Well, that’s true also that people disagree with you.

David Frum:

And so, as people look to politics more and more as a source of meaning, because they don’t need a sack of coal and they don’t even really exactly need the bridge, there are a lot of bridges already, they turn to politics for validation, ratification. To use a fancy word, we’re climbing up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to the highest of them all.

David Frum:

We always thought that as we got up that hierarchy, that we would find our politics more rational, and we [inaudible 00:37:16] discovering they’re more irrational because they’re about things that it’s harder to compromise on. I mean you can always say, “All right, this year you get the high school. Next cycle, we get the high school in our district.” But if you say what I want from politics is to say that my fundamental way of seeing the world is right and other people’s is wrong, that’s a harder thing to compromise upon.

Preet Bharara:

What you said just now makes me think of a thesis that Tom Nichols and others suggest, and I won’t get it quite right, but he suggests that some of what’s going on with respect to the insurrection and the people who are fomenting violence and are very disenfranchised, it’s not about they’re not having material things. It’s not about class resentment. It’s a lot of bored people who want to be associated with some kind of crusade. How does that mesh with what you were saying a second ago?

David Frum:

Yeah. Well, I think I would agree with that, but I would drain it of the pejoratives that Tom associates it with, that I think the human quest for meaning is the best part of who we are. It represents something important and good about human beings, that they can be sad, that they can have materially enough. I think we all feel that the compulsive shopper or the …

David Frum:

That’s why one of the reasons that people are offended by the concentration of wealth, that there’s thing like really you should be focusing on higher things at a certain point, and the society should be focusing on higher things. So when people are … It’s not that they’re bored, it’s they don’t want another bridge from their politics. They want politics that delivers them something more spiritual. The problem is that becomes a very difficult politics to manage.

David Frum:

And so, what happened on January 6th, I think most fundamentally, was a lot of people who have a vision of what it means to be an American were shocked by the discovery they don’t have the clout to win that meaning at the ballot box.

David Frum:

What I would tell them as someone who’s basically still a pretty conservative person is you can do some modifications. It doesn’t have to mean … You can take your values and reapply them and enlarge them, and you’ll be surprised that there are coalitions out there waiting for you. But you have to adjust. You have to adapt to the constantly changing country, just as conservatives through history have always had to adapt to change. Change is the great fact of … And especially with the dynamic progressive market economy like this one. It’s part of what makes America great dynamism.

David Frum:

So you have to adapt constantly, but you can also preserve constantly. But that there are people who become not conservative, but reactionary. So, no, I want things to stay exactly the same, and not only the same as they were but the same way that I falsely remember them. I want a past that never was, a romanticized past, the past that I thought was true back in 1957 when I was a child. That’s not how the adults saw it, but that’s how I thought it was. That’s what I want back. I want it to be always Christmas like in the Christmas movies, not Christmas as it actually was in it.

Preet Bharara:

But we can judge that, right? You said a minute ago this Tom Nichol’s idea about people wanting to be engaged or associated with a crusade, you want to drain it of the pejorative. But it depends on what the crusade is. If you decided in the ’50s that meaning for you was keeping Black people down, and so the crusade I want to enter upon is through the KU Klux Klan. I, in good faith … This interesting debate on what good faith means, doesn’t get you off the hook if you believe something in good faith.

Preet Bharara:

If you believe in good faith, meaning it’s a sincerely held view, which you and I find abhorrent and disgusting and terrible, but if you believed in the 1950s that Black people were inferior to white people and shouldn’t be in school with your kids, and you embarked upon a crusade even though it’s not out of boredom, we can judge, right?

David Frum:

No. What I meant by draining the negative was I’m wondering the idea that it’s somehow better if your politics is about material things than if it is about psychic things. I would say, as someone who’s very interested in problems with political management, I think it’s easier. I mean it was obviously easier to do politics when politics was about material things.

David Frum:

That’s the question that people will unfairly ask of modern presidents. Why can’t you do what Lyndon Johnson did and rally a vote in the Senate by promising somebody a bridge? The answer is, well, because the bridges aren’t as important today when we have so many as they were when we had fuel.

Preet Bharara:

But they’re crumbling.

David Frum:

[crosstalk 00:42:06].

Preet Bharara:

We need to replace those bridges, David.

David Frum:

Yeah. But the idea that you’re going to get a senator’s vote with promise of a project in a way that in a much poorer country you once could. So that makes political management more difficult. So, as I said, we need to understand this may be something we’re just faded to encounter. So to say, well, people are bored and that …

David Frum:

I think one of the things that is a problem on the Democratic side is a lot of the people were sending $200 and $250 checks to Democratic candidates, are doing so on behalf of impossible causes and often driving their party in impossible directions.

David Frum:

They’re doing it because, at some level, they don’t care about the prospects. They disrespect the kinds of concerns that a Chuck Schumer would have or a Joe Biden would have. They’re more excited by visions of a better world. It makes politics more difficult. It may just be something about the level of development American society has reached.

Preet Bharara:

You’re talking about the politics of giving people concrete things. Here’s an example that I think falls into that category, that’s been in the news recently, and that is the capping of prices of insulin, which would seem to me that there are Democrats and independents and Republicans who can afford certain medications and maybe can afford insulin. I wouldn’t think that to be such a divisive, non-bipartisan issue or partisan issue. What am I missing about that?

David Frum:

Well, I mean as a matter of policy, what you call capping prices means paying subsidy, because the price isn’t capped. The price is capped to the ultimate consumer, but someone else is stepping up to write a check for the difference between the market price and the price paid by the consumer. That’s absolutely the kind of thing that discussions are.

David Frum:

So if Bill Gates gets diabetes and he goes and buys insulin, he pays the same price. Why would you subsidize it that way? Why are you delivering the subsidy for certain purchases and not others? It’s like the argument over lightening the load of college debt. Why is that one form of debt deserving of a subsidy rather than other forms of debt? So those are important public policy conversations to have.

David Frum:

I thought you were going in a slightly different question with this, which is I think that the people proposing this are going to be surprised at how little benefit, political benefit, the people who want to cap insulin get from their proposal. I think that there is a part of the Democratic world that keeps remembering things as they were in 1965, when in a poor country, you could deliver Medicare and it would change the political framework of the country. That happens less now because politics is much more about nonmaterial things than it used to be.

Preet Bharara:

And so, tell me again, is that a good thing, a bad thing, or it can be both?

David Frum:

It’s just a thing.

Preet Bharara:

It’s just-

David Frum:

It’s just a thing.

Preet Bharara:

… non-normative David.

David Frum:

Yeah. No, I think you sometimes have to say that sometimes your society changes in ways that create new kinds of problems for political managers, and you just have to adjust your thoughts. But where you get into trouble is … I mean this is another way of being … A flip side of the Fox News message I want it always to be Christmas as Christmas appeared to a seven-year-old in 1957, to say I want politics always to be the way I think it was when Lyndon Johnson was swaying votes by promising bridges and high schools and job projects in the Senate in the 1960s, and the keeping up with your society as it is.

David Frum:

This has been a theme of my writing for a long time, which is to be a patriot means loving your country as it is, not as you believe it used to be. So you have to accept the world as it … You have no choice, whether you like it or not. It’s a big universe and your politics have to face it.

David Frum:

That’s why politics is so hard. That’s why I have so much respect for politicians, because it is such a challenging thing to do. As the country gets bigger and more variegated all the time, the job becomes ever harder.

Preet Bharara:

That’s an interesting concept, that you must love your country the way it is rather than the way it used to be. I know you probably don’t quite mean this, but it just made me think, in various ways, conservatives in particular, Republicans in particular are trying to take us back to some of those good old days, whether we’re talking about abortion or some people more on the fringe talking about a taking away of the wall between church and state. Although that’s always been a part of our charter since the beginning.

Preet Bharara:

What do you make of folks who love the country the way it used to be, and also in terms of immigration and the racial makeup of the country? Would you agree that there are people who want to take us back to the place that they used to love?

David Frum:

The theme I keep stressing is it isn’t the way it used to be. It’s the way they believe it used to be, because if they saw the way it used to be, they wouldn’t like it. So there are people who complain about …

David Frum:

There’s a soap opera, or historical soap opera, called Bridgerton. They’ve done race-blind casting. So many of the people in what is supposed to be regency England are Black. This is obviously not the way it was, and I’ve heard people complain about it. But it’s also true that all the characters have teeth, and that’s awesome.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

David Frum:

If you had to go back to America in ’57, none of the people who think they want it would like it, especially if you’re given a random position in the class hierarchy, I mean because-

Preet Bharara:

But they might like certain things about it. If you’re a racist, you might like some things about it.

David Frum:

But the things you like about it are connected to the things-

Preet Bharara:

To the other.

David Frum:

… that you didn’t like about it.

Preet Bharara:

Bad dentistry.

David Frum:

Yeah. So you fix the dentistry and you are also fixing a lot of other things at the same time. I mean, for example, one of the things you might say is that I’d like to have the size of government that we had in the 1950s, but … No, the 1940s now, because it happened a little later, but not the bad teeth.

David Frum:

Well, the most important thing that changed the teeth was fluoride in the water. That was more important than any of the things you do at the dentist you see two or three times a year. It was the fluoride in the water that changed the teeth. That was an incredibly … If you’re complaining about the vaccine, I mean the people who complained about the vaccine once literally did complain about fluoride in the water. But the fluoride in the water is what makes teeth strong.

Preet Bharara:

So I mentioned this earlier that I would ask you is Trump … Forget about Trump himself personally, but Trump as in whatever that is, and feel free to define it or not. Is Trumpism ascendant or waning, or even keel?

David Frum:

I think when you think about these kinds of questions, you need to always keep in mind that these are choices. We’re not observers here. We are choosers. So Trumpism could be ascendant. However, again, we can argue about what exactly it is. But with that thing, and we have a sense of what we mean. That thing could be ascendant if you agree, if you don’t do all you can to stop it, or could be defeated if you combine with like-minded people of goodwill and summon your energies. It’s up to you. It’s not-

Preet Bharara:

So this is the David Frum way of avoiding prediction.

David Frum:

It is my way of avoiding prediction. But I avoid prediction not just because I’m afraid of being wrong, because I’ve been wrong plenty and I’m not afraid of it, because it’s-

Preet Bharara:

Because you don’t know. We don’t know.

David Frum:

No. But I have an anti-prediction stance that comes from predictions treat the future as a thing that exists, as a thing about which statements can be made. There are probabilities, but it’s shapeable. It’s shapeable.

David Frum:

I ended one of my books about Trump by reminding people of the story of the Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas, Carol, with the last ghost, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Be appears before Ebenezer Scrooge, and Scrooge asks the question, “Are you a vision of what will be or what may be?” The ghost silently does not answer the question, but the story reveals it was just a vision of what could be, and you could make other [inaudible 00:50:44] and have another future.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. I will accept that for now. I mentioned a couple of people earlier, and I struggle with this myself. You have these members of Congress who I think are basically know-nothing and they have a lot of terrible qualities and they espouse terrible things. For example, Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. There are people who say, well, they should be ignored and there are other people who say, well, when they say those crazy things, they should be called out.

Preet Bharara:

My first question is do you have a view on one or the other? Then, second, have they not already won … I think if you went and asked a hundred progressives to name Republican members of Congress, the first names that they would come up with would be those two, even though they have very few accomplishments to their name, good or bad, even if you’re a progressive What do you make of that debate?

David Frum:

The question of how you react to things is very much a prudential matter. There are people who say provocative things as a way to make themselves famous. They’re not famous now-

Preet Bharara:

[crosstalk 00:51:50].

David Frum:

… they say a provocative thing, and they get more famous. One of the reasons the Tucker Carlson Show is the way it is is that Fox News, like all cable broadcasting, faces a crisis. Cable is an industry of the past and it faces a very uncertain future. And so, one of the people who write that show think, “How do we make clips that will be shared on social media?” because we can’t count on people who have working … We can’t count on people to watch our show on cable anymore the way you could, 10, 15, 20 years ago. But if we can get them to share it, we can energize them. We create demand for our product, even if it’s a negative kind of demand.

David Frum:

On the other hand, when the man who was President of the United States says something outrageous, and people say, “You with your Twitter fee, why are you platforming?” I say, “He’s the President of the United States. It’s important whether I tweet him or not. He can end organized human life on this planet on 11 minutes’ notice.”

Preet Bharara:

So that’s the President. But what about somebody who was on the way to becoming famous like Marjorie Taylor Greene? To me it only works, this idea that you don’t amplify, it’s only works if everyone is on board with that. That’s just not going to be because of human nature, right?

David Frum:

Look, to my mind, the questions about is the way the internal incentives of Congress have changed, the leaders can’t squelch backbenchers in the way they once could. Famously, Sam Rayburn, who was Speaker of the House in the ’50s wouldn’t even talk to first-term members of the House, because he said, “The American people will elect anybody to anything once. Get reelected then we talk.”

David Frum:

But that was at a time when the leaders of the party controlled the finances. That one-term member, if the one-term member displeased Sam Rayburn, Sam Rayburn could cut that person off committees, could deny the money, could basically force them out of office. That’s not so true now.

David Frum:

And so, Kevin McCarthy has many fewer tools. He may have discovered he has fewer tools even against Liz Cheney, by the way. It’s not impossible that Liz Cheney gets reelected. Then what does he do?

David Frum:

So Congress is shifting in ways that create incentives for people to behave the way Marjorie Taylor Greene and others have done, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. When she first came into the House, tried to have a kind of [deton 00:54:29] with Nancy Pelosi and, in fact, changed her behaviors in some ways. She got rid of a chief of staff who was very offensive to other Democrats and who had some financial scandals.

David Frum:

She looked like she was choosing a future as a member of the House. But I think you can see a lot of people are saying, “I don’t want to rise to the ranks of the House. I want to be an internet celebrity,” and that’s its own form of power. And so, that’s going to be one of the ways that politics is going to be different, is that social media allows people to create this new kind of information power that political societies, political leaders have to deal with.

Preet Bharara:

So I’m going to ask you to make a different prediction because maybe this is an easier one to make, but you can also sidestep it if you want. All indications, do you agree, are that … And people don’t like it when I say this. All indications are that the House is going to change hands. Do you agree?

David Frum:

Yeah, probably. Yeah, I do agree with that. I think that’s a-

Preet Bharara:

You must be so certain of that you’re willing to make a-

David Frum:

I think that-

Preet Bharara:

You’re not saying, “Well, we can make a choice, Preet.”

David Frum:

No, no. No. [crosstalk 00:55:31]

Preet Bharara:

“We can decide that the Democrats remain in power.”

David Frum:

Look, those kinds of things are … We can talk about probabilities. I think you can always predict probabilities.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

David Frum:

You can imagine ways that the Democrats don’t lose the House. You can certainly imagine ways that the Democrats don’t lose the Senate. But the probability is they will lose the House and a lower probability, but still a probability, is they lose the Senate, too.

Preet Bharara:

So they lose the House. I’ve talked a little bit about what that might look like in 2023. But I’m interested in hearing from you, what is that going to look like? How many degrees of crazy is that going to be, or if Kevin McCarthy is the speaker, will he try to make it a little less crazy than I have predicted?

David Frum:

Kevin McCarthy is going to be a weak speaker. And so, he may try, but he will not succeed. That is a prediction. There’s a real pattern in American midterm elections. There are aberrations like 2018 where the party that gains the House is on its way to gaining the presidency. But much more common in recent times are elections like 1994 and 2010, where the party that wins the majority of the House takes it as a license to do every crazy thing it can think of and actually sets the table for then its defeat in front of the bigger electorate to come out in presidential years.

David Frum:

And so, I think one of the questions that if you’re a Republican presidential candidate you have to worry about is your best hope is that Republicans just barely fall short in 2022 and that the party then gets so revved up and upset that they come out for you in 2024, because the danger that they face is your team wins in 2022 and then proceeds to do one crazy thing after another.

David Frum:

Meanwhile, the administration has the power to do some course corrections now that it doesn’t have to worry so much about its members in the House and Senate, especially in the House. He can do some course correction.

David Frum:

Biden will be able to do in ’23 some very visible law and order things to reaffirm that … I don’t want to abolish police. No, I think, of course, criminals belong in prison, obviously. I think that the price of gas will subside. I think people hugely overestimate the power of presidents over things like food and fuel prices, which are driven very much by economic cycles.

David Frum:

I mean, even before Ukraine, gasoline prices were going up. Because prices had been low, therefore, people didn’t make the investments in 2017 and [28 00:58:21] to generate the supply that you would burn in ’21, ’22, and ’23. Prices had been higher and, therefore, people do make the investments and they take to those investments, take two or three years to come to market. And so, the seeds of the next era of high prices are always in the last era of low prices, and vice-versa.

Preet Bharara:

Last question. You were a senior advisor to Rudy Giuliani during his presidential campaign in 2008. There are many questions I could ask, but the primary question no one asked you, and feel free to embellish and elaborate, is the Rudy Giuliani of 2008 the same guy we see now, or is he a different guy?

David Frum:

He was on the path to being this guy. It was a very heartbreaking experience because I’d lived in New York in the ’90s. I knew the Rudy Giuliani of the 1990s. He’s not always a lovable person, but someone who with a sense of right, someone who was determined to do what it took to make life better for the people around him, and someone who worked for others.

David Frum:

Something went awry and it accelerated. I saw that actually even during the campaign, that one of the reasons that campaign went so badly was there was something already amiss, something that was already not committed. I think voters, even Republican voters, sensed that, that he was about different things.

David Frum:

It’s not the most impressive line in my resume, but I kept trying, to the limit of my very small influence there, to say, “You need to talk about the needs of the middle-class people that you championed when you were mayor of New York.”

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Look, I mean it’s interesting when people talk about Rudy Giuliani. I did not know him as well as you, but I knew him some. He was very nice to me when I became the US attorney. They’ll say, “See, we knew him all along. He was always this way. He was always self-obsessed. He was always ambitious in a particular way. He always wanted to be relevant.”

Preet Bharara:

My view is, and I ask this of people who know him better than I do, he may have had some bad qualities, you point them out. He was very full of himself and very arrogant and had a certain conceit throughout his career, even when he was a young US attorney himself. But this Rudy Giuliani is quite different.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know what exactly happened, but in some ways it’s sad to see. Not everyone feels sad for him, but he was, by many accounts, a good and strong leader of the office that I led many years later. For him now to have associated himself with people and with conduct that’s just crazy town, and to have his law license suspended in two jurisdictions, I think is, among other things, quite sad.

David Frum:

It happened to a lot of people in the Trump orbit. I mean when people say, “Oh, now you see, Preet,” I think characters have a lot of elements to them and a lot of potentiality to unfold in ways that are good and bad.

David Frum:

I mean Mike Flynn did really good work in Iraq for the United States, and then things went wrong. I mean he was then appointed the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which was a job that was too big for him. He failed at it, he became embittered. Then he spiraled off into this path that he’s now on.

David Frum:

But you can imagine that if he had not been given the job at DIA, if he’d been given another job, he could have led an honorable military career into a quiet retirement teaching, training, and looking back on real service to the country, and a life to be proud of, and real accomplishments in Iraq where he did a lot to break insurgencies because he was very good at micro police work.

David Frum:

It’s a caution for all of us, that I think if we examine honestly our own character, we see potential in ourselves, for good or for bad, depending on our environment. So much of the lesson of studying these kinds of conspicuous characters is to understand I need to focus on making sure that I’m in situations that bring out my best self and that I consciously think about what is my best self and what is my worst self, and that I avoid the path that consume people who had big potential in themselves.

Preet Bharara:

David Frum, you’ve been very generous with your time. Thanks for joining us on the show again. It’s really great.

David Frum:

Oh, it’s always a pleasure. Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with David Frum continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider.

Preet Bharara:

As you know, it’s not uncommon for me to end the show by talking about the passing of someone important to me or important to the public. This week, I want to mention the demise of a restaurant. It’s in Lower Manhattan, nestled in between the SDNY and the DA’s office, amid the courthouses and alongside Chinatown. It’s called Forlini’s. It’s been there for 79 years.

Preet Bharara:

News broke recently that after all this time, it’s shutting its doors. Forlini’s, if you haven’t been there, and I’m guessing most of you have not, had big booths and white tablecloths. It served family-style Italian American classics, and was one of Manhattan’s last remaining red sauce spots. It was a longtime favorite of judges, defense lawyers, prosecutors, and defendants, and also reporters, bail bondsman, court officers, and really anyone who worked in the courtroom ecosystem.

Preet Bharara:

One of the special things about the restaurant is that the booths were adorned with plaques bearing the names of famous patrons. One inscription read Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder, founded first Sex Crimes Prosecution Bureau in US, 25 years patron. Then another one, Robert M. Morgenthau, the legendary Manhattan district attorney who lived to the age of 99, who used to eat at Forlini’s twice a week and was referred to by the staff as The Boss. Now, in my view, Morgenthau was a giant, but the jury is still out on whether anyone can be called The Boss besides Bruce.

Preet Bharara:

In recent years, Forlini’s got attention because it began catering to a hipper set. You might call it a hip replacement that failed. In 2018, it played home to Vogue’s pre-Met Gala party, which was attended by celebrities and members of the downtown fashion set. The Forlini’s that I knew was not exactly a hotspot for fashion designers. I have my own connection to the place and many great memories.

Preet Bharara:

First of all, when I was a line assistant, it was a common place for people to have their farewell lunches. People would give toasts and tell stories about a departing assistant US attorney from the Southern District of New York. When I became US attorney in 2009, I met for this first time that legendary Manhattan district attorney when he was still in office, Robert Morgenthau.

Preet Bharara:

I remember sitting down in the booth and looking over to the side on the wall and seeing the plaque, which basically designated that booth Robert Morgenthau’s. I felt, I will say, a little bit intimidated. I joked, I think, at the lunch that maybe one day in the future, if I’m lucky, there might be a booth with a post-it saying Preet Bharara on it.

Preet Bharara:

When it came time for me to pick a place and celebrate what was both my birthday and my swearing in as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, I chose Forlini’s to hang out with my family and close friends from the office. Anyway, it was a special place for a lot of reasons and for a lot of people.

Preet Bharara:

Forlini’s was family-run for all its 79 years in business. Its most recent owners were Joe Forlini and his cousin Derek. The Forlini’s reportedly sold the building for an undisclosed amount. Derek Forlini told The Times in 2018, “My father always used to say we came from Italy with nothing, and now judges know me by name.” Not a bad American story. I’ll miss Forlini’s.

Preet Bharara:

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.

Preet Bharara:

Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me, @PreetBharara, with the hashtag #AskPreet, 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.

Preet Bharara:

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Seper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The CAFE team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Sean Walsh, and Namita Shah. Our music is by Andrew Doss. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.