The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Writer David Frum Discuss Political Courage and Standing Up For Your Beliefs

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

In today’s episode, Ryan and conservative pundit David Frum talk about how it feels to be a conservative who opposes Donald Trump, the limitations that political correctness imposes on our culture, and more.David Frum is a journalist and conservative political commentator who is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic. Frum worked as a speechwriter for the second Bush administration and coined the term “Axis of Evil.” He has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, Canada’s National Post, Tablet, and numerous other publications, and is also the author of several books such as Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy and Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic.This episode is brought to you by the Theragun. The new Gen 4 Theragun is perfect for easing muscle aches and tightness, helping you recover from physical exertion, long periods of sitting down, and more—and its new motor makes it as quiet as an electric toothbrush. Try the Theragun risk-free for 30 days, starting at just $199. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow David Frum: Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidfrumInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidfrum/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davidjfrum/Homepage: https://davidfrum.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. of necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystowach.com. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like.

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But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking, Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently?

And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke Podcast. You know, these are sort of strange, unprecedented times,

not just because of the pandemic, not just because of the protests that have erupted all over the country, but just generally, the sort of the pandemic, not just because of the protests that have erupted all over the country, but just generally the sort of the political course that America has been on for the last several years is historic and strange and surreal and deeply alarming in many ways. And yet, when I say that it's unprecedented, the irony is that it's sort of not unprecedented. This mirrors the demagogues of ancient Greece, it mirrors the political gridlock of ancient Rome. And so when I talk about politics, of course, I have my own political opinions,

and sometimes people listen, get upset for me, daring to express them. You know, we've talked a little bit about snowflakes here, but I'm interested in exploring what's happening today in the context of how it connects with or reveals patterns from the past. And vice versa, I want to look at the lessons that ancient Greece and ancient Rome and Cato and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius all learned. And how does that give us clarity today here in the 21st century? What did America go through in the trial of the Civil War, in the founding of the American Republican? How does that reflect on where we are today? And so my guest today, I'm having a conversation with David from. David from is a great writer for the Atlantic. He's a longtime journalist. He was a speechwriter in the Bush administration.

He's worked in conservative politics for many years as well, but he's been a prominent voice, a prominent critic of Trump. Again, not in the sort of reactionary liberal sense, but in a sense of this or that is a violation of the principles upon which this country is found. This is a violation of human decency or what is right. Or this is just a violation of just the sort of laws

of politics as in it is a bad idea. So David and I talk about sort of how did we end up where we are? And I think we do that in a nonpartisan sense. I don't think we're not saying that if you believe we need immigration reform on the left or the right, we're not talking about that. What we are talking about is how have we gotten to a place

where our policies have become so cruel? Or how have we gotten to a place where, you know, the president could say with a straight face, I take no responsibility at all for a pandemic that's killed 110,000 Americans. How have we gotten to a place where America, you know, for so many years, the leader of the free world,

the shining light on a hill, the country that was a paragon of science and leadership and administration, how can we be in a place where we're almost undoubtedly the worst place in the world as far as the COVID-19 pandemic? How does that happen? The Stokes would say, characters fate. And so I talked to David about how character impacts

leadership. But we also talk about courage. How does David break with this party and begin to talk about these things in a way that earns him sort of numerous enemies? And again, you don't have to agree with him to, I think, learn from what that takes, right? I think one of the things that alarms me most about where we are politically is not that people have decided to support this person and that person, but the

sort of the boot-looking that's gone along with it. I think that still sort of found that disturbing and disgusting. So, you know, we talk about character, we talk about courage, we talk about the Shakespearean themes that are being sort of laid out for us on at center stage. And then we talk about political compromise. How does the country move forward? How do we make progress? How do people as to use general madness is term? How do we unite without the president? If the president is interested in uniting us, how do we move forward? How do we accomplish things? how can we get past where we are, how can we learn from this. And so David's writing on the Atlantic is an absolute

must-read. He wrote a book early in the Trump presidency, or as Trump was getting elected, called Trumpocracy, which is talking about sort of corruption in politics, the sort of gangster style of politics, and the threats that that presents. And then most recently he's the author of Trump apocalypse restoring American democracy. You know, that title might sound like the book is all about Trump, but it's not. This is a book about the future of the American system. How, as he says, you know, how does America reconcile itself with democracy and protect or protect itself from the enemies of democracy, which is what we are seeing with the rise

of this sort of authoritarianism and liberalism? Again, you can like the policies that Trump has put in place. But I think we all know that we can do better, as from has said, that this isn't greatness. We're tweeting typos and we're refusing to change, where we're endorsing, you know, disgusting or disturbing individuals

and people where cruelty is commonplace, where corruption is accepted, you know, where incompetence is celebrated, right? I don't think anyone thinks that this is our best self. So that's what I talked to David about. I'm always interested in talking to people who opened my mind from writing has done that for me. I think you'll like this interview. And again, if you are already a little bit triggered or alarmed with what I'm saying, this is precisely why

I think you should listen. And more importantly, this is an opportunity to practice listening to something you don't agree with, which is something that's still awkward. Do you have the discipline to hear things you disagree with? Can you have the wisdom to benefit and learn from things you disagree with? That's what we do in this interview. Look forward to you listening, and I'll talk to you soon. So David, I was, when I think of you, I think of the Edward Everett Hale story, a man without a country, which is the story of a man who sort of loses.

He's basically exiled on a ship after the American Revolution, and he's not allowed any news of the United States as his punishment. And I'm curious, what has sort of been the political wilderness like for you? It must be strange having been active as a Republican for so long to now find that you kind of don't belong to either party. You know, I've had this question asked in a less kind way than you just put it. By people make it sound like I'm sleeping

over a sewer grate somewhere, huddling in a blanket, warmth, the caging, playing the banjo for my next meal. Look, I'm a journalist first, that's my occupation. I have been involved in Republican politics and conservative politics my life, but I don't, I don't think I have ever looked, well, not in a long time,

looked around me for political guidance. I've tended to try to make my own judgments. And I think in many ways I feel about my friends who went Trump. I don't know the source of this story, but the joke about the English newspaper at the RAND, Storm and Channel continent cut off. I think they're lost. I'm not lost.

They're lost. No, that's really interesting, because what I was going to ask is, is it actually kind of clarifying, like in a way belonging to a party or identifying with a certain label, it sort of makes decisions for us, but you have the ability, and I think this is what we should all be cultivating, to sort of look at each issue,

each problem, each event in the news, and go, what do I think about this, not what am I supposed to think about this, and what will advance my career the most? I think there has been one of the themes that the Trump years has been, what the economists call revealed preference. The economists use this to think, we all have different preferences and we don't most of the time worry too much about ordering them in any kind of rank.

But if we have limited finite resources and we go to the store to make shopping decisions, we reveal our preferences that we value one thing more than another. In the Trump years, we have all had to do that. And many of my Republican friends who used to say, they believed in, for example, American leadership in the world are free trade, fiscal restraint, limited government, they've revealed they don't value those things that highly because they've sacrificed them for other things that they have demonstrated, they value more.

For me, my first commitment has always been to the American-led world order, liberal world order, collective security, free trade. That's the thing I've always, through my political life, cared about the most. Trump could not be a more severe enemy of that priority. So I've had to make my choices. My friends who have chosen Trump have revealed that they value

other things more, including some pretty dark things like cultural chauvinism, racial dominance, and sometimes just clean old money because one of the things that is bound so many people outside the Congress, the Trump administration, is this is a very corrupted administration. And if you are a Washington lobbyist in a time of a corrupt administration, you make a lot more money than you do in the time of an honest administration. And also it seems like maybe the most kind of craven, revealed preference,

has just been sort of dominance generally, or just sort of winning generally. Like, it's like, oh, at the core of this, it was never about this idea or that idea. It was about using this idea or that idea as a means of controlling the levers of power. And now that that falls away, you still have to come up with a reason to why you should be, you and your party

should be in control of the levers of power. Well, the winning, Donald Trump is not a winning figure. He is not win. He is not won on issues. And he hasn't won politically. I mean, the 2018 elections were a disaster for Republicans and a highly predictable disaster, as I kept telling them through 2017 and 2018.

You're not going to, when you are alienating, when a Republican party is alienating affluent and educated women, it is burning its chances because women have had the vote for a century and you can't put together a majority without them. But the dominance that is certainly true. I have had this sense with people I know, not people I know well, but people I've come to know, that a big part of the appeal of Donald Trump is he emancipates the worst instincts in us. He is guided by the worst instincts and some people watch that and find it exciting. You know, for 500 years, I think twice a week, I mean, your classes, I still know better, twice a week they filled the seats in the Colosseum with the spectacle of human cruelty.

It's always been a money maker. And Donald Trump has demonstrated human cruelty in the Office of the Presidency. And there are people who feel excited by that, emancipated by that. He says the things they would like to say. Yeah, it's interesting, right? Like it's supposedly this backlash

against political correctness. And I'm not someone who believes in political correctness, but there is this sort of distinction lost between saying what is true or sort of not caring about conventions, and then sort of embracing or encouraging cruelty sort of indecency, meanness. You know, and it does seem like it is unlocked at a sort of, there's a, I don't know if you've ever read any Bruce Catton, he was a Civil War historian

and he says, yeah, he has his brilliant, he says, you know, the American public, he says it's sort of like a chimp wearing a mask and you pull the mask down and you see the sort of primalness underneath. It, I think, one of what you see in great leaders is they find a way to sort of call to the higher angels, and then what you see in the worst leaders is that they encourage you to take the mask off.

Well, let's talk a little bit about this concept of political correctness. I've written out two books about the Trump presidency, Trumpocracy at the beginning, and Trumpocalypse at the end. And in Trumpocracy, I had a discussion about the power of political correctness as an issue in the 2016 vote. And the question is, what did the people who said, the problem is we, it's an undefined term, so you ask people and they will tell you about it, but it's not clear they all mean the same thing. But one of the things it seems to mean when you should have go through the data, both quantitative, there's polling on this and a lot of, and there's some research of other kinds.

Political correctness is experienced by many Americans as a kind of etiquette that the highly educated professional middle class imposes on everybody else. And it's an etiquette that is constantly changing. And so a lot of people, including by the way women, that one of the big reveals of the polling I use in Trumpocracy was that women were very likely to cite political correctness as something they were worried about in 2016.

And putting it together with other research that's available, you can see what they're worried about. My husband finished high school and has had a job in a big company and he makes jokes that not everybody thinks are funny, but he's a good man and he's harmless. And I am terrified that one day one of his jokes will get him fired and ruin my family economically. And none of us can predict in advance what it is that he's not allowed to say. On the other hand, among us who are in the educated professional middle class, it often happens that people use the term

political correctness to say, I'd like to be an enormous jerk. And I feel all kinds of social pressure, not to be an enormous jerk. And I resent that social pressure because it takes away from me what I would think of as a lot of fun, which is to be an enormous jerk.

Yeah, it's strange. And what's weird too, there is this idea of political creptice and a pushback against it. And yet, I would sort of define these times that we're in as sort of lacking the courage to tell the truth. So what I think is so impressive about your writing and your books and where you've come down on this is, as you said, look, this is what I think is true. This is what I'm

going to say, even though it's probably against my career interests, even though I could go along and get along, why do you think people are, I mean, for the stokes, it was all about like, you know, if it's not right, don't do it, if it's you know, if it's not right, don't do it, if it's not right, if it's not true, don't say it. How have we gotten to this place where people are afraid to say what is actually happening and define reality as reality is?

It's almost strange gaslighting. Well, look, most of us are not heroes, and happily we live in a society where heroism is not required. The stoics of your lived in a world in which death always lurked in which powerful people could easily have, people have ended them killed, tortured, enslaved, ruined. We don't live in that world.

I mean, there are people can lose their jobs sometimes, but mostly not. And so one of the things I'm always wondering about with many of my friends here in Washington is, what on earth are you afraid of? You know, you'll be booked on cable television less often. That's the fear. Your lobbying business will not flourish quite as much as it otherwise would. that's the fear. Those are not very impressive fears. I mean, when you consider what people in other times and places have been asked to do, what is asked of us is so little, how can you decently not do it?

Yeah, and I think it's, you know, I was thinking about this with the masks, people who don't want to wear masks because they think it'll make them look stupid or you know, people who, it strikes me that actually we've underrated just how little people have practiced or are willing to look foolish or different. So Kato you know famously would walk through Rome bare headed or bare feet he would wear worn clothes. He was actually sort of cultivating in in difference

to what other people said and thought and then so then so as Rome starts to go down this dark path and he sees Julius Caesar as he does and everyone else is afraid to say anything or do anything, Kato has actually cultivated the fortitude necessary to do what that moment requires. And I wonder if actually ironically political correctness has set us up to be, to lack the courage we need to call a spade a spade.

Well, that's such an interesting story. And it raises a philosophical debate, and I may be on the other side of this from you. So John Stritt Mill and On Liberty famously writes about England in the 1850s, when he was writing, is a society that is tremendously free of state coercion, but he mill compliance. It is a society shackled by social convention. And what he argues for in that book is we should conceive of liberty is not only emancipating us from an arbitrary state, but also emancipating us from the tyranny of our neighbor's opinions. And so it's so important, he says, to conduct experiments and living and to explore new new ways. Don Sturt Mill, of course, is a very famously inhibited person and had been raised in a very repressive way. And he was kind of like a hippie. He wanted to be a hippie, but never dared.

Too brilliant, too logical, but he didn't want to be so logically, he wanted to be a poet instead of a logician. So this sparked a huge discussion at the time, and one of the most powerful rebuttals to John Stuart Mill was written by a man not well remembered today named Stephen, who's probably best known as he was Virginia Wolves' uncle. But he had a number, he was a jurist and had a number of important roles in the British Imperial Court system. And he wrote a rebuttal, and when she talked about that the kinds of gestures of independence that mill praise and the Kato practiced, non conformity and dress, he said, these are acts of independence of the small minded. And what he recommended was, if you want to be an independent minded person, think deeply, you know, dare adventures. But the idea that, you know, you're going to wear some unusual dress and that proves that you're an independent

minded person. You think that's just a refuge for the petty minded. You know, I've all, I mean, I've been through my life, I'm more on the Stephen side of this, which is I think in small things, you should of course, conform to the society around you. If the card says the dinner is black tie, put on a black tie. What are you proving if you're putting on a Hawaiian shirt? You're being obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious. And it's like sometimes it's true that people who are obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious will be brave for the sake of being brave.

They may be they'll be brave for being obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious will be brave for the sake of being brave, or they may be they'll be brave for being obnoxious. Maybe many of the people who are defiant in times of authoritarian regimes are just people who are generally balky and they wouldn't go along with sensible orders either. But I mean, I think in our time in the societies we live in, you know, that political correctness raises a host of issues. We use it to meet many different things. And barking us will only get us so far. I think we really do need to reexamine this kind of,

the feeling that the Trump voters in 2016 had, which is they are being policed by people come from a different social class and don't honor them. At the same time, we are seeing in things like the MeToo movement and to some degree in Black Lives, a protest against cruelties that we don't see because they're so familiar. And they're familiar, and he doesn't make them any less cruel. And overcoming them is no less important for the fact that we didn't think about them until they were pointed out to us.

No, I think that's right. And, you know, Seneca Toxie, he sort of makes the distinction between the cynics who sort of reject all societal convention and the still, he just reject the unnecessary ones. So, you know, he's saying, like, look on the outside, you should look the same on the inside, you should be different. And I think that that's maybe how you sort of split the difference between the two schools.

It does strike me out that there, like when I see the reactions to some of the Black Lives Matter stuff, particularly from people who have sort of gone on this Trump ride over the last three or four years, it's almost, you're almost seeing the opposite of it, it's like because they have practiced cruelty or raised their tolerance for cruelty, whether it's a tweet about a POW or mocking a reporter

with disabilities or just in a sort of general uncouthness and bad grammar. I think in a way that, and I know slippery slopes are supposed to be a logical fallacy, but to me, when I then see people who are able to watch a video of George Floyd and shrug it off as not you know, not a big deal

or make fun of it or go to a conspiracy theory instead of wrestling with the horror of it, there is maybe a link there. Mm-hmm. Yeah, Trump clearly isn't touch with powerful psychic forces. Not in a conscious way. One of my favorite quotes about him comes from one of his early staffers who said,

people sometimes just scribed Trump as paying three dimensional chess. Most of the time, he's just eating the pieces. He is a profoundly reactive person. He's not strategic at all. And he's not even all that tactical. He has only got a certain number of go-to moves. And sometimes they work and at other times they don't work. And he's never able, in advance, to predict when they will work

and when they don't. But what he does have is an unaring instinct for human weakness, both individual and collective. But he's just fine. And he has, again, again, through his administration, he has found people who seem like perfectly normal, ethical, decent people. Lindsey Graham would be an extreme example of this You know normal Republican Senator John McCain's best friend in the US Senate and Trump just found something in him

And I don't believe in the complex theories about blackmail or so. I don't think life works that way. I think he found just a kind of witness and played on it and Used it just a kind of weakness and lead on it and used it. Yeah, it's it's it's Shakespeare in that sense and that was something I wanted to run by you. There's a line in Richard III. I think it's in a fellow two. Shakespeare has a character go like I cannot think it. Basically the idea of like it's too painful, it's too weird, it's too out there for me to consider, I'd rather turn my eyes away from it. And what I like in your writing, I mean, even to call it a chumpocalypse, there does seem to be like even though the themes are there laid out

in such bearness, you know, they are there in the tweets, they are there in the talks, they are there in the policy decisions. It's so sort of in your face and clear that it almost, it almost reveals our own, as a society, our own psychic forces that you could show us, evil might be a strong word, but I don't think that it is. You could show us evil or you could show us stupidity or you could show us these almost Greek level

sort of characteristics in so indisputably and we could find a way to not see them. I think that's an interesting part of where we are. I wanna say a word about the title from apocalypse and you're interested in classics so you'll recognize the Greek. I mean, we use the word apocalypse conventionally to mean a disaster, the end of the world, zombie apocalypse,

murder or a horno apocalypse. But as you know, that's not exactly what the word means. It comes from two Greek words that mean to remove the drapery from something, to unveil, to reveal, apocalyptic literature is literature of revelation. Now, what's being revealed in the Christian and Jewish apocalypse literature of 2000 years ago is the end of the world. That's how the tooth that the ideas came together.

They would write revelations about the coming end of the world and then the advent of a new heaven and a new earth. So, I'm in the title playing on those puns. I mean, the Trump, I did not, when I wrote most of Trump apocalypse, I was able to write something for a monthly pandemic. I didn't expect exactly what we're having now, but I did expect a serious recession in 2020 driven by Trump's trade policies. And I did expect that there would be some series of the Trumps increasing levels of risk taking through his

presidency would lead to disasters in 2020, perhaps a shooting more, a conflict with China, something like that. So this is both the book about the likely disastrous end of the Trump presidency, the everyday use of the word apocalypse, but also about what is to come after, the more exact understanding the word Trump apocalypse. It's a book that tries to predict the American future after Trump and to set a path for the 2020s, which are going to be a very difficult decade. Yeah, and if someone was to say,

how could he have predicted these things? How did he see this coming? To me, it's so, this is another sort of Greek and concept that then comes to the Romans, but it comes from Heraclitus. He says, character is fate. Ironically, this is also one of John McKean's favorite songs. He even wrote a book called Character is Destiny.

But yeah, you couldn't have known a pandemic was coming, you couldn't have known any of these specifically things were coming, but it does seem that you were able to read character and that tells you in not in specific detail, but in the big picture, almost like a law of gravity, what is going to happen? Exactly. And the way what the White House is, the United States government, in all its vastness, is the greatest information gathering system on Earth. It gathers so much information that no individual human mind

could ever possibly process it, or even begin to process. So what the US government has on top of it, are a series of systems for identifying and canalizing information to where it needs to go. That's essentially the most important job of the White House staff. Well, it has to. It has to process information on the way in, and it is to process decisions on the way up,

to make sure that decisions that the President announces actually turn into the public policy of the United States. That one man says things, and then if this vast bureaucracy has to execute them, how do we even know that it's happened? How do they know the President has said it? How does the President know that the bureaucracy has done it? So inbound and outbound, that's what the White House does. So when you smash the White House, when you fill up full of crooks and non-edities and

fanatics and weirdos, your guaranteeing the information won't flow in, decisions won't be made, and then they won't be enforced on the government. And so it's predictable. There's going to be something that the people at the center needed to know. As it happened, it was that there was this extremely dangerous new virus appearing in China in November of 2019. And there were elements of the U.S. government that knew that. But there was no way to get that information into the center of the decision making.

Partly because of that, those wires were cut. But partly because the people in the Senate refused to hear. They had this philosophy, this happy talk philosophy. We only listened to good news because we have no ability to cope with bad news and because we need good news that we didn't earn to vindicate. I mean, Trump never earned anything in his life. And he's always bashed in the appearance of success created by others.

And so it was just predictable that sooner or later, all of that would catch up with us. And so if it is inevitable, if the cost of, you know, sort of speaking up are actually so low, why is courage in such short supply? Why does it take until, you know, now for General Matt has to say what he says, and I'm not questioning his courage. I'm just saying, why does it take, why can't people do what you did

and what other people have done? Why have there been fewer whistleblowers, why have there been fewer defections, why are people not doing what is so obviously the right thing? Well, there are two parts to that answer. The first, and this is a chapter of Trump Oculips, is the military has been much more resistant to the Trump presidency than I think is generally understood.

And I have a whole chapter on how they have just not, they have tried to work without disobeying orders. And I have the, for example, after the events in Charlottesville in summer of 2017, the first important figure in American life to speak out publicly, and so it happened over a weekend, was not a member of Congress, was not a CEO, it was the chief of naval operations who put on Twitter his, not any criticism of the president exactly, but a strong statement against the things that the president had just endorsed a few hours before.

And then he was followed by all of the sense of service chiefs. In the same way, the military just Trump wanted a big parade by which the military would identify itself with his presidency. And the military just kept finding over two years ways and ways and ways not to do it. It's a funny, almost a funny store but bureaucracy that he would say, I'd like a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue. And they would say, well, that's going to cost more money than you think. So we need another appropriation. And then you find the money. Actually, we've studied it some more.

And if we use the vehicles you want us to use, we're going to damage the streets of Washington, DC, and they will charge, the city will ask us to repay them. And that'll cost some more. So the money you proposed was an adequate, we're going to need to go back to Congress and get some more money. And of course, that will take a lot of time. Can we just forget about it? And no, well, we don't have soldiers at hand

who have the trick, we're going to have to train people to do marching, the marching people, they're not in Washington. They just mocked him and mocked him and mocked him. They didn't want to do it. And so, and Matt has been outspoken in some quite funny ways for a while. He spoke at the Al Smith dinner in I think 2018. And just after his resignation or six months after his resignation in New York, where he

talked, Trump had called him overrated. And he pointed out that Trump had also described Merrill Streep as overrated. And Matt has said, I take some pride in being the Merrill Streep of generals. And then he said, and he didn't just say I was overrated, he said, I was the most overrated. And he was very funny about that. And then ended with this rather mean punch time, he said, I think the only figure in our military

who Donald Trump doesn't think is overrated is Colonel Sanders. Okay, so that's, but another reason that you haven't heard more. And this pertains to something I wrote immediately after the beginning of the Trump presidency, is people thought they couldn't manage him. And they said, if I speak out, I lose my effectiveness. I need to stay effective so I can protect the country from this bozo president. And I wrote an essay around the time of the inauguration of 2017 and was inspired by a conversation

I had with a friend who had been invited to take a fairly important role in the Trump presidency. And he was weighing in a conscientious way whether to do it or not. So the article went through the pros and cons of whether you should do it and how that you should analyze this question differently if it was a national security job, then a policy job, differently if you were at an independent agency, then the White House, et cetera, et cetera. But I ended with this question. If you are asked to take a job in the Trump White House, or in the Trump administration, especially in the White House, sooner or later, you are going to have to say no. Are you confident

that you will be able to say no to the press of the United States? And then I said, and even if you are confident, I want you to consider this, if the people in the White House shared your self-confidence, they would never have asked you to take the job in the first place. Sure. Right. No, and I saw this that I was the director of marketing at a company called American Apparel for many years, which had sort of a Trump-like figure who eventually sort of crashed and burned in a similar fashion.

And yet, at almost every one of the lowest points of the company, whether it was a sex scandal or a bankruptcy or this or that, I watched him manage to go to Wall Street and get hundreds of millions of dollars in George Soros, hundreds of millions of dollars from Ron Berkall, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars from this Soros, hundreds of millions of dollars from Ron Berkall, hundreds of millions of dollars from this hedge fund, or that hedge fund, there was this, even though these are ostensibly the smartest people in finance, even though the record is indisputable

and the articles are there, what I think it's appealing to is the ego of the person on the other side, which is everyone, everyone who has gone before me has failed, but that's because they're not as good as me. I can manage, I can change this person, I can control this person. And I think we're seeing a little of that. Right. And you just can't, you just can't.

No. And one of the reasons you can't is because the normal things that you would appeal to and even a bad person because Trump is so impulsive are not going to work, which is I forget at one point I illustrated something that Donald Trump had done with like one of the statements about the United some United United Senator saying you know I think he's growing into the role and I illustrated it with that painting by Goya of of Kronos eating his son. And so I imagine, you know, normally what would happen is you've got your boss at American Apparel and you'd go and say, you know, sir, I look, I know you love the taste of fresh and delicious human baby eating on television. But let me just explain why from your own point of view, leaving all those ethics, weak minded ethics, from your own point of view, here's why it wouldn't

be a good idea to go on television or need a baby. And probably he would listen to that advice. The thing about Trump is he wouldn't remember, he wouldn't process that. He just, even though it hurts him, he does it because he just can't not. People keep telling him just, you know, through the first three years of the presidency, when things were sort of bumping along, when the economy was fine, you know, through the first three years of the presidency, when things were sort of bumping along, when the economy was fine, you know, in Trump documents, I take apart Trump's claims

to have done anything on the economy. Basically, the economic trajectory from 2014 to 2019, if you look at the chart, you cannot find the point at which Donald Trump becomes president. It's exactly, there's not the best months in that period, 2014 to 2019, are in 2014 and 2015. Manufacturing job growth is the same over the period. It's all just, it's a consistent.

So the American economy goes, you know, really recovers from the great recession in 2014 and has a five year run. That run begins to get a trouble in late 2019 because of the trade policies and then everything explodes because of the pandemic. because of the trade policies and then everything explodes because of the pandemic. But he had a three year period where things were fine. And if he had just played golf every day and never tweeted at all, he would have had a shot at being a reasonably popular president, but he couldn't do it because he couldn't control himself.

No, and there's an interview with, which happened, I think this is what, this idea of character is fader, these people can't help themselves. This is after he loses the company, after 12,000 people lose their job, after he loses all his money, you know, someone said, you know, duh, because his thing was he kept having relationships with his employees and someone said, all right, duh, I'm going to propose a thought experiment.

You can have everything you want in life. You can have your company, you can have nothing, none of this will happen, but you just can't eat almonds. He's like, you can have all of it, but you cannot eat almonds. That's the only thing. And you know, it sort of interrupts him and he goes, but I should be able to have relationships with my employees. Like he couldn't even get the metaphor of the almonds without it. And so I think this is that idea of restraint

and moderation when you are not in control of yourself. In some respects, it helps you do a lot of things, but ultimately it soes the seeds of your destruction because you cannot stock yourself from hitting the self-destruct button. Right. Well, and we can speculate a lot about the particular psychopethology.

I hope no one listening to us has had the experience of being at close quarters with a malignant narcissist. Unfortunately, I have and I have such a person in my extended family and they do a lot of harm and they do a lot of harm to themselves too. But through the two books, Trampocracy and Trump Oculips, I've tried to stay away from the personality of Donald Trump because the question I am interested in is, look, obviously, obviously, all the things you're going to say, yes, no dispute. But the United States has this incredibly convoluted

intricate and expensive system of election nearing and leadership selection that is, there are all kinds of psychopaths out there. And the system, the justification for our political system, which is so inefficient, so wasteful, so prone to corruption, the justification for it is, well, at least it presents a really tight screen that keeps psychopaths away from the nuclear weapons of the most powerful military force

in the history of humanity. And the thing we have to confront is that all failed. That all failed. I mean, that, and we have to wrestle not with who Donald Trump is and what and why and, you know, you know, we're all very sorry about the people who've lost their manufacturing jobs and opioids and, you know, the diners, all of that. Nonetheless, four years, we put a psychopath in charge of the nuclear weapons of the mightiest military force in history of the human world, human race. How do we make sure that nothing like this ever happens again? I mean, we, at least so far, have not had a war. You know, we're corining from disaster to disaster. They're likely to get worse. How do we protect ourselves? And why did this Trumpocracy ask? Why did the system fail?

And Trumpocalypse makes suggestions. How do we make the system work better? No, and I've got two two last questions for you and to go to your point, I think we also have to look in the mirror, right? Like I was talking to a Republican congressman that I know a few days ago and and I was asking sort of like, you know, if you called for Trump to resign or if you broke with Trump right now, would you lose your re-election in November? And you know there wasn't, there, that the answer wasn't, no of course not, I would be fine, says something about the public as well, right? That, that, that the base of support has not turned away from him so sharply in light of what's happened. you can't blame Donald Trump for the fact

that Donald Trump has been, had approval ratings at a relatively stable level through all of this. That unfortunately, we have to look in the mirror as a country. Right. But something about that base, the American political system, which lacks the efficiency and crispness of a parliamentary system,

is designed so that politicians are not answerable only to their base. The whole point to the American political system is that member of Congress who should be thinking, that's the theory, and especially if members of Senator should be thinking, okay, yeah, it's true, that the Republicans in my district really like them, but everybody else does not, and if I add the minority of in my district really like them, but everybody else does not.

And if I add the minority of Republicans who don't like them to the majority of non-Republicans who don't like them, I have to worry about all of them. The American political system since 1990. I quote in Trump aqua-pso congressman from Florida, Ted Yoho, who said, I answered to the president. Well, that's a new way for a member of the House of Representatives to think. I'm sure. I'm not going to forget. I think his district voted in 2016,

54% for Trump, something like that, I forget. But the person who had that job in 1975 would have thought, I answered to my district, and the majority of my district is pro-Trump, but this is an important minority in my district. That is anti-Trump, and I have to think about them if only because I have to worry about my own future, that we've reinterpreted the job of members of Congress because we've reinterpreted our political system works where it's possible for a member of the House to ignore

45, 46 percent of his constituency. Yeah, and that was where I wanted to wrap up, because I think this is where some of the writing in Trump-Pocalypse connects interestingly to sort of stoicism in Rome. There's this argument that the system in Rome wasn't working, that the government had sort of ground to a halt that much-needed reforms were required, and that it was the Stoics.

It was Cato who had sort of decided he was so pure, he was so true, he knew what was right. He was the sole shepherd of the, what they call them, the most morium, the old ways, that he would refuse to compromise, he would consider no changes. You know, he sort of pioneers the filibuster, right? Pompeian and Caesar and proposing all these things

and Kato says, you know, not gonna happen on my watch. And so what I was so interested in about in your book is you sort of propose a throwback to, you know, let's call it pre-Civil War America, where there are these kind of grand compromises or exchanges of competing interests on both sides of the party to break through the you I'm talking about your sort of environmentalism compromising with immigration to talk to me about this idea that hey actually you know president or no president America's got to figure out

some way to break this this log gem so then we can move on and deal with other issues. Right. Well, my big suggestion for how you break the log jam is you need us to revive the sense of nationhood and the willingness of people to make sacrifices for the nation because they get benefits from the nation. So I talk about, I have a number of reforms of the political system to advance, but in the largest sense, I have there

three things that really interest me. We have to find a way to take our three greatest challenges, climate, healthcare, and national cohesion, immigration, and put them together because we're not solving any of them separately, but I think they become more solvable actually if you try to do them all at once. There's an old saying, and I attribute it to a lot of people. I think sometimes the Dwight Eisenhower,

if you can't see a way to solve a problem, make it bigger. And I think, so for something like the healthcare, I think, the one of the reasons we're not able to solve it is we have such a diverse population becoming more diverse. Many more, we have 10, 12 million people who are present in the country illegally. They also get sick. Some day they will get old. The majority of those 10 to 12 million people have been in the country for more than 10 years. They're unlikely to be returning to where they came from. What do we do about them? And every Democrat on the stage in the debates, when asked, would you favor health coverage

for illegal aliens, put up his or her hand and said, yes, well, that's a vote loser. But if you could combine a healthcare approach with meaningful immigration enforcement, maybe both of those problems get easier. In the same way that if you, we've been unable to deal with climate because was expensive and their powerful interest, but also so many American sea environmentalism like the mass issue as a criticism of them. It's an attack on their way of life. They're big cars, they're big houses, the air conditioning of the summer, the fast food. They feel culturally threatened by it. Is there a way to make it less culturally threatening? And I talk about how you could use action on climate to stimulate

employment, especially stimulate employment, especially manufacturing employment, especially for men in non-metropolitan areas. And if you can do that, something that people feel culturally threatening becomes maybe culturally inviting. You can solve problems that seem insolvable by making them bigger. And that's the second half of Trump's problems. No, and I think that's great. And I think it's an important sort of note that just because

things have gotten so bad and so corrupt, it can't create on the other side a sort of a flight towards self-righteousness and moral purity and superiority, it actually has to create the opposite, which is, how do we come together, how do we make moves together, how do we do political compromises, or as sort of Matt has said in his statement, how do we unite in spite of what is being done at the highest level, and maybe that's how you move forward. And that is how the book ends.

And I tell this story that on the night of his re-election in 1864 Abraham Lincoln stepped out onto the White House front step to greet a group of well-wishers who come to play music and congratulate him. So most politicians having won reelection to presidency of the United States on the verge of winning the greatest war in American history might have a moment of self-congratulation, not Lincoln, it was not his style.

So you must have startled him. He gives him this very philosophical speech about the trauma the country has been through. It's not one of his better known speeches, but it's one that has always had the most resonance with me. And then he ended with this observation, and these are the last words in the book on this. They're just five lines, so forgive me if I read them, because I won't remember them exactly by heart. Lincoln said to the people, the well-wishers, what has occurred in this case must ever recur in similar cases. Human nature will not change.

In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and good. Let us therefore study the incidents of this as a philosophy to learn wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be revengeed. That's beautiful. That's the perfect place to stop. Thank you so much. And most importantly, thank you for your writing. It's been a guide to me. It's opened my eyes to a bunch of stuff.

And I think been reassuring as you watch the world tear itself apart that not everyone is caught up in it and that some people are insisting back towards our true principles and better angels. Thank you. Thanks for the hospitality. If you like the podcast that we do here and you want to get it via email every morning,

you can sign up at dailystoke.com slash email. Hey, prime members, you can listen to the daily stoic early and ad free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts. music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.